How does capitalism ruin democracy? (pressian.com)
Columnist Kim Chang-hoon | 2023.04.22.
I read a book by philosopher Michael Sandel for the first time in a long time. The original English title is <Democracy's Discontent>. It's an unusual title. Sandel believes that American democracy has deviated from the norm. The United States has been a democracy for a long time, but if you look back at events like the Capitol riots, it's clear that American democracy is in serious trouble. The prosecution of Trump shows that there is an irreconcilable rift in American society. How did we get here? Sandel explores how democracy has become so corrupted.
Sandel identifies two widespread grievances in American society. The first is that "people are losing control of the forces that govern their lives, both individually and collectively." The second is a perception that "the moral bonds of the community are loosening." Sandel attributes this discontent to the American public's failure to critically reflect on what he calls "public philosophy". Public philosophy refers to "the political theories that are embedded in the behaviours we practice - the set of assumptions about citizenship and freedom." In other words, public philosophy is the view of political philosophy that is tacitly endorsed by society and serves as the basis for individual behaviour.
We think of American democracy as a monolithic concept that has been around for hundreds of years, but that's not the case. Sandel believes that American democracy has strayed too far from its initial ideology of republicanism. Republicanism is the idea that the participation of virtuous citizens is more important than the freedom of ownership and personal choice. Sandel's favourite politician is Thomas Jefferson, the founding father and third president of the United States. He begins his story with Jefferson.
In the United States, freedom has been an important ideology from the beginning. It also required a certain kind of material foundation to maintain it. Thomas Jefferson, a founding father and third president, opposed the promotion of big manufacturing on the grounds that an agrarian way of life created moral citizens fit for self-government. His reasoning was different from today's: large-scale manufacturing undermines independence, a prerequisite for republican citizenship. Jefferson believed that citizens whose independence had been eroded by manufacturing conglomerates would not be able to exercise the self-governance at the heart of American democracy. "The idea that liberty requires self-government, and that self-government, in turn, depends on civic virtue, is at the heart of republicanism," Jefferson thought. He was not alone in this view. Benjamin Franklin, an inventor and thinker, also believed that "only a moral man, with a proper education, is capable of enjoying liberty". This was the common sense of the educated at the time.
The republican model of prioritising the lives of the people, which Sandel calls the "political economy of citizenship", was rejected by another Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton established federal fiscal policy and sought to revive large-scale manufacturing. Hamilton was in favour of subsidising businesses. For the Republicans, this was a dangerous policy that would lead to rampant corruption. The republicans of the day considered the republican ideal to be a community of self-governing farmers, not tenant farmers. The American democracy that Tocqueville admired was a participatory democracy practised in small towns. But a tidal wave of capitalism washed over the country. The Jeffersonian model was swept aside and society was increasingly transformed by Hamilton's vision. Material growth became the only thing that mattered.
Even in the midst of change, many agreed that economic independence was an essential prerequisite for citizenship. Economic independence was not the same as independence as we know it today. Throughout the 19th century, wage labour was denounced as a system that undermined human independence, often referred to as wage slavery. Commentators like John Caldwell Calhoun scorned the capitalist wage system in the North as worse than slavery. They denounced the lifetime employment and basic welfare provided to slaves as non-existent for Northern wage earners. George FitzHugh, a Southern antislavery theorist, said.
"You [Northern entrepreneurs] are slaveholders, but you are slaveholders who do not fulfil the duties of slaveholders."
Economic independence meant homesteading. At the time, there was considerable popular opposition to wage labour. Psychological resistance to wage labour had to disappear in order for capitalism to flourish. Pro-capitalist wage labour advocates began to discard the civil concept of "free labour" after the Civil War, which referred to the right to work without being subject to bondage. As a civil right, "free labour" was eventually reduced to the freedom to choose one's work. The concept of "voluntarism" was introduced to replace "free labour". Labour was now packaged as the product of a voluntary contract between employer and employee. Pro-capitalists touted these labour contracts as being in line with existing notions of freedom. The Lochner case of 1895 was the catalyst. Lochner, a New York City baker, was fined for violating a New York state law that stated that the workweek could not exceed 60 hours in a 10-hour day. He argued that the law was not coercive and was a mutual agreement with his employees. The Supreme Court sided with Lochner and ruled that the New York law violated freedom of contract. This was the turning point in which freedom of contract was declared to be a more important value than a full and independent life.
