Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






THE THEORY OF POLITICAL CONFLICT

Politics, economics, and social classes are crucially linked. For the economic system is organized around property, which defines classes, and property is upheld by the state. Property is not the thing itself that is owned; the thing is owned by someone only because the state establishes their legal right to it and will act to enforce that claim with the power of the police and if need be the army. Marx and Engels in The German Ideology poke fun at bourgeois ideologists who think that property somehow is an inalienable right of the individual, having nothing to do with society. Particular kinds of property emerge only in particular social systems. The man who legally owns a piece of land but who has no capital to cultivate it has nothing, only possession of a fiction. Paper money similarly is worth nothing at all unless one submits oneself to the conditions of the society that make it legal tender.

For this reason, any dominant economic class must be concerned with politics. That does not mean it has to be concerned with the day-to-day running of the state. But it has to make sure that the state continues to protect its property interests, and it wants the intervention of the state's power to help it make even greater fortunes. The feudal aristocracy wanted the state to keep the peasants in line, but it also wanted the state to carry out wars that would give lucrative opportunities for conquest, to award monopolies on the profits of foreign plantations, and to tax goods moving along the roads. The capitalist society is even more entwined with the state because it de-

-70-

pends on a monetary system and on a complex network of stocks, loans, interest payments, taxes, monopolies and regulations, lawyers, courts, and lawsuits.

We may conceive of an inner and an outer form of politics. The outer involves the personalities of politicians, their scandals, their dramatic foreign policy crises, their slogans of nationalism, corruption, reform, liberalism, and conservatism. The dominant economic class does not need to take an active part in this, although there is always an opportunity for the wealthy to go into politics personally. But the inner form of politics, too boring for the newspapers and the public generally, is what makes the class system operate: here there are little-known maneuvers between the treasury and the banks, the funding of public debts, the setting of contract law and innumerable other technical regulations. Here the dominant class has a real interest and, according to the Marxian conception, almost always gets its way.

Politics is a struggle to control the state. In Marx and Engels's conception, the dominant propertied class always wins this struggle, except in the historical situation when the basic form of production is shifting. Then the political control of the old ruling class breaks down and is replaced by a new class. Here we have to distinguish between the way Marx's economic system was supposed to work and the sociology that Marx and Engels attached to it. Marx's economic conception was that the internal contradictions of capitalism would bring about the concentration of capitalist property, the growth of a huge unemployed and underpaid proletariat, and eventually an economic crisis so large that the only way out of it would be the abolition of the system of private property. The economic prediction has not yet come true; for various theoretical reasons, it can be argued that it never will. Modern Marxists have generally gone another route to look for the causes of revolution, one which is not dependent on economic crisis per se. It would probably be true that if the capitalist economy worked the way Marx said it did, then politics would be overwhelmingly dominated by the capitalist class until the point at which an abrupt transition of power took place from them to the political leaders of the proletariat. In actuality politics looks much messier than this.



-71-

Revolutions, when they have occurred, have always had a mixture of different social classes fighting it out in complex coalitions. Marx and Engels themselves, when they analyzed the revolutions of their day, paid a great deal of attention to the struggles between different portions of the capitalist class (or for the Reformation wars analyzed by Engels, struggles between different portions of the aristocracy). In short Engels and Marx's sociology is much more realistic than their economics. If their economics had worked, their sociology would just be one more flywheel on the machine, grinding out political results of economic processes. But if the economics does not work well, that does not mean the political sociology should be abandoned. Far from it: their political sociology provides the opening wedge of a realistic conflict theory that is applicable to all sorts of situations, not just the particular economic scenarios they envisioned. The sociological flywheel comes loose; we can discard the economic machine entirely if we like. We are still left with a series of principles that show who wins what degree of political power, and why. The bourgeoisie need not always win; it becomes possible to explain the conditions under which we get various liberal reforms, representation of working-class interests, as well as class splits. In short we have a powerful tool for understanding all the messy realities of politics.

One crucial principle is that power depends on the material conditions of mobilization. This principle goes back to Engels's formulation of why the German peasants could be dominated by the aristocracy. The peasants far outnumbered their oppressors; during the peasant revolts, they created armies many times larger than those of the nobles sent to fight them. Nevertheless the nobles always won. They did so by splitting the peasants, buying off one local group while attacking another. What the nobles had was superior means of mobilization: they were organized precisely as a group specializing in long-distance movement and intercommunication, with their horses, their alliances, their familiarity with military maneuvers. Just as the peasants could achieve only a mystified consciousness of the world outside their little local worlds, they had no material means for organizing themselves in political combat. Marx stated the point even more forcefully in re-

-72-

gard to the French peasants of his own century: they were split, he declared, "like potatoes in a sack," merely lumped together externally but never achieving any unity. Their material conditions separated them and kept them from achieving any power.

