Capital's Veto and the Decline of Democracy

With an attempt to clarify the true meaning of "the left"

We hear a great deal lately about the decline of democracy, but for most of us, the actual experience of anything worthy of the name is pretty marginal to our lives. There are very few settings in which we rationally deliberate with our peers to decide on collective actions more important than choosing a restaurant. Most of the hours of most of our days are spent in authoritarian spaces, where we must follow orders from a clear command hierarchy and spend our time on activities that have no necessary relationship to our own goals or desires. The few cases where a job lines up with a passion are essentially a coincidence, and such jobs are increasingly difficult to find, as companies find they can exploit people’s natural desire to do things they find meaningful without paying them.

This lack of genuine autonomy or control in the workplace leads to fantasies of becoming an entrepreneur. At least if I am the boss, the reasoning goes, I can be free. But there one typically meets with another constraint in the form of market pressures, which Søren Mau has characterized as a form of mute compulsion. Where in previous generations private firms had more leeway in how they were run, the rise of private equity takeovers as an ever-present threat beginning in the 1980s has enforced a very narrow set of “best practices” that few companies feel empowered to deviate from. (Melinda Cooper has documented the regulatory shifts that allowed the cancer of private equity to arise, while Daniel Davies has reflected on the ways the looming possibility of a private-equity takeover degrades decision-making and outcomes within organizations.) Even among the tech giants, which are immune to such threats and supposedly filled with self-styled geniuses who alone can create transformative change, groupthink is powerful, as evidenced by the almost unimaginable sums being squandered on the development of a dysfunctional and unpopular technology misleadingly labeled “AI.”

In the immediate postwar era, a number of factors—the inertia of wartime economic controls, the recognition of the sacrifices made by a generation of soldiers, and the threat of an alternative economic model—conspired to give the state more control over the economy. That era, for all its many very real faults, is now remembered as a unique window of broadly shared prosperity that built up the physical and cultural infrastructure on which we continue to rely, as the state channeled economic forces in a way that genuinely increased the average citizen’s quality of life. The logical endpoint of that development was the gradual abolition of non-democratic and arbitrary economic power. Shareholders became an increasingly vestigial organ as firms were managed with an eye toward the full range of constituencies affected by their actions, often with the active collaboration of workers (or at least their union representatives). Taxes were kept high enough to prevent unseemly accumulation of wealth. In some countries, there were even plans to begin essentially winding down capitalism by gradually buying out the shareholders of the existing firms in order to establish true public ownership.

Inevitably, someone will accuse me of being “nostalgic” for the postwar era, which was marked by racial and gender hierarchy in the US and was certainly more conformist and less free in a lot of important ways. Those very serious compromises were arguably necessary to get the postwar system of economic management off the ground, but they were not integral to the very idea of the mixed economy or the welfare state. Indeed, as Melinda Cooper elsewhere documents, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the benefits of the system were beginning to be distributed more equally as a result of gains made by the civil rights and feminist movements. This shift created an opening for the political backlash that wound up tearing down the postwar settlement rather than share it with minorities and single mothers, but that outcome was not inevitable.

In any case, the backlash occurred, and over the course of the last three decades of the 20th century, the political sphere was gradually “encased” by a global system of economic constraints that enforced a narrow set of economic “best practices” and swiftly punished any serious attempt to reassert state control over the economy. In the developed countries, this enforcement took the form of a broad consensus among political actors that made it impossible to vote against the “best practices” that led to soaring inequality, declining union density, crumbling infrastructure, and degraded public services. In the Global South, it was enforced through coercive loan terms and trade rules that kept them subordinate. The relative handful of countries that were able to break away from the “Washington Consensus” and generate a real shift toward great prosperity—most notably China—were still constrained to better manage the capitalist economy in order to compete within the global market, and few can be held up as models of greater democratic control of economic forces.

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This is the context in which we need to discuss the current democratic backsliding. For virtually everyone’s adult lifetimes, democracy has not been permitted to act on the most important issues. Our lives and livelihoods are controlled by anti-democratic and even purely impersonal forces. Political actors that would seriously challenge the capitalist veto on democracy have been systematically excluded from the halls of power, even when their policy proposals are popular. The only area where elections have been allowed to make a serious difference is in the so-called “culture war” issues, around identity and morality.

There have been genuine gains in this time, most notably in the acceptance of gay marriage, but the loss of nationwide abortion rights in the US shows us that all such gains are fragile. That fragility stems in part from the fact that identity-based gains are typically perceived as zero-sum, even when that construal is obviously irrational. For instance, many conservative Christians felt that they were harmed by the legalization of gay marriage or abortion, in a way that simply advising them not to get gay-married or have an abortion doesn’t help. The greater recognition of populations they regarded as undesirable or immoral was implicitly a knock against their own public prestige. I think they’re wrong to think that way. I wish they would stop. But they do in fact think that way, and it’s fully predictable that they would.

