Adapted from Streeck & other places
Luther's 95 Theses: 1517.
Peace of Westphalia: 1648.
American War of Independence: 1775-1783.
Critique of Pure Reason: 1781 / 1787.
American Constitution: 1787.
French Revolution: 1789–1799.
Hegel is professor in Berlin: 1818-1831.
De la démocratie en Amérique: 1835 / 1840.
Communist Manifesto: 1848.
Das Kapital Vol. 1: 1867.
The organised capitalism of the 1950s and 1960s was an international response to the social devastations that were widely perceived at the time to have been caused by the unfettered operation of self-regulating markets in the 1920s and 1930s. Cf. "advanced capitalism / organised capitalism / late capitalism" (Habermas); "state capitalism" (Pollock); "late capitalism or industrial society" (Adorno). Cf. Miliband, Poulantzas, Laclau, Offe, Hirst.
The early Dahl is a representative theorist of the welfare state compromise: his classical pluralism draws on the republican tradition of stability in mixed governance, updated in light of the perceived extremism of both the capitalist and and communist modes of social integration, and informed by social-anthropological research into the empirical operation of democratic institutions.
Free trade was regulated under a system of fixed exchange rates (Bretton Woods) anchored by the US dollar's convertibility into gold at a fixed price. Fixed exchange rates were incompatible with free flows of capital.
The political economy of Fordism or Keynesianism, terms that were used almost interchangeably, was deliberately designed to reconcile capitalism with social stability. It allowed for a newly settled way of life for the generations that had been through the Great Depression and the Second World War. At its centre was a regime of social rights, generated by democratic politics, that was to take precedence over the mechanisms of the market: rights to a minimum level of income, freedom from poverty, a modicum of social and economic equality, equal access to education, and social security in periods of unemployment, illness, and in old age. Cf. Marshall.
By the 1970s, the Fordist promises of economic and social security and stability began to be gradually withdrawn. Increasingly, employers and governments urged workers and unions no longer to insist, in an ever more competitive world, on what now was denounced as the “rigidities” of a defunct old regime, and concede more “flexibility” in just every aspect of the employment relationship.
Workers must respond faster to market changes; bear a growing share of the costs of structural adjustment; accept more regional, occupational and in particular downward mobility; submit to “lifelong learning” and feel responsible for their own “employability”; give up security for “flexicurity,” which means accepting spells of unemployment hoped to be short due to effective support by the government employment agency; agree to increasing shares of pay being commuted into bonuses dependent on individual and collective performance; understand that there can be no family wage any more as employers can no longer pay for two when employing just one.
Cf. "Zumutbarkeit", what is acceptable, & Habermas's idea in LC about the risks of the administrative intervention in socio-cultural system --> public themeatization of boundary conditions.
The dissolution of the Fordist social order extended to the institutions and to the social structure that such institutions had supposedly been set up to support.
Obviously, flexible labor markets that are open to all cannot offer the same sort of security and stability as the labor markets of Fordism --> "liberationist" model. "Market pressure" model: Beginning in the 1970s, stagnant real wages and rising unemployment compelled households to supply more labour to the market to defend their accustomed standard of living.
Improving market access for “outsiders,” in turn, required that institutional protections of “insiders” were disabled at least in part, intensifying the spreading sense of uncertainty about the future. As opportunities for all sorts of “atypical,” flexible employment proliferated, so did the pressures on the standard employment relationship at the center of the employment regime. Unlike in the liberationist story, that is to say, where market participation clears the way to a desirable social life, in the economic pressure scenario markets are imposed rather than sought, with market uncertainties undermining the formation of stable social commitments or thwarting them in the first place, as the system of social rights invented in the postwar period to protect society from commodification gives way under the impact of marketization.
Ways of reconciling: (1) models blend, w/ "liberationist" the relatively more accurate towards the top of the income distribution & vice-versa; (2) "liberationist" model an ideological form of the "market pressures" model.
Where formal institutionalization of family relations carries with it obligations to mutual assistance that replace entitlements to social security benefits, modern welfare states may entail economic incentives not to enter into formalized family bonds.
Corporatist (?) programme of cultural re-education, teaching people to regard flexibility and uncertainty as individual challenges – as opportunities not just for economic prosperity but also for personal growth – rather than as violations of collectively achieved social rights. Cf. Habermas on administrative milking the socio-cultural system for legitimation points.
The tension between female labour market participation and the political expectation, inevitable for fiscal reasons, that families will bear the main share of the growing burden of care for the aged.
For a number of years now there has been a growing consensus, even among “conservative” parties like the CDU, that flexible family structures and employment patterns force the state to take responsibility for child rearing if children are what government perceives to be in the public interest.
