Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World
We have now reached the end of our examination of the past and present literature on political development, and we have been left with something of a puzzle. It emerges that the 'doctrine for political development' has triumphed, in the literature and in practical politics, just when the search for a theory of political development with which the literature began has been abandoned. A new orthodoxy has been born, strongly supported by independent foundations and research councils in the United States, and founding texts and supporting journals are busy setting out its principal terms. Its leading exponents have suddenly become militant advocates of the need to have no theory at all. At the same time, they have become touchingly coy about the links between the type of democracy they favour and the structural needs of capitalism, despite their eagerness to join the chorus which proclaimed capital's universal triumph.
This final chapter evaluates the past and present of the political development literature in the light of some simple propositions drawn from Marxist theory. I suggest why it was that three successive attempts to theorize political development – the functional, cultural and comparative historical approaches – failed to do so, and offer an explanation for two particular features of the contemporary literature – its defiant claim to have abandoned its earlier interest in theory, and its equally adamant assertion that its consuming interest in political democracy does not require it to concern itself with capitalism, or even acknowledge its existence. I argue that these two features are intimately linked, and that they are jointly the precondition for the literature to operate as bourgeois ideology rather than as a source of understanding of the real dynamics of change in the modern world, and the real limitations of liberal democracy. Finally I offer an explanation for the triumph of the doctrine for political development in the 1990s.
I make three arguments: first, that the literature is primarily ideological in character, and that it misunderstands and mystifies the relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism by persistently taking as natural or universal characteristics which are the social and historical products or requirements of capitalism; second, that a holistic Marxist analysis explains the successive failures to arrive at a satisfactory theory of political development and identifies the logic of the arguments concerned better than the literature is able to do itself; and third, that the explanation for the simultaneous abandonment of theory and the survival and triumph of a pragmatic 'doctrine for political development' lies in the contrasting politically economy of the 1960s and the 1990s respectively. In making these arguments, I also show that the literature has persistently defied its own methodological principles in order to preach one set of rules for 'the West' and another for 'the rest'. In this respect, I suggest, it has used the dubious claim that the politics of 'non-Western states' are fundamentally different to those of the West as a device to justify differential treatment.
Marxism and Bourgeois Theory
In the opening pages of the Grundrisse, in which Marx sets out to sketch the foundations of his critique of political economy, he condemns 'modern economists' for presenting accounts of contemporary social relations in terms of elements and relationships held to be common to all societies. For Marx, this act of abstracting away from specific historical situations in order to arrive at general models valid for all times and places makes it impossible to understand the internal logic and dynamics of any given society. It leaves out of account the specific features which shape the society in question, and in doing so it inevitably renders obscure the relations and connections which give it its particular character. Within this broad perspective, Marx himself argued that it was the capitalist system of production and exchange which gave the present epoch its character and shaped its social and political institutions, and he therefore took this as his central object of study.
On one level, the practice of undue abstraction is a failing resulting from an inadequate understanding or an inappropriate method of analysis. At the same time, however, it has an effect of great social significance: it presents as natural and eternal phenomena which are social and historical, and thereby helps to conceal the fact that they are the products of human agency. Because the processes which underpin capitalism do not always manifest themselves in surface appearances, this is particularly the case with modern bourgeois production and society. Marx argues, in relation to the tendency to 'forget' the specific features which determine the development of particular societies in particular historical epochs, that 'the whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and the harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting' (Marx 1973: 85; emphasis mine). Seen in this way, such acts of forgetting are part of the broader phenomenon which Marx terms 'fetishism' – the tendency to perceive the historical products of human ingenuity and sociality as natural, eternal and alien forms. Such acts of forgetting literally 'dis-member' historical societies and social relations. The task of critical social science is to 're-member' them, calling these connections to mind, and thereby putting the societies and social phenomena in question together again.
Marx also suggested that a conscious motive might at times lie behind the presentation of social and historical phenomena as natural and eternal. Thus, he argued,
the aim is ... to present production ... as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding (87).
Whether abstraction resulted from 'forgetting' or from the surreptitious introduction of bourgeois relations in the guise of natural laws, the consequence was a dissolution of internal logic which brought 'things which are organically related into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection' (88).
These brief considerations give only a general impression of Marx's approach as they leave out of account entirely the particular processes and mechanisms which he identified as central to the capitalist system of production and exchange. However, they suggest two basic propositions, which might be seen as defining the stance taken by Marxist theory. First, all bourgeois 'social science' is essentially ideology or mystification, aimed at reinforcing the hold of capital over labour, and furthering or preserving the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Second, an understanding of social phenomenon can only be achieved by an approach which probes beneath surface appearances to grasp the logic of the whole, and the connections between its various parts.
These brief reflections provide a starting point for a critique of political development theory, which can be seen, throughout its long trajectory, as laboriously proving the truth of Marx's assertions. It began as the exact antithesis of Marx's attempt to locate the dynamics of the modern epoch in a holistic analysis of capitalism as a complex system of organically related parts, as in its first functionalist phase it was a method of ahistorical abstraction committed to law-like generalization. In fact, its leading practitioners claimed to be scientific precisely because they looked beyond the complexity of particular historical circumstances to capture the universal constants in whose terms political development could be understood. Although, as we shall see, they actually took the emergence of modern liberal democracy in capitalist societies as their point of departure, they made a point of not seeking to investigate any political characteristics or mechanisms specific to capitalism itself.
Over the years, the initial project of a scientific understanding of political development as a universal process gradually faded. After a brief attempt to account for local specificity through attention to the 'political culture' of particular societies, it gave way to an approach founded upon a form of comparative historical analysis. In essence, this was an attempt to understand the syndrome of developmental change specific to modernity, and as such it marked a significant break with the ahistorical universalism of the functional approach. When this effort too was declared to have failed, the theory-building impetus behind the approach lost all its momentum, and gave way to a declared hostility to grand theory.
In the meantime, however, the effort within political development theory to identify the policies which would bring about appropriate change, present from the beginning alongside the quest for theory, had taken its own direction. At a point when the functional and cultural approaches were at an early stage of development, and well before any concerted effort was made to systematize the comparative historical approach, Pye and other others set out the 'doctrine for political development', which embodied the assumptions of the elitist revisionist theory of democracy, but sought to define the policies required to bring about a desired form of political development without further bothering with questions of theory. As the synthetic summaries offered by Huntington in the 1960s and again in the 1990s suggested, there was a line of direct continuity between the breach effected between theory and policy in the formulation of the 'doctrine for political development' and the later separation of concern with the preconditions for democracy from the processes by which it could be brought into being and sustained. Thus the 'doctrine for political development' resurfaced in the 1990s as a pragmatic effort to codify the 'rules' of successful elite-controlled democratization.
Even in this less ambitious guise, political development theory still exhibits precisely the traits identified by Marx, albeit in a different and perhaps more knowing form. Early ambitions regarding scientific analysis and the discovery of universal laws have been replaced by a more mundane but similarly generalizing and universalizing advocacy of both capitalism and liberal democratic political institutions. In the process, the advocates of capitalism and democracy seem to have progressed from being victims of the illusion that there can be a universal, ahistorical science of political development to being declared apologists for the political institutions of the advanced capitalist societies and their reproduction on a global scale.
Despite the apparently diametrical opposition between the functionalism of the 1960s and the anti-theoretical evangelism of the 1990s, it required only a tactical shift to turn from deriving universal 'functions' from the real historical institutions of advanced capitalist liberal democracies to claiming that those particular institutions were universally appropriate. Today's theorists of political development rarely dwell directly on the relationship between liberal democratic politics and capitalism, but they scrupulously reflect and seek to enforce capitalism's supposed requirements under the guise of the normative general model they advocate. In so doing, they faithfully emulate those 'modern economists' of the nineteenth century, and 'modern political scientists' of the 1960s, who presented the social relations and institutions of their day as reflecting universally applicable principles, valid for all time.
