Affiliation: Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

Marek Hrubec (M. HRUBEC)

Affiliation: Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

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Centre of Global Studies

Institute of Philosophy

Czech Academy of Sciences

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Book review

Harris, Jerry. 2016. Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy. Clarity Press.

Marek Hrubec

Marek Hrubec is Director of the Centre of Global Studies and also of the Department of Moral and Political Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences. He teaches at Charles University in Prague. In 2014 and 2015, he was Head of East Africa Star University. He has published on social and political justice, global conflicts, intercultural dialogue, development and the global poor. His main book is From Misrecognition to Justice: A Critical Theory of Global Society and Politics (in Czech, 2011). The last book (with N. de Oliveira, E. Sobottka, and G. Saavedra) is Justice and Recognition (2015). He lectured in many countries including the European Union, the United States, China, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Iran, India, Vietnam, New Zealand, etc.

Abstract:

A review deals with Jerry Harris’s new book on the crisis of democracy in the contemporary system of global capitalism. The book’s central idea is an analysis of the three elements in various types of regimes: the state, market, and civil society. Harris demonstrates that different types of economic and political regimes in both the past and the present have maintained a reductionist focus on just one of these elements. Harris looks for a solution that would balance the three elements. He attempts to synthesise them in order to establish a realistically feasible model of democratic market socialism.

Keywords: global capitalism, democracy, socialism

The book focuses on democracy’s backsliding tendencies in the current system of global capitalism. It insightfully demonstrates that major global changes were spawned by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the advent of new information technologies. The new technologies and political trends have paved the way for the establishment of a new system of global production, transportation, trade, communication, financial speculation and manipulative repressive practices that erode the avenues open to ordinary citizens. Subsequent redefinition of capitalism in a transnational and global framework installed a new era and new schisms that we are still coming to terms with.

This publication soundly illustrates that Jerry Harris, National Secretary of the Global Studies Association of North America, is one of the leading authors of a critical analysis of global capitalism. At the same time, focusing on the crisis of democracy, the book heralds a potential solution to this crisis.

From the perspective of the author, the book extends his previous work The Dialectics of Globalization: Economic and Political Struggle in a Transnational Era (2008), presenting a comprehensive analysis of the global system and transnational capitalist class.

When it comes to collective research, the book makes an important contribution to the “critical school of global capitalism”, i.e. a transnational group of researchers who specialise in this topic and have been brought together in the Network for Critical Study of Global Capitalism. This is no coincidental contribution because Harris is a member of the Network’s International Executive Board. He shares with William Robinson, Leslie Sklair, Georgina Murray, David Peetz and several others, as key analysts of the topic, the analytical baselines of the school, at the same time he pursues his own original path, with an emphasis on the democratic deficit and on identifying specific ways out of the crisis through the potential revitalisation of democracy.

The book is worth a thorough read. It can be split into three parts, though the author does not explicitly do so. The first part could be said to comprise the initial three chapters. While the first two chapters present an analysis of the current decline of democracy and the class contradictions of market fundamentalism in the system of global capitalism, the third chapter outlines a potential compromise in the form of the Green New Deal. The second part is made up by the fourth and fifth chapters, which widen the discussion further beyond the USA and illustrate the various contradictions within a broader framework. There are case studies dwelling on the military and political conflict in Ukraine, and on China’s specific situation in terms of the domestic and transnational landscapes. The third, final part of the book is its sixth and seventh chapters. They start by examining failed alternatives of state socialism in the Soviet Bloc and futile, muted anarchistic attempts to change the system’s sub-components. The book as a whole is aimed at real and theoretical alternatives.

The book’s central idea is an analysis of the three elements: the state, market, and civil society. Harris demonstrates that different types of economic and political systems in both the past and the present have maintained a reductionist focus on just one of these elements. First, the Soviet Union tried to create a socialist society rooted in state power, which became more and more bureaucratic. State power consequently hypertrophied, eclipsing the market and civil society. Secondly, anarchistic attempts at a non-hierarchical society relied on a set of relationships within civil society, with the market and the state pushed into the background or eliminated completely. The absence of larger-scale state-backed organisation ultimately means anarchistic attempts will founder in a complex society. Thirdly, capitalism relies on the market and private ownership but underestimates the role of civil society and the state. This fetishizes the market and the private sector, engendering social and political conflicts.

