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Seventh Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 4

EKΔOΣEIΣ νήσος – Π. KAΠOΛA 14 Sarri, 105 53 Athens tel./fax 210 3250058 e-mail: [email protected] www.nissos.gr

Publishing Director: Pola Kapola Scientific Director: Gerasimos Kouzelis

Since 2007, the Nicos Poulantzas Institute has established an Annual Lecture in memory of Nicos Poula ntzas, where distinguished figures from different countries elaborate on their issues of interest, linking theory to political practice, in the broad sense.

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ISBN 978-960-9535-97-7 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 5

Frank Deppe

Authoritarian Capitalism

Seventh Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture Athens, 4 December 2013

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Frank Deppe is Professor of Poltical Science at the University of Marburg. deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 7

FOREWORD

Gerassimos Kouzelis*

Our professor and our comrade Frank Deppe was and is one of the most important political scientists in Germany. He has signed a great part of the theoretical and research work that shaped the Marxist thought in the then West Germany, and in what today counts as left political theory. He was and is the emblematic figure of what is called the ‘Marburg School’. He was and is a theorist and a fighter, active both in the lecture halls and in the meeting rooms - formulating critique but also formulating politics. Born in Frankfurt in 1941, he studied Sociology, Political Science and Economics both at the University of Frankfurt and the Univer- sity of Marburg. I should note - and please forgive my personal tone - that this is one of the four things that we have in common: first, we studied the same things; second, we went to Marburg for the same purpose, to find ourselves in a department that, at the time, bore the stamp of the great sociologist and left fighter Wolfgang Abendroth who, I should remind you, went to the island of Limnos as a member of a German battalion. There, he cooperated with, and eventually de- fected to, ELAS in 1944. He joined the ranks there, and was later ar-

* Professor of Philosophy of Science and Sociology of Knowledge.

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rested by the British and sent to exile in Egypt. In 1968, Frank Deppe submitted to Abendroth his doctoral dissertation on Blan- qui, and received his readership at Marburg in 1972. He went to Marburg in 1964 in order to study next to Heinz Maus [my own professor - a third coincidence], the student and editor of Horkheimer’s work, a special personality of the then crammed Critical Theory. It was crammed because the dominant - at that decade in Marburg - Marxism did not have space for a lot of criticism and too many openings, in the context of correctness set somewhat absolutely by DKP. And this is the fourth coincidence: I started studying in the year and the institute where the thirty-year old Deppe had just become a professor, giving ground and oppor- tunities to a more dialectical, more western version of Marxism, as we somewhat stubbornly followed, influenced by Poulantzas, Euro- communism and the renewing left. From my then teachers, well- known names of the orthodox communist intelligentsia at the time, board members of the famous IMSF, the Institute for Marxist Stud- ies and Research of the German Communist Party, a body that was too dogmatic towards the Marxism that I then and now support or rather exercise, Deppe, perhaps together with Dieter Boris and Georg Fülberth and of course Abendroth himself, was one of the few who taught social theory from a perspective of fertile activation and critical control of Marxist conceptions and notions.

It sounds of minor importance, but it is not. Because this was an era when, in this bastion of left theory and politics, you would not easily pass the course of Reinhardt Kühnl - also an assistant of Aben- droth - if, following Poulantzas, you distinguished fascism from dictatorship or if you recommended an Althusser-inspired reading of Rousseau to the famous and otherwise refreshing and Gramscian Marxist historian of philosophy, Hans Heinz Holz. The climate, therefore, that started to grow thanks to teachers like Deppe, and

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of course with the moral support of an anti-dogmatic and anti-com- formist attitude such as the one of Maus, allowed the post-1968 generation of Marburg to play a role outside the orthodox, Soviet- like, critical discourse. I shall limit myself to what may be somewhat familiar to our dis- cussions here. To this intellectual climate, we should attribute the development of informal research and discussion groups, out of which the critical reading of the French and Italian Marxism in Ger- many began (I remember Professor Alex Demirovi and the con- troversial election as a full professor of the then director of the Gramsci Institute, which ultimately was not accepted by the education minister of Hessen), a core nucleus of ‘Class Analysis Program’ [Projekt Klassenanalyse] that nurtured the hegemonic project of the VSA publishing house (which of course was located in Hamburg and Berlin), as well as the stormy debates on the contribution of other poststructuralist approaches and particularly the Foucauldian theory, as advocated for example by our then classmate Ulrich Raulff (a recognized translator of Foucault, Castel and Deleuze). In this theoretical and political context, we owe to Frank Deppe and the company of the younger former assistants of Abendroth the development of a theoretical current that, on the one hand con- verses with Frankfurtian critical theory and, on the other hand - apart from whatever was inherited from Horkheimer (more than the other school members, as Deppe notes) - kept intact the task of class analysis and the interest in the structural element, beyond the individual, and in the confrontational element of Marxian theory. We owe this to them, and this is why I, at least, went to study in Marburg. We owe to them a robust defence of the practical - political dimension of theory, which is what allows us to understand social reality, and when the flow of time brings twists, it shuffles the ground of historical developments and blurs clear analyses. I am trying to say - and my peers know this all too well - that in the wake of 1968 and with fresh images from the uprising in Prague,

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amid a cold and a hot war - remember Vietnam -, with a Europe built as a union, a social democracy that was dominant by exploit- ing what was built as a welfare state, an economy becoming global- ized at an unprecedented rate, with trade union demands and ini- tiatives on the agenda, in the orgasm of asymmetric development of the ’70s and ’80s, the theory, Marxist theory and left-wing thought were tested on a daily exercise of interpretation and policy-making. There was no protected non-practical space, as there was no political practice independent of the use of concepts, with universities and social sciences at the forefront.

The fact that Frank Deppe belongs to those who opened and en- riched the field of critical social research in those decades is not unrelated to his political activities. Besides, critical theory is an attitude according to our Frankfurtian teachers. So, having embraced such a conception of theory as practice, through his engagement with the work and teaching of Adorno and Horkheimer, but also under the influence of Marcuse in Frankfurt, Deppe - still a student at the time - turns to politics while at Marburg. Already in 1964, he joins the famous SDS, the socialist German student union which, though founded under the umbrella of social democracy, had already breached its relations with SPD and had become the pole of attraction of the ‘new Left’. He joined there before well-known leaders like Dutsckke did, in the organization that was about to play a catalytic role in the German May of ’68, with headquarters in Berlin, Frankfurt and Marburg. And he is in the leadership of this organization during the critical years from 1965 to 1967, thereby coming into contact with the Institute of Abendroth, who at the time played a leading part in the theoretical work of SDS, among others as editor of his journal, ‘Neue Kritik’. Academic and political collaboration in the years of his thesis completion leads Deppe to participate in the establishment of the

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Socialist Centre and the Socialist Office [Sozialistisches Büro], which published the famous links magazine, as well as in a number of ini- tiatives geared towards democracy and disarmament. Action, this time, is both movement-inspired and theoretical, and the connection between practice and research work will remain in the subse- quent period. [I should note, anecdotally, that the slogan circulated among Marburg students at the time was “Marx an die Uni, Deppe auf H4!” (Marx at the university, Deppe as first-grade professor)]. A member of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Marxist Stud- ies and Research, IMSF, until 1989, he is currently a member of the Scientific Council of Attac and a member of Die Linke (becoming a member of a political party for the first time) while, markedly, his farewell lecture as professor emeritus at the University of Marburg was titled ‘Crisis and Renewal of Marxist theory’ [Krise und Erneuerung marxistischer Theorie]. Lastly, let me note that he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Rosa Luxemburg Foun- dation.