Despite themselves, however, the theorists of political development have been drawn ever closer to an explicit admission that the object of their enquiry is the relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy in the modern world. The doctrine for political development today exactly reflects the logic of the reproduction of capitalist regimes – current debates, in fact, revolve around the question of whether they have yet got the role played by the state in the reproduction of capitalism absolutely right. Yet it is introduced with the emphatic statement that there is no theory underpinning it at all. This curious fact is revealing in itself. The problem at the heart of political development theory was once that its analyses led it to the conclusion that the practices and institutions to which it was committed were unrealizable. That is no longer the case. The problem which gives it its current form is that it cannot openly proclaim the logic which underpins it in the hour of its apparent triumph. It is forced, therefore, to celebrate what it dare not explain. As a result, it is vulnerable to the demonstration that it is the logic of capitalist reproduction in the circumstances of the day that underpins its new devotion to liberal democracy – in other words, that despite protestations to the contrary, there is a theory of political development after all.
In the light at these considerations, political development theory is interpreted in this final chapter as an evasion, a refusal to openly explain the dynamics of politics in the modern world in the light of the dynamics of capitalist development. I suggest, at the same time, that this evasion is increasingly difficult to sustain, and is particularly apparent in the tensions and contradictions of the current literature on democratization. Finally, I offer a way of looking at the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the 'developing world' which restores the possibility of grasping its logic at the present time, and I assess its implications.
In doing so, I rely upon a number of simple propositions about capitalism. Contrary to the frequent assertions of the theorists of political development (Binder 1986; Almond 1988), Marxist analysis does not suggest that the bourgeoisie will control the state and rule in capitalist society. On the contrary, its perspective, rightly or wrongly, is that capitalism will be driven by eventually irresistible economic crisis and class conflict, and give way to socialism. However, it does identify the conditions which must be met if capitalism is to be reproduced over time. First, capital accumulation depends upon the right to own and dispose of private property, the ascendancy of capital of labour, and a process of continual reinvestment in order to maintain individual and national competitiveness. The right of capitalists to invest comes before the right of workers to consume. Second, in political terms this requires the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony – or the 'legitimacy' of capitalism in the eyes of the majority. In a liberal democracy this has the precise meaning that the 'choice' which is offered to electors must be restricted to options which will enable the continuation of capitalism. Third, it requires a state which is committed to capitalism, but which enjoys a degree of autonomy not only from the propertyless majority of the population but also from capitalists themselves, in order to allow it to act in the long-term interests of capital in general rather than as the agent of a particular sector of capital. Despite the claims of some current accounts (Przeworski et al. 1995), it does not require continual improvements in the material well-being of the majority, or even the persuasive promise of eventual gains in this area. It only requires, to quote a phrase that has become the slogan of an era, that it should appear that 'there is no alternative'. There is no better way to secure this appearance, of course, than to treat the hear and now as natural and eternal. With these simple propositions in mind, I turn to the botched history of political development theory.
The Arts of Forgetting
The functional, cultural and comparative historical approaches each demonstrated in different ways the art of 'forgetting' the connections between the political institutions of the modern age and the structural imperatives of capitalist reproduction. The functional approach derived its 'functions' directly from modern political structures, but claimed that they reflected universal and ahistorical elements of all political systems; the cultural approach located fundamental structural features of contemporary politics in the orientations of individuals rather than in broader social processes; and the comparative historical approach identified a number of imperatives central to government in a capitalist society, but failed to spot the logic connecting them. As a result, these approaches touched upon but failed to comprehend the significance of the key elements of the politics of capital history reproduction: bourgeois hegemony, the 'relative autonomy' of the state, and the need to secure not only the accumulation of capital, but also its legitimation in the eyes of the majority.
Almond and Powell's functional approach identified six conversion processes in all political systems: rule-making, application and adjudication, interest articulation and aggregation, and communication. The first three reflected the division between legislature, executive and judiciary, while the last three corresponded to political parties, pressure groups and the media. Almond and Powell noted that
[Our] approach ... grows directly out of separation-of-powers theory and the stream of empirical research critical of that theory; from this base it treats the functions of the political institutions which emerged after the broadening of the suffrage and industrialization – political parties, pressure groups, and the mass media (Almond and Powell 1966: 12, ft. 10).
On their own account, their starting point combined an institutional analysis which drew largely on the experience of the United States with a focus on social and political aspects of nineteenth century capitalist development. But they deliberately abstracted away from the specific combined historical process of 'the broadening of the suffrage and industrialization', breaking the varying organic links between them from case to case to recombine them in an abstract framework at a later stage. Significantly, they did not see themselves as deriving a general model of the political process from these specific historical processes for purely analytical purposes. Rather, they claimed to identify universal functions which had always been present below the surface in all political systems:
The tripartite approach ... seemed to be an adequate theory for purposes of political analysis and institution building at a time when the politically active class was limited and socially homogeneous. However, much has happened since the eighteenth century. The development of universal suffrage, the emergence of mass political parties intended to mobilise the electorate, the rise of organized interest groups intended to express the interests of the component parts of a complex society and influence the course of political decision, and the development of the media of mass communication, have sensitized us to political functions which were not fully appreciated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (11, my emphasis).
This approach involved a sleight of hand in which the institutions of modern capitalist society were first invoked, then made to vanish, leaving behind an ahistorical framework which retained their imprint, but claimed to capture all that there was to be captured within all political systems. Once this was done, its authors were able to deal with the familiar elements of their own political landscape as if they reflected timeless requirements of the political process, but they were unable to think that capitalism might have generated new political imperatives specific to itself.
The consequences were seen clearly in the argument that the state required to be insulated from society – a proposition which has specific meaning, as we saw above, in the context of capitalism. It was central to the theory of political development from the earliest descriptions of the non-Western political process, and it stood at the heart of the functional approach. However, as a result of the process of abstraction central to functionalism it was not only split off from the specific context of capitalist society from which it was derived, but also rendered incoherent by the decision to speak of the 'political system' rather than the state. This was more than a change of vocabulary. Six conversion processes, three proper to the 'state', and three to 'society', were grouped together without distinction, thereby obliterating any distinction between 'state' and 'society'. At the same time, the separation of 'politics' and 'economics' which is fundamental to the capitalist system (so that political choices may not affect the fundamentals of the economic system) was presented as a question of a difference in the roles played by individuals from one context to another. As a result, the dynamics of capitalist reproduction were obscured, and the principle of the relative autonomy of the state appeared in the abstract form of the need to maintain the boundaries of the political system.
