Daniel Judt (#6: Liberal Democracy and Capitalism)

(Yale)

When Christina wrote to me about this panel, my first thought was to Max Horkheimer’s famous statement from 1939: “Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.” 

Today, most mainstream historical interventions on the authoritarian threats to liberal democracy ignore capitalism altogether. This is very damaging. In order to make sense of the crisis of liberal democracy, historians must proceed from a critical theory of capitalism. By this, I mean that we must treat capitalism as a social order in which wealth is measured in terms of the expenditure of abstract human labor time, or what Marx called value. This, before anything else, is what distinguishes capitalism from other forms of society: the two-sidedness of labor, as both a concrete activity that produces material wealth and an abstract concept that mediates our social relations. 

This understanding of capitalism is not static. As Marx argued in Capital, it implies a powerful and compulsive historical dynamic (a dynamic specific to capitalism—not a transhistorical notion of History). Over time, as capitalists strive for greater productivity, living labor becomes less central to the creation of material wealth; a gap opens up between our present social world and the world it makes possible, a world not organized around the sale of one’s labor-time. And yet capital also constantly reinforces the centrality of living labor to our society. This, for Marx, was capitalism’s most fundamental contradiction. It makes possible a post-capitalist future even as it works to ensure that this future cannot be realized.

Today, the gap between our present social order, still organized around labor time, and the world that it has made possible is excruciatingly wide. This is manifest in a sensation of stuckness and stagnation; in declining rates of productivity and a rampant search by capital to reconstitute labor in new forms (think of the proliferation of make-work in our so-called “service economy”); in social movements that emphasize identities beyond the proletarian subject; and, finally, in an inchoate but widespread feeling that the present social order is at once no longer necessary and yet impossible to change. 

It is only in this context that we can begin to make sense of the rise of authoritarian, anti-democratic movements in the post-industrial west. They are a response not only to the austerity of neoliberalism, but to the stuckness and stagnation of the past 50 years as our form of wealth has grown increasingly anachronistic. To be sure, the neo-fascist critique of the present is perverse. It dreams of a return to industry, an elimination of superfluous people (in nativist & racist forms), a rerun of the American century, a retrenchment of “traditional” forms of life. However, it is important that we understand this program not as a repetition of 1930s, but rather as a response to secular stagnation within capitalism—a response to our historical moment. This means that the neo-fascist turn cannot be met with a return to social democracy or the welfare state. Those forms were dependent on a moment in capital’s historical trajectory that is now irrecoverable. 

Finally, a critical theory of capitalism like the one I have outlined here puts a different spin on the much-lamented “lack of positive vision” or “loss of the future” that has bedeviled the euro-American Left for the past fifty years. For it suggests that this loss is really a misrecognition of capital’s loss: the loss of a productivist vision of industrial society that would mark the culmination of capitalism, not its transcendence. Leftists and liberals do have an alternative to the authoritarian reaction. But to articulate it we must name the right enemy: it is capitalism, and nothing short of this, that prevents us from realizing a world of self-determination. In other words, to amend Horkheimer’s dictum: Whoever is not willing to talk about socialism should also keep quiet about democracy.

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