The idea of "voluntary contract" in labour was expanded after World War II into a "voluntary libertarianism". This view of freedom stems from the voluntary self-image. According to Sandel, the voluntarist self-image is "the idea of an independent self that is free to choose whatever it wants to do." This view of the self has been mainstream since the mid-20th century. Sandel believes that the voluntarist self-image has led to valuable achievements such as the welfare state and the expansion of individual rights. This view of self and freedom resonates with liberalism.
Has this self-image, view of freedom, and liberalism made Americans happier? Sandel is adamant that it hasn't. Says Sandel.
"Despite the expansion of individual rights and benefits over the past few decades, Americans' control over the factors that shape their lives has actually declined."
"Paradoxically, the triumph of the voluntary libertarian view has occurred in the midst of diminishing individual control or influence."
Sandel even goes so far as to claim that
"The difficulties facing liberal democracy in the United States today may not be the result of specific frustrations, but rather of a lack of the voluntarist self-image that underpins liberal democracy."
The voluntarist self-image assumes an unattached self in favour of community. By focusing on these individual attributes of human beings, Sandel believes that liberalism neglects another human attribute: community.
Sandel criticises liberals for limiting power to proceduralism. When political power fails to control capital power, society breaks down. In Sandel's words.
"The rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant populism is usually a sign of the failure of progressive politics. When liberals fail to protect people from powerful groups by keeping economic power democratically tied to them, people look elsewhere."
Sandel believes that liberalism based on a voluntary self-image has ultimately failed American society. Republics break down when political power becomes mired in procedural legitimacy.
The vision of Sandel and other communitarians is based on a longing for life in a town. His preoccupation with republicanism and communitarianism is rooted in town life in the early days of the founding, when republican sensibilities were alive and well. The bonds of community are fundamentally incomprehensible without the space of the town. According to Tocqueville, the town, the heart of American self-government, was only two or three thousand people in size. Here's what Tocqueville had to say about the size of the town.
"On the one hand, it is not too large, so that the interests of its inhabitants will not be in conflict; on the other hand, it is not too small, so that men capable of presiding over its affairs can always be found among its citizens." (Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, published by Han Gil.)
Let's look at the writings of another communitarian philosopher, MacIntyre. His book is full of romanticised longing for the pre-modern era. McIntyre writes
"For liberal individualism, the community is merely a stage on which every individual pursues his or her own self-chosen idea of the 'good life'. (In the ancient and medieval view, by contrast, the political community not only requires the practice of the virtues in order to maintain itself, but it is the task of authoritative adults to raise children into virtuous adults." (The Loss of Virtue)
In other words, while modern people are preoccupied with their own good, ancient and medieval people not only tried to live virtuous lives, but also taught their children to live virtuous lives. McIntyre proposes a communitarianism based on virtue as an alternative to liberalism based on individualism. It sounds good, but is it possible?
Ethical philosopher Hwang Kyung-sik disagrees with the communitarians' proposal to build a community based on virtue in his article, "The Correlation between Moral Systems and Social Structures. Here's what Hwang has to say about the relationship between morality and social structure.
"A moral system, no matter how reasonable and desirable it may seem in itself, is powerless and meaningless as a social ethic if it cannot function properly as a practical guide, that is, if there is a defect in its practical applicability or realisability."
Recreating traditional ethics and virtue ideas in the modern era requires social and philosophical reflection on the conditions of modern society. His words are soft but firm. Hwang says that it will not be possible to create a virtuous community based on small communities without assuming a revolution.
The decline of the traditional republican virtue ethic of the Gemeinschaft, a community based on kinship and connection, cannot be attributed solely to liberalism. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that the rise of a large and anonymous society led to the loss of the traditional virtue ethic, the republican ethos, and the introduction of individualistic liberalism to replace it. Kant, Mill, and Rawls are the representative thinkers of liberalism who captured this society. In other words, liberalism is an ethical system that responds to huge changes in the substructure. Hwang Kyungsik says
"Unless a fundamental reform of the structure of modern society is premised or a transformation of the socio-economic system is possible, the ethics of rules and obligations (liberal ethics - my note) will have to exist as the leading moral system of modern society, especially as the substructure and basic order of character and virtue ethics."
The argument is that a liberal ethic is inevitable in a complex society like the modern world.
Sandel encourages republicanism to overcome the social unrest that capitalism creates. Sandel's attachment to republicanism leaves something to be desired. It doesn't go beyond the red lines set by the ruling class. In his words.
