Beyond market and state

the project of democratization of the economy

by Alex Demirovic

[This article published on 8/26/2009 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.linksnet.de/artikel/24805.]

To emphasize the seriousness of the current economic crisis, it is often compared to the Great Depression of 1929. Despite the depth of the current crisis, so far it does not appear that the left in general, the Left Party in particular, the social movements or the trade unions have been successful in giving the crisis a critical meaning. Such a meaning would illustrate the dynamics of capitalist socialization that are destructive of individual and collective life perspectives and would provide the impetus to advocate for its overcoming. For now, many continue to place their trust in those who have been instrumental in creating the crisis and have proven that their economic and political competence is poor. The dominant, financial market-oriented factions of capital are using the crisis to further enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else by attempting to appropriate even the wealth of society that is yet to be generated in the medium term by indebting the state. The left and civil society organizations have been warning of such a crisis for years. Through arguments and protests, they have tried to influence politicians and rulers not to further unleash the dangerous dynamics and power of the financial industry and to rein in the one that already exists.

The crisis is the result of previous attempts to remedy the over-accumulation crisis of capital and, to that extent, of policies that have been pursued in recent years. Thus, it is not a matter of a "socially disembedded" market. The SPD and the Greens, in particular, have fostered the conditions for the crisis dynamics with numerous laws promoting the financial market and facilitating speculation, establishing private pensions, putting pressure on wages, lowering taxes on the wealthy and continuing privatization of public property. It is part of the dominance of these capital groups not to have to take note of the reality of many people. Representatives of the business community even demand empathy for themselves because they, too, have been surprised by the crisis. Green and SPD politicians behave as if they were completely uninvolved. Prominent Green politicians such as Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, as well as some journalists, have left the impression that the crisis is nothing more than a "black swan" that unexpectedly flies by.

At the founding party conference of Die Linke in the summer of 2007, there was talk of posing the system question. There was even talk of it on the Tagesschau. But Spiegel Online is amazed to see these days that no one is asking the system question, despite the crisis. In fact, the situation is different.

But it has been one of the historical experiences of the left for many decades that the bourgeois camp is rarely well informed about the positions of the left. The rulers have prescribed excellence - i.e., neoliberal ignorance - for themselves: There is no such thing as society; they prefer to live in the dream world of model platonisms and market utopias. These are rational insofar as they bring opportunities for enrichment to a few powerful groups in the bourgeois camp. The considerable risks for the others are pushed aside. Therefore, there is much to suggest that conflicts in the bourgeois camp, between the various factions of capital, will also increase during the crisis.

The economic crisis runs deep. Many billions of dollars and euros have already been destroyed. Many people in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan have lost their jobs, their pensions, their savings, their purchased apartments or houses. In the countries of the global South, many people - who have been forced into the existence of free wage labor for only a few years or decades - are set free. This causes a huge migration wave of migrant workers returning to their homeland, from the oil-producing Arab states back to Egypt or the Philippines, in India or China from the industrial regions and cities back to the countryside. The transfer funds of these migrants will be lacking for the survival of their dependents. In the countryside itself, subsistence is not guaranteed, which could increase migration to the cities. The remarkable thing about this crisis is that after the wave of crises in the 1990s that hit Mexico, Argentina, Russia, Southeast Asia, and after the dotcom crisis at the beginning of the decade, even before an economic recovery, a new and even deeper crisis is already taking place. But the crisis that erupted in 2007 is not just one of the financial industry and the global economy. This crisis is overdetermined by other crises: the food crisis, the energy crisis, the climate crisis. Other elements of crisis could be added. After the boom triggered by information technologies, which enabled significant rationalizations, the leading OECD countries are in a technological crisis because further innovations would require fundamental changes in the industrial structure. They are still oriented toward fossil fuels, and mobility is still based on combustion engines. The scrappage scheme, which is being used as a crisis instrument in a good dozen countries, is being used to renew the automobile fleet; this means that cars with an outdated technology will be the main means of transportation for another twenty years and will contribute to CO2 emissions. Technological innovations that would raise social reproduction to a higher level in a relevant and sustainable way are marginal. Genetic engineering is a risky large-scale technology that does not contribute to a sustainable way of life. Many countries are characterized by an increasing imbalance between urban and rural areas: More and more people are concentrated in a few cities, while rural areas are becoming deserted, populations are declining, older people and children are being left behind, and material and cultural provision is becoming precarious. There is an education crisis, because even the rich states do not provide as much money for education as would be necessary to ensure even the reproduction of knowledge. Knowledge is bought on the world market. This means that poorer countries, and there the middle classes, bear the costs of education, the ready educated then migrate to the centers where they are promised higher incomes.

