hugging their chains

Here we go again:

If anything has been laid to rest by China's rising wealth, it is the comforting idea that capitalism, and the growth of a prosperous bourgeoisie, will inevitably lead to liberal democracy. On the contrary, it is precisely the middle class, bought off by promises of ever-greater material gains, that hopes to conserve the current political order. It may be a Faustian bargain - prosperity in exchange for political obedience - but so far it has worked.

It’s amazing how many pundits are shocked – shocked – that the middle classes, by and large, happen to be conservative, especially when they’ve just made their money and are nervous about hanging on to it.

The structural error here was to make free – or free-er - institutions the subject of an economic wager, as though their virtue was to deliver growth rather than in being absolute goods in themselves. This isn’t to say that they don’t, but that this isn’t really the point of them. And anyway, way back when in China anyone with three chickens was considered a capitalist. That restriction was lifted and now there are chickens bustin’ out all over. This tends to happen whatever the state of civil society.

Of course, there’s a subtext to all this. In making prosperity a direct outgrowth of freedom you can sidestep the fact that class conflict has been a motor of democratisation in many societies. The middle classes may be more or less happy with the status quo in China, but down in the countryside where the mass group incidents roam people have been known to protest somewhat vigorously about abuses of power by the governmment and those connected to it.

The freedom = wealth equation is pernicious in other ways too. If you’re taught that the accumulative processes of capitalism are inextricably linked with free institutions and that relationship turns out to be very much weaker in real life than advertised, then you’ve created an opposition between the two that need not exist and a standing temptation to abandon the latter for the former.

Comments

[ejh]

class conflict has been a motor of democratisation in many societies

Indeed.

[Nick L]

Much to the consternation of Marx and Engels, the exact same thing happened in Europe in 1848: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

There's no reason this should have surprised anyone, therefore. In any case 'the comforting idea that capitalism, and the growth of a prosperous bourgeoisie, will inevitably lead to liberal democracy' has little basis in large n statistical studies that would be needed to support such a general statement. The evidence, rather, suggests that all political systems are unstable *except* wealthy democracies. There is not much evidence that rich dictatorships transform into democracies, just that if they *do* collapse and become democracies they won't revert in the foreseable future.

[jamie]

Ah, the 18 Brumaire. Napoleon III got a lot of support from peasants endowed with smallholdings after the big estates were broken up following the revolution, which is interesting given the new laws on private property ownership in China...