While many nations call
themselves democracies none so far as I can tell hit the mark.
Democracy gets some bad press for being an imperfect system but that
is only speculative to my mind as we have never put it to the test
due to never having a real democracy exist in society. Certainly the
manner of voting, governing and so forth used by most so called
democracies have their shortcomings however the problem goes deeper
than that.
Capitalism undermines
democracy in that it is more powerful, more natural and more
effective at doing what democracy attempts. Capitalism has a kind of
inherent momentum, it drives itself and has the ability to correct
its direction while democracy needs to be actively maintained.
Capitalism is the result of peoples actions and directly serves their
desire while democracy requires people to take extra actions and then
only indirectly serves those people.
I could go on
extensively about how capitalism is a more perfect system than even
the most ironed out utopian democracy, let alone any of the shambles
we have today. I will spare the reader the monologue as it is so
obvious, not just in theory but also if you consider your day to day
life. How little the government actually impact anything while the
effects of capitalism are all around us, always changing and
improving and yet deeply ingrained within our lives.
The problem is not with
capitalism, nor with democracy, both are useful systems for society.
The issue is with how capitalism makes democracy fairly impotent
while somewhat super-seeding one of the integral moral components of
democracy. With capitalism, your vote is your money and where you
chose to spend it, in democracy your vote counts the same as everyone
else. These two ideas are at odds and with capitalism being the far
more powerful system we end up living in a weird meritocracy where
your opinion is worth one vote plus your spending power. A true
democracy could only really exist under an economic system that
ensured each person has the same amount of money, which we know from
experience takes most of the wind out of capitalism's sails.
The problem is not even
anything to do with having meritocratic properties. As the name might
suggest, a meritocracy is in principle a good thing. The issue, as
ever is the imbalance of power between the systems and between
individuals. The quality of a meritocracy is dependant on how well
the merit of a person is assessed and therefore the proportion of how
much impact their actions and opinions should count for. In countries
like the UK and USA the poorer people make up the majority of voters
yet no government comes close to enacting their view of appropriate
wealth redistribution due to a rational fear of the economic fallout.
Much of this fallout would be retaliatory things from the wealthy
minority, both individuals and companies more inclined to emigrate,
evade tax or commit some other antisocial act.
In other essays I have
discussed how the one flaw in capitalism is how it has a positive
feedback that tends towards wealth aggregating. The main drawback
from this is the widening of the wealth gap which in turn has many
undesirable social ramifications. In this context however it simply
ensures that the richest people have more monetary voting power than
a perfect meritocracy would afford them. I do not have a problem with
higher earners having slightly more political sway than other people.
I do take issue with those that think it should be in proportion to
the unchecked results of present day wealth distribution.
The USA saw the
importance of trying to separate religion and state right from the
outset and despite this aim have failed spectacularly to achieve it.
For a true democracy to work in a capitalist nation there would need
to be the separation of economy and state, a task that would be far
harder than the separation of religion. This impossible task combined
with the strength and utility of capitalism imply we should be aiming
for a modified form of government. Most in terms of how we understand
our government and what we should expect from them. Democracy tells
us we are equals while capitalism plainly refutes that claim. Each
somewhat represents the main virtues of a state, democracy
representing equality and capitalism representing freedom. The hope
being that the power struggle between the two mechanisms results in
the maximum possible freedom and equality within the society.
Although there is much
that can be said to be working well as a result of the capitalist
democratic power balance there are the issues mentioned earlier in
the aggregating properties of capital and the raw efficiency and
dedication to purpose of capitalism. Combine this with rapidly
improving technology and capacity for work within society and you
find that over time you would expect the power of spending and
capital to increase relative to that of a democratic vote as well as
finding that more and more voting power was localized within a
smaller demographic of society. This trend is already observable over
our recent past however little is being done to turn the tide and
little thought is being given to the end result of this problem.
With the internet and
cost of shipping globally the mechanisms of trade are changing.
Amazon and ebay are in their infancy yet already play a huge part in
trade worldwide. The power of this kind of company will increasingly
lead to them dictating the conditions for trade to governments and
not the other way around. I suspect this in itself will lead to a
higher degree of free trade and a global economy which are good
things however these are not the only ramifications. When companies
dictate the terms of global trade rather than democratic governments
we are no longer in a meritocratic blend but an oligarchy whose
motivations are not implicitly aligned with society.
Various recent studies
have come out supporting these trends, observations and logical
conclusions. An American PhD student looked at voting patterns and
legislation over the last few decades in the USA and concluded that
it was already an oligarchy. Thomas Pikkety went much further back
with his recent book “Capital” and looked at the aggregation of
wealth over a couple of centuries, showing that it was always greater
than the rate of the total accumulation of wealth. Put in Pikkety's
simple terms, the most elegant solution is to make the rate of
aggregation of wealth roughly equal the rate of the growth of wealth.
Ideally it would have minor fluctuations either side so as to allow
gradual movement of wealth where most appropriate rather than a
forced flow in one direction only. Assuming you started from some a
point close to the ideal equilibrium between democratic power and
economic power or left the situation long enough to reach that
equilibrium then you would have a pretty reasonable meritocratic
society.
