Why is the topic of democracy and capitalism relevant today?
African governments have been under pressure from many quarters to ‘democratise’ – this has been the case since the 1990s to the present. Within the African countries themselves, movements for democratic change emerged and struggled for the right of African people to have a say in government.
At an international level, the need to ‘democratise’ has become one of the conditions imposed by the international financial institutions particularly the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Today the need to ‘democratise’ has been tied to the need to introduce ‘free market’ economies – in other words to reduce the role of the state in the economy, to privatise state enterprises, to liberalise the economy and so on.
Although up to the late 1960s many movements in Africa called for democratisation as part of the struggle for self-determination and independence, this call was not tied to the introduction of market economies.
After more than three decades of structural adjustment programmes in Africa, and despite the introduction of democratisation in most countries, we need to ask why the promise of a better life and freedom from poverty has not accompanied the processes of democratisation? In other words, we need to ask ourselves:
- Why have people continued to ‘vote for their own impoverishment’?
- Can the institutions of democracy in our countries contribute to the struggle to overcome poverty and hunger?
- Will the struggles we are currently waging for democratisation lead to overcoming the legacy of impoverishment of Africa and its people?
What is democracy and how did it emerge?
In many textbooks we are told that democracy comes from Greece, and that it means ‘rule by the people.’ The fact is that in all societies, long before the Greeks, people ruled themselves in one way
or another. People had to rule themselves because no person can survive on their own, and so they needed to cooperate with others in order to ensure their survival.
Therefore, all societies have one or other form of collective decision making.
Different societies differ, however, on who is regarded as the ‘people’, and on how the ‘rule’ of those who are regarded as the people is organised.
In Greece, for example, only the male slave owners above a certain age were regarded as the ‘people’, and therefore only they were allowed to participate in collective decision-making about the affairs of Greek society as a whole. Women and slaves were excluded from this process. For many centuries before colonialism African societies had various ways in which collective decision-making took place – and this was different from time to time and from society to society.
The Birth of Democracy
Our modern democracy, that is the way people rule themselves today is relatively new, and has emerged over the last 250 years. This is a very short time, considering that ‘people’ have been ruling themselves for thousands of years.
The modern form of democracy differs from previous ones in two ways: the fact that all people above a certain age are included in making decisions about how they are ruled, and in the way this decision making is organised – that is representatives make decisions on behalf of the people.
But even this democracy has changed in very important ways over the last 250 years. Firstly, not all people above a certain age were allowed to vote
– in the beginning only those who owned property were allowed to vote. Secondly, for a long time women were not allowed to vote. Thirdly, in certain contexts, as under colonialism in Africa, only white people were allowed to vote, and so on.
The modern form of democracy emerged through a series of struggles between the new class of capitalists (this is in the 1400s to the 1700s), and the old class of princes, bishops and kings (the Feudal classes) in Europe. These struggles were over the control of wealth in society – they were over how the wealth that was coming out of the new factories, and out of the new forms of trade, was owned and distributed. The kings, bishops and princes used their control of the decision-making processes in society – their democracy – to transfer most of the wealth to themselves.
This led to a series of struggles, the most famous of which were the English revolution of 1688, the American revolution of 1776, and the most important – the French revolution of 1789.
But the capitalist class was not the only class that was struggling against the injustices of the rule of kings, bishops and princes. The peasants in Europe had been involved in many struggles against the rule of the feudal classes for hundreds of years. These struggles had led to many uprisings in Europe. Some of the famous ones were in Germany in the 1400s and 1500s. Like the struggles of the new capitalist classes, the peasants fought over the transfer of wealth they produced to the feudal lords.
Although the capitalist classes were the minority, they were very powerful – mainly because they were wealthy, they had education, they travelled widely (they already had a tendency to globalise), they had organising skills, and developed a whole system of ideas to defend and justify their struggles.
The new capitalist classes were then able to present themselves as the representatives of all the classes and people that were oppressed by the feudal classes.
This attempt to be the representatives of all oppressed people and classes is what led to the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, and to the slogan of the French revolution, “Equality! Liberty! Fraternity!” In order for their struggle to succeed, the capitalist classes – who were known as the bourgeoisie – mobilised all the oppressed classes.
Before the revolution was even over, the bourgeoisie began to exclude the peasants and urban workers from ‘the people’, and instituted rule by those with property. This led to a new round of struggles, which forced the bourgeoisie to give the right to vote to the working class and the peasants. In France the most famous of these struggles was the revolution of 1848, and in England it was the workers movement known as the Chartist Movement.
From the French revolution in 1789 it took more than 130 years before all adults in Europe could vote – and it was 130 years of struggles!
Capitalism and Democracy
Although the capitalist class did not ‘make’ the revolutions, which overthrew the feudal system of rule, they were the main organisers of those revolutions.
Like the feudal classes before them, the capitalists also sought to transfer wealth from – or to exploit the mass of workers and peasants. They wanted to accumulate wealth at the expense of the masses.
These interests of the capitalists make it difficult for them to share collective decision-making with the workers, the unemployed, the landless and peasants. Therefore capitalists always attempt to exclude these classes from any form of decision- making. In many cases this proved impossible, and the struggles waged by these oppressed classes forced capitalists to accept a system of rule which included all (adult) people.
There are a number of important observations that we need to make from this fact. For most of the
250 years since the introduction of the modern form of democracy, capitalists have tried many ways of excluding the mass of the people from collective decision-making. For most of this period, it was the struggles of the people that forced capitalists to accept a democracy that included all people. These include struggles for the vote in Europe, anti- colonial struggles in the Third World, particularly in Africa, and struggles for socialism all over the world.