In contrast, the political culture approach took variations in the attitudes and behaviour of individuals as its point of departure. As a result, Pye's study of Burma and Almond and Verba's comparative study of five nations both abstracted away entirely from structural features of the societies in question. Pye, as we saw, made a point of insisting that the sources of underdevelopment must be psychological as no conceivable causes could be found in comparative political economy. He thereby disposed in a sentence of any need to consider what the implications might be of the place Burma occupied in the global economy, and the domestic consequences. In The Civic Society, the focus on individuals led to the identification of an apparently paradoxical need for citizens to refrain from exercising their perceived ability to participate, and to the bizarre but nevertheless logical conclusion that stable and effective democracy required 'inconsistencies in the attitudes of an individual' (Almond and Verba 1963: 479). In fact, the data revealed a pattern of differential participation by class which Almond and Verba barely explored, and entirely failed to mention in their conclusions. Had they cared to look for it, they had clear evidence of systematic variations in 'subjective political competence' across classes. For example, they had figures for each nation comparing responses for four 'classes' of worker (unskilled, skilled, white-collar, and professional and managerial) on the question of whether the 'ordinary man' (sic) should be active in his local community (176, table 4). They did not calculate the differentials across these classes for the sample as a whole. Had they done so, they would have found that 23 per cent of unskilled workers agreed with the proposition, compared to 32 per cent of skilled workers, 39 per cent of white-collar workers, and 45 per cent of managers and professionals. Similarly (in another calculation for which they had the data, but which they did not make), 55 per cent of unskilled workers thought they could do something about an unjust local law, compared to 66 per cent of skilled workers, 72 per cent of white-collar workers, and 86 per cent of managers and professionals (calculated from data in 210, figure 3). Other data suggested the strong differential effects on political competence across classes of the process of socialization in family, school and work. In a number of cases, schooling was reported to repress the political capacity of the poor while nurturing that of the rich, while for the sample overall 78 per cent of white-collar workers reported that they were consulted at work, compared to 57 per cent of unskilled workers (my calculation from 364, table 24).
It is commonplace these days, of course, to assert that such differences by social class exist in measures of subjective political competence. My concern here is with the implications of the fact that Almond and Verba showed so little curiosity about the issue. Because they treated underlying cultural dispositions as sources of explanation, they were diverted away from the search for such structural variables, and paid little attention to the evidence which they had themselves unearthed. As a result, they mistook a necessary structural feature of liberal democracy in a capitalist society for a mysterious and highly convenient inconsistency in the psychological make-up of the individual. This had the effect of making what was in fact a contradiction specific to capitalist society appear to be a generic problem of democracy. In other words, instead of demystifying what they described as the 'myth of democracy', they compounded it.
In The Civic Culture then, Almond and Verba took as their starting point, without explanation or justification, an elitist model of politics in which it was assumed that political stability required a delicate balance between elite authority and responsiveness to non-elite influence which could only operate if non-elites assented to a norm of participation but refrained from participating in practice. The 'civic culture' was seen is the necessary counterpart to this balance between elite authority and responsiveness. As Lijphart and others pointed out, the argument was defective as an attempt to define the necessary character of democracy. However, if applied to the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in a capitalist society, it precisely captured the logic of bourgeois hegemony. Almond and Verba surreptitiously defined one of the central requirements for stable liberal democracy in a capitalist society, but did so without reference to its capitalist character, despite data which pointed directly to a class interpretation. Their own presentation, skirting around the question of the need for bourgeois ascendancy, was contradictory and illogical, but there was a sound if unspoken logic behind it all the same
In contrast again, the attempt to explore political development through the analysis of the historical trajectories of particular countries through the 'crises and sequences' model came closer than any other to revealing the complex yet intimate connections between capitalism and democracy – it made the modern world the object of its study, rather than the universe of political systems past and present, it identified the pressure for equality as the central problem with which contemporary governments had to contend, and in its five 'crises' it identified all the elements necessary for a comprehensive grasp of the dynamics of liberal democratic politics in a capitalistic economy – centralization of authority, acceptance of bourgeois minority rule, incorporation of the working class into bourgeois-dominated political processes and institutions, the extension of state authority over new areas of social life and behaviour, and the balance between investment and generalized consumption. If the relationship between these elements had been explored, it would have occurred to someone that the logic of the 'crises' of development was precisely that of the need to promote the relative autonomy of the state, establish the authority of the dominant classes, and secure the balance between accumulation and legitimation by developing social mechanisms to absorb, deflect or postpone demands for consumption. It is here that we find by far the most striking evidence of the capacity of the political development literature to 'forget', for despite Coleman's summary of the systemic logic connecting the elements of the 'development syndrome' (the interaction between differentiation, the imperatives of equality, and the responsive and adaptive capacity of the political system), it was so successfully broken down into separate elements that Verba was able to claim, apparently in all honesty, that he saw no connection between them. Precisely because he addressed them separately, with no attempt to identify the systemic logic which linked to them, the 'organic connections' had been lost, and appeared precisely as if they were 'accidental relations'.
It is not surprising that the halt was called at this point to the attempt to devise a theory of political development, for its protagonists were on the point of being forced to recognize that the logic which they were exploring was not that of universal political functions or individual orientations but that of the politics of advanced capitalist societies. This incidentally explains why it was that they failed to make sense to the politics of the 'developing areas' which were the ostensible object of their enquiries, and why theoretical reflection upon them soon gave way to justifications of authoritarian intervention and calls for the exercise of leadership. It also draws attention to the pattern of evasion which runs through the three approaches considered: political development theory began with a systemic approach – functionalism – which however abstracted away entirely from the specific historic circumstances of modern capitalist societies. It then moved to a consideration of social relations in modern democracy, but did so from the perspective of individual orientations. Finally, it adopted an approach which captured the elements of the specific logic of politics in advanced capitalist societies, but it simultaneously abandoned the systemic approach which was the only virtue of functionalism, and therefore failed to put them put them together into a picture of the whole.
Ironically, Almond had rightly insisted at the outset that it was essential to 'master the model of the modern' if progress was to be made in understanding the dynamics of political change (Almond 1960: 63). However, neither he or any theorist of political development was ever willing to accept that to do so required mastery of the logic of capitalist society. Much, indeed, has happened since the eighteenth century. Almond and his colleagues have devoted much of their energy to the art of forgetting what it is.
The Doctrine for Political Development
If the multiple confusions and contradictions which surrounded attempts to construct a theory of political development suggest that they should be seen as examples of forgetfulness, the doctrine for political development is better understood as a case in which criteria applicable to capitalist society were knowingly smuggled in. For while the various attempts to formulate a theory of political development collapsed as a result of their inability to identify key structural features of capitalism, the doctrine for political development announced by Pye in the early 1960s and developed thereafter by Coleman, LaPalombara, Lerner and others showed a perfect practical grasp of their implications, for all that it couched discussion of them in elite rather than class terms. Pye's formulation, unlike Almond's, rested upon a clear theory of the state in a capitalist society, defining as it did the requirements placed upon the state if it was to promote capitalist development. In fact his contention that the state elite should seek to modernize 'the domain of administration and formal government' and 'the process of politics in the society at large' exactly parallelled the description of states as 'social actors and society-shaping institutional structures' (Skocpol 1985: 6) which Skocpol later sought to counterpose to the allegedly society-centred development theorists of the 1960s. This disposes entirely of Skocpol's claim to have herself 'brought the state back in', but reflects the same tendency to reproduce a standard Marxist reading of the role of the state without being aware of doing so. The Studies in Political Development series can be seen as an extended development of the basic idea that the state has the dual role of governing directly and shaping the process of social change through its institutions.
In order to understand the discomfort of the protagonists of the doctrine for political development in the 1960s, however, it is necessary to introduce a distinction between the general structural requirements for capitalist development, and their specific implications in different conjunctures. Simply put, no direct implications for specific government policies can be drawn from the general structural requirements for relative state autonomy, bourgeois hegemony, accumulation and legitimation. The specific policies required will always depend upon the precise nature of the conjuncture – the state of the global capital economy and of the particular national capitalist economy, the character of the state, the balance of class relations, and the manner in which these elements are systematically related. For example, the global capitalist economy might be an a phase of growth, periodic crisis, or recession; individual national economies might be more or less competitive; the state might be in the hands of declining capitalist groups whose defence of their special interests threatens more general accumulation, or of adventurers who enjoy extreme autonomy but are solely concerned with personal gain. Equally, the bourgeoisie might be more or less securely hegemonic; the pace of accumulation might have been forced so greatly at the expense of generalized consumption that legitimacy is eroded, and coercion replaces consent; or consumption levels might be so out of line with the productive capacity of the economy that accumulation is threatened. Whatever the underlying general principles, the necessary direction of policy will depend upon a correct diagnosis of the mix of circumstances from place to place, and time to time. However, the doctrine for political development assumed that democracy in the developing world require a fixed set of policies regardless of time or place – a state firmly in elite hands, with a broadly liberal orientation of the economy and minimal responsibility for welfare, and a set of social mechanisms capable of securing popular acquiescence in this state of affairs.
