Abstract
Jerry Harris has written a powerful book for our times. We live in a period of multiple crises: a neoliberal globalization that is undermining national economies and delegitimizing nation-states, the global displacement of millions by capitalism that has produced mass migrations worldwide, terrorist blowback from imperial wars, unstoppable capitalocentric climate change and an unresolved financial crisis that still looms over our heads. And on top of all this is the inability of the state to find a fix for any of these crises due to the crisis of democracy that Harris analyses in this sweeping study.
That crisis of democracy is not just due to political gridlock. It goes deeper. Political elites are no longer so much in the service of national capital. With globalization, they have become beholden to a transnational capitalist class (TCC) rooted in transnational corporations. Unlike the era of national capitalism where the system enjoyed hegemonic legitimacy due to political democracy and growing economic well-being, global capitalism is facing a worldwide crisis of legitimacy in the face of spreading austerity and the naked political power of the 1% (p. 98). That delegitimization of political elites is expressed in the current US electoral campaign, in the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, in the sweeping unpopularity of Mexico’s president and in so many other countries that have been drawn into global capitalism. This is because, as Harris shows, ‘the new transnational capitalist class has little use for democracy, the social contract, or any sense of national responsibility’ (p. 19).
The hegemonic bloc that the ruling class had constructed around Keynesianism in the post–World War II (WWII) period has now dissolved as capital has leaped over national borders, in effect expelling the working class from its benefits. As Harris perceptively points out, ‘neo-Keynesianism has been unable to mount an effective alternative, trapped by its own belief in a more “just” globalization’ (p. 50). As social tensions mount, coercion tends to replace consent as the main form of control.
Neoliberal corporate globalization has transformed the working class worldwide into a precariat. Production has been restructured into global assembly lines. Investment has shifted away from production towards financial speculation. These changes have enabled the formation of the TCC. Harris argues the TCC is a self-conscious class that knows no national identity, moving between global cities, conferring in places like Davos, presiding over a global system of endless accumulation of capital. Governance of this system is through the market and the beginnings of a ‘transnational state’ (p. 96) being constructed in trade deals that establish a judicial apparatus independent of national states in investor-state resolution panels. In effect, these give sovereign power to transnational corporations in the new world order of global capital. Here, we can see most vividly the crisis of democracy.
Harris postulates that a stable social order requires a balance between state, market and civil society. The market fundamentalism of neoliberalism gives all weight to the market. Today, neoliberalism is the dominant ideology embraced not only by the ruling class but also by the subject classes. Thus, the state is not seen as the instrument of a popular will serving its interest. Rather, its aim is to widen the market in service to individual ‘freedom’. In practice, this amounts to the freedom of corporate capital in the market and the freedom of consumers to buy what they offer. It is a freedom without political content. Social solidarity and collective action are seen as interfering with freedom. It is thus that Harris says ‘We may be facing a time in which the bourgeois democratic revolution has run its course’ (p. 51).
This reader would wish that Harris had explored more fully the political fallout in the countries of the global North from the increasing precariousness of the working class as a result of neoliberal globalization. As what used to be called a ‘labor aristocracy’ faces the threat of downward mobility, we are seeing a popular rebellion against globalization and a delegitimization of states that have promoted it. In the absence of a Left alternative, large sectors of this rebellion have moved to the Right. Witness the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the Trump phenomenon in the United States where rejection of globalization was often expressed in racist terms.
In our lifetimes, the political elite has been able to successfully manage the political process so as to give us the illusion that it was democratic. In this managed democracy (as Shelton Wolin has called it in Democracy Incorporated), competing elites gave us candidates between which we voters got to choose. The result was that the winning candidate who then ruled over us enjoyed legitimacy. Elections were a contest between elites and a way of legitimating the rule of one section of the elite.
This year that system broke down in the face of the loss of its legitimacy. The Republican establishment lost control of the nominating process and ended up with a candidate they could hardly stomach. And it was only by blatant manipulation that the neoliberal New Democratic establishment was able to fend off a populist challenge to its chosen candidate. The outcome left voters the distasteful choice between two unpopular candidates and the deepening delegitimization of a fundamentally undemocratic political system.
What we are seeing in this rebellion is blowback from neoliberal globalization. This has been a long time brewing and will not end with an election. The neoliberal globalization promoted by the political elite is a betrayal of the people, a betrayal of the nation. Policies that favoured corporations were one thing in the era of national capitalism. But now in the age of transnational corporations, they amount to the abandonment of the nation and undermine the legitimacy of the political system. Harris’ critique of globalization can serve well to illuminate how we have come to the impasse where our alternatives may be between socialism and barbarism.
Harris finds hope in the global South where civil society is contesting its eclipse. Harris’ final chapter titled ‘Democracy Beyond Capitalism’ looks at popular struggles for a new protagonistic democracy. This is a rich survey of the ideas of Marta Harnecker and David Schweickart (economic democracy) as well as historical experiences in Argentina, Bolivia, Greece and especially Venezuela. It is here that Harris sees a Gramscian ‘war of position’ unfolding where social movements as well as progressive governments are ‘creating counter-hegemonic institutions based on working-class power that can contest with capitalist structures over a long period of time’ (p. 259). Prominent among such institutions are cooperatives as key in a strategy to build ‘a social and economic base for socialist transition’ (p. 258). In the Chavez vision of a 21st Century Socialism, the state empowers workers by promoting protagonistic democracy within civil society through self-managed cooperatives and communal councils.
In conclusion, Harris suggests we are approaching the end of the national bourgeois democratic era and facing the challenge of constructing a post-liberal form of popular democracy that maintains the best revolutionary content of the liberal form, but goes beyond it to a broader and direct participatory social system. This will require a new balance between state, market and a dense network of civil society institutions. Such a ‘popular and protagonistic democracy is now on the historical agenda’ (p. 54).