Since the French revolution, stable capitalist democracies that included all people only date from the period after the Second World War, 1945.
Although the ideologues of capitalism would like to argue that capitalism is good for democracy, history shows a different picture.
Capitalism, therefore, has a contradictory relationship to democracy. Because of their social and economic interests, capitalists tend to limit democracy – that is, the extent of collective decision-making in society. The struggles that are waged by the masses for democracy can lead to the overthrow of capitalism, to the extent that the masses begin to identify the problem as being the capitalists themselves.
Democracy is also useful to capitalism if it can be made to give legitimacy to the social and economic system of capitalism. Therefore the challenge to capitalists is how to restrict the levels of collective decision-making in society, but at the same time maintain popular legitimacy for capitalism.
This challenge is always difficult to meet in periods when the organisations of the poor are strong in society. This is why capitalist democracy was strongest in Europe after the Second World War. The working class organisations were strong then, and the capitalists were forced to accept a broad level of collective decision-making in society. For example, in many countries – like France and Italy – the communist parties were some of the strongest parties, and the only way the capitalist parties could keep them out of power was through making coalitions with each other.
The challenge of restricting the levels of collective decision-making while at the same time maintaining legitimacy for capitalism has not always been easy
to meet. In many instances this has led to situations in which capitalists resort to dictatorship and authoritarianism in order to protect their interests. This was the case in many countries in Latin America, and in Africa after independence.
Neoliberalism, Globalisation and Democracy
The contradictions between capitalism and democracy have intensified since the beginning of the 1970s, and have made the challenge of keeping the balance between the social and economic interests of the capitalists and the pressure for democratic government more difficult.
Capitalism is a system driven by the search for profits, and this makes it a very unstable system. The search for higher and higher profits forces capitalism to look for cheaper labour, cheaper raw materials, and new markets. This results in the system crashing periodically, leading to the collapse of profits, large-scale unemployment, and social instability.
The waves of struggles for democratisation in
Europe and throughout the rest of the world after
1945 meant that cheap labour, cheap raw materials and new markets were not easy to secure, and, together with other processes within capitalism, this led to a global economic crash in the early 1970s.
Capitalism needed to restore profitability and a number of measures were taken by the major capitalist powers – led by the United States and Britain. The key measures were to shift the social balance of power in society, so as to ensure that all the measures needed to ensure that workers’ resistance did not block access to cheap labour, cheap raw materials, and new markets.
The first strategy to shift this balance of power in society was through repression: for example Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), Argentina (1976), USA (1980-82), Britain (1979-84), and so on. Promoting the ideology of the free market, free enterprise, market economy, individualism, and so on. This meant a much more powerful role for the mass media.
Once the strength of the popular classes was broken, a number of other measures were possible. These measures include lowering wages, intensification of technological innovation, lowering prices of raw materials, lowering taxes on capital, providing more subsidies to capital, privatisation and removing the state from active economic life, ensuring free movement of goods and capital (but not labour), and so on.
In general, neoliberalism and globalisation intensified the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich within the countries of the North and the countries of the South, and from the South to the capitalists of the North.
This new period of capitalism led to the need to ensure that democratic government did not undermine the new capitalist agenda. This was done in a number of ways including privatisation of decision-making – increasing the role of private consultants; the creation of independent bodies, especially in key areas of economic decision- making, like reserve banks; subordination of national parliaments and institutions like the courts, and the increasing treatment of corporations as ‘legal persons’ with equal rights to the citizens.
Other methods were internationalisation of decision-making – and therefore increasing the role for multilateral financial, trade and economic institutions.
A systematic policy of weakening mass organisations that resist the new agenda.
Removal of social and economic rights from national laws and constitutions. Centralisation of power first in national government, and then in international institutions. Making local government less powerful. Undermining the economic and social power of government, for example through privatisation and so on. Increasing the power of the repressive institutions of the state – that is, the army, police and prison systems.
Once this agenda is consolidated, it becomes possible to narrow democracy to periodic elections every five years or so. The government that is voted for is powerless to change anything, and is forced
to implement the agenda of capitalist classes in the particular country, and of the global capitalist classes – mainly from the US.
In the event that the government is committed to serving popular interests, or if it gives in to the pressure from its own people, then external economic pressure is applied, or direct repression. The key strategy, however, is to maintain a democratic form of government, but ensuring that it does not undermine the agenda of the capitalist class.
The modern form of democracy in Africa
Within Africa, capitalism did not arise with democratic government; Africans were excluded from democratic participation.
It was the struggles for national self- determination and independence that made the call for democratic participation for all people, and for a long time this was resisted by the colonial powers. Already at independence, the new African nations inherited a state that was designed to serve the needs of the colonial powers, and did not have structures and institutions to serve the local populations.
Unlike in Europe, many nationalist struggles did not create strong working class and peasant organisations, so this meant a weak democracy from the beginning. The combination of a weak neocolonial state, and a weak mass or civil society movement, produced a tendency to populist one- party dictatorships.
The fact that African capitalism was orientated outwards – that the local capitalist class was always subordinated to the foreign capitalist classes, reinforced the tendency to repression and undemocratic practices. The onset of the global capitalist crisis weakened the local capitalist classes even further and made them more dependent on foreign capital. This further weakened the already weak states.
The crisis also weakened mass organisations, especially the trade unions, and this added to the weakness of democracy.
By Oupa Lehulere
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