Democracy and Capitalism – Part 1

                One of the tensions between where we find ourselves and a more essential and radical phase of democracy is its relationship to capitalism.  Capitalism has become the uncontested economic descriptor of our age.  Nothing really even opposes it any-more.  We are, we’ve been told, ‘at the end of history’ as it relates to the evolution of competing forms of economic and social organization.  While there are many phases and types of capitalism, they all share one founding epiphany, the elimination of the cosmos and the deracination of experience.  This is the dominate theme of Peter Sloterdijk’s book, In the World Interior to Capital.  While there are many layers of his critique that are too complicated to reproduce here, the central insight is the way that the invention of latitude and longitude paved the way for Portuguese navigators to reduce the world to a set of coordinates instead of a specific and sacred place.  The age of navigation and exploration destroyed any connection to place and value that wasn’t easily reduced to capital. 

                It took awhile for the older cosmological forms of order and meaning to dissipate, but we find ourselves at the point in this transition where even the sustainable future of the biosphere is being overrun by the intense lack of value other than money that capitalism feeds on.  There is no viable argument for continuing to destroy the environment, and civilization, in search of the last petro-dollar, but we appear to ready to do it anyway.  Sloterdijk’s critique makes it clear that any other value system or form of meaning that opposes the raw value of capital must be defeated.  Our relationship to the world becomes existentially transactional.  I think it’s important to see this as the essence of capitalism.  This isn’t just an argument about what kind of energy or distribution system our economy will be based on, it is the realization that capitalism is incapable of leaving any extractable value on the table.  The reality at the heart of capitalism is that it is driven to destroy any connection other than money.

                The issue is no longer how labor is rewarded or organized, because eventually capitalism consumes and destroys the concept of labor.  Eventually, capitalism devolves into the consumption of money by money.  It no longer is connected to anything but its own internal dynamic and cannot be regulated or modified by any other locus of meaning.  It consumes the cosmos and renders all the connections and values within it moot.   We have tended to treat capitalism as an economic practice that is compatible with and controlled by politics.  Increasingly it is clear that politics is being controlled by capitalism in its most raw and base forms.  Capitalism is incompatible with politics once it begins the reduction of the political to the economic.

                Radical democracy cannot be content to reform or redirect capitalism.  If we are going to be democratic, we have to find a way to build a cosmological defense against capitalism.  That is, money cannot be the reason we do what we do.  This is not merely a question of moving to socialism or some other more collectivist form of capitalism that temporarily diverts the ultimate goals of capitalism.  We’ve tried that, back when we were still part of ‘history.’  It is impossible to overstate the threat of capitalism to the planet.  We talk about alternative energy and sustainable growth, but none of that is compatible with capitalism and none of it will survive the brutal transactional force of capital.  The only way to defeat capitalism is by creating a cosmology of value beyond money.  There are lots of potential pitfalls in that idea.  Cosmologies carry their own dangers, just follow the trajectory of any organized religion. 

                The challenge of radical democracy is to create a cosmological connection to the earth and to one another that can remain open and avoid orthodoxy and tests of purity.  There are lots of possible and even plausible narratives about why democracy has failed, but they should include the corrosive effects of capitalism and its destructive and inhumane ideas of wealth and progress.  Radical democracy is not more of the same with better group dynamics and smarter leaders.  Radical democracy must challenge the Eurocentric narrative of capitalism and wealth if it is going to have a chance.