State provision of free childcare, higher child allowances, a new family allowance for parents of newborn children, increased child supplements to social assistance and other benefits are currently about to transform child raising from a private to a public responsibility, well into the middle classes.
In both accounts of the co-evolution of flexible labour markets and of deinstitutionalized patterns of family life – the market opportunities as well as the market pressures account – marketization causes gaps in social structures and gives rise to collective dysfunctions that must be repaired at public expense.
Here as elsewhere, while private profit requires subsidization by a public infrastructure, the private problems caused by its pursuit need to be fixed by social policy. The logic seems remarkably similar to that of the current banking crisis, where the liberation of financial markets from traditional constraints and the progressive commodification of money have ultimately issued in irresistible pressures on the state to step in and restore with its specific means the social commons of stable expectations and mutual confidence.
In both cases, and perhaps generally, capitalism seems to imply a need for a public power capable of creating substitutes for social relations invaded by market relations and as a consequence becoming unable to perform some of their previous functions. There is of course no guarantee that such work of social reconstruction can always be done. Even where something is considered “functionally necessary” by social theorists or social agents, this does not mean that the political will and the economic resources can in fact be mobilized to procure it. In the case of family policy filling the gap caused by the destruction of traditional family relations due to the attractions and pressures of markets, the problem is for an already overburdened and indeed highly indebted welfare state to divert the necessary funds from other commitments.
Showing posts with label Dahl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dahl. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Robert Dahl
Early work:
- What is a majority? "The numerical majority is incapable of coordinated undertaking."
- Agrees empirically w/ Schumpeter (competitive elitism): apathetic citizenry & opinion-making representatives, but reads a different significance. Lack of political involvement can be social capital - trust.
- Substantive diversity better protects rights that constitutionalist guarantee supported by separation of powers.
- Power in the USA disaggregated and non-cumulative: protean complex of shifting advantages.
- Business organisatins, political parties, ethnic groups, religious groups, trade unions, NSMs, even government departments: competitive equilibrium in the long term.
- Underlying consensus establishes horizon of politics.
- The problematic of state power can be superimposed on individual group.
- "Influence terms" taxonomise “A” getting “B” to do what “A” wants.
- Critique from Bachrach and Baratz, 1962; Mouffe on struggle inscribed on hegemonies; Foucault on grids of intelligibility; Lindblom on controlled volitions & circularity (& cf. PSRPs). & ??
- Democracy requires effective participation; voting equality at the decisive stage; enlightened understanding; control of the agenda; inclusiveness.
- Modern Western states are polyarchies, not democracies. Polyarchies have elected officials, free and fair elections, inclusive suffrage, rights to run for office, freedom of expression, alternative information and associational autonomy.
- Threat to liberty has not been from equality (as de Tocqueville predicted) but from inequality produced by "liberty of a certain kind" -- namely, liberty to privately accumulate unlimited economic resources and organise production in hierarchically governed enterprises.
- Truman: emphasis on overlapping membership.
- Neo-marxists and post-marxists
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Held on pluralism and Dahl
Key features of pluralism: government by minorities, constitutional resistance to faction.
Who has power? Classic: diverse overlapping groups; neo: bias to corporate interests.
What is the state? Classic: a mediator; neo: the state, and even individual departments, have their own interests.
What is the nature of political resource? Classic: various, distributed, and fluid; neo: endogenously unequal.
Involvement of the citizenry? Classic: minimal enough to ensure stability; neo: goverment is not permeable to most citizens, apathy is compulsory.
Role of the international? Classic: by and large helps to uphold pluralist, free market societies; neo: dominated by multinationals and the particular interests of powerful states.
Early Dahl (1956)
For many contemporary societies, Dahl claims a deep underlying consensus, which effectively winnows down "politics" into an area of technics and details.
Dahl abstracts the constitutional form of so-called liberal democracies as "polyarchy." But for Dahl, the formal polyarchic constitutional content is trivial compared with the substantive social prerequisites of democracy. Early Dahl claims that these criteria are more or less met de facto.
Criticism: Dahl is surrendering "the rich history of the idea of democracy to the existent."
Criticism: Empirical research drew the idea of an underlying consensus into question. There seemed to be systematic ideological differentials with a significant class structure. The political polarisation during the 60s and 70s in Europe and the US was difficult to account for within the classical pluralist framework.
