Democracy and Capitalism

The welfare state is at the centre of a long-standing debate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. One view holds that democracy and capitalism are in tension with each other, and that footloose capital undermine redistribution; another view holds that democracy and capitalism are complements, and that democracy compensates for inequalities in the distribution of property and income. This chapter provides a critical review of the literature on advanced democracies and capitalism, and how the two coexist and co-evolve. It explores several topics: (a) approaches to the study of democratic redistribution and how democratic institutions shape distributive outcomes; (b) the relationship between democracy and capitalism, and in particular whether democracy is constrained by footloose capital; and (c) the historical origins and co-evolution of advanced capitalist democracies.

Uncertainty, Profit, and the Limits of Markets

The neoclassical market model is the overwhelming basis for contemporary views of markets as fair, efficient, or both. But is it an appropriate starting point? The article draws on Frank Knight’s 1920s work on the economics of uncertainty to show that the ideal of perfect competition conceals a tacit trade-off between equality and certainty. Largely undetected, this trade-off continues to govern financialized capitalist democracies, evading normative and political debate. By explaining how markets and firms resolve the problem of uncertainty, Knight shows that all supposed market benefits, even allocative efficiency, are not costless to society. More specifically, Knight argued that modern markets are premised on a tacit agreement between a handful of “daring” entrepreneurs and the “risk-averse” public: the former agree to carry the uncertainties of business-life in return for a substantially larger share of its power and rewards. Despite the highly static assumptions of neoclassicism, therefore, and its linked assumption of perfect knowledge, uncertainty is far from absent in modern economics. It is built into firms and markets and manifests itself as a steep social and material hierarchy.

The Policy Road to Socialism

In the standard formulation, the Marxist theory of the state implies that socialism requires revolution: Reformist social policy generates capital flight and capital flight undermines reform. I show that this mechanism, while plausible, turns out to have little empirical merit. State theory correctly points to an “accumulation” function whereby capitalist states depend on revenue and must therefore worry about the reforms that undermine profitability. But this accumulation function has been overwhelmed, historically, by a more powerful “legitimation” function: Popular social expenditures in rich capitalist democracies tend to grow and only rarely decline, even during the so-called neoliberal period. This article considers both sides of this debate. First, I propose (and predict) a path to socialism by way of mushrooming social policy. And second, I argue that if revolution is the only hope for socialism, then socialism is off the table; the revolution must be betrayed.

The nature of crisis responses

The final chapter concludes by discussing the policy implications of the findings for the future management of the financial sector and banking crises. It highlights major developments in banking since the financial crisis and discusses the nature of the political responses to it. The insights from the previous chapters relate to the selective reconstruction of the crisis and its consequences for political reform, competitive concerns, competing policy aims, and a bias of contemporary capitalist democracies towards the promise of future growth. Given the limits of financial regulation and the expectation of future bank bailouts, the chapter encourages a broadening of the fora in which financial knowledge is constructed.

Introduction

The United States is a nation of diverse peoples, formed not through a common genealogy, as were its European counterparts among capitalist democracies. Instead, its people have been bound together through allegiance to a constitution, outlining the framework for the making of law and for governance, and a loosely defined, ever-contested creed. Americans are moved to love their country not by membership in an “American family,” but rather by the powerful rhetorical formulations of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that establish the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” What this inspiring language means in practice is an ongoing argument that holds Americans together....

Bringing Gender and Class into the Frame: An Intersectional Analysis of the Decoloniality-As-Race Critique of the Use of Law for Social Change

During 2017, South African decoloniality theorist Tshepo Madlingozi argued, in relation to the ongoing socio-political and economic exclusion of the black majority in South Africa, that the post-1994 rights-based constitutional order represents more continuity than rupture, consolidating a triumph of social justice over liberation and a privileging of the democratisation paradigm over the decolonisation one. In Madlingozi’s critique of the “neo-apartheid” social justice order, race continues to be the most important dividing line, and human rights constitute a western “perpetuation of the coloniality of being”. This argument resonates with broader contemporary critiques of the weak, compromising and imperial nature of human rights. Against this backdrop, we examine the potential, as well as the limits, of using human rights as a tool for social change. Engaging an intersectional analysis informed by the seminal work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and Nancy Fraser, we find that the focus on decoloniality-as-race obscures other critical fault lines to the detriment of progressive change, and that a radical reading of human rights is capable of correcting this flaw. We argue that the incorporation of gender and class lenses provides a powerful tool to change both the narrative about the drivers of inequality among capitalist democracies and the role of socio-economic rights adjudication within them. Our article is also an invitation to rethink the domestic constitutional histories of the global south by acknowledging rights-based redistributive transformations within the context of market and development policies, and to push for the uptake of rights to empower social struggle and tackle structural disadvantage.

Old Parameters/New Tricks: The place of celebrity journalism in persona construction (and what we might do about it).

Celebrity journalism is a founding discourse for the construction of persona. As the first mass-circulated media, journalism made celebrity a “very public form of discourse about the dimensions of what is public and what is private, and ultimately what is intimate” (Marshall 2014, p. xii). It created parameters for the construction and visibility of different facets of self-identity in public spheres (Connell 1992; Hartley 1996), which often perpetuate inequalities of social structures through offering narrow versions of self, for example against the priorities of capital (Littler 2004; Couldry 2000, 2002). This created an incessant focus on self-fulfilment through consumerism and display of consumption as if this was an accurate public reflection of who we are (Marshall 1997, 2010; deCordova 1990). As journalism naturalised and rationalised celebrity, together they created tools through which public personas became powerful cultural signifiers and props of the socio-economic and political systems in which we live. Celebrity journalism is a principal and founding characteristic of these systems, our collective understandings of self-identity within them, how we perform this to others, and the mediation of these things. As a genre, celebrity journalism ties together the contradictions of public and private dichotomies of capitalist democracies and humanises our place in it all. Journalism and celebrity helped develop the fabric of persona, establishing threads of politics and commerce, ordinary people made extraordinary through media rituals, interwoven public and private spheres, the constructions of reality and the celebration and contestation of new ideologies.