To complete the picture, it is necessary to address politics and the state. It is constitutive of democratic societies that they create channels of opinion and will formation that enable critical and oppositional forces to voice moments of social crisis and to work for reforms that force concessions from the rulers in order to improve the lives of the subalterns. But democratic mechanisms, for their part, are not in good shape. There is talk of "post-democracy," by which is meant that, while the façade of democratic institutions and procedures continues to exist, it is primarily the interests of globally operating corporations that prevail. The parties are weakened and losing members, interest in politics is at a low level among the population, the unions have been losing members for years, their support among younger and highly qualified people is relatively low, and a very high proportion of companies have no works councils. Politicians like Edmund Stoiber or business representatives like Hans-Olaf Henkel would like to see voting rights restricted according to criteria of income or region. There is also a desire for efficient executive decision-making processes that should no longer be prevented or slowed down by laws, legal procedural rules or social movements. In the case of the enforcement of the Financial Market Stabilization Act and the establishment of the Financial Market Stabilization Fund SoFFin, the media rightly spoke of a "cold coup" and an "emergency decree." Support for democracy is low; it is going through a crisis.

Reference is often made to the social movements when it comes to naming alternatives to the parties and the unions. But the latter are themselves in a difficult situation - the "street versus palace" model is also in crisis. The advantage that social movements are now recognized as a form of interest representation and as a component of the political system of the Federal Republic has at the same time the disadvantage that their existence, their issues, their practices are themselves normalized. They exist, they are recognized, and precisely because of this, they can be overlooked and overheard by politics and business. The number of demonstrators must already be particularly high, violence must be added, before the media and politics deal with it. But then it is not about the substantive demands, but about the forms of action, about individual groups among the demonstrators - and the media and politicians act as if they were neutral referees protecting the rules of the game. The people's anger fizzles out in the streets, and the media only carry pictures and marginal notes for a day, writes Adrian Kreye in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. What was long considered a strength of the social movements is described by him as a weakness. The left is faceless, he says, and the few better-known individuals are unable to command a majority - which is an awkward way of saying, according to the author, that they cannot symbolize the movements in their diversity. In line with the comprehensive crisis context of the capitalist social formation, the movements address many issues with not only local, regional or national, but global reach. But so far they have hardly succeeded in bundling their topics, their demands, their goals. The social movements recognize the complexity and non-reducibility of the problems. It is precisely this fact, as well as the temporal, spatial, social and factual scope of the social movements, that makes them superior to the representatives of the ruling camp in many cases. At the same time, however, they are also inferior. For it is one of the necessities of politics to symbolically condense various problems into one theme in such a way that all struggles refer to all others as if by themselves, and the solution of one problem can also be expected to solve the other problems, at least to some extent. Chains of equivalence must be formed that establish a link between the various social struggles. Only in this way will those who protest and advocate emancipatory goals recognize themselves as participants in a comprehensive social movement directed against a common antagonist. Thus, in order for the various social movements to unite, they must form equivalents. An equivalent is neither a common interest underlying all nor an argument that convinces all because it is true as such. Such an equivalent may be the rejection of nuclear power, which represents a life-destroying industry to some, a masculine technology to others, a key capitalist investment to third parties. In recent years, the equivalent that has united many movements and groups has been the critique of neoliberalism: the privatization of public goods, the disenfranchisement of the unemployed, the pressure on wages and the de-limitation of working hours, and many other moments have made neoliberalism the symbol of the opposing camp. There were the mobilizations within the framework of the social forum movement, the G8 protests, the formation of groups like Attac; there were the numerous protests of those affected by Agenda 2010. Environmental and climate groups, Antifa and anti-racist groups, migrant contexts, groups that put the sexual and gender question at the center of their activity, activists in the field of surveillance and urban development unfolded diverse activities and discussed at conferences critical of capitalism. Now that universities have lost importance as places of critical knowledge production, an increasing number of seminars, lecture series or summer academies have been organized from critical contexts in recent years. But despite all efforts, no movements emerged from these processes in recent years that formed a more comprehensive bloc. That such a bloc, actively organizing the majority, has not formed indicates that "neoliberalism" does not have sufficient symbolic power to absorb the contradictions and polarize society.