As it happens, the recovery of the advanced capitalist states from the depression had called for quite different policies, as had the international conjuncture of the post-war period. As we saw, LaPalombara took it to be axiomatic that governments in advanced capitalist societies should both intervene in the economy, and engage in the extensive provision of welfare. At the same time, he and his collaborators took the view that the hold of pro-Western elites in the developing world was precarious, and that they would be hard-pressed to contain majority demands for accelerated economic development and the provision of welfare within the limits compatible with democracy and capitalist development. As a result, he was forced into the contradictory position of admitting that the time when public officials could sit on the sidelines and leave the economy to private entrepreneurs was past, yet simultaneously insisting that in the developing world bureaucracies should exercise self-restraint and confine themselves to a purely supportive role. In the same way, in support of Pye's dictum that developing societies wanted too many things which they could not have, he urged them to concentrate on rural investment and agricultural production, and leave industrial activity to the developed West. Finally, competitive democracy was declared to be off the agenda. In other words, the doctrine for political development sought to perpetuate the international division of labour which had characterized the pre--1914 laissez-faire world economy, while endorsing democracy and intervention in advanced capitalist states and condemning it elsewhere, and refusing to enter into an analysis of the history and dynamics of the international capitalist economy. It is not surprising in the circumstances that Tilly was sceptical of the motives of the proponents of this model, or that Frank's crusading attack proved so devastating, despite the crudity of the version of dependency theory which he counteposed to it (Frank 1967a, 1967b). The doctrine for political development owed its character, and the contradictions into which it fell, to the prevailing conjuncture in the global economy, and the conjunctural interests of the advanced capitalist states. As we have seen, it tended to seek to overcome these contradictions by appeals to political leadership. The transitional programme set out by Lerner precisely captured the way in which the doctrine for political development aimed to hold off democratic participation in the developing world until the hegemony of capitalist interests could be guaranteed through the democratic political process.
The tendency to ignore issues of political economy and revert instead to doctrines of elite leadership remained a feature of the theory of political development thereafter. In the 1970s, as we saw in Chapter 6, it was a prominent feature of the treatment of the two 'developing world' cases covered in Crisis, Choice and Change. The individual case studies of India and Mexico each sketched out a 'political economy' analysis which was then submerged by 'explanations' based upon leadership. This twist in the analysis, taking up with alacrity by Almond and Mundt, rendered the cases inexplicable within the analytical framework of relatively sophisticated institutional political economy within which all the 'first world' cases were examined, an outcome which, as we saw, was curiously taken to confirm the virtues of an emphasis on leadership. As a result, Almond and Mundt were able to perpetuate the myth that the politics of developing countries were not amenable to the forms of analysis appropriate for the advanced societies of the 'West'. In fact each case was perfectly explicable in terms of coalitions around conflicting interests. Ironically, by building exclusively upon elements of analysis which abstracted away from the political economy of the cases in question, Almond and his colleagues missed the obvious contrast between the shift from private enterprise to state intervention in Mexico in Cardenas's developmental project of the 1930s, and the contrasting shift from a state-run to a private enterprise agricultural system in India as developmentalism came under pressure in the different context of the 1970s. A political economy approach sensitive to class projects and conjunctural logic would have identified and understood this contrast, but without it Almond and Mundt were as perplexed in their turn as Verba had been by the problematic 'five crises'.
Precisely the same tendency – a disposition to analyse the politics of advanced capitalist societies in terms of political economy and those of the developing world in terms of political leadership – was exhibited in a significant contribution to the O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead collection on transitions from authoritarian rule. Writing on the prospects for the transition to democracy in Latin America, Przeworski reversed the argument of his earlier work (Przeworksi 1985), which has suggested that it was the ability of capitalism to provide a material basis for the 'consent' of workers to the system through rising living standards which undermined revolutionary socialism and shaped social democracy. He now proclaimed that such 'Keynesian projects' were out of the question in the Latin American context:
It seems as if it almost complete docility and patience on the part of organized workers are needed for a democratic transformation to succeed ... We cannot avoid the possibility that a transition to democracy can be made only at the cost of leaving economic relations intact, not only the structure of production but even the distribution of income (Przeworski 1986: 63).
On Przeworski's own instrumental logic, this conclusion was impossible. But the need to urge restraint upon citizens and consumers in the Third World proved more powerful than the need to apply the general argument consistently. He has since, incidentally, come to the view that the future stability of capitalism in the developing world does after all require material improvements in the condition of the majority (Przeworski et al. 1995). While this view may well be wrong, it is at least consistent.
It is clear from all these examples of the logic of the doctrine for political development was invoked precisely when a consistent political economy perspective prompted conclusions which the theorists of political development were either unable to comprehend, or unwilling to contemplate. Recognition that the conditions were not yet right for the introduction of the political institutions of Schumpeterian liberal democracy in the developing world consistently produced at the interim call for 'quasi-pluralist' authoritarian elite leadership. It is necessary to explore further, therefore, the relationship between the doctrine on the one hand, and the changing international political economy on the other.
Capitalism and Democracy in the Developing World Today
A consideration of the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the developing world today requires as a starting point some reflection on the curious manner in which the doctrine for political development triumphed in the 1990s despite the final abandonment by the theorists of political development of hope that their goal of theoretical understanding could be achieved.
In fact, the demise of the theory and triumph of the doctrine of political development are intimately related, and simply explained. What has happened is that changes in the global political economy (of a kind which the theory of political development never took into account) have simultaneously proved the theory to be inadequate precisely because it never took account of them, and created the conditions for the virtually global dissemination of the doctrine. As we have seen, theories of political development have persistently broken down precisely when they have been confronted with issues of global political economy which they are unable to comprehend. But the literature has always had a doctrine core concerned with the problematic character of mass political participation in the developing world, and the consequent need to identify mechanisms by which it could be controlled by elites. This has existed independently from attempts to produce a suitable theoretical framework through which to sanctify it, and it has outlived such attempts at theory-building as have been made.
From the beginning then, political development theory addressed the issue of mass political participation in the developing world from the perspective of the interests of leading capitalist states of the West. It did so, too, in the light of the emphasis emerging within the behavioural approach upon the need for and the normative acceptability of elite control and relatively limited popular participation. Its consistent message was that popular participation should be strictly limited and the demands of the majority deflected and contained by elite control and institutional constraints if stable democracy was to be achieved. Hence its constant programme: the institutional autonomy of the state, and elite hegemony. In this context, the democratic institutions of the West were not valued so much for their own sake as for the stability they might potentially deliver.
In other words, the political development literature can now be seen to have addressed in its own way, from the point of view of the ruling class, two of the structural imperatives for the survival of capitalism: its need for bourgeois hegemony and for a relatively autonomous state. In suitably abstract form these twin imperatives shaped the doctrine for political development.
