alternet | The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with
politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most
capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich
who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated
extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at
least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of
legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among
those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage
runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as
the 2020 election looms.
The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists
who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a
small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are
the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the
micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the
major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the
key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.
Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to
themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay
packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the
social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners
and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges.
Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow
chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The
owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to
shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.
However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo
capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when,
for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians
whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse
capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government
spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways.
If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable
levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for
example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from
capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net
revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist
hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each
with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism
would disappear.
Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent
employees from forming just such political majorities. During its
recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts
between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics),
capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how
best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism
altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.
To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small
social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those
alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all
emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests
or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist
minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is
with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a
military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for
anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors.
Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established
minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large
anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military
dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such
alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus,
fascism has arrived.
During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by
imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains.
Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and
results of the capitalist economic system and especially its
characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To
that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with,
to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and
use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.
In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the
capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc”
with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the
capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the
anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally,
for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic
power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing
parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and
beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep
anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social
movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge
capitalism’s hegemony.
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