Subject: Re: BHA: Democracy is capitalism
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 13:10:31 -0000


Hi Steve/all

I very much agree with what you wrote about the possible subversive
content of the concept of democracy, but isn't that precisely because
it explodes the division between political and economic?:
"However just to clarify and to expand the discussion of 'democracy' -
I
used to know an old Maoist (now unfortunately dead) who once explained
to me that 'democracy for us is different' referring not only to
Badiou's perspective but also to the provocative understanding that
the
act of striking in the sense of official and unofficial strikes
were/are
acts of democracy. He was one of the first people I ever met who
produced a truly radical notion of participatory democracy."

Economics and Politics
Part III



Habermas's Version of the Divorce between the Economic and the
Political.



Theoretically the debate about the relation between the economic and
the political has now opened up much more than before; that makes
Habermas's neglect of it the more reprehensible.  The purist
positions?laissez-faire denial of any connection, and mechanical
Marxist assertion of economic (even technological) base/superstructure
determinism?have given way to positions ranging from seeing current
history as the unfolding of the iron laws of capital, playing down for
instance the impact of class struggle, to seeing the state as a
neutral ground on which there is a struggle for hegemony among current
contending forces?of the "economic" forces (including not only capital
and labour but "consumers"), but also of many others, wrestling in
civil society for advantage in the form of legislation favourable to
their interests.

An obvious weakness of the latter theory is the enormous disproportion
between the global power of hyper- and super-states, corporations and
banks (including the Pentagon, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund) and the fragmented power of organised labour and of
concerned citizens.  Oil companies, conglomerates such as AOL Time
Life Warner CNN, and other corporations and banks, are legal persons
in the state where I too am a legal person; we have equal rights under
the law to the use of our property, and even equal rights to
self-expression.  But apart from the differences in economic power,
the corporations are legal persons in many other states, and are free
to leave the one I am in if they do not like what is going on in it,
and to take their property elsewhere. How is any dialogue of the kind
Habermas ideally envisages possible between us? Bribing and bullying
are more consonant with the accumulation of capital, the stated goal
of all corporations, and the pursuit of national interest, the stated
goal of the US state, controller of the IMF and the World Bank.

However, the real strength of the argument about globalisation is the
fact that the phenomenon is not a recent development; nor is the
problem a compartmentalised one, which is how Habermas seems to be
regarding it in recent belated perfunctory marginal acknowledgments
that there is a problem.  It belongs to the essence of the capitalist
system, and has always negated the validity of the separation of
(nation state) politics and (market) economics, and also of their
sciences as disparate disciplines.   An extreme version of the
abstraction of the political from the economic is the post-Cold War
thesis that the only issue is the political one of democracy (good)
vs. right and left totalitarianism (bad).  But at least during the
Cold War it could be recognized that the dangerous threat was
socialism, an "economic" system.  However, the high ideological ground
from which that was viewed was that of democracy as freedom (not
equality), and such political freedom included unlimited freedom of
"enterprise" (not insignificantly the name of a "Starship" which still
popularly represents an endless future of unlimited progress).

Enlightenment does require seeing that rationality necessarily
involves the attaining and securing of freedom in some form, as
embodying the human capacity for universality, self-government,
equality, and justice, and that to unify these in some embodied form
requires the intellectual skills of the virtue of phronesis.  But it
also requires seeing that their embodiment must be in relations of
production, that is of universal access to the resources necessary for
meeting physical and spiritual needs.

Any discussion of "political" relations should see them and "economic"
relations (both class relations of production) as of the same nature,
and as mutually implicated or at least imbricated.  Any analysis in a
given conjuncture of "the ensemble of social relations" (sixth thesis
on Feuerbach)?including relations of race, gender, etc.?will demand
complicated empirical study.  Pure "political" theory about the nation
state and its individual citizens, addressing itself impartially to
the USA and to Pallau, and with no reference to "the economic" (that
is, to global relations of production) is empty, unreal,
irrelevant?but also, unwittingly or not, an apologetics for the status
quo.  In Habermas's case, the given reason for the concentration on
the political and the neglect of the economic seems to be the
methodological claim that moral and political "communicative" norms
are arguable?on the basis of the pragmatic implications of
semantics?but that human development has arrived at the mature insight
that substantive values must be left to the decision of autonomous
individuals, preferably in a structure suited to such procedural
norms.  However, a more fundamental reason could be Habermas's
reduction of production to something beneath the notice of
rationality.

The given reason echoes Rawls's divorce of the right and the good, the
procedural and the substantive. This is to concede too much to the
prevalent modern scepticism which Habermas claims to seek to overcome.
Scepticism about the rational validity of value judgments is the
negative foundation of bourgeois relativism, and of theories of the
validity only of "thin" accounts of the good, and only of
proceduralist accounts of justice.  As Marx argued, ignoring
production and class means reproducing the current ideas of the ruling
class.









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