Failure of Liberal Capitalist Democracy
* Book: Krishnan Nayar. Liberal Capitalist Democracy: The God that Failed. Hurst, 2023
URL = https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/liberal-capitalist-democracy/
Description
From the publisher:
"A spectre is haunting Europe and America: the spectre of anti-democratic, right-wing nationalism. This has finally exposed as ill-based the astonishingly widely shared belief that unleashing capitalism will, sooner or later, lead societies to democratic politics. It’s nothing more than the big liberal myth.
Krishnan Nayar explores the history of six major pioneers of modernity—Britain, America, France, Germany, Russia and Japan— from the seventeenth century’s Cromwellian revolution to Donald Trump’s election, via the Age of Darwinian Capitalism: the pre–Second World War, pre-consumerist, pre–welfare state capitalism of severe economic instability and a penurious working class. Nayar shows that, in this period, capitalist industrialisation was far more likely to lead to modernised right-wing autocracy than democracy, which got a chance thanks simply to fortunate circumstances in a few countries.
Capitalism only underpinned democracy in the post-war period due to transient factors: the existence and character of the post-1945 Western welfare systems owed far more than is admitted by most historians to the challenge posed by the Russian and Chinese revolutions. The return of large-scale, extremist right-wing politics should not, therefore, come as a surprise. As autocratic China grows in strength, and Russia returns to expansionism, can democracy be rescued from a capitalism of dire instability and inequality?"
Review
Branko Milanovic:
"Krishnan Nayar makes three key points in his recently published Liberal Capitalist Democracy: The God that Failed. First, he argues that bourgeois revolutions frequently failed to lead to democracy, a view strongly embedded in the Anglo-American Whiggish history and in simplified Marxism. Rather they provoked aristocratic reaction and the authoritarian economic developments which in many respects were more successful than those of bourgeois democracy. In other words, democracy does not come with capitalism and, as we shall see, capitalism often destroys it. The authoritarian modernizers (Nayar studies four: post-1848 Germany, Louis Napoleon’s France, Bismarck’s Germany, and Stolypin’s Russia) enjoyed wide support among the bourgeoisie who, fearful for its property, preferred to take the side of the reforming aristocracy than to throw in its lot with the proletariat. This indeed was one of the disappointments that surprised Marx and Engels in 1848-51, when they noticed that the propertied classes sided with Louis Bonaparte rather than with the Parisian workers.
Second, Nayar argues that the unbridled Darwinian capitalism always leads to social instability and anomie, and that social instability empowers right-wing parties. He thus argues that Hitler's rise to power was made possible, or was even caused, by the 1928-32 Depression, and not as some historians think by either the fear of communism or bad tactics of the Communist Party which instead of allying itself with Social Democrats fought them.
Third, and for the present time perhaps the most interesting, Nayar argues that the success of Western capitalism in the period 1945-1980 cannot be explained without taking into account the pressure that came on capitalism both from the existence of the Soviet Union as an alternative model of society, and from strong left-wing parties linked with trade unions in major European countries."