The problem with
stating the solution in terms of a logical premise is that is misses
all of the subtleties and context of the problem. First and foremost
the fact that the only means society has to restrain the aggregation
of wealth is democratically. Capitalism necessarily encourages it and
mechanically loses much of its virtue if you try and set up a
variation of it that would not have that property. Realising
democracy is the only way to alter the rate of wealth aggregation you
see that the solution to obtaining an effective democracies relies on
you already having an effective democracy. The appropriate analogy is
like trying to give yourself a leg up.
We can theorize that in
a society with minimal or “natural” variance of wealth any
democratic system would be near its maximum effectiveness. This is
all well and good but helps us in no way to get us to the society
with the lower wealth gap. The state of western democracies is not so
hopeless or impotent that change cannot come from them however it
will be slow, heavily resisted and a back and forth process. In my
more cynical musings I wonder if the present UK focus on immigration
is not just a good way to deflect the political attentions of the
poorer people in society. Parties such as UKIP would not have been
acknowledged or allowed to join the debate by the major parties if it
were not for the social focus on the economic side of things
resulting from the recent financial crisis and the involvement on the
financial sector in that crash. More public pressure is on financial
reforms which puts the political parties under more pressure from the
industry lobbyists. The fact that democracies are underpowered
compared to what they should be in theory means that it is easier to
deflect social pressures than it is to address them.
To conquer the more
powerful foe one must exploit it's weaknesses. The most effective
manner in which the poorer people have to reduce the wealth gap is
not voting for the most socialist party on offer but changing their
spending habits. Each time we shop at Walmart or Tesco, each time we
eat McDonalds or stop at Starbuck's for coffee we are casting a more
powerful vote in contradiction to our political stance. Certainly
this is less convenient and/or more expensive. It is not an option in
certain areas to buy products not produced by giant companies and it
is not an option at all for the poorest in society. The wonderful
thing about capitalism is that it is adaptive, as spending patterns
start to shift it will respond accordingly. If people want to buy
more local products produced by smaller local companies that keep the
flow of wealth more contained and less syphoned by the capitalists
then those services and goods will become more available and cheaper.
The weakness of
capitalism is not that it responds to our demands, that is its
strength. It's weakness is that it only understands and responds to
cost and profit. It relies for the most part on our greed to get the
thing we want cheapest so that we can obtain more of other things we
want. In terms of cost and profit there is no room to understand
happiness, empowerment and other human factors. If we, as a society
learn to think in terms of the democratic vote affixed to the price
of each thing we buy then we would change the world for the better
quicker than any purely democratic method could manage.
A large problem is that
we now have a capitalist culture where by we equate success to money
in too many areas. We now educate ourselves not to make us better
people or live in a better society but as a means of investing in our
own economic potential. We do well at school to get a better job so
as to have more money in later life. The more society becomes
conscious of the fact that money cannot buy fulfilment nor happiness
the more we will be able to use it so as to force through desirable
social change. It is empowering to chose to pay a little more for the
service you support, be it the local baker over the supermarket, the
bookshop with its friendly staff over Amazon.
The capitalists so to
speak may have the coordination and the money but the people still
hold all the real power we just lack the knowledge of how to use it,
the direction in which to use it, nor the organization to do so
effectively. We do most of the work, we do most of the real spending
and consuming of all the most important things. We create most of the
demand for the things that are then brought to market.
We are an inconceivably
long way off being able to get our oil from the local refinery or our
medication from the little family run pharmaceutical company, nor is
it a pragmatic end game for those kinds of industry. The hope is that
a gradual improvement in the wealth gap would subsequently empower
democratic government to more effectively control those industries
that need to be vast to work without falling subservient to them or
crippling them by trying to make them publicly operated. Knowing that
when buying a product you are doing a lot more than just getting
something for some money, certainly more than you do when you head
out to vote on election day, is a big part of the battle. It is the
kind of thing that education should be comprised of. Choosing not to
go into debt or buy the cheapest product when you can get the same
without contradicting your beliefs elsewhere. Choosing to support
those who are not well off with your custom rather than your charity.
Realising it is the fact you condone paying minimum wage to people by
supporting those companies with your custom is the reason there are
lots of people paid minimum wage. All these things we have the power
over and should we start to spend more with our humanity and
political sway than with our capitalist cultural way of thinking. In
doing so we would further empower ourselves by making our forms of
democracies start to function more as intended.
*Disclaimer
I have nothing against
any of the large companies mentioned in this essay. I am ignorant of
any wrong doing they may or may not have done and am not picking on
them in any way specifically. My intent was just to paint a picture
of the kinds of large company we endorse each and every day. My
objection to large companies in this essay is purely in regards to
how they naturally assist in the aggregating of wealth and how they
are able to influence politics due to their economic power and
importance. The more profit the company has the more it is
aggregating wealth and so by capitalist definitions it is at its best
when being most damaging to society. The bigger it gets overall is a
another key measure of success for a company and is the main factor
in political influence. As such the better a company is by
traditional capitalist aims the more damaging it is towards
democratic ends.