However, in the 1950s and 1960s, the circle could never be squared, as every line of research that was pursued suggested that there were real obstacles to the achievement of the objective of pro-Western political stability through the export of Western political models. The political development theorists were perfectly aware of these obstacles, which were identified over and over again as the main elements of the international particular economy of the post-war world: the global confrontation between capitalism and socialism, the expectation throughout the world that the state should play an interventionist role in remedying social deprivation and inequality, and the enormous pressure for a swift response to the social needs of populations throughout the developing world. Despite being aware of them, however, they were capable of doing little more than recognizing them as apparently insoluble problems.
Much, however, has happened since the 1960s. The phase of global confrontation between capitalism and socialism to which the Bolshevik Revolution gave rise has ended. At the same time, crises of accumulation in the advanced capitalist economies, global instability and recession, and the intensification of inter-capitalist competition have led to a renunciation of the policies of intervention and welfare provision that was unthinkable to many three decades ago. And the same global forces, along with specific local effects such as those set in motion by the boom and bust of international lending from the mid-1970s onwards, have reduced the prospects and expectations for social improvements across a large part of the 'developing' world. The relevance and apparent realism of the agenda of political development theory today arises, then, from the simple fact that the key structural elements of the post-war international political economy have been transformed. The socialist alternative appears to have been removed from the agenda; the tendency towards 'excessive' state intervention has been reversed; and the expectations of the majority populations of the world have been effectively lowered, both by internal failure and by international pressure.
In these circumstances, it is now possible, it what appears a new global situation, to conceive of pro-capitalist and pro-Western democratization of the kind envisaged by the theorists of political development without it appearing immediately as an impossible dream. As a result, from the point of view of Western elites and interests, the doctrine which was the true core of the political development literature is today more consistent, more coherent, and more realizable than it ever was in the days when such efforts were expended to develop an accompanying theory of political development. In these circumstances of immediate practical opportunity, the apparently comprehensive failure of efforts to theorize political development is genuinely of little moment.
However, this apparently favourable set of circumstances has come about as a result of a period of intense crisis in the international capitalist system. What is more, as noted above, this has been as much a crisis of interventionist welfare capitalism in the advanced capitalist economies of Europe and the United States as it has been a crisis in the developing world. A significant consequence is that the doctrine for political development is no longer preached in the developing world alone. Rather, it has become a global ideology which aims to adapt political participation everywhere to the constraints imposed by a global system of competitive capitalism. As such, its intimate connection to the structural imperatives of capitalist reproduction is clear. It is the product of a conjunctural and to some degree structural and permanent global shift in the balance between investment and consumption, reflected in the adoption of new strategies of accumulation (broadly, the policies of neo-liberalism) and legitimation (broadly, again, the switch from legitimation through material improvements to insistence on the negative message that there is no alternative). It must be understood, therefore, in that context.
In the light of these considerations, it cannot come as a surprise that the most recent statements of the 'doctrine for political development' reviewed in the previous chapter are explicitly committed to a particular vision of capitalism, to which the version of democracy they espouse is directly related. As we saw, O'Donnell and Schmitter urge the adoption of narrowly political democracy, excluding social and economic initiatives under the heading of 'socialization' and describing it as a 'persistent (if remote) goal' (1986: 12). They tie the fortunes and character of political democracy throughout to its ability to meet the interests of the bourgeoisie. Contradicting their insistence elsewhere that 'structural' determinants are of limited significance in a context of uncertainty, they consider 'one class condition which does seem unavoidable for the viability of the transition' to be that the whole or important segments of the bourgeoisie regard the authoritarian regime as dispensable, 'either because it has laid the foundations for further capitalist development or because it has demonstrated its incompetence for doing so' (27). In the same spirit, they regard as indispensable features of the process that 'the property rights of the bourgeoisie are inviolable', that 'to the extent that the armed forces serve as the prime protector of the rights and privileges covered by the first restriction, their institutional existence, assets and hierarchy cannot be eliminated or even seriously threatened', and that 'the only realistic alternative for the Left seems to be to accept the above restrictions and to hope somehow in the future more attractive opportunities will open up' (69). In case the newly enfranchised populations of the developing world should be unimpressed by this logic, the further suggest that in the transition 'parties of the Right-Center and Right must be "helped" to do well, and parties of the Left-Center and Left should not win by an overwhelming majority' (62), while in general parties should be seen as 'not only, or not so much, agents of mobilization as instruments of social and political control' (58). By this point, the carefully maintained separation of procedural agreement and substantive content in the process of transition has collapsed. In fact the procedural logic flows directly from the substantive goal of securing of political conditions for capitalist development. In other words, 'uncertainty' operates only within limits which are defined by the presumed requirements for capitalist accumulation, and it is the analysis of those presumed requirements which shapes the injunctions with regard to the transition, and the character of political institutions.
The first step, therefore, towards a critique of the literature on political development and a better understanding of the processes which it seeks to analyse is to accept at the outset that the object of its enquiry is indeed the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the modern world. It is precisely because current accounts of the transition are underpinned by a particular understanding of the relationship between capitalism and democracy, and propose a set of institutions which are intended to support capitalism on a global scale, that their authors are impelled either to deny that their work is informed by any theory at all (as O'Donnell and Schmitter have done) or to insist (as Diamond, Linz and Lipset do) that the very concept of capitalism is 'so vague as to be almost meaningless'. Following the guidelines presciently laid down by Marx when bourgeois social science was in its infancy, they introduce their argument in abstract and general terms, then smuggle in specific features of capitalist society in the precise form of 'inviolable natural laws'. Private property and capitalism are assumed, and their logic informs the whole from start to finish. As a result, the line drawn between structure and choice silently treats the basic requirements of capitalist reproduction as structural parameters, and designates the limited space within them as the realm of choice. Within this framework, the role of leaders is to persuade the majority that the limits thus designated should be observed, and it is the ability to do so which qualifies as 'leadership'. Thus a framework which affects merely to identify the scope for choice in fact serves to limit it in a highly particular way. The literature on democratization is highly ideological, and fundamentally bourgeois in character. In being so, it echoes precisely the character of the revisionist theory of liberal democracy from which it springs.
Because this literature is more concerned to deliver an ideological message than to clarify the relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy, or more generally between political economy and types of political regime, it does more to obscure than to illuminate the dynamics of the political processes to which it directs its attention. In general, as examples from the two collections reviewed in the previous chapter will show, this is because too little attention is paid to the conjunctural circumstances of particular transitions, with the result that differences between them are not noted, and their individual dynamics are not understood.
This is the case with O'Donnell and Schmitter's treatment of pacted transitions to democracy, in which a composite procedural model is built from the cases of Colombia and Venezuela in the 1950s, Spain in the 1970s, and a number of Latin American cases in the 1980s. The first invoke Otto Kirkheimer's suggestion that pacts should be seen as involving adjustments to 'standing contradictions between social content and political form', and note his discussion of 'modern, "post-liberal" pacts based on complex exchanges between public and private groups, mutually guaranteeing their collective right to participate in decision-making and their respective privilege to represent and secure vital interests' (37). They suggest that at a later stage in the process there may be 'a change in the nature of the compromises and in the identity of the actors entering into them, as new contradictions between social content and political form emerge' (40). Here parties enter the process, and the pact 'involves a package deal among the leaders of a spectrum of electorally competitive parties to (1) limit the agenda of political choice, (2) share proportionately in the distribution of benefits, and (3) restrict the participation of outsiders in decision-making' (41). Finally, at some point a social and economic pact may be negotiated to conclude the process, in order to 'reassure the bourgeoisie that its property rights will not be jeopardized for the foreseeable future, and to satisfy workers and various salaried groups that their demands for compensation and social justice will eventually be met' (47).