The research and teaching work of Frank Deppe covers an excep- tionally broad field of political and social science, always in a relationship - if I may use this rather awkward term - of structural time- liness. [Let me say indicatively that the three undergraduate courses taught by Deppe that I remember were about the social aspects of automation, the problems of theory and analysis of the state, and Western European integration]. He always turns, with a rare right- ness of judgment as to what is at stake, to the issues associated with the reconstruction of social relations, the recasting of the political landscape regarding conflicts of forces and power relations, and the re-conceptualization of political claims and principles. Apart from his thesis, he has published - if I have counted them correctly - 25 books, one of which was translated in Greek in 1995, titled ‘The new international order: the world beyond the compe-

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tition of systems’, from the original that was published in 1991. Bear in mind that we are talking about 1991, a time in which ambiguity and intellectual uncertainty still prevailed as to the characteristics of this new order. Deppe must be one of the first Marxist theorists who turned to the systematic monitoring and explanation of so-called European integration, drawing on the conceptual tools of the Critique of Po- litical Economy - for a long time he also directed the research group of the university on the European Communities. He edited the volume on the ‘European Economic Community’, tellingly subtitled ‘for a Political Economy of Western European integration’, which was published as early as 1975 [EWG. Zur politischen Ökonomie der westeuropäischen Integration Rowohlt], and the - similar in con- tent - volume ‘1992 - Project Europe, Politics and Economy in the European Community’ [Projekt Europa, Politik und Ökonomie in der Europäischen Gemeinschaft] in 1989. He also published two studies of his own: one in 1993, titled ‘On the post-Maastricht crisis of the European Community’ [Zur Post-Maastricht-Krise der Eu- ropäischen Gemeinschaft] and another in 1991, on the ‘1992 internal market’. I should once again note the timing; he analyzes the trends, the momentum and the dynamics, even before these get to unfold and appear in the spotlight. The subtitle is indicative: ‘On the development of labor relations in Europe’ [Binnenmarkt 1992 - Zur Entwicklung der Arbeitsbeziehungen in Europa], denoting his particular cognitive interest as well as the political and social stakes. The systematic study of the European Union continues to occupy him until today, culminating in the co-authoring of the volume on ‘Europe towed by financial markets’ [Europa im Schlepptau der Fi- nanzmärkte] published in 2011. Let me convey the central position of all the aforementioned works by using a term borrowed by Deppe: this is about the foun- dation of an ‘International Political Economy’. For those who, even

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tangentially, are involved in the study of the European Union, it is readily understood how valuable such a perspective can be for a field in which the directness of politics and the banality of neoliberalism tend to write off the possibility of a total critical interpretation. However, as shown in the aforementioned reference to industrial relations in Europe, labor, trade unions and - in the tradition of Abendroth- the history of the labor movement allow Deppe to develop his theoretical construction just like he wishes to, in direct connection with his political positions and the emancipatory em- phasis of his specific research perspective. Even before his thesis, in 1969, he co-publishes a study in which the employee participation in decision-making in business is assessed from a class point of view [Kritik der Mitbestimmung. Partnerschaft oder Klassenkampf. Gemeinsam], while his first book, in 1971, refers - from the perspective of political sociology - to workers’ consciousness [Das Be- wußtsein der Arbeiter. Studien zur politischen Soziologie des Ar- beiterbewußtseins]. In 1977, he edits a volume on the history of German trade unionism [Geschichte der deutschen Gewerkschats- bewegung], in 1984 and 1985 he publishes two critical studies on the condition of labour and the trade union movement and the identity of the working class at the time [Ende oder Zukunft der Arbeiter- bewegung? Gewerkschaftspolitik nach der Wende. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme + Arbeiterklasse gibt’s die noch?], in 1995 he publishes a work that blends his two main research subjects with his theoretical concern over the state, entitled ‘Unemployment, the welfare state, and trade unions in the European Union’ [Arbeit- slosigkeit. Wohlfahrtsstaat und Gewerkschaften in der Europäis- chen Union], and in 2011 he publishes the volume ‘Unions in the Great Transformation’ with a flashback from 1970 until today [Gew- erkschaften in der Großen Transformation. Von den 1970er Jahren bis heute. Eine Einführung].

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The labor movement and trade unions constituted the tempo- ral axis of internal cohesion of the political thought and practice of Frank Deppe. He never ceased to fight for achieving a connection of his own work with that of the activists in this area, decisively in- fluencing the strategy of leftist unions. Thus, he found himself in countless lectures, courses, and meetings of trade unionists.

His - let’s call it that way - more applied research work in the fields of Europe, labour and trade unions was accompanied throughout the course of his work, already since the period of his studies, by theoretical research and elaboration on the concepts and concep- tualizations of political theory. So, apart from Blanqui and the concepts of conspiracy, insurgency and revolution examined in his thesis, in 1987 he wrote a now classic study of politics and Machiavelli [Niccolo Machiavelli. Zur Kritik der reinen Politik], while we owe to him the systematic four-volume report on ‘Political Thought’ in the early twentieth century, the interwar period, the Cold War and the transition to the twenty-first century [Politisches Denken am Anfang des 20 Jahrhunderts, Bd.I (1999), Politisches Denken zwis- chen den Weltkriegen , Bd. II (2003), Politisches Denken im Kalten Krieg (2006), Politisches Denken im Übergang ins 21. Jahrhundert, (2010)]. This is a project that contains Gramscian claims, where Deppe sets out the orientations of political theory from the perspective of the role of intellectuals in social conflicts and, at the same time, depicts the shaping of contemporary class relations on the basis of the material offered by the conscious and unconscious processing of these relations in the practical-theoretical programs that interpret the political and cultural horizon of the era. The presentation of modern political thought unfolds from the standpoint of a Marxist, and this special perspective permeates Deppe’s work. So, he never abandons his interest in the structural changes of German society and the political correlations within it,

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the substance and historical specification of capitalist relations, the international economic and social conjuncture. Already in 1971, he co-authors a comparative study of Western and Eastern German society [BRD - DDR. Vergleich der Gesellschaftssysteme], in 1991 he writes the book that was translated in Greek about the new post-Soviet conditions [Jenseits der Systemkonkurrenz], in 1997 he produces an essay about the end of the millennium [Fin de Siècle. Am Übergang ins 21. Jahrhundert], and in 2001, 2004 and recently, in 2011, he raises the question about the new forms and the new faces of capitalism and imperialism [Ein neuer Kapitalismus? + Der neue Imperialismus + Imperialismus]. His main interest is the analysis of the correlation of forces at the specific point in time; this is what distinguishes his studies, and this is where the special shade of political theory that he exercised and developed is reflected upon.

Frank Deppe is certainly one of the most profound scholars of the - unfortunately - topical, systematic disdain and cancellation of democracy. In 2008, he edited the volume titled ‘Democracy in a state of emergency’ [Notstand der Demokratie] and very recently he published the work ‘Authoritarian capitalism: Democracy in test’ [Autoritärer Kapitalismus. Demokratie auf dem Prüfstand], which is also our today’s theme. Here, the focus is on the inherently contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy, and the exacerbation of this tension in the circumstances that he calls the ‘crisis of democracy’ and the destabilization of both the institutions of participation and representation, and the processes of legitimization. We are on the threshold of the complete prevalence of authoritarian regimes of surveillance and control, the removal of constitutional guarantees, and scenarios of Bonapartist governance.

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It is very crucial that from a very early stage, by analyzing labor, political and social relations in Germany, Europe and the international networking, Frank Deppe turned our attention to the real capitalist barbarism and its threatening fascist deepening, and we owe this to him, especially in today’s Greece of neo-Nazism and crisis. We owe to him the systematic, uncompromising scientific work for the adequate interpretation of the dynamics of this barbarism, the thorough study of the hegemonic correlation of forces following the his- toric changes of the late 20th century, the analysis of the critical cultural changes associated with capitalist integration and the wide- spread commercialization of all fields of life, the theoretical high- lighting of the multifaceted techniques that establish discrimination, marginalization, exploitation and, of course, the consistent criticism to the dominant discourse, the discourse of power and its intellectuals. We owe to Frank Deppe concepts and conceptual formations that support our critical reflection on our present.