In the end, the “culture war” dynamic, which for most voters is a purely symbolic proposition that has no bearing on their actual life or livelihood, has produced a public sphere that is completely detached from reality. Even the minimal democratic accountability of voting the bums out of office for mismanaging “the economy”—which, even in the US, is not meaningfully under the control of the president or Congress—has been lost as voters have no reliable access to accurate economic information and no way to recognize it when they see it. The zero-sum nature of identity- or recognition-based conflict means that each side by definition “overreaches” in the eyes of the other team every time it is in power, leading to a rapid gyration back and forth. And in the US, where a party duopoly is virtually enshrined in law, that means that even when one party is taken over by maniacs, they nevertheless still hold power approximately half the time.

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Some have suggested shifting this dynamic by reforming political institutions. That prospect is attractive to me, because I regard the US Constitution that the slavers imposed upon us as a curse and a trap. Our institutions are dysfunctional and riddled with contradictions. The loser can win the presidency, an office that shouldn’t exist in the first place, and the Senate has for several decades basically refused to allow itself to vote on routine legislation. Our system of staggered elections and polarized parties creates a virtual guarantee of divided government for at least half of each presidential term, leading to gridlock and ineffectuality most of the time. Even our basic budgeting process is irrational, as we are the only country on earth in which the failure to reach a new budget agreement routinely leads to “partial government shutdowns.”

We can and should do better, at the very least by adopting the parliamentary model common to most other developed democracies. But it’s not as though those countries are doing much better. The existence of a wider range of parties does not mean that voters feel they have a genuine share in public decision-making, because all of those other countries are faced with the same capitalist veto we are—one that is doubly enforced in many countries by the rules of the European Union. In all those countries, the traditional parties of the center are essentially discredited, creating an opening for the far right, and any attempt by the anti-capitalist left to take power is thwarted even at the cost of further empowering the far right. Despite the fact that they offer nothing but pointless cruelty and magical thinking, it is basically inevitable that far-right parties will take power in all the major European countries unless something radically changes soon.

I am horrified at that prospect, especially since many have plans to follow Orbán’s lead and create institutional changes that will render it virtually impossible to remove them from office. How can people sit idly by while such a threat to democracy builds? How can they vote for such dangerous figures on a “vote the bums out” basis when the cost could be so high? What the fuck is wrong with everyone?

I would suggest that one possibility is that they have not been given any reason to value democracy. What little experience they have of it consists of making a mostly binary choice every few years that doesn’t seem to make any difference. Surely there is no one—no one—who could seriously contend that existing liberal democratic institutions serve to give people meaningful control over their lives and livelihoods. The fact that so many of our fellow citizens regard voting so lightly is definitely leading to very negative consequences, but those consequences are not “what they were voting for.” Trump has done crazy and unpredictable things that often directly contradict what his idiot “based” thought they were voting for. They didn’t think that voting Trump in would make that much of a difference because no election has made much difference in living memory, even Trump’s first election. They don’t take their responsibilities as democratic citizens seriously because they have been given literally no reason to do so.

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That’s not on “us,” that’s on the elites who locked us into a situation where the global market is the ultimate authority, with a final veto on every public policy and every political coalition. We are told that the market represents the aggregate of all our free decisions—a kind of democracy-slop—but it does not. In fact, it doesn’t even represent the aggregate of all business leaders’ or investors’ decisions. It represents the outcome of its increasingly aribtrary and destructive dynamics. It represents nothing and no one, a faceless drive to pile up human value to no end.

Because the market can only say no, it cannot govern. It can only prevent us from governing ourselves. This comes out most dramatically in the climate crisis, where the market has repeatedly vetoed any attempt at collective action by incentivizing every firm and every country (aside from a few island nations that are in danger of physically disappearing from the face of the earth) to try to burn while the burning is good. All things being equal, every ton of carbon corresponds to an increment of economic growth, which is all that matters. And if we try to imagine that something else could matter, we get slapped down by market forces that force us to act as though the market is all that matters.

The market is taking up the slot where our global collective agency should be, and it exists only to thwart and distort any smaller attempts at agency—not only at the level of individual states, but at the level of capitalist firms themselves. The market is a truly inhuman and nihilistic tyrant.

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And this brings me to the topic of the “left.” In our current political configuration, that term is hard to get a handle on, because it seems to have no stable referent. The best most people can do is that it’s the “other side” of the identity conflict from the far right, the side that favors things like Black Lives Matter or the dreaded “pronouns.” It’s true that those causes do have a real affinity to the traditional left, but when someone can propose that HR departments are the strongholds of the “left,” then there is a serious confusion at work.

Hence I propose that we need to return to what everyone up until approximately 1973 knew to be the meaning of the left: the political tendency that aims to overthrow capitalism in favor of the democratic control of production. The left is not limited to that. Many other causes—like fighting against racial discriminiation or for the right of trans people to bodily autonomy—are correctly characterized as left-wing. Nor must one claim that overthrowing capitalism would somehow “automatically” fix all other problems, as the history of actual-existing socialist countries amply illustrates. In fact, attempts to overcome the market before overcoming other more immediate forms of arbitrary hierarchy and oppression have repeatedly backfired, as Mike Konczal has documented in the American context.

But what makes left demands a coherent program rather than a divisive laundry list is the long-term goal of overthrowing the ultimate tyrant, the impersonal market. There are many gains to be made in the meantime, many ways to affirm freedom and self-determination in many more limited spheres—but that has to be the goal. Without that core commitment, we should simply retire the term “left” for the sake of clarity.