GOOD MORNNG AND HOW IS THE MIND TODAY. CAPITALISM AND DEMOCRACY: A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS? I ran into a young nouveau-riche liberal sometime back who equated capitalism with democracy as indivisibly systemic to political freedom. I explained to him that the very notion of capitalist democracy is a contradiction in terms in the sense that capitalism, as an economic system, concentrates the ownership and control of the industrial, commercial, financial and agricultural means of producing wealth in the hands of a very small minority of the population who profit therefrom in disproportionate rate to the majority of the population employed by them to produce that wealth. Furthermore, this systemic inequality also extended to private ownership of the means of communication in society such as public media which enables this small minority to exercise a disproportionate degree of influence on politics and unilaterally informs only on what it deems to be in the public interest without any proven mandate. And this, combined with the same small minoritys monopoly of economy power as a result of their exclusive ownership of the means of producing wealth, makes the protection of their interests and maintaining a politically stable investment climate a national interest priority for the state. In addition, economic progress is measured by that state, not first in terms of the aggregate rate of improvement of the material and social welfare of the majority, but in terms of the productive output of the means of producing wealth and the rate of profit derived therefrom for its owners on export markets. Even more disturbing; the supply of goods to society is primarily influenced by vacillating market value as a distributary determinant, as opposed to public need and aggregate use value. Can something as unstable and vacillating as a spectral market and business cycles, really be a viable determinant of the availability of essential goods and services to the society? If so, why and with what moral or other justification? But, retorted the nouveau liberal - We can vote! We have political equality and an independent justice system? The majority have a voice! And this means what exactly in a society where everything is for sale as commodities and money ultimately determines your access to, and quality of basic services and justice disproportionately on the basis of your income, or lack thereof?, I asked. Hereafter, as often befits young nouveau-riche liberals tested beyond the intellectual limits of their platitudes, the discussion degenerated into labels such as communist, illiberal, MARXIST, etc. I thanked him for the MARXIST compliment and moved on. However, this still left the question of what, in a nutshell, I considered as the most basic requirement for real democracy. A democratic society which, as the socialist activist RALPH MILIBAND put it in his book The Long Revolution: ... will long require a state to carry out essential tasks which the state alone can accomplish: for instance, the decisions which must ultimately be made about priorities regarding the allocation of scarce and essential resources; the adjudication of a diversity of competing claims in societies where division and conflict, though greatly attenuated, would continue to occur; the ultimate guarantee of civic, political, and social rights which give much of its force to the notion of socialist pluralism; and so on . . . just as society would check state power, so too would the state, democratically invested with the capacity to do so, constitute a check on the power of popular institutions and agencies. And therein lies the essence of the political rub - a true democratic society organises itself around the protection of, not only the notion of individualized liberalist political rights, but also those rights that build the collective agency and organised power of the masses - the social and civic rights MILIBAND refers to. What the substantive content of these collective social and civic rights should be, will determine the quality of democratic praxis.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Oct 2013 05:48:16 +0000
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