In the first part of this blog, I said that the BLM movement and Keir Starmer’s reaction to the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston raised important questions for the broad concept of democracy and the relationship it has to representative democracy. I will be raising these questions in the current post.
It is the implicit assumption present in all mainstream Western political thinking that representative democracy and democracy itself are synonymous1. The suggestion is that elected governments represent the “will of the people”. The deep hostility of the Guardian’s political editor and of the Labour party establishment to Corbyn has been largely based on the argument that he was unelectable because his views are too extreme2. If he is unelectable, he could not represent the will of the people. There was general consternation when the 2017 general election result showed that he might, after all, be electable. I have argued in my forthcoming Soundings article that this was because he had succeeded in making the class issue the main issue of the election. There was relief on the part of the political establishment that normal political assumptions had been reconfirmed when he was heavily defeated in the 2019 general election and eventually ousted and replaced by the more realistic and astute Starmer. I have argued in the same article that this was because national identity and Brexit were the main issues in the 2019 elections.
Politics as a Capitalist Commodity
However, perhaps the main flaw with the argument that elected governments represent the will of the people lies in the wider truth of the famous statement once made by Norman Lamont in his 1993 resignation speech from the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer following the UK’s departure from the European Exchange-Rate Mechanism (ERM) that the government gave the appearance of being in office but not in power. Lamont said:
…there is too much short-termism, too much reacting to events, and not enough shaping of events. We give the impression of being in office but not in power. Far too many important decisions are made for 36 hours’ publicity. Yes, we are politicians as well as policy-makers; but we are also the trustees of the nation. I believe that in politics one should decide what is right and then decide the presentation, not the other way round.
The key point being made by Lamont is that politics was no longer, if it ever had been, about striving to achieve what politicians believed to be right but had become a search for publicity and popularity. Lamont was arguing for a politics in which parties expressed particular political principles and visions and elections were about giving the electors the choice between different political perspectives. However, representative democracy gradually became corrupted as aspiring politicians came to see politics as a career, the objective of which was to be successful, popular and win office for its own sake, rather than achieve social and political change by fighting for particular causes. This was what Lamont denounced as reactive politics rather than the politics of shaping events which he felt was necessary. Politicians and the political establishment came to see their democratic role as adjusting to the views of the public rather than trying to shape them by sticking to the principles they espoused3 . This corruption of politics was the result of the penetration of capitalist ideology into the operation of representative democracy, transforming politics into a commodity, the consumer demand for which could be measured by opinion polls and marketed by using the standard techniques of capitalist commodity marketing. Thus, increasing amounts of capital were required. Politicians and political parties become dependent on money to conduct the business of politics in representative democracy, nowhere more so than in the United States where fundraising and PAC money became crucial for winning elections. The electors, perversely, far from being grateful that their views are being represented by politicians, come to see politicians as mercenaries willing to do and say anything to win votes. The analogy between politicians and salesmen is far from a flattering one to politicians. The fundamental fallacy of the political editor of the Guardian characterization of Starmer as astute for riding two horses pulling in opposite directions at once, is that it will inevitably lead to Starmer being viewed by the public as unprincipled, taking up positions in order to win elections rather than because he believes in them. He will lose respect in both constituencies he is trying to appeal to. Labour MPs representing Northern English constituencies who argue that they need to represent their constituents’ views on Brexit whatever their own personal views for fear of losing their seats is a sure way to send voters who blame foreigners for their woes into the arms of Nigel Farage, who appears to be a genuine nationalist and xenophobe or to support a Tory party which has been taken over by genuine and fair weather pretend Brexiteers.
Democracy and the Economy
There is, however, another more fundamental sense in which elected governments are in office but not in power. This relates to the issue of the power of governments over the economy. The concept of democracy is inextricably linked with that of economic equality. This is expressed in the slogan of the French revolution “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. The capitalist economy, however, has its own dynamic which is largely impervious to the actions of governments and increasingly so. The “health” of the capitalist economy is commonly measured by the state of the stock market index, a measure of how well the owners of capital are doing. Perhaps the most important reason why Jeremy Corbyn is considered unelectable is that the electorate realise that his election on a radical redistribution platform would most likely swiftly be followed by a stock market crash and capital flight from the country that he would be powerless to do much about unless he reneged on all his campaign promises to benefit the many at the expense of the few. The redistribution policies he advocates might well be popular, particularly given the obscene increase in economic inequality that has relentlessly taken place since 19804, but electors feel he will have little chance of implementing them because the markets won’t let him. There seems therefore little point in voting for policies that cannot be carried out. The consequence of this is that the policies that parties can present to the electorate are only the ones that are acceptable to the markets and that won’t cause an economic crash. Thus, the results of elections far from representing the “will of the people”, are more likely to represent the will of capital which dictates what constitutes the Overton window of politics. The results of the 2017 elections in which Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party achieved a relative success reflect the degree of desperation in which people find themselves. Things could hardly get any worse, so Corbyn was given the benefit of the doubt as he, unlike most politicians, was an honest man seeking to improve the position of “the many” relative to “the few”.