Harris looks for a solution that would balance the three elements. He attempts to synthesise them in order to establish a realistically feasible democratic society. His approach here, however, is not limited to a description and critique of historical experiments to establish state socialism and anarchism. He does fulminate against improprieties which led to the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet bloc, to be sure, but is also able to identify some of the positive elements that can be found within the system in order to use them in the future. He levels similar criticisms at chaotic anarchistic attempts to establish a new model but is also mindful of the potential positives that could develop if a non-hierarchical method of societal organisation is employed. Theoretically, from a critical viewpoint, he is dealing primarily with Michael Albert’s concept of Parecon here.

Those interested in Harris’s outline of “post-liberal democracy” will find it in the last chapter “Democracy beyond capitalism”. Democracy here becomes his main point of convergence, which needs to be developed and, through participation, deepened. Otherwise, existing democratic trends would sink into an oligarchic system in which they would become innocuous components.

According to Harris, the new kind of democracy should be sought in elements that have proved successful in history, and also in the theoretical models that build on such historical inspiration. He finds inspiration particularly in the concept of the protagonistic democracy linked to political sociologist Marta Harnecker, though he also draws attention to her limits, specifically to their playing-down of organised political expressions. Nevertheless, his bigger inspiration is David Schweickart, who formulated a model of the democratic market socialism, even though he can see also some restrictions similar to those formulated by Harnecker, albeit to a lesser extent. In Schweickart’s economic democracy, he identifies a parallel with the potential offered by practical experiments, such as Mondragon. Other practical examples discussed by Harris are cooperatives in Italy and Venezuela, the experience of horizontal democracy in Argentina, and recent experiments in Bolivia and Greece. In all these examples, there are at least seeds of how a balance can be achieved between the three constitutive elements (the state, the market, and civil society) and how the model of democratic market socialism can be targeted.

As the first six chapters of the book are almost entirely descriptively explanatory and critical, the final normative chapter is an invitation to analyse a possible future democratic model. Naturally, this prescriptive model cannot be developed in detail over the space of the single chapter because it is a very complex theme which would require a separate book. Therefore, the normative model awaits a bigger elaboration in future texts by Harris and his followers, including analyses of a variety of alternative models with the complicated terrain of numerous theoretical discussions. If such a model is to be meaningful, it will, of course, be necessary to stick to the principle of all critical approaches which are steeped in the reflection of historical developments (as pointed out well by Harris) in practical efforts at justice, rather than in the mere speculation typical of non-critical approaches.

An indispensable task in the elaboration of the normative model of a participatory democratic society will be its development on a transnational and global level. The model will have to respect various concepts of economics and politics of different cultural and civilisational groups. This raises the question of what avenues could be followed in Europe, the USA, China and other places of the world where people attempt various economic, political and culturally specific alternatives. Needless to say, the model is supposed to have a common, universal base of democratic socialism but the variants are not merely a negligible aspect. It is important to recognize the pluralism of these models.

In his book, Harris has admirably dwelt, for example, on an empirical description and explanation of the current state of the Chinese economy in his analysis of the global system. This raises the question of how such analyses would be combined with the normative model of democracy in China in the future. The Chinese model is influenced by Marxism, Confucianism and other factors. The Chinese government itself and many academics refer to Marxism and Confucianism when formulating their own future model. A discussion on some of these issues can also be found in some texts already published in International Critical Thought, and it will be important to continue these analyses.

These are all questions elicited by Harris’s inspiring book. Its main message is that it is necessary to ride out the current parlous state of the global capitalism and that the democratic socialism is possible and necessary to develop in the transnational and global era. The book is one of the main contributions to today’s examination of this topic, and it merits in-depth studying.

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