But there is no doubt that shifts in the balance of power in favor of the left can be observed. The experience of government policies pursued by the SPD and the Greens - militarized foreign policy, Agenda 2010, continued privatization of public goods, privatization of pensions, promotion of enrichment strategies - has contributed to overcoming passivity from below. Social market economy, Rhineland capitalism, New Center are no longer convincing. With the formation of the Wahlalternative Arbeit & Soziale Gerechtigkeit (Election Alternative for Work and Social Justice) in 2004, there was for the first time in the history of the Federal Republic a noteworthy initiative from the working class for political self-organization. Another new development is that the distance that has existed between trade unions and social movements since the 1970s is narrowing. The Left Party is the result of the political efforts of a large number of groups and currents, not just the merger of the WASG and the PDS; its founding in the summer of 2007 led to a shift in the balance of power, because since then alternatives to capitalism can also be addressed in the official public sphere. With the Left Party, there is also the possibility for the East and West German left to reflect together in an emancipatory perspective on the mistakes of previous state socialist attempts and on authoritarian dynamics in the socialist project. The reappraisal of and search for alternative concepts as well as their implementation in concrete policies have a point of reference in the official political sphere and find a certain support there.

The creation of a chain of equivalence against the common opponent "neoliberalism" works, but it itself has a weakness. By focusing on a critique of neoliberalism and its phobia of the state, the left limits its perspective to state euphoria. Particularly in the Left Party, one can detect an etatism according to which socialism is the realization of the laws in force and nationalization. The failure of markets and managers is countered by the transfer of companies and banks secured by the state to public ownership and control. The neo-liberal side counters this demand with the argument that state-controlled banks in particular have been involved to a considerable extent in speculative transactions, and that experience teaches that state-owned enterprises are managed worse than privately owned ones. Above all, the state is preventing the market from exercising its cleansing function, even now in the crisis. In contrast to this narrow focus on the alternative of state or market, it is necessary to argue in favor of the third option of converting companies into holding companies. In this case, the companies no longer have to achieve the high profits that correspond to the benchmarks of the financial markets. Moreover, the producers and consumers can and should be directly involved in company decisions. They have to bear all the risks anyway, i.e. unemployment or tax increases, so it is appropriate if they also participate in the company decisions about products, investments, working hours and type of work. The political economy of profit can be replaced by the political economy of labor; organize society around the labor that is denied under capitalist conditions, that generates the polity and its very existence. Thus, centrally, there is the question of extending democracy far beyond the political realm into the centers of economic power. This will not be an immediate solution to all the problems of social movements, but will contribute to conditions in which they will be more workable.

Alex Demirovic, born 1952, PhD; currently assistant professor of general and political sociology at the Bergische GHS/University of Wuppertal; previously worked at the Institute for Sociology at the University of Wuppertal.