Extra-parliamentary v. Parliamentary Politics as Agents of Change
The discussion of opinion poll results with which Part 1 of this blog started, demonstrated that the street and extra-parliamentary movement of Black Lives Matter achieved a major change in public opinion, something that the now prevailing reactive politics which Norman Lamont denounced would never have done. In the process, the politics of representative democracy were also significantly altered, and its Overton window was shifted leftwards. Policies which previously would have been thought unthinkable and extreme by mainstream parties, began to be seriously considered, even by the Democratic party establishment, such as defunding the police and shifting resources from repression of crime to social preventive measures.
Whilst this may be seen as a new development, in fact most important progressive changes that have occurred in societies have been achieved by extra-parliamentary movements that have forced the will of significant sections of the people on those with power. In the golden post- World War II period of political consensus so beloved of moderate social democrats, the degree of relative economic redistribution that occurred was largely due to the strength of the labour movement, facilitated by the economic boom which maintained full employment and created labour shortages, rather than a benefit bestowed on them by a benign state. Strong trade unions, official and unofficial strikes, forced employers to cede significant amounts of the proceeds of growth to labour. The reduction in economic inequalities that were achieved were fought for largely outside parliaments. In receipt of healthy profits, capital would rather give way than face prolonged battles that would put those profits in jeopardy. When, with the onset of the stagflation economic crisis of the 1970s, workers tried to defend the gains they had made against the onslaught of capital in struggles such as the 1979 strike movement in the Winter of Discontent, they were denounced by the “moderate” social democrats as “extremists”. Now the “moderates” are bemoaning the disappearance of the trade unions and blaming the draconian anti-labour laws which they had helped to put in place for it. Neoliberalism, an ideology, is presented as the culprit because it demonised the benign state which had been the agent of redistribution in the golden post war era, rather than capitalism as an economic system.
It seems to me that real democracy is incompatible with capitalism and cannot be achieved whilst the system is in place. How we get rid of it, I have little idea but the advent of the BLM movement carried through by what I have called the new working class in imperialist countries seems to me a step in the right direction.
In the final part of the blog, I will discuss the relationship of imperialism to class and nation in the context of BLM movement.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
August 2020
Modern Western imperialism has been morally justified as spreading democracy where the word is implicitly used as synonymous with representative democracy. This was the justification that was used for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, a main cause of the current chaos and suffering in the Middle East. It also ultimately generated the refugee crisis in Europe which has so profoundly affected internal politics in the European nations. The assumption that the West is spreading democracy is the fundamental building block in the consensus on foreign policy that exists in Western political establishments, and which is shared by the media messengers of the liberal establishment including the Guardian in the UK, and the New York Times and Washington Post in the U.S. . It is currently being used to demonise China and to transform alarm at the economic challenge that China has come to pose to Western economic domination at a time of economic stagnation into a moral crusade for the spread of democracy. ↩
The same charge was levelled at Bernie Sanders in the United States by the Democratic Party establishment and associated media. ↩
In the current issue of the London Review of Books, William Davies, in a complex and interesting article entitled “Who am I prepared to Kill?”, raises a similar point when discussing the historical development of opinion polling. He too is critical of the politics which Lamont criticised as reactive, but doesn’t link the rise of such politics to the corrupting influence of capitalism over politics. Davies argues that what he describes as politics by acclamation, the politics of ascertaining public opinion by a binary “approve” v. “disapprove”, present in the Brexit referendum, has very old roots and has been facilitated more recently by the development of statistical polling techniques and by the development of social media, with its ubiquitous 👍 👎. However, there is an important difference between Davies’ politics by acclamation and the commodification of politics. The Brexit referendum represents a choice between two policies put by politicians to the electorate. The commodification of politics involves shaping policies according to market research results, what Lamont criticised as reactive politics. Davies associates the rise of such politics with the development of consumerism but doesn’t present consumerism as being the creation of capitalism. I would argue that the commodification of politics goes hand in hand with the outright corruption of representative democracy. Both are generated by the power of capital over the operation of representative politics which undermines it as an expression of the wider meaning of democracy. This has to include economic equality and equality in power. ↩
The Guardian announced last week that during the pandemic, as millions of workers lost their jobs, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos increased his wealth by US$10 billion in a single day last week. US$10 billion is more than the entire GDP of Haiti, a country of some 11 million inhabitants. ↩