"Keynes's insights are both liberating and sobering. His insight that politics comes first is the most liberating of all."
His vision stops short of calling for a republican politics that has the guts to reintroduce Keynesianism in place of neoliberalism. America has tried Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Both have failed. America is now in a state of actual civil war.
Thinker Nakcheong Baek offers a different perspective. In a conversation with Yongok Kim, Baek says that the framers of the US Constitution "had a clear intention not to have a democracy". The separation of powers, bicameralism, and indirect presidential elections were created with that intention. They created a system in which the wishes of the people were structurally distorted through various devices. Left unchecked, any attempt at reform is bound to result in an oligarchy. As long as American democracy maintains the mechanisms that ultimately lead to oligarchy, it is impossible to build a political force that can overcome economic power. Philosopher Yongok Kim's critique of democracy is even more radical. "It is important to get away from the violence of the language of democracy," he says. "It is important to break free from the violence of the language of democracy," he says.
Can Sandel's republicanism shed a glimmer of light on the decline of democracy in the United States and around the world? I don't think so. But I think Sandel's proposal for a virtue-based community is a valuable one. I believe that Joseon, a "precocious modern state" as indigenous theologian Lee Eun-sun calls it, lasted for 500 years because it orientated its intellectual cognitive class of Yangban to the ethical ideology of Sunghwa.
After reading the book, I feel like this. Democracy is so hard to go along with capitalism.
Contemplation/Eam Taekyoung
Modern society is a global organism. Not only living organisms but also social organisations can be called organisms if they have three capabilities: independent self-replication, independent energy conversion, and independent homeostasis. The modern nation-state is not an organism, but rather a sub-organism of an organism, because it lacks these three functions.
Modern global society is a hydra-organism that is economically, socially, and culturally connected as a single body but politically has many heads. The underlying causes of many of the problems of global society are the problems caused by the structure of this hydra-organic society.
The current problem facing the United States may be due to the fact that it has reached the final stages of aging because it has received surplus calories from other countries, causing it to mature more quickly. This seems to be a consequence of the principle of aging, one of the six main principles of organismal evolution.
Democracy as a reflexive political system of imperialism seems inevitably to be transformed into a political system suitable for the emergence of a global organic society. The coming political system will be found to reflect the principle of optimal efficiency, the principle of imitation, and the principle of metacognition as it dissolves the hydra society.
The six main principles of organismal evolution
1. The Principle of Optimal Efficiency
The evolutionary direction of higher life was to minimise the moment (force to rotate around a point) generated by the body during energy acquisition activities. This can be described as the pursuit of optimal efficiency in energy acquisition/consumption. Animals have continued to optimise in the direction of uprightness for walking and streamlining for flying and swimming. Note that "pursuit" here does not mean pursuit as directed by will. When we look back at the results of the interaction of natural selection and rare leaps (mutations), we observe trends that can be interpreted as "pursuit".
2. The principle of instability
Instability is the driving force behind the evolution of life and social organisms (organisations, nations, etc.). "Irreversibility leads to instability, instability gives rise to self-organisation, and self-organisation gives rise to life," said Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Ilya Prigozhin. By the same principle, desire (irreversibility) leads to chaos (instability), chaos (instability) leads to the will to change (self-organisation), and the will to change (self-organisation) leads to new societies (life).
3. Principles of Aging
The rate of "excess energy accumulation" and "deepening energy distribution imbalance" is the rate of aging of individual life or individual social organisms. According to Harvard biologist Bernd Heinrich, "Consuming a surplus of calories means growing faster, maturing faster, and living shorter."
4. The principle of imitation
The structure of human society has evolved and will continue to evolve towards a more sophisticated mimicry of the human body and mind (brain)! Social structural evolution is a particle avatarisation of humans, and the metaverse can be seen as a wave avatarisation.
5. Principles of Metacognition
Every organism has its own path to optimal efficiency, but it can be categorised into two paths. The first one is to obey the will of selfish genes (blueprints) (survival and reproduction). The second path is to go beyond the will of the genes through metacognition. It defies the second law of thermodynamics. Socrates' words, "Know thyself!" can be seen as the formal starting point of metacognition and social evolution.
6. The principle of connection
Humanity has been connected in proportion to the development of transport and communication. As transport and communication have advanced, the scope of the "social we" in human society has expanded and connectivity has deepened. It will continue to do so!
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