The classical pluralist analysis of power, as influence by A over B's action, was also criticised. Power was assigned a role previously belonging to representation. Cf. Henry Parker (the people and their parliament both are sovereign) vs. Thomas Hobbes (the body politic is so much a fiction it cannot even contract with the sovereign, only constitute itself as a fiction by contracts among its members). Cf. perhaps Sieyes, representation as constitutive of social relations. For the classical pluralists, de-juridified power in a well-behaved polyarchy could tick some of the same boxes because of overlapping membership, and the diversity, fluidity and transitivity of that power. Cf. balance of powers.
Bachrach and Baratz (1962): A's power may mobilise bias to establish / defend structures ("social and political values and institutional practices") of political process which exclude any issues whose resolution may frustrate A's interests. Cf. triangulation, social choice theory, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, agenda setting, saliency theory (competition of emphasis), hegemony, transforming positional issues into valence issues, politics conducted in a register of morality (Mouffe).
Late Dahl
Dahl (1985): threat to liberty is not from equality (as Tocqueville suspected it would be) but from liberty of a certain kind - namely, liberty to accumulate unlimited economic resources and organise production in hierarchically governed enterprises. INEQUALITIES.
Corporate capitalism produces sharp inequalities in social and economic resources sufficient to undermine political equality and therefore democracy.
Furthermore: the capacity for Western goverments to act in the ways desired by many groups is systematically constrained by the requirements of private accumulation. Governments must ensure the prosperity of the private sector.
Democracy is embedded in a socioeconomic system which systematically privileges business interests. Dahl now argues that the normative content of democracy demands the priority of the right to self-government over the right to private property.
Political liberty requires democratisation of the workplace and a widespread system of cooperative forms of ownership.
Sectors of the state are locked into the interest structures of private corporations.
Some neo-Marxist theories of the state
Miliband (1969): the state is a crucial instrument in the maintenance of the structure of power and privilege inherent in capitalism, which routinely separates itself from ruling class factions.
Poulantzas: Miliband is humanist and subjectivist, reproducing bourgeois categories of thought. Direct participation of the capitalist class in government is unnecessary. The state is a condensation of class interests. It participates in class contradictions. It is nonetheless the subsystem which oversees the organisation of class fractions, and the political disorganisation of the working classes. It regroups the economically and politically marginal. The state bureaucracy and electoral leadership involuntarily construct national unity and simultaneous atomise the body politic.
Offe: the state is constitutively contradictory. The arbitration of interests is key to its legitimation, and tax revenue from a particular interest (accumulation), key to its material reproduction. Intervention in the economy is inevitable, yet it risks challenging the traditional basis of liberal social order.
The liberal democratic capitalist state (a) is excluded from accumulation; (b) is necessary for the function of accumulation; (c) is dependent on accumulation; (d) functions to conceal a, b & c.
The state is a reactive mechanism. Contra Miliband and Poulantzas, it is not functionally interlocked (in the long term) with the needs of capital. The manouevres of constellations may benefit the working class. The most vulnerable suffer.
Cf. Habermas in Legitimation Crisis.
Schmitter (theorist of corporatism) argues that at the very least, the validity of an unspecified number of voluntary self-determined categories is deeply questionable.
Some more on corporatism:
Financial liberalisation
Labour market liberalisation
Professionalisation and bureaucratisation of large sections of the labour movement
Contemporary corporatism: a system of interest representation organised into limited "singular, compulsory, hierarchically ordered" & functionally differentiated categories, licensed by the state to a representational monopoly.
Tripartite relation between state, employees and labour
Is tripartism displacing traditional political representative institutions? Extraparliamentary policy origins?
To be fair, it's mainly macroeconomic policy so far
It's also limited by the degree to which the trade unions produce a legitimate elite that is both amenable to corporatism
Final thoughts
Non-Marxists have come to appreciate the limits placed on popular sovereignty by massive concentrations of ownership of productive property. Vulgar marxism is marginalised, with few Marxist theorists arguing for the reduction of state activity to class categories.
- Citizenship rights: one-person-one-vote, freedom of expression and association.
- Constitutionalism, checks and balances, division of powers.
- Competitive electoral system.
Who has power? Classic: diverse overlapping groups; neo: bias to corporate interests.
What is the state? Classic: a mediator; neo: the state, and even individual departments, have their own interests.
What is the nature of political resource? Classic: various, distributed, and fluid; neo: endogenously unequal.
Involvement of the citizenry? Classic: minimal enough to ensure stability; neo: goverment is not permeable to most citizens, apathy is compulsory.
Role of the international? Classic: by and large helps to uphold pluralist, free market societies; neo: dominated by multinationals and the particular interests of powerful states.
Early Dahl (1956)
For many contemporary societies, Dahl claims a deep underlying consensus, which effectively winnows down "politics" into an area of technics and details.
