IS DEMOCRACY REALLY POSSIBLE UNDER CAPITALISM?
By Professor Duncan Richard Shaw
Madrid, 6 July 2022
Back in 1985, Ken Livingstone was the embattled left-wing leader of the Greater London Council, a sharp thorn in the side of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
At exactly the same time as Thatcher was privatizing almost all of Britain’s (previously excellent) public services, Livingstone was reducing the fairs on the London Underground. At exactly the same time as Thatcher was eliminating most of Britain’s enviromental and labour safeguards, Livingstone was working hard to increase labour protections in London – and also to introduce restrictions on the private motor car: the first major city in the world to do that.
Livingstone knew that Thatcher was out to get him, in an ugly political battle for control of London. He wrote a prophetic book entitled If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish it.
In 1986, the Greater London Council was summarily abolished by Thatcher, without any regard at all for political decency and democratic norms.
I was a PhD candidate at the University of London at the time, about to leave for Spain to carry out the research for my thesis. The brutal abolition of the Greater London Council made me start to ponder one of the most profound questions in contemporary life: is democracy really possible under capitalism?
Left-wing theorists such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Eric Hobsbawn have always seen true democracy as incompatible with capitalism, largely because of political parties and individual leaders being corrupted by the money of Big Oil, Big Pharma, climate change deniers, media moguls and arms manufacturers.
Even cautious American liberals such as Robert Reich (who was Bill Cllinton’s Secretary of Labor, and originally held to the liberal-reformist line that special interests could be tamed) have finally managed to see the light:
“Free markets were supposed to lead to free societies. Instead, today’s supercharged global economy is eroding the power of the people in democracies around the globe. Welcome to a world where the bottom line trumps the common good and government takes a back seat to big business…”
An even sharper analysis of how special interests have ruined democracy can be found in today’s Guardian, written by George Mombiot, one of the most thought-provoking columnists in today’s troubled world.
Mombiot cleverly connects recent US Supreme Court decisions about abortion, environmental regulation and gun control to the power of oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.
“All these cases expose the same political vulnerability: the ease with which democracy is crushed by the power of money. We cannot protect the living world, or women’s reproductive rights, or anything else we value until we get the money out of politics, and break up the media empires that make a mockery of informed political consent.”
Countless studies show just how alienated and disillusioned people are (especially young people) with today’s corrupted and enfeebled democracies, in which special interest groups, lobbies and oligarchs can so easily manipulate and overturn the will of the majority.
So: is proper democracy really possible under the global capitalist system?