This composite picture, described as a single sequence of 'moments' in the pacted transition, obliterates the organic connections between the various elements of the cases from which it is drawn, conceals their dynamics, and gives them a misleading appearance of commonality. It draws on the 'duopoly' of political positions and patronage agreed in specific circumstances in Colombia and Venezuela in the 1950s, and the 'corporatist' pacts of continental Europe in the 1960s, without regard for the circumstances, or the content of the bargains struck. In so doing, it ascribes to socio-economic pact-making in the wake of the withdrawal of authoritarian regimes a content which is arguably appropriate for the cases of Colombia, Venezuela and Spain, which occurred in quite different national and global conjunctures, but is quite false for contemporary Latin America.
O'Donnell and Schmitter abstract away from the conjuncture of transition in two ways. First, they fail to locate the transitions in a 'world-historical' context. In Spain and Portugal authoritarian regimes which were remnants of the upheavals of the post-depression period in Europe were replaced by new democracies which joined the post-war institutional and economic order symbolized by the European Community, at a time when economic boom and social progress appeared possible as a result. In Latin America, authoritarian regimes which had appeared in response to social upheavals prompted by 1960s developmentalism were replaced by democratic regimes offering a much narrower agenda, in a very different global context. Second, they comment in passing that for a transition to proceed the bourgeoisie must believe that the outgoing regime is dispensable 'either because it has laid the foundations for further capitalist development or because it has demonstrated its incompetence for doing so' (27), but they fail to incorporate this crucial contrast systematically into their analysis. In other words, they focus neither on the global conjuncture, nor upon the significance of the regime in terms of the process of capitalist accumulation.
Diamond, Linz and Lipset's treatment of the prospects for democracy in Latin America similarly abstracts away from the organic connections between society, economy, and political forms in the region, most notably in the grotesque discrepancy between the account they give of the Latin American past, and the aspirations they voice for its future. They provide a relentless documentation of the past failure across the region to produce states and executives capable of maintaining order and the rule of law; strong and independent political parties free from dependence on prominent personalities, and capable of cross-cutting and softening class cleavages; public policies capable of securing steady and broadly distributed growth, the economic and political inclusion of majorities, and broad and deep legitimacy; and strong, autonomous popular organizations and associational life. They then vacuously appeal to the 'capacity, courage, judgement and values of domestic actors' and 'effective political leadership and action' (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1989b: 51) to remedy the situation, while urging patience and a judicious lowering of expectations on their citizens. This approach enables them to air their normative and ideological preferences, but is otherwise analytically feeble, precisely because of its refusal to explore the organic connections between the political economy of the region and the political forms they find so defective. Those deficiencies require explanation in terms of the inability of the bourgeoisie in the region to exercise hegemony through democratic means after the collapse of export-led regimes in 1930, and resulting patterns not only of widespread intervention, but also of adaptation of forms of personalism, populism and clientelism as elements of 'second-best' strategies of accumulation and legitimation. Such an analysis would of course reveal quite different connections, dynamics and trajectories from case to case, and it would need to be complemented by similar analyses of new configurations in the period of regional transition to democracy. In their absence, resort to the call for patience and responsible leadership is simply a gesture, and an index of prior ideological conviction. More generally, the account given of the economic, social and political circumstances of Latin America makes it apparent that the preference expressed by Diamond, Linz and Lipset for the introduction of political democracy without immediate social or economic reform is a contradiction in terms, precisely because social dependency and economic inequality are shown conclusively to make the enjoyment of the standard rights associated with political democracy impossible.
For Diamond, Linz and Lipset, as for O'Donnell and Schmitter, then, the failure to address the links between capitalism and transition to democracy leads to a doctrinal conclusion which meets the ideological needs of the moment precisely because it abstracts away from the structural dynamics and conjunctural context of the cases in question. In each case, the continued propagation of an ideologically driven doctrine for political development depends upon a refusal either to acknowledge the assumptions on which it is built, or to explore the connections which might lead to an appreciation of the real dynamics of the interaction of political economy, institutions, and choice from case to case.
Conclusion
It is possible to describe the capitalist system in the 1990s, for the first time in world history, as genuinely global in the scale. After a long period in which military and economic competition seemed intertwined, competition for military supremacy has given away to what Stopford and Strange (1991) describe as competition for world market shares. This outcome reflects the culmination of a process which has been under way since the since early in the last century, and was of course memorably anticipated by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto nearly 150 years ago (see Box 9.1).
This final chapter evaluates the past and present of the political development literature in the light of some simple propositions drawn from Marxist theory. I suggest why it was that three successive attempts to theorize political development – the functional, cultural and comparative historical approaches – failed to do so, and offer an explanation for two particular features of the contemporary literature – its defiant claim to have abandoned its earlier interest in theory, and its equally adamant assertion that its consuming interest in political democracy does not require it to concern itself with capitalism, or even acknowledge its existence. I argue that these two features are intimately linked, and that they are jointly the precondition for the literature to operate as bourgeois ideology rather than as a source of understanding of the real dynamics of change in the modern world, and the real limitations of liberal democracy. Finally I offer an explanation for the triumph of the doctrine for political development in the 1990s.
I make three arguments: first, that the literature is primarily ideological in character, and that it misunderstands and mystifies the relationship between liberal democracy and capitalism by persistently taking as natural or universal characteristics which are the social and historical products or requirements of capitalism; second, that a holistic Marxist analysis explains the successive failures to arrive at a satisfactory theory of political development and identifies the logic of the arguments concerned better than the literature is able to do itself; and third, that the explanation for the simultaneous abandonment of theory and the survival and triumph of a pragmatic 'doctrine for political development' lies in the contrasting politically economy of the 1960s and the 1990s respectively. In making these arguments, I also show that the literature has persistently defied its own methodological principles in order to preach one set of rules for 'the West' and another for 'the rest'. In this respect, I suggest, it has used the dubious claim that the politics of 'non-Western states' are fundamentally different to those of the West as a device to justify differential treatment.
Marxism and Bourgeois Theory
In the opening pages of the Grundrisse, in which Marx sets out to sketch the foundations of his critique of political economy, he condemns 'modern economists' for presenting accounts of contemporary social relations in terms of elements and relationships held to be common to all societies. For Marx, this act of abstracting away from specific historical situations in order to arrive at general models valid for all times and places makes it impossible to understand the internal logic and dynamics of any given society. It leaves out of account the specific features which shape the society in question, and in doing so it inevitably renders obscure the relations and connections which give it its particular character. Within this broad perspective, Marx himself argued that it was the capitalist system of production and exchange which gave the present epoch its character and shaped its social and political institutions, and he therefore took this as his central object of study.
On one level, the practice of undue abstraction is a failing resulting from an inadequate understanding or an inappropriate method of analysis. At the same time, however, it has an effect of great social significance: it presents as natural and eternal phenomena which are social and historical, and thereby helps to conceal the fact that they are the products of human agency. Because the processes which underpin capitalism do not always manifest themselves in surface appearances, this is particularly the case with modern bourgeois production and society. Marx argues, in relation to the tendency to 'forget' the specific features which determine the development of particular societies in particular historical epochs, that 'the whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and the harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting' (Marx 1973: 85; emphasis mine). Seen in this way, such acts of forgetting are part of the broader phenomenon which Marx terms 'fetishism' – the tendency to perceive the historical products of human ingenuity and sociality as natural, eternal and alien forms. Such acts of forgetting literally 'dis-member' historical societies and social relations. The task of critical social science is to 're-member' them, calling these connections to mind, and thereby putting the societies and social phenomena in question together again.
Marx also suggested that a conscious motive might at times lie behind the presentation of social and historical phenomena as natural and eternal. Thus, he argued,
the aim is ... to present production ... as distinct from distribution etc., as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded. This is the more or less conscious purpose of the whole proceeding (87).