The property-owning class dominates politically because it has more of the means of political mobilization. Capitalism itself is an interconnected system. Business people are actively engaged in trading among themselves, watching competitors, taking loans, forming cartels. The financial network and the market itself are means of communication that bring the capitalist class into a close network. For this reason the business class, especially in its upper financial circles, is already extremely well organized. The business class has a network at its disposal that it can easily use to enter politics when it wants something done. The working classes, on the other hand, have no such natural means of organization. For them to take part in politics, they have to make special efforts to create political organizations and painstakingly try to connect workers from different places together into a common force. Thus, although the workers far outnumber the business elite, the superior means of political mobilization of the latter tends to put the balance of political power in their hands. This together with the upper-class control of the means of mental production -- in modern society the ownership of newspapers, television stations, and the like -- means that a fairly small business minority can usually define political issues from their own slant and gain political power far out of proportion to their numbers.

For this reason, the capitalist class has historically preferred some form of republican government. A democracy of voters turns out to be favorable to business interests because the business class is most strongly mobilized to win the struggle for power. One might say that the same material conditions that constitute the business system itself are readily turned to dominating the market for votes. Barrington Moore, Jr., a few years ago used this principle to help explain why and where democracy was created rather than socialist or fascist governments; we will take up this and other ramifications of Marx and Engels's political sociology below.

-73-

There is one other important reason why capitalists find it relatively easy to dominate the politics of a democracy, at least in the matters of greatest concern to themselves. This is the importance of finances in any government, especially the national debt. Marx pointed out that the revolutionary government of France in 1848 did not dare put into effect any radical economic policies because its own solvency depended on the strength of the French currency. The banks held the government hostage because any policy that disturbed business confidence automatically brought unemployment, fewer government taxes, and generally exacerbated the problems of the government in paying its bills. A government could of course take over the banks and command what it wants by force, but only at the cost of having the entire business system collapse. The government in relation to a capitalist economy is like the owner of a goose that lays golden eggs only as long as it is treated well. Because a government cannot survive unless it can feed its own army and its civil servants, not to mention keeping the confidence of the general population, it needs to maintain economic prosperity. Any shifts to the left tend to be automatically self-negating because they cause a reaction in the business community that creates an economic crisis. We have seen the same mechanism operating many times in the twentieth century: socialist and liberal governments in Europe in the 1920s, or in Latin America throughout this century, have fallen because of the rampant inflation that followed their taking office. In effect this means that any half-way socialist reform is not likely to work. Only an extremely strong revolutionary government can overcome the loss of business confidence and the resulting period of economic crisis by taking all business and financial affairs into its hands immediately and imposing a completely regulated economy.

The scheme also explains the conditions under which the power of the working class can grow. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels pointed out that capitalism itself was overcoming the isolation and fragmentation that characterized the older lower classes. Where the peasants were isolated on their little farms, the very process of business concentration that took place in capitalism was bringing the workers together. As small businesses were bought out, increasingly

-74-

larger numbers of workers came into huge factories where they became easier to organize. Not only trade unions but workingclass political parties were forming; eventually, with the projection of the business trend toward one huge monopoly, the workers would be brought into a corresponding unity that would finally realize their strength of numbers and overwhelm the capitalists.

This is not quite what happened, but Marx and Engels were partially right on the historical trend and even more so on the right track theoretically. Historically, working-class parties were created as capitalism became more concentrated, although this did not go as far as Marx and Engels expected because the means of political mobilization also shifted and the process of monopolization stabilized at an intermediate point. Within the big capitalist corporations that emerged, the organizational structure itself mobilized different groups of employees into different layers. Below the top management, a middle layer of office workers came to acquire their own consciousness based on their peculiar conditions of work; hence, they became an intermediate political force of their own. Outside these giant corporations and interconnected with them there grew up networks of specialists and professionals: small innovative firms, engineers and architects, lawyers, media people, investment consultants, academics, intellectuals. These various professions have often in their own way been even more mobilized and more interconnected into networks than even the business class. The means of political mobilization remain all-important; what has happened empirically, though, is that these means have mobilized a large number of different, self-interested occupational groups. Modern politics instead of simplifying into the showdown of capitalists and workers has, instead, fragmented into the complex maneuvers of many separately mobilized interest groups. Politics has thus turned into the negotiation of complicated coalitions.

In fact it has probably always been so. Engels and Marx wrote brilliantly on coalitions in their analysis of revolutions in their own time. Their theory of politics still applies, as I indicated, even to new circumstances. It shows us not who the actors are going to be at any given time, but, instead, what

-75-

political weapons they can use and what outcomes will result once we know the lineup of players. Modern theories of social movements, especially the resource-mobilization theory of Charles Tilly and Anthony Oberschall, carry forward this line of analysis.


Date: 2015-04-20; view: 990


<== previous page | next page ==>
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY | THE THEORY OF REVOLUTIONS
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.006 sec.)