Dahl abstracts the constitutional form of so-called liberal democracies as "polyarchy." But for Dahl, the formal polyarchic constitutional content is trivial compared with the substantive social prerequisites of democracy. Early Dahl claims that these criteria are more or less met de facto.
Criticism: Dahl is surrendering "the rich history of the idea of democracy to the existent."
Criticism: Empirical research drew the idea of an underlying consensus into question. There seemed to be systematic ideological differentials with a significant class structure. The political polarisation during the 60s and 70s in Europe and the US was difficult to account for within the classical pluralist framework.
The classical pluralist analysis of power, as influence by A over B's action, was also criticised. Power was assigned a role previously belonging to representation. Cf. Henry Parker (the people and their parliament both are sovereign) vs. Thomas Hobbes (the body politic is so much a fiction it cannot even contract with the sovereign, only constitute itself as a fiction by contracts among its members). Cf. perhaps Sieyes, representation as constitutive of social relations. For the classical pluralists, de-juridified power in a well-behaved polyarchy could tick some of the same boxes because of overlapping membership, and the diversity, fluidity and transitivity of that power. Cf. balance of powers.
Bachrach and Baratz (1962): A's power may mobilise bias to establish / defend structures ("social and political values and institutional practices") of political process which exclude any issues whose resolution may frustrate A's interests. Cf. triangulation, social choice theory, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, agenda setting, saliency theory (competition of emphasis), hegemony, transforming positional issues into valence issues, politics conducted in a register of morality (Mouffe).
Late Dahl
Dahl (1985): threat to liberty is not from equality (as Tocqueville suspected it would be) but from liberty of a certain kind - namely, liberty to accumulate unlimited economic resources and organise production in hierarchically governed enterprises. INEQUALITIES.
Corporate capitalism produces sharp inequalities in social and economic resources sufficient to undermine political equality and therefore democracy.
Furthermore: the capacity for Western goverments to act in the ways desired by many groups is systematically constrained by the requirements of private accumulation. Governments must ensure the prosperity of the private sector.
Democracy is embedded in a socioeconomic system which systematically privileges business interests. Dahl now argues that the normative content of democracy demands the priority of the right to self-government over the right to private property.
Political liberty requires democratisation of the workplace and a widespread system of cooperative forms of ownership.
Sectors of the state are locked into the interest structures of private corporations.
Some neo-Marxist theories of the state
Miliband (1969): the state is a crucial instrument in the maintenance of the structure of power and privilege inherent in capitalism, which routinely separates itself from ruling class factions.
Poulantzas: Miliband is humanist and subjectivist, reproducing bourgeois categories of thought. Direct participation of the capitalist class in government is unnecessary. The state is a condensation of class interests. It participates in class contradictions. It is nonetheless the subsystem which oversees the organisation of class fractions, and the political disorganisation of the working classes. It regroups the economically and politically marginal. The state bureaucracy and electoral leadership involuntarily construct national unity and simultaneous atomise the body politic.
Offe: the state is constitutively contradictory. The arbitration of interests is key to its legitimation, and tax revenue from a particular interest (accumulation), key to its material reproduction. Intervention in the economy is inevitable, yet it risks challenging the traditional basis of liberal social order.
The liberal democratic capitalist state (a) is excluded from accumulation; (b) is necessary for the function of accumulation; (c) is dependent on accumulation; (d) functions to conceal a, b & c.
The state is a reactive mechanism. Contra Miliband and Poulantzas, it is not functionally interlocked (in the long term) with the needs of capital. The manouevres of constellations may benefit the working class. The most vulnerable suffer.
Cf. Habermas in Legitimation Crisis.
Schmitter (theorist of corporatism) argues that at the very least, the validity of an unspecified number of voluntary self-determined categories is deeply questionable.
Some more on corporatism:
Financial liberalisation
Labour market liberalisation
Professionalisation and bureaucratisation of large sections of the labour movement
Contemporary corporatism: a system of interest representation organised into limited "singular, compulsory, hierarchically ordered" & functionally differentiated categories, licensed by the state to a representational monopoly.
Tripartite relation between state, employees and labour
Is tripartism displacing traditional political representative institutions? Extraparliamentary policy origins?
To be fair, it's mainly macroeconomic policy so far
It's also limited by the degree to which the trade unions produce a legitimate elite that is both amenable to corporatism
Final thoughts
Non-Marxists have come to appreciate the limits placed on popular sovereignty by massive concentrations of ownership of productive property. Vulgar marxism is marginalised, with few Marxist theorists arguing for the reduction of state activity to class categories.
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