Whether abstraction resulted from 'forgetting' or from the surreptitious introduction of bourgeois relations in the guise of natural laws, the consequence was a dissolution of internal logic which brought 'things which are organically related into an accidental relation, into a merely reflective connection' (88).
These brief considerations give only a general impression of Marx's approach as they leave out of account entirely the particular processes and mechanisms which he identified as central to the capitalist system of production and exchange. However, they suggest two basic propositions, which might be seen as defining the stance taken by Marxist theory. First, all bourgeois 'social science' is essentially ideology or mystification, aimed at reinforcing the hold of capital over labour, and furthering or preserving the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Second, an understanding of social phenomenon can only be achieved by an approach which probes beneath surface appearances to grasp the logic of the whole, and the connections between its various parts.
These brief reflections provide a starting point for a critique of political development theory, which can be seen, throughout its long trajectory, as laboriously proving the truth of Marx's assertions. It began as the exact antithesis of Marx's attempt to locate the dynamics of the modern epoch in a holistic analysis of capitalism as a complex system of organically related parts, as in its first functionalist phase it was a method of ahistorical abstraction committed to law-like generalization. In fact, its leading practitioners claimed to be scientific precisely because they looked beyond the complexity of particular historical circumstances to capture the universal constants in whose terms political development could be understood. Although, as we shall see, they actually took the emergence of modern liberal democracy in capitalist societies as their point of departure, they made a point of not seeking to investigate any political characteristics or mechanisms specific to capitalism itself.
Over the years, the initial project of a scientific understanding of political development as a universal process gradually faded. After a brief attempt to account for local specificity through attention to the 'political culture' of particular societies, it gave way to an approach founded upon a form of comparative historical analysis. In essence, this was an attempt to understand the syndrome of developmental change specific to modernity, and as such it marked a significant break with the ahistorical universalism of the functional approach. When this effort too was declared to have failed, the theory-building impetus behind the approach lost all its momentum, and gave way to a declared hostility to grand theory.
In the meantime, however, the effort within political development theory to identify the policies which would bring about appropriate change, present from the beginning alongside the quest for theory, had taken its own direction. At a point when the functional and cultural approaches were at an early stage of development, and well before any concerted effort was made to systematize the comparative historical approach, Pye and other others set out the 'doctrine for political development', which embodied the assumptions of the elitist revisionist theory of democracy, but sought to define the policies required to bring about a desired form of political development without further bothering with questions of theory. As the synthetic summaries offered by Huntington in the 1960s and again in the 1990s suggested, there was a line of direct continuity between the breach effected between theory and policy in the formulation of the 'doctrine for political development' and the later separation of concern with the preconditions for democracy from the processes by which it could be brought into being and sustained. Thus the 'doctrine for political development' resurfaced in the 1990s as a pragmatic effort to codify the 'rules' of successful elite-controlled democratization.
Even in this less ambitious guise, political development theory still exhibits precisely the traits identified by Marx, albeit in a different and perhaps more knowing form. Early ambitions regarding scientific analysis and the discovery of universal laws have been replaced by a more mundane but similarly generalizing and universalizing advocacy of both capitalism and liberal democratic political institutions. In the process, the advocates of capitalism and democracy seem to have progressed from being victims of the illusion that there can be a universal, ahistorical science of political development to being declared apologists for the political institutions of the advanced capitalist societies and their reproduction on a global scale.
Despite the apparently diametrical opposition between the functionalism of the 1960s and the anti-theoretical evangelism of the 1990s, it required only a tactical shift to turn from deriving universal 'functions' from the real historical institutions of advanced capitalist liberal democracies to claiming that those particular institutions were universally appropriate. Today's theorists of political development rarely dwell directly on the relationship between liberal democratic politics and capitalism, but they scrupulously reflect and seek to enforce capitalism's supposed requirements under the guise of the normative general model they advocate. In so doing, they faithfully emulate those 'modern economists' of the nineteenth century, and 'modern political scientists' of the 1960s, who presented the social relations and institutions of their day as reflecting universally applicable principles, valid for all time.
Despite themselves, however, the theorists of political development have been drawn ever closer to an explicit admission that the object of their enquiry is the relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy in the modern world. The doctrine for political development today exactly reflects the logic of the reproduction of capitalist regimes – current debates, in fact, revolve around the question of whether they have yet got the role played by the state in the reproduction of capitalism absolutely right. Yet it is introduced with the emphatic statement that there is no theory underpinning it at all. This curious fact is revealing in itself. The problem at the heart of political development theory was once that its analyses led it to the conclusion that the practices and institutions to which it was committed were unrealizable. That is no longer the case. The problem which gives it its current form is that it cannot openly proclaim the logic which underpins it in the hour of its apparent triumph. It is forced, therefore, to celebrate what it dare not explain. As a result, it is vulnerable to the demonstration that it is the logic of capitalist reproduction in the circumstances of the day that underpins its new devotion to liberal democracy – in other words, that despite protestations to the contrary, there is a theory of political development after all.
In the light at these considerations, political development theory is interpreted in this final chapter as an evasion, a refusal to openly explain the dynamics of politics in the modern world in the light of the dynamics of capitalist development. I suggest, at the same time, that this evasion is increasingly difficult to sustain, and is particularly apparent in the tensions and contradictions of the current literature on democratization. Finally, I offer a way of looking at the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the 'developing world' which restores the possibility of grasping its logic at the present time, and I assess its implications.
In doing so, I rely upon a number of simple propositions about capitalism. Contrary to the frequent assertions of the theorists of political development (Binder 1986; Almond 1988), Marxist analysis does not suggest that the bourgeoisie will control the state and rule in capitalist society. On the contrary, its perspective, rightly or wrongly, is that capitalism will be driven by eventually irresistible economic crisis and class conflict, and give way to socialism. However, it does identify the conditions which must be met if capitalism is to be reproduced over time. First, capital accumulation depends upon the right to own and dispose of private property, the ascendancy of capital of labour, and a process of continual reinvestment in order to maintain individual and national competitiveness. The right of capitalists to invest comes before the right of workers to consume. Second, in political terms this requires the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony – or the 'legitimacy' of capitalism in the eyes of the majority. In a liberal democracy this has the precise meaning that the 'choice' which is offered to electors must be restricted to options which will enable the continuation of capitalism. Third, it requires a state which is committed to capitalism, but which enjoys a degree of autonomy not only from the propertyless majority of the population but also from capitalists themselves, in order to allow it to act in the long-term interests of capital in general rather than as the agent of a particular sector of capital. Despite the claims of some current accounts (Przeworski et al. 1995), it does not require continual improvements in the material well-being of the majority, or even the persuasive promise of eventual gains in this area. It only requires, to quote a phrase that has become the slogan of an era, that it should appear that 'there is no alternative'. There is no better way to secure this appearance, of course, than to treat the hear and now as natural and eternal. With these simple propositions in mind, I turn to the botched history of political development theory.
The Arts of Forgetting
The functional, cultural and comparative historical approaches each demonstrated in different ways the art of 'forgetting' the connections between the political institutions of the modern age and the structural imperatives of capitalist reproduction. The functional approach derived its 'functions' directly from modern political structures, but claimed that they reflected universal and ahistorical elements of all political systems; the cultural approach located fundamental structural features of contemporary politics in the orientations of individuals rather than in broader social processes; and the comparative historical approach identified a number of imperatives central to government in a capitalist society, but failed to spot the logic connecting them. As a result, these approaches touched upon but failed to comprehend the significance of the key elements of the politics of capital history reproduction: bourgeois hegemony, the 'relative autonomy' of the state, and the need to secure not only the accumulation of capital, but also its legitimation in the eyes of the majority.
