The battle for democracy in the face of neoliberalism

In June 2012, Wolfgang Streeck — sociologist and Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies — delivered the Adorno Lectures at the Institut für Sozialforshcung. Those lectures have been gathered and expanded in the book Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. A book, you will be unsurprised to learn — given that lengthy introduction — that I am currently reading.

It will also be no surprise that Streeck believes the 70s were a turning point for what he terms ‘capitalism in the wealthy democracies of the Western world’. It was in the 70s that he identifies a ‘breakdown of the postwar order’ and by that I believe he means basically the attack by capital on the mixed economies and welfare state that formed the social pact that delivered the Western democracies from revolution after 1945.

What he implies but doesn’t yet make clear — at least on this first reading — is that the 1970s were a crisis of capitalism masquerading as a crisis of democracy. The corporate class felt reined in by the regulations and drive for a more egalitarian society imposed on them by a politics that believed the economy was for the common good rather than simply about fear and greed.

It was, in short, a battle between democracy and capitalism. And capitalism won. The market became more important than politics and democracy was hollowed out. The 1970s and the neoliberal project that took control of both states and economies led directly to 2008 and the most recent financial crisis.

Brexit and Trump are further consequences. Both reveal how democracy serves capitalism and, more explicitly, the corporate elite rather than any nation’s citizens. We are now, for the most part, consumers and customers rather than citizens.

The pretence of democracy, the pretence that the corporations are subservient to the state, endures in certain quarters — and is encouraged as a belief by those who most benefit from the opposite reality. But as the Fascism that stalks the corridors of power in an increasing number of countries begins to assert itself more blatantly, democracy itself will be discarded, mocked, seen as a sign of weakness.

There are some in our seats of government who struggle to uphold the traditional democratic values. Theirs is an uphill battle. I’ll leave you with a final quotation from Streeck:

Never since the Second World War have the governments of the capitalist West looked so clueless; never behind the façades of equanimity and tried political craftsmanship have there been so many indications of blind panic.