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AUTHORITARIAN CAPITALISM

Frank Deppe

The title of this lecture refers to the title of a book of mine recently published in Germany1. In this book I have devoted a chapter to “State, Power, Socialism” of Nicos Poulantzas, which was published in the year of 1979 in Germany, one year before his tragic death. In Part Four of this book he discusses the “Decline of Democracy: Au- thoritarian Statism”. In the developed capitalist states of the West a “new form of State, authoritarian Statism” is achieved: “increased intervention of the State into all spheres of socio-economic life, which is accompanied by a radical decline of the institutions of formal democracy as well as by draconian restrictions of so-called ‘formal liberties’, which one really begins to appreciate when they are taken away”2. At the end of this chapter Poulantzas concludes: “authoritarian Statism” produces however itself various forms of mass struggles. New social movements are directed towards direct rank- and-file democracy characterized by “Anti-Statism”. The spread of centres of self-administration (“Autogestion”) as well as of networks of direct intervention of the masses into processes of decision making which affect them (“new social movements”) manifest this tendency: committees of citizens, urban district committees with different arrangements of self-defence and of control by the people”. At the same time there are new struggles “… of the women’s movements, the ecological movements and struggles for the qual-

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ity of life”3. This was written in 1977 – I will come back to this ar- gument, asking whether we still agree with Poulantzas and at the same time reflecting on the differences between “authoritarian Sta- tism” and “authoritarian Capitalism”. There is a second point of reference to the work of Nicos Poulantzas which I would like to mention at the beginning of my lecture. In the 70s I had already started to work as a Marxist Polit- ical Scientist on problems of European Integration – at that time only the “European Economic Community” was in place with orig- inally 6, then 9 member-states, not yet including Greece or the Southern European Mediterranean countries as the latter joined the Community at the beginning of the 80s (except Italy, of course)4. We did not only analyze European integration as a project of the ruling classes in Western Europe during the Cold War; we also focused – at a theoretical level – on the contradictory relationship between economic internationalization (“globalization” as we call it today) and the role of the national state (in the framework of international organizations). Economic internationalization went hand in hand with the enlargement of state functions regulating the national economy and society. An article of Poulantzas published in 1974 proved to be extraordinarily helpful: “The Internationalization of Capitalism and the National State”. Poulantzas wrote: “Though the role of the national state today still depends on the specific character of the social formation and its class struggles, it is today more and more determined by the imperialist division of labour as well as by the capitalist reproduction of social classes at a global level”. He continues: “The changed role of European national States oriented towards the international reproduction of capital under the dominance of American capital, and the political and ideological conditions of this reproduction result in a relevant institutional transformation of these state apparatuses”5. In Amsterdam, it was Kees van der Pijl who in his early works referred to this approach, concen-

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trating on the formation of transnational class and power relations6. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin from Toronto have to this day advanced the analysis of the transformation of state apparatuses in the process of globalization, concentrating on the role of the American state7. “The globalization of production and finance … was accompanied by new codifications of rules for the operating of ‘free Mar- kets’…” This did not imply “state retreat but the restructuring and expansion of linkages between states and markets. The more capital became internationalized, the more states became concerned to fashion regulatory regimes oriented to facilitating the rapid growth of international trade and foreign investment”8. For the analysis of the EU crisis since 2010 this approach has proven quite productive.

Looking back: the “Landslide” (Eric Hobsbawm)

The tragic death of Poulantzas (followed by the retirement of Louis Althusser) shook us severely in a period of rapid social and political transformations: the transition to the political and ideological victory of Neoliberalism, to global financial capitalism, had already started. The last section of Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal “Age of Ex- tremes” was titled: “The Landslide”. “The history of the twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis. And yet, until the 1980s is was not clear how irretrievably the foundations of the Golden Age had crumbled”9. At this time – at the end of the 70s – the deep crisis of Marx- ism and the scope of the defeat of the Left were not yet fully real- ized by Marxist intellectuals, although quite soon the triumph of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would sent clear signals. In the second half of the 70s for instance, Perry Anderson and Louis Althusser were convinced that the crisis of Marxism and the Left could be corrected by the dynamics of the class struggle itself10. In

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the final chapter of “State, Power, Socialism” Poulantzas outlines the path towards “democratic socialism”. Regarding the “contemporary situation in Europe” he speaks of a historically unique op- portunity “for the success of a democratic socialism and the happy junction of transformed representative democracy and direct grass- root-democracy. … the long process of seizing power on a democratic way to socialism consists essentially in developing the centres of resistance of the masses within the networks of the state, to intensify, coordinate and direct them, creating and developing new centres”11. The subject of this lecture is not the analysis of this specific historical period at the end of the 20th century, which was also a period of deep political and ideological crisis of the Left – or rather of the traditional working class Left, organized in mass socialist and communist parties as well as in trade unions12. Many books have been written and discussed on this subject. In the third volume of my “Political Thought in the 20th Century” I have quite extensively treated the crisis of Fordism, the end of the Bretton Woods system, the victories of the New Right (Neoliberalism) and the defeats of the working class Left from the end of the seventies13. Of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the opening of Eastern and South Eastern Europe to the West (EU and NATO), but also the beginning of the Deng- Xiao-Ping Reforms in China after 1978, marked radical changes on the way to a new era of world history. The epoch was characterized by the breakdown of the old world order (Cold War) and the opening of a period of struggles for a new world order (which is still unfolding, as the Ukraine crisis shows)14. The new formation of global financial capitalism that emerged from this “chaos and turbulence” – succeeding the old formation of “Fordism” – has developed as a highly dynamic process of capital (especially financial) accumulation and revolution in the productive

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forces (“digital revolution”), spreading over the world as a whole and driven forward by the states themselves, enforcing privatization of public enterprises, flexibility of the labour market and deregulation in the field of social policies. At the same time, globalization and “Capitalism unleashed”15 generated instability and contradictions: financial crises, polarization between the rich and the poor, extreme violence resulting from the dissolution of Empires and fail- ing states, religious fundamentalism, mass migration etc. When in 1997 Eric Hobsbawm commemorated the 150th anniversary of the “Communist Manifesto” by Marx and Engels, he mentioned a book- store near Wall Street in New York that presented a new edition of the “Manifesto” in its window. Bankers praised the book: Marx and Engels correctly admired capitalism, in the first part of the “Manifesto”, as a revolutionary system that radically overthrew old orders and traditions all over the world, not only economically but also in politics, everyday life, culture etc. This is what bankers pre- tended to be their own task today: radically changing the world, de- stroying old orders and traditions under the rule of profit and share- holder-value! Marx however, the bankers added, was of course completely wrong when he identified the working class as the “gravedigger” of capitalism and the architect of socialism. With Warren Buffet, this is what they believed: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning!” Looking back at the year 1979 and at the final chapter of Poulantzas’ “State, Power, Socialism” there are two propositions that must be critically reviewed. Firstly, the anticipation of a forthcoming radicalization of class and popular struggles was refuted by the crisis and the decline of the Western European Left as the 1980s were approaching 16. The two decades after 1980 were a period of defeats and setbacks for the radical political Left in Europe. The mass Communist parties in France and Italy crumbled; “New

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Labour” (Blair, Schröder, Gonzales etc.) became the direct agent of neoliberal politics, domestically and in the European Community (EU). At the same time: “European unions are under siege… they have lost clout in the all-important market arena. Traditional union- ist identities no longer work well. Resource supplies from politics and the state are dwindling. Unions organizational capacities are stretched thin”17. Even the “new social movements”, which in the 70s were celebrated as the new agents of emancipation and the radical critics and successors of the working class movement, entered a period of decline or of institutional integration into parliamentary structures. At that time Eric Hobsbawm was quite alone predicting that the “Forward March of Labour” since the end of the 60s might have come to an end18. Secondly, with the victory of Neoliberalism, the state withdrew its interventions into the economy and society; deconstruction of the welfare state and weakening of the trade unions became the central targets of neoliberal policies supported by a strong ideology claiming that the “Market can always do better than the State”. At the same time, new forms of authoritarian control over society were established: on the one side, through the expansion of repressive state apparatuses, and, on the other, through the strengthening of market forces and competition, (“disciplinary neoliberalism”, Stephen Gill). At first sight, neoliberal “deconstruction of the state” seems to contradict Poulantzas’ thesis of the tendency towards “authoritarian Statism”. In his new book on the present “Crisis of Capitalism”, David Harvey asks “how to interpret the present mess? … My view is that it refers to a class project that co- alesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and virtues of pri- vatisation, the free market and free trade, it legitimised draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power. This project has been successful, judging by the incredible centrali- sation of wealth and power observable in all those countries that took the neoliberal road. And there is no evidence that it is dead”19.