Almond and Powell's functional approach identified six conversion processes in all political systems: rule-making, application and adjudication, interest articulation and aggregation, and communication. The first three reflected the division between legislature, executive and judiciary, while the last three corresponded to political parties, pressure groups and the media. Almond and Powell noted that
[Our] approach ... grows directly out of separation-of-powers theory and the stream of empirical research critical of that theory; from this base it treats the functions of the political institutions which emerged after the broadening of the suffrage and industrialization – political parties, pressure groups, and the mass media (Almond and Powell 1966: 12, ft. 10).
On their own account, their starting point combined an institutional analysis which drew largely on the experience of the United States with a focus on social and political aspects of nineteenth century capitalist development. But they deliberately abstracted away from the specific combined historical process of 'the broadening of the suffrage and industrialization', breaking the varying organic links between them from case to case to recombine them in an abstract framework at a later stage. Significantly, they did not see themselves as deriving a general model of the political process from these specific historical processes for purely analytical purposes. Rather, they claimed to identify universal functions which had always been present below the surface in all political systems:
The tripartite approach ... seemed to be an adequate theory for purposes of political analysis and institution building at a time when the politically active class was limited and socially homogeneous. However, much has happened since the eighteenth century. The development of universal suffrage, the emergence of mass political parties intended to mobilise the electorate, the rise of organized interest groups intended to express the interests of the component parts of a complex society and influence the course of political decision, and the development of the media of mass communication, have sensitized us to political functions which were not fully appreciated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (11, my emphasis).
This approach involved a sleight of hand in which the institutions of modern capitalist society were first invoked, then made to vanish, leaving behind an ahistorical framework which retained their imprint, but claimed to capture all that there was to be captured within all political systems. Once this was done, its authors were able to deal with the familiar elements of their own political landscape as if they reflected timeless requirements of the political process, but they were unable to think that capitalism might have generated new political imperatives specific to itself.
The consequences were seen clearly in the argument that the state required to be insulated from society – a proposition which has specific meaning, as we saw above, in the context of capitalism. It was central to the theory of political development from the earliest descriptions of the non-Western political process, and it stood at the heart of the functional approach. However, as a result of the process of abstraction central to functionalism it was not only split off from the specific context of capitalist society from which it was derived, but also rendered incoherent by the decision to speak of the 'political system' rather than the state. This was more than a change of vocabulary. Six conversion processes, three proper to the 'state', and three to 'society', were grouped together without distinction, thereby obliterating any distinction between 'state' and 'society'. At the same time, the separation of 'politics' and 'economics' which is fundamental to the capitalist system (so that political choices may not affect the fundamentals of the economic system) was presented as a question of a difference in the roles played by individuals from one context to another. As a result, the dynamics of capitalist reproduction were obscured, and the principle of the relative autonomy of the state appeared in the abstract form of the need to maintain the boundaries of the political system.
In contrast, the political culture approach took variations in the attitudes and behaviour of individuals as its point of departure. As a result, Pye's study of Burma and Almond and Verba's comparative study of five nations both abstracted away entirely from structural features of the societies in question. Pye, as we saw, made a point of insisting that the sources of underdevelopment must be psychological as no conceivable causes could be found in comparative political economy. He thereby disposed in a sentence of any need to consider what the implications might be of the place Burma occupied in the global economy, and the domestic consequences. In The Civic Society, the focus on individuals led to the identification of an apparently paradoxical need for citizens to refrain from exercising their perceived ability to participate, and to the bizarre but nevertheless logical conclusion that stable and effective democracy required 'inconsistencies in the attitudes of an individual' (Almond and Verba 1963: 479). In fact, the data revealed a pattern of differential participation by class which Almond and Verba barely explored, and entirely failed to mention in their conclusions. Had they cared to look for it, they had clear evidence of systematic variations in 'subjective political competence' across classes. For example, they had figures for each nation comparing responses for four 'classes' of worker (unskilled, skilled, white-collar, and professional and managerial) on the question of whether the 'ordinary man' (sic) should be active in his local community (176, table 4). They did not calculate the differentials across these classes for the sample as a whole. Had they done so, they would have found that 23 per cent of unskilled workers agreed with the proposition, compared to 32 per cent of skilled workers, 39 per cent of white-collar workers, and 45 per cent of managers and professionals. Similarly (in another calculation for which they had the data, but which they did not make), 55 per cent of unskilled workers thought they could do something about an unjust local law, compared to 66 per cent of skilled workers, 72 per cent of white-collar workers, and 86 per cent of managers and professionals (calculated from data in 210, figure 3). Other data suggested the strong differential effects on political competence across classes of the process of socialization in family, school and work. In a number of cases, schooling was reported to repress the political capacity of the poor while nurturing that of the rich, while for the sample overall 78 per cent of white-collar workers reported that they were consulted at work, compared to 57 per cent of unskilled workers (my calculation from 364, table 24).
It is commonplace these days, of course, to assert that such differences by social class exist in measures of subjective political competence. My concern here is with the implications of the fact that Almond and Verba showed so little curiosity about the issue. Because they treated underlying cultural dispositions as sources of explanation, they were diverted away from the search for such structural variables, and paid little attention to the evidence which they had themselves unearthed. As a result, they mistook a necessary structural feature of liberal democracy in a capitalist society for a mysterious and highly convenient inconsistency in the psychological make-up of the individual. This had the effect of making what was in fact a contradiction specific to capitalist society appear to be a generic problem of democracy. In other words, instead of demystifying what they described as the 'myth of democracy', they compounded it.
In The Civic Culture then, Almond and Verba took as their starting point, without explanation or justification, an elitist model of politics in which it was assumed that political stability required a delicate balance between elite authority and responsiveness to non-elite influence which could only operate if non-elites assented to a norm of participation but refrained from participating in practice. The 'civic culture' was seen is the necessary counterpart to this balance between elite authority and responsiveness. As Lijphart and others pointed out, the argument was defective as an attempt to define the necessary character of democracy. However, if applied to the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in a capitalist society, it precisely captured the logic of bourgeois hegemony. Almond and Verba surreptitiously defined one of the central requirements for stable liberal democracy in a capitalist society, but did so without reference to its capitalist character, despite data which pointed directly to a class interpretation. Their own presentation, skirting around the question of the need for bourgeois ascendancy, was contradictory and illogical, but there was a sound if unspoken logic behind it all the same
In contrast again, the attempt to explore political development through the analysis of the historical trajectories of particular countries through the 'crises and sequences' model came closer than any other to revealing the complex yet intimate connections between capitalism and democracy – it made the modern world the object of its study, rather than the universe of political systems past and present, it identified the pressure for equality as the central problem with which contemporary governments had to contend, and in its five 'crises' it identified all the elements necessary for a comprehensive grasp of the dynamics of liberal democratic politics in a capitalistic economy – centralization of authority, acceptance of bourgeois minority rule, incorporation of the working class into bourgeois-dominated political processes and institutions, the extension of state authority over new areas of social life and behaviour, and the balance between investment and generalized consumption. If the relationship between these elements had been explored, it would have occurred to someone that the logic of the 'crises' of development was precisely that of the need to promote the relative autonomy of the state, establish the authority of the dominant classes, and secure the balance between accumulation and legitimation by developing social mechanisms to absorb, deflect or postpone demands for consumption. It is here that we find by far the most striking evidence of the capacity of the political development literature to 'forget', for despite Coleman's summary of the systemic logic connecting the elements of the 'development syndrome' (the interaction between differentiation, the imperatives of equality, and the responsive and adaptive capacity of the political system), it