The In and the Out of 21st Century Global Capitalism 1. Polanyi was correct in so far as he put forward a theory of the breakdown of liberal capitalism in the early 20th century. a. He correctly located the source of the drive towards socialism or fascism (protecting society against the market or protecting the market against society, respectively) in the international economic connections that effected people’s daily lives while leaving the state incapable of responding to their demands. b. Also, E.M. Wood, J. Rosenberg… 2. The place-boundedness of particular industries, small businesses and the petty bourgeoisie, aligns them politically with the forces of authoritarian capitalism (fascism, if you must, or more recently rightwing ‘populism’) a. This politics is one of exclusion and limiting of capitalist ‘democracy’, it seeks to dictate who is in and who is out regarding state sanctioned liberal rights. b. It is the attempt to save the economy by ditching ‘democracy’ a la Polanyi. c. This is the product of the contradiction between liberal rights to property and liberal formal rights to liberty and freedom discussed in 4. 3. As Schmitt and others have shown, liberalisms attempt at pluralism is a loophole through which illiberal ideas are smuggled in, undermining the liberal project by exposing its inability to respect rights and have a pluralist society. 4. Combining this insight about the potential shortcomings of liberal pluralism with the insights of Marx on property rights, and particularly productive property or the MOP, leads to a wellrounded and integrating theory of the liberal basis of authoritarian capitalism (or fascism). a. The liberal absolute right to private property, especially productive property, can never be rectified with the attempt to have a pluralist society, consisting of individuals having equal rights and opportunities. i. The structural advantage this gives to those owners of productive property undermines the positive liberty of those who do not own such property, thus eroding their rights and oppressing them. 5. China’s success, now and going forward, is partially in its ‘front loading’ of authoritarianism, thus leaping over the stage of ‘democratic’ capitalism that leads to a breakdown into authoritarian capitalism (a curtailing of liberal ‘democratic’ rights) when the economy is internationalized, as we are witnessing in the West. 6. The current retrenchment of liberal rights, occurring in large part through exclusionary politics, corresponds with the break in representative ‘democracies’ responsiveness to the polity caused by the contradiction between the interests of globally mobile capital and citizen workers. a. The state becomes more authoritarian as the breadth of demands of the citizens are eclipsed by those of the globally mobile bourgeoisie. b. The inability of the state to respond to the needs of the polity grows as global economic forces further force the hand of the state, which must resort to increasingly militarized forms of oppression while it slowly expands the sphere of the excluded.