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Capitalism and democracy

My book on “Authoritarian Capitalism” is subtitled “Testing democracy”. So, my special interest is directed towards analyzing three di- mensions of the contradictory relationship between capitalism and democracy: 1) in general, 2) Neoliberalism and the tendency towards “post-democracy” (C. Crouch), 3) the crisis after 2008 and the turn to “authoritarian capitalism”. A separate chapter is dedi- cated to the analysis of this relationship in different countries where the majority of the world population lives (USA, Russia, China and India) and where, during the past two decades, capitalism has developed rapidly. However, capitalism has flourished in different social and political environments. In the USA, freedom is restrained by the power of executive state apparatuses (CIA, NSA), perfected during the “war against terrorism”; moreover, representative democracy is dominated by the rich and by corporate and financial interests (“one dollar, one vote”). In Russia, capitalism is built up on the ruins of state socialism; the country has to cope with the enormous challenges resulting from the collapse of the old order, the “accumulation by dispossession” of the working class, the new class polarization and the pressure from outside in the battle for the distribution of power within the new world order. Putin’s “reg- ulated democracy” seems to be a political answer to these challenges still counting on a large majority of the electorate. In China, the regime of the Communist Party is still quite stable, directing the explosion of the economy and the big cities, balancing the growing inequality in income and wealth, reacting to challenges from world politics, deeply influenced by the growing economic, political and military power of China on a regional (East Asia) and global scale. Democracy is still defined according to the Maoist interpretation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. However, the party is open to reforms and innovations which explain at least part of its suc-

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cess and stability. In India, the integration of the IT-sector and other industries into the world economy has accelerated. Yet, the power of traditional cultures, mass poverty and religious extremism is still very strong and threatens Indian democracy which was and still is an elite project, since the country’s independence in 1948. Therefore, summing up, the statement of mainstream political scientists, namely that we are living in the middle of the third or fourth “wave” of worldwide democratization, is not empirically very convincing. Even “The Economist” (March 1st, 2014) has recently asked “What’s Gone Wrong with Democracy?”: “Democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world”. First of all, a few remarks on the relationship between capitalism and democracy in general. On the basis of private property, exploitation and class conflict, the relationship between political equality and social inequality is always the field of conflicting interests and struggle: arrangements are reached temporarily, reflected in constitutions and laws. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle knew about the interrelation between the form of political regime and the division between the rich and the poor. “Tyranny is a personal regime in favour of the ruler, oligarchy is a regime in favour of the rich and democracy is a regime in favour of the poor”. Of course, for Aristotle, these regimes were the degenerated forms of monarchy, aristocracy and “Politie” which is the rule of the multi- tude in favour of general welfare20. In modern states with a democratic constitution (since the American Revolution) and an economic system based upon private property “socio-economic inequality exists besides civil liberty and equality… in capitalist soci-

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ety the direct producers are subjected to economic constraints which are not determined by their political status... The workers are submitted to the power of capital as well as to the laws of competition and profit maximization”, as Ellen Meiksins Wood writes in her book “Democracy Against Capitalism”21. Young Marx criticized the contradiction between “The droits de l’homme, the rights of man, as such, distinct from the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen’”. He continues: “Only when the real Individual man re-ab- sorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual has become a species-being (“Gattungswesen”) in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his ‘own powers’ as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates his social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished”22. When Engels later (1880) explained that, with the socialization of the means of production and the abolition of classes, the state – as a separate institution of class power – will not be abolished but will die, will be “taken back into society”, he reformulated these early philosophical reflections of Marx on the basis of historical materialism23. Class power on the basis of private property is first of all protected by the capitalist state, by Law and – if necessary – by force. The ideologists of “liberal democracy” had (and still have) no prob- lem with this asymmetry. In the 18th and early 19th centuries they took for granted that the large majority of the people were excluded from the right to vote. It was the possessing minority which – through elections – decided who would hold the executive state power. The parliamentary system offered a constitutional frame in which different fractions of the ruling classes could exchange argu- ments related to their different interests and compete for the exercise of power. The ruling classes always had common interests (protecting property rights, suppressing the working class, agreeing

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on the foreign policy) – at the same time their members and fractions had competing interests, economically, culturally and politically. Elections legitimized who would exercise power for a limited period of time. The popular mass movements of the bourgeois revolutions and subsequently the rise of the socialist working class movement since the early 19th century placed universal suffrage on the agenda. At that time, even for many Liberals, democracy had become a syn- onym for socialism24. It was only in the early 20th century that universal suffrage was introduced into the constitutions of the developed capitalist countries of the West – under the pressure of the Russian Revolution at the end of the First World War. For women, universal suffrage was implemented even later. The ideologists of Neoliberalism – for instance F. A. Hayek, who supported the fascist putsch of Pinochet in 1973 – even today denounce the “risks” that democracy represents for “free economy” – risks connected to majority decisions on the basis of universal suffrage. As they claim, politicians (in democracies) compete for majorities and therefore offer social “gifts” to the electorate that intervene into property rights and suffocate the dynamics of a free market economy. Hayek’s famous book, “The Road to Serfdom”, published in 1944, did not refer to communism and the Soviet Union but to the plan of the liberal politician William Beveridge (a close friend of John Maynard Keynes, both members of the Liberal Party), who designed far-reaching social reforms for the post-war order in Britain! The concept of liberty – advocated by neoliberal orthodoxy – is not related to democracy but to the market, the free disposition of private property and the freedom from state control and intervention. Large parts of environmental and social policies are rejected as restrictions of this freedom: from medical care, pension systems and education, to housing policies! In our times the debates about Obama’s medical reform in the US and the attacks of the Tea-Party-

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Movement demonstrate the viability of this conservative, rather re- actionary position. Marx analyzed the tendency towards authoritarianism at the end of the 1848 revolution in France. The dictatorship of “Bonapartism” was an answer to the class struggle, more generally to the “danger” of social revolution: the working class, or more precisely the popular masses, fought to seize power in order to establish democracy and social justice by intervening into the property rights of the bourgeoisie. Under these conditions the ruling capitalist class (in coali- tion with the “old” landed aristocracy) was willing to give up the democratic constitution and the parliamentary regime. They accepted the personal dictatorship of Louis Bonaparte. Marx argued: they gave up political power in order to preserve their economic and social power25. The fascist regimes (and the crisis of Liberalism) in the first half of the 20th century – after the results of the First World War (“Versailles”), the wave of revolutionary proletarian movements following 1917 and the world economic crisis of 1929 – confirmed this tendency towards the authoritarian state, towards “Bonapartism” or “Caesarism” in many countries of Europe. “Bona- partism” rested on the mass support of fractions of the lower classes (“Lumpenproletariat”) as well as on the independent executive power of the “state machinery”, as Marx argued. Later, Max Weber denounced increasing bureaucratization (including expanded state interventionism) as the road to the “steel case of serfdom”. In the works of Poulantzas we also find elements of this kind of criticism of the state. On the other hand, the working class movement has proposed – from its beginnings – a programme of social democracy. First of all, political democracy must be supplemented by the acknowledg- ment of the freedom of assembly for parties, unions and other social interest groups. Secondly, social democracy requires policies of social welfare, “economic democracy” (workers control, co-deci-

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sion, democratic planning at macro-economic level etc.) and, finally, social democracy requires a “mixed economy”, i.e. the transfer of parts of industry, transport, energy, banks etc. to public, i.e. state property. In these fields, trade unions play an important role as in- tegrating forces of social democracy. In the period between the Two World Wars it was the Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer who spoke of a balance of class power, articulated in a constitution that acknowledges both private property and the political and social rights of the working classes and its organizations. Many social democrats – after 1945 – believed that the road to the “social em- bedding” of welfare capitalism – on the basis of class compromise – was inevitable. The Scandinavian countries around Sweden seemed to be a civilized socialist alternative to the state-socialist system of the Soviet Union and its allies. My teacher, Wolfgang Abendroth, in his interpretation of the West German Constitution of 1949 referred to Otto Bauer’s concept of the balance of class power. Reflecting on the experience of 1933 (which was extremely important for German socialists after the war) he confirmed that the stability of democracy – especially in periods of deep economic crisis – depends substantially on the stability of the institutions of economic democracy and the welfare state, protected by a strong working class movement26. Finally, in his analysis of the Paris Commune (1871) Marx developed a concept of revolutionary democracy which was revived in Lenin’s “State and Revolution” (1917) and served as a point of reference in the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution. The proletarian revolution does not only overthrow the structures of bourgeois power and property. It must also destroy the state, the an- cient “state machine”, by establishing a new form of radical democracy: self-management of the people that abolishes the separation between legislative and executive functions. Direct democracy in Rousseau’s tradition had inspired these concepts. The movements

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of the workers’ councils in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and af- terwards – in quite a few European countries – and the revolutionary movements between 1917 and 1923 fought for such institutions of working class power. The attempt to establish people’s sovereignty by creating new forms of popular self-management – at different levels of social organization, from workplace to central functions – was very strong at that time, but also highly contradictory. In the German revolution, many assemblies of the workers’ and sol- diers’ councils were dominated by right-wing Social Democrats; Rosa Luxemburg was not allowed to speak! The history of the So- viet Union – until the collapse of 1990/91 – has been characterized by the formal acceptance of the “soviet” organization (at the local, regional, factory levels etc.), yet at the same time by the imposition of strictly centralized control (by the party and the security regime) over all sectors of society. “Democratic centralism” was an element of the structural crisis of state socialism that was ultimately responsible for its end!

Neoliberalism and democracy

When, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history”. He argued that representative democracy and market economy (i.e. capitalism) had been undermined by communism and fascism. At the end of the century, however, the American model of “freedom and democracy” had triumphed and there was no alternative! Nowa- days, political scientists more and more realize that the “hegemony of Neoliberalism” since the last quarter of the 20th century goes hand in hand with a thorough transformation of democracy. Re- cently, Wolfgang Streeck, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Cologne/Germany, published a fierce critique of

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the “destruction of democratic capitalism” in three steps, since the 1970s. A few years ago, he was still an advocate of “competitive corporatism”, and urged the German unions to accept the constraints of global competition (“There is no Alternative”). Now, he accuses: “The rapidly progressing de-democratization of the economy and the economization of democracy with the intention of an institutionalized hegemony of market fairness over social justice”27. I do not agree with the thesis of Streeck that the “Golden-Age Pe- riod” of Capitalism (1948 – 1973) was a period of ‘Democracy’ and social justice. However, his theses about the primacy of the market over the state and – as a consequence – the processes of de-democratization (due to the deconstruction of the welfare state, i.e. “social democracy”) and of a “newly defined relationship between economy and politics by a complete reconstruction of the state system, especially in Europe”, summarize quite precisely the tendency towards authoritarian capitalism. Neoliberalism denounced the welfare state, the strong unions and the Keynesian policies of full employment as the decisive factors of the crisis of the 70s that resulted in inflation, declining economic growth, growing unemployment and state-debt. At the end, one of the pillars of modern democracy, “social democracy” (including its welfare and full employment policies) was torn down – a pillar which during the 20th century had been re- garded as an indispensable element of political stability in periods of crisis in the programmes of West European Social Democratic Parties28. Margaret Thatcher had opened the war against these programmes by professing: “I don’t know what society is, I only know individuals!” In reality she waged war – in 1984/85 – against the British unions, first of all the militant miners unions29. Stephen Gill, a political scientist from Toronto, Canada, has shown how global financial capitalism and the ideological and political hegemony of Neoliberalism have achieved a “new constitutionalism”, which he defines as “disciplinary neoliberalism”30. Govern-

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ments – political actors in general – are confronted with the so- called “economic necessities” (“Sachzwänge”) imposed by the markets (especially financial markets) and global competition. In order to improve competitiveness (of the corporation, the city, the university, the country etc.), taxes, legal restrictions, social costs and, of course, wages must be reduced, adapted to the advanced level of global competitiveness. At the same time, the price of formerly “public goods” (education, health, transport, culture etc.) is rising, as a consequence of privatization. The European Common Market already created until the early 1990s, was combined with the mes- sage that, from then on, national social welfare systems would be confronted with the pressure of privatization and competition within a Common Market with no boundaries for goods, capital, services and labour. The “activation of social policies” followed by the governments of New Labour at that time tried to answer this pressure through the opening of the pension systems and the health sector to privatization and the financial markets. Such “necessities” have neutralized the democratic legitimization of political decisions. Leading bankers for instance discovered that financial markets have acquired the status of a “fifth power” in democracy: besides the legislative, executive and juridical power in the system of separation of powers, and besides the controlling role played by the public and the media, international financial markets have the power to “correct, overnight, false options” of national or local political decision makers. How is this power exercised? By means of evaluations from rating agencies, of interest rates on credits and government bonds, of capital flight, exchange rates versus US-Dollar and so on. Finally, after 2008, the crisis has demonstrated that a possible crash of the financial system threatens the whole order of present capitalism and its state. Committed to the slogan “Too big to fail”, governments were forced to mobilize huge funds for the rescue of the financial sector; until today, crisis-management is concentrated

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on the stabilization of the financial sector. However, I repeat, these “necessities” are neither natural laws nor pure economic constraints. Behind these constraints exist – as David Harvey has always and again stressed – manifest interests oriented towards strengthening the class power of the bourgeoisie. These interests are politically served through the activities of governments and other political actors. International organizations like the IMF, World Bank, EU and ECB play a central role in this game. In Greece, you have to learn painfully how the despotic regime represented by the “Troika” is working! Recently, the former Social Democrat prime minister of Spain, José Luis Zapatero, published a book on his last 600 days as head of government (2004 – 2011). When the crisis hit Spain in 2009 he had to reduce government expenditure, although he was still convinced that the crisis could be managed by Keynesian counter-measures. However, in a meeting of the Euro- Group in May 2010, his liberal-conservative colleagues let him know that there was no longer room for Keynesian politics in debt-ridden Europe. So, he had to learn that the cornerstones of Spanish politics were no longer decided in Madrid, but in Brussels and more and more in Berlin31. Consequently, the ideologists of Neoliberalism have triumphed: left-wing policies (even in their moderate Keyne- sian variant) are no longer possible against the “strong arms of the market”. Let us now look at the effects of these policies on democracy at home. Market radicalism, the politics of privatization, deregulation and “flexibility” of the labour market produce – together with tax policies favourable for higher incomes, profits and wealth – a continuous increase of social inequality, a widening gap between the rich and the poor – with a middle class in-between threatened by social decline32. The informal or precarious sector of the labour market, with low wages, no social rights, no protection by unions, has been significantly enlarged during the past decade. For the USA,

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Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have demonstrated – under the title “Winner Take-All-Politics” – how the policies that make the rich richer (especially the top 1 percent of the rich), are responsible for increasing poverty33. Because of low wages within the so-called precarious sector, poverty can co-exist with “full-employment”34. This tendency obviously undermines democracy. Together with growing poverty and marginalization, the number of people who do not participate any more in democratic politics and public debate is increasing. This affects participation in elections, membership of political parties or social interest groups and the general interest in public / political affairs (for instance the reading of newspapers). Large numbers of people do not anymore feel represented by democratic politics. Peter Mair, an Irish political scientist, characterized the “hollowing” of democracy as a march towards “democracy without demos”35, combined with indifference or contempt on the part of those who are marginalized and excluded from social cohesion and democratic politics. “The attempt to reinvigorate growth through liberalization has left its imprint on democracy. As countries have grown more unequal, citizens have lost their faith in elections, parliaments and governments”. On the contrary, comparative research for different countries in Europe shows that: “There are fewer signs of democratic disaffection in the most egalitarian countries, which still have comparatively high levels of taxation and public spending”36. These new class lines – social polarization and the political deconstruction of social cohesion – have promoted the rise of right-wing populism and neo-Nazi parties in quite a few Euro- pean countries! On this basis another transformation is proceeding. According to Colin Crouch, this is the main feature of “Post-Democracy”: the elimination of the demos as the sovereign, the subject of democracy, corresponds to the fact that – without changing the constitution, the system of institutions and the formal democratic rules – the

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economic and financial elites more and more directly and success- fully intervene into the politics of governments – for instance in the field of tax policies, bank control, environmental and energy policies, and of course European politics37. At the same time, decisions of central banks and international organisations become means of this kind of intervention and class power. European politics, for instance, since the creation of the Common Market and with respect to crisis management after 2010, are a central object of direct corporate and business intervention38. The influence of business and banking lobbying in Brussels has grown significantly in recent years. Experts and lawyers working for the banks and insurance companies (or their corporate interest associations) are hired out to government departments, to outline drafts of laws for the regulation of the financial sector. “Authoritarian Capitalism” implies that governments surrender to the so-called objective necessities exerted by markets of goods and finance. Balance of payments and interest rates on government bonds become central parameters of political decision-making. Within the country, a growing number of people are either excluded from political participation or have – together with the growing number of immigrants from poor countries – no civil right to participate in public affairs39. In this way, the asymmetry between rich and poor even in the political field is increasing enormously. These tendencies are of course enforced by the dominant orienta- tion towards consumption. The growth of private debt follows primarily from the purchase of houses and apartments, cars and other high-quality consumption goods. Furthermore, the use of credit cards – which is a rather modern invention – has also increased private debt as the second pillar (besides public debt) of debt-economy, nowadays fed by the low interest rates fixed by the American Fed and the European Central Bank. In order to understand the passivity of large sections of the working class towards the debt cri-

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sis after 2008, we must acknowledge the fact of high individual in- debtedness of many working class families: they fear that social decline will be accelerated, as they face unemployment, precarious- ness and high debt. In the United States and in Spain – I suppose, in Greece too – the real estate crisis has led to massive forced evac- uations from houses and apartments. In consumer capitalism, happiness and well-being are largely defined by the acquisition of goods. Consumer Capitalism has become a religion of its own! Additionally, young people are not only de- politicized by consumer “dreams” but also by modern forms of communication in the Internet and by mass events in the fields of sports and pop-culture. They are largely interested in their personal well-being, but not in the “well-being” of the community or in the collective representation of interest and solidarity within the community. They are more interested in fun, provided by new mass- cultures for the youth. Yet, even entertainment is dominated by the constraints to which young people are subjected: competition in school and university, competition for good jobs, competition for recognition, affection, beauty and success. Of course, these tendencies do produce counter-tendencies. This is why, since 2011, in many countries and cities of the world, young people especially have demonstrated and revolted against this kind of competitive totali- tarianism, which is combined with the destruction of future perspectives for the youth. If this analysis is correct, maybe you understand why I am speak- ing of “authoritarian capitalism” and not – like Nicos Poulantzas at the end of the 1970s – of “authoritarian Statism”. So far, I have out- lined long-term tendencies connected to the cycle of neoliberal hegemony that started in the developed capitalist countries of the West around the mid-1970s. These tendencies are primarily a prod- uct of market liberalization and of a political management oriented towards competitiveness, domestically and in the world market.

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They are at the same time part of the re-organization of the global capitalist empire that began in the 1970s under the direction of the American state and the US-central bank (Fed). “National states … have to accept some responsibility for promoting the accumulation of capital in a manner that contributed to the US-led management of the international capitalist order”40. Even control of individual be- haviour follows more and more the rules of accelerating competi- tion41. At the political level “new constitutionalism confers privileged rights of citizenship and representation to corporate capital, whilst constraining the democratization process that has involved struggles for representation for hundreds of years. Central, therefore, to new constitutionalism is the imposition of discipline on public institutions, partly to prevent national interference with the property rights and entry and exit options of holders of mobile capital with regard to particular political jurisdiction… Traditional notions of constitutionalism are associated with political rights, obligations, and freedoms, and procedures that give institutional form to the state”42. From this follows, that the thesis of “Bonapartism” that inferred the authoritarian turn within capitalism (to the point of fascist dictatorship and terrorism) from the “failed offensive of the working class to seize state power” (in 1848 or in the period between 1917 and 1923), cannot sufficiently explain the transformation of the relationship between capitalism and democracy since the last quarter of the 20th century. Neoliberalism was a class strategy reacting to the waves of class struggle in the early seventies and the growing power of the working class expressed by left wing parties and governments that proposed to enlarge the public sector, improve social security, reform education and the university system, strengthen democracy in factories, universities, media etc. Class struggles put an end to the dictatorships in Greece, Portugal and Spain; in the early 1970s even parts of the bourgeoisie were convinced that the

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future of these countries would be determined by socialism. Yet, the tendency towards “democracy conforming to the market” (this formula is used by the German Chancellor, Mrs. Merkel), towards new forms of discipline imposed by competition, towards control in the sense of Foucault, was enforced after the political victory of Ne- oliberalism since the end of the 1970s globally and nationally – on the basis of a disastrous defeat of Socialism and the working-class Left! Hence, the new system of control exerted by the market did not require the abolition of democratic constitutions and institutions! There is however one aspect of the hollowing of democratization that confirms Poulantzas’ thesis of “authoritarian Statism”. The primacy of the market and competition and the retreat of the state within the system of “disciplinary Neoliberalism” are obviously the dominant tendencies. On the other hand, the repressive state apparatuses have been strengthened. Secret services which are not under parliamentary and public control are now using information technologies to perfect global networks of control over the whole of society. The American NSA and other secret services have ex- tended this kind of control over the whole world. Parts of the police have been transformed into a civil war “army” confronting demonstrations with massive police attacks. In the name of the “war against terrorism” since 2001, and not only in the USA, these departments of state executive power have been enlarged and perfected. Fundamental democratic rights have been suspended. On the one hand, this reflects a restructuring of the system of state apparatuses in favour of global competition and the “security state”. On the other hand, it reflects a growing “need for security” on the part of the state and the ruling classes. With the increase of “poverty regions” in society, with the growing number of immigrants who are extremely poor and without civil rights, new forms of criminality, aggression and racism have arisen. At the same time,

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increasing social polarization and the effects of the crisis after 2008 produce a decline of legitimacy of the “dominant blocks”: the po- tential of social and political resistance has definitely grown since 2011. More state control is needed to suppress these movements that might revive the program of socialism. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated that the use of modern war tech- nology (including the war of drones) is combined with most brutal forms of suppression of human rights (by torture, imprison- ment/Guantanamo, abduction of suspects etc.). The NSA classified documents released by Edward Snowden have recently exposed how far the constraints of democracy and the building-up of systems of state control over individuals and the whole of society have progressed.

The turn to authoritarian capitalism

So far, I have focused on the relationship between the victory of Neoliberalism and the hollowing of democracy at the level of do- mestic policies and parliamentarian democratic institutions. The way towards disciplinary society is predominantly steered by market- and competition-processes. The growth of the “security state” is a reaction to the manifestation of social contradictions and to the declining legitimacy of the political class or the “ruling block”. Exter- nal challenges (“war against terrorism”) strengthen these tendencies. However, in every country, this constellation of contradictions is shaped by specific national features, traditions, relations of social and political forces etc. The case of the Greek crisis illustrates this combination of general parameters (connected to the crisis of global capitalism and the Eurocrisis) with very specific national factors and patterns of the crisis. These include the fact that the country has been ruled and governed for a long time by a small group of rich and

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powerful families. A system of clientele relations from above has fastened this kind of power to many sectors of society and the state. This establishment has led the country into the crisis and has so far prevented democratic reforms. The accumulation of wealth is not only connected to the leading positions of this elite in the Greek economy, but also to the exploitation of state power in favour of an oligarchy that, for instance, transfers profits and dividends from the financial market to the real estate markets of New York, London, Paris and Berlin. Tax policies in favour of the rich, state expenses and EU-subsidies as a source of personal enrichment, control (and corruption) of the judicial system etc. are elements of this system of exploitation and domination. The solution of the crisis therefore cannot only consist in changing the policy and institutional structures of the European Union (EU). It must start with a radical democratic transformation at home. With the crisis after 2008, the development towards authoritarian capitalism has reached a new stage. Crisis management of the EU after 2010 is guided by austerity policies. The crisis – as the ideologists of this policy confirm – is supposed to be a result of the accumulation of state debt in the decade before the crisis. This explanation is totally wrong but corresponds to the interests of financial capital and legitimizes austerity policies and cuts in social expenses. The Big Crisis after 2008 is a result of the structural over- accumulation of capital in the old centres of Western capitalism and the extreme expansion of speculative capital in the global financial markets. And, in the EU, the crisis is a result of the fact that, since the introduction of the Euro in 2000, the unequal development of national balances of payment between surplus- and deficit-countries in the Eurozone has been fixed and financed by credits with low interest rates. When, after 2008, national governments had to intervene with large sums of money to prevent the breakdown not only of the financial sector but also of the economy and the labour mar-

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ket, they reached a state of insolvency which would have accelerated the crash of the global financial system centered on Wall Street or at least the European one. It was there that crisis management at the national level and EU-crisis management had to intervene: austerity policies combined with a set of obligations for bailouts were oriented a) to the stabilization of the financial sector and the specific interests of the actors in this sector (banks, insurance companies, pension-funds, hedge-funds, private equity companies, rating agencies etc.), and b) to the interests of the relatively stable and rich countries around Germany in the Northern EU enjoying sur- pluses and growth effects due to industrial exports especially to China and the BRICS-countries. The surplus-countries are interested in disciplining the deficit- countries and avoiding a common responsibility (within EU) for the debts; the deficit- and debtor-countries try to weaken disciplinary control from the outside and make the creditors accept the distribution of the costs. On this basis European solidarity is thoroughly destroyed. The project of a European Marshall Plan oriented towards a reconstruction of the crisis-ridden economies of the South – proposed by the unions – had no chance of succeeding. The project of the European capitalist class is to strengthen the EU as a global actor in the world order of the 21st century, economically, politically and militarily43. Geopolitical interests determine not only EU-crisis management but also the handling of the Ukrainian crisis, the negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Agree- ment with the USA and the redefinition of relationships with China and Russia. Even the enlargement of the EU – its relationship to Turkey – is ultimately determined by such strategic considerations. In this context, the Euro must be rescued as one of the basic elements of this strategy. The European capitalist class accepts the in- tensification of social divisions within the EU and the leadership of the German government in this process. However, the European

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capitalist class knows quite well that the effects of this policy will destroy European solidarity, provoke social and political protests and political polarization between the radical left opting for a democratic transformation of the EU and the radical nationalist right questioning the EU as a whole. In any case, if the crisis is not solved and these tendencies prevail, the use of force and state control will grow and intensify. The European Central Bank is responsible for providing “cheap money” to rescue the banks and stimulating investment. However, austerity policies imposed by the EU, the European Central Bank and the “Troika” do not solve the contradictions that have led the Southern countries into the crisis. They rather re-enforce the crisis of the economy. Private and public debt has increased significantly since 2008. Unemployment and poverty are rising, wages are reduced and the public sector (health, basic education, universities) is being demolished. At the same time, dramatic changes are being pushed forward in the labour market, the welfare systems, the workers’ and unions’ rights. The economy is suffocated; society is destroyed; individuals are driven to despair and exhaustion. The situation is complicated by the relative stagnation of the economy, the growing public debt and the political instability in Italy and France, two of the big founding members of the European Community. Cri- sis management as a “fiscal dictatorship” – imposed on the whole of society – is carried out as a revival and enforcement of neoliberal politics and ideology44. Weakening the Left and especially the unions is one of the main targets of this policy! At the same time, unequal development within the EU is functioning as the basis for diverging interests between governments and social and political forces, as the basis for the mobilization of popular protest in favour of a change of these policies but also as the basis for the rise of right- wing populism. The forthcoming elections for the European Parlia-

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ment in May 2014 may stress this danger of a turn towards the political Right. The hollowing of democracy now acquires a new quality. The disciplinary regime of a “new constitutionalism” steered by market and competition is now accompanied by “authoritarian constitutionalism” interfering with national sovereignty and democratic constitutional rules45. From Pareto to Hayek, liberal economists committed to the free market and fighting against the Welfare state have accepted – in a “state of emergency” (Carl Schmitt) – the abolish- ment of democracy by personal or military dictatorships46. The Greek prime minister of PASOK had to step down when he proposed a referendum to ask the Greek people whether they accepted the rescue plans from Brussels. Elections have to be re- peated if they do not produce “correct” results. As long as the big parties of the so-called centre-right or centre-left (liberal, greens, conservatives and social democrats) are the winners of general elections, they form governments that go along with the rules dictated by the EU. Credits from the so-called “rescue-fund” of the EU are bound to the acceptance of austerity measures imposed by the troika and are not open to negotiation or control. As long as the people accept this kind of rule of an economic dictatorship from the outside, the façade of democratic procedures remains intact. In this manner, parliaments as the central legislative institutions of representative democracy (resulting from general elections) are substantially devaluated. Crisis management has become the job of the executive – as a fiscal dictatorship, a regime to protect the borders of Europe against migrants and refugees. Secret services are quite immune (and protected by the government) to the claim of parliamentary control in the name of transparency and fundamental democratic rights. Of course, we cannot predict how these tendencies will develop. We cannot predict the dynamics of political and social struggles

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within the member states of the EU and the effects on Europe of the transformations and crises within the world system. The 21st century will be characterized by the competition between the “old” capitalist centres on both coasts of the North Atlantic and the rising powers in the East and the South East of Asia, foremost China. In the latter, the state plays a much more important role for economic development than in the USA or the EU. If state capitalism in Eastern Asia – under the leadership of the Communist Party in China – is still successful, it might become attractive for the West. Slavoj Zizek remarks that the “virus of this authoritarian form of capitalism is slowly, but safely about to spread over the whole of the globe ... today the connection between capitalism and democracy has been broken up”47. Ian Bremmer – in a US bestseller – asks: “End of the Free Market. Who will win the war between states and corporations?” He argues for the victory of the American model of a “free market economy”, but realizes that the new power relations in the world economy and in world politics are highly influenced by countries with a strong developmental state, especially in the economy. So he concludes rather realistically, that only the “hard power”, i.e. military power of the US, will guarantee “that the US will remain in essential fields the predominant factor of economic and political stability in the world”48. Immanuel Wallerstein, head of the school of “world system theory”, is convinced that the pre- dominance of the “Model of Western Atlantic Capitalism” – which was the center of the world system since 1500 – is coming to an end. This decline will be accelerated by the crisis of 2008 and the effects of austerity policies. “Unemployment in the world will not di- minish, but grow. Common people will significantly feel that things turn worse. Already we have seen that they do strike back. This kind of popular resistance will increase. We find ourselves in the midst of a battle for the construction of the future. Those who today dispose of power and privileges will not stay lazily aside. They

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will understand that their future is not guaranteed by the present capitalist system. They will try to introduce a system which does not rely on the central role of the market but on a combination of brutal force and fraud. The new system must guarantee the continuity of three essential elements of the present system: hierarchy, exploitation and polarization”49.

Democracy against authoritarian capitalism

What are the perspectives of “popular resistance” against authoritarian capitalism mentioned by Wallerstein? Since 2011, starting with the “Arabian Spring”, the world has entered a “new period of social unrest”. All these movements have to be thoroughly analyzed; they vary considerably because of their local and regional unique features. Their outcome is not yet sure; revolutionary movements that have driven away old regimes are confronted with religious fundamentalism and counter-revolution often headed by the army. Mass demonstrations and meetings in the centres of big cities (Madrid, New York, Istanbul, Rio etc.) do not establish a solid struc- ture of continuous mobilization against authoritarian capitalism. Yet, in spite of the differences between these movements and their dis- continuity, they are united in a worldwide democratic front not only against political repression, but also against poverty, unemployment, exploitation of cheap labour, exploitation of nature, against the destruction of future social perspectives for younger generations etc. And, they are united in their criticism of corrupt regimes, of a system of representative democracy which has become a democracy without demos, an instrument serving the interests of the rich and powerful. They fight for a culture of self-determination and auton- omy, for new forms of collective action and organization beyond the traditional models of the socialist working class movement. They

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use the new means of communication to mobilize for mass meetings. This social unrest manifests itself in different forms: rebellion of youth without future, riots in the ghettos, protests against gen- trification, mobilizations against the destruction of urban quarters to build shopping malls and luxury flats and strikes and general strikes of the unions against unemployment, government policies and EU fiscal dictatorship. New social groups engage in these struggles – for instance, young academics who are confronted with unemployment, precarious labour and personal debt50. The Left must learn to develop a strategy of democratic transformation that builds a “counter-hegemonic block” composed by young middle class academics (many of them are activists in the new social movements), poor urban youngsters mainly from the migrant population) and “old working class” activists from left-wing parties and unions. The rise of SYRIZA in Greece demonstrates the transformation of “social unrest” and despair into electoral and parliamentary power, opening the perspective of a left-wing government which might re- sist authoritarian capitalism, open new perspectives in the struggles for democracy (which cannot be renewed without the defeat of neoliberalism and authoritarian capitalism) as well as for international solidarity.

Notes

1. Frank Deppe, Autoritärer Kapitalismus. Demokratie auf dem Prüfstand, Hamburg: VSA-Verlag 2013. 2. Nicos Poulantzas, Staatstheorie, Hamburg 1978, p. 185/6. 3. Ibid. p. 227/8.

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4. Cf. Frank Deppe (Ed.), Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft (EWG). Zur Politischen Ökonomie der Westeuropäischen Integration, Reinbek 1975. 5. Nicos Poulantzas, Klassen im Kapitalismus – heute, Westberlin 1975, p. 75/6. 6. Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, London 1984. 7. Leo Panitch, Globalisation and the State, in: Socialist Register 1994, Lon- don 1994, pp. 60 – 93. 8. Leo Panitch / Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, London / New York 2012, p. 223. 9. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, The Short Twentieth Century 1914 – 19912, London 1994, p. 403; also: Frank Deppe / David Salomon / Ingar Solty, Imperialismus,. Köln 2011.. 10. Perry Anderson, Über den westlichen Marxismus (1976), Frankfurt / Main 1978, p. 139 ff.; Louis Althusser, Die Krise des Marxismus, Hamburg / Ber- lin 1978. 11. Poulantzas, Staatstheorie, p. 235/6. 12. As far as Unions are concerned cf. Frank Deppe, Gewerkschaften in der Großen Transformation, Köln 2012. 13. Frank Deppe, Politisches Denken im Kalten Krieg, Teil 1: Die Konfron- tation der Systeme, Hamburg 2006, S. 171 – 284. 14. Cf. Giovanni Arrighi / Beverley Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, Minneapolis / London 1999. 15. Cf. Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed, Oxford 2006. 16. In 1975, in his book Crisis of Dictatorships in Portugal, Greece and Spain, Nicos Poulantzas wrote about the “chance for a process of real national independence and transition to socialism”. 17. Andrew Martin / George Ross et al., The Brave New World of Euro- pean Labour, New York / Oxford 1999, p. 368. 18. Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? London 1981. 19. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: and the Crisis of Capitalism, Lon- don 2010. 20. Aristoteles, Politik, München 1973, S. 114. 21. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Demokratie contra Kapitalismus, Köln 2010, S. 22. Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, MEW, Band 1, S. 364 and 370. 23. Friedrich Engels, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (1880), MEW 19, S. 226. 24. Cf. Arthur Rosenberg, Demokratie und Sozialismus (1937), Frankfurt / Main 1962.

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25. Karl Marx, Der 18 Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, MEW, 8, S. 154. 26. Cf. Frank Deppe, Wolfgang Abendroth – Demokratie und Sozialismus, in: Ders., Politisches Denken im Kalten Krieg, Band 2: Systemkonfrontation, Golden Age, antiimperialistische Befreiungsbewegungen, Hamburg 2008, S. 84 - 139. 27. Wolfgang Streeck: Gekaufte Zeit. Die vertagte Krise des demokrati- schen Kapitalismus; Berlin 2013, S. 147/8; cf. Armin Schäfer / Wolfgang Streeck (Eds.), Politics in the Age of Austerity, Cambridge. 28. Cf. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism. The West Eu- ropean Left in the Twentieth Century, London 1997. 29. The writer David Peace in 2004 published a novel on the miners’ strike of 1984 (“GB84”) demonstrating the brutality and the criminal character of Thatcher’s policy. 30. Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, New York 2003, S. 116 ff. 31. José Luis Zapatero, El Dilema. 600 Dias de Vertigo, Madrid 2013. 32. Göran Therborn, Class in the 21st Century, in: New Left Review, No. 78 / 2012, pp. 1 – 15. 33. Jacob S. Hacker / Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All-Politics, New York 2011. 34. Cf. for Germany: Klaus Dörre et al., Bewährungsproben für dei Unter- schicht? Frankfurt / New York 2013. 35. Peter M. Mair, Ruling the Void? The Hollowing of Western Democracy, in: New Left Review, 42, November / December 2006, pp. 25 – 51. 36. Armin Schäfer, Liberalization, Inequality and Democracy’s Discontent, in: W. Streeck / A. Schäfer (Eds.), Politics in the age of austerity, Cambridge 2013, pp. 169 – 195, here p. 188 ff. 37. Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, Cambridge 2004. 38. In as far as the European Round Table of Industrialists (URTI) is concerned, cf. Bastiaan van Appeldoorn, The European capitalist class and the crisis of its hegemonic project, in: Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class, ed. by Leo Panitch et al, London / New York2013, pp. 189 – 206. 39. According to Perry Anderson (The New and the Old World, London / New York 2009, p.542) “the issue of immigration has risen to a prominence out of all proportion with its objective place in society, becoming the punctum dolens of societies that rest on a social inequality and popular impotence which can never themselves be admitted to public consciousness … beleaguered mi- norities on the margins of social existence become the focus of every kind of

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projection and resentment … Acting as incubators of xenophobia, the appara- tus of security can then provoke the kind of revolt that the intimidated majority has forgotten …” The riots of the banlieus of 2005. 40. Leo Panitch / Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism. The Politi- cal Economy of American Empire, London / New York 2012, p. 8. 41. Social (and work) experience of individuals is increasingly determined by stress; they complain about the nearly total control of the individual at work (and outside) – and they realize that everything is going fast and faster. Com- bined with the uncertainty about future security this leads to many forms of diseases. 42. Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, op. cit. p. 132. 43. Cf. Bastiaan van Appeldoorn, The European capitalist class., op. cit. 44. Cf. Steffen Lehndorff (Hrsg.), Ein Triumph gescheiterter Ideen, Zen Län- der-Fallstudien, Hamburg 2012. rdg), Ein Triumph gescheiterter Ideen. Wa- rumeuropa tief in der Krise yteckt. ZehnH 45. Cf. Lukas Oberndörfer, Die Renaissace des autoritären Liberalismus? In: Prokla, 168 / 2012, pp. 413 – 432. 46. David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford 2005, pp. 7/8) has characterized “Pinochet’s coup on the ‘little September 11th of 1973 as… the first experiment with neoliberal state formation…The coup, against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, was promoted by do- mestic business elites threatened by Allende’s drive towards socialism. It was backed by US corporations, the CIA, and USA secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It violently repressed all the social movements and political organizations of the Left and dismantled all forms of popular organization (such as the community health centres in poorer neighbourhoods). The labour market was ‘freed’ from regulatory or institutional restraints (trade union power, for example) … A group of economists, known as the ‘Chicago boys’ because of their attachment to the neoliberal theories of Milton Friedman…. was summoned to help reconstruct the Chilean economy”. 47. Slavoj Zizek, Das unendliche Urteil“ der Demokratie, in: G. Agamben u.a., Demokratie? Berlin 2012, p. 116. 48. Ian Bremmer, The End of the Free Market. Who wins the War Between States and Corporations? New York 2010, p. 197. 49. Wallerstein quoted in Deppe, Autoritärer Kapitalismus, p. 62. 50. The British journalist Paul Mason (Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere. The New Global Revolutions, London 2013, p. 3) concludes his analysis of these

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different movements all over the world since 2010: “We’re in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with an upswing in technical innovation, a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means”. To me, speak- ing of a “revolution” seems exaggerated, it rather reflects the enthusiasm of a journalist visiting all these events from North Africa to New York and Rio de Janeiro, now probably to Istanbul. However, Joseph Stiglitz, in the introduction of his new book Price of Inequality writes in 2011 that this year might be com- pared to 1848 or 1968! Since 2012, a lot of books written by renowned social scientists on the new movements have appeared: Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope. Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge 2012; Wolfgang Kraushaar, Der Aufruhr der Ausgebildeten. Vom Arabischen Frühling zur Occupy-Bewegung, Hamburg 2012; Dario Azzelini / Marina Sitrin / Eduardo Galeano, They Can’t Represent Us. Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy, London 2014.Hamburg 2012; DAriuo Azzelini / Maria Siktien, Tehy Cant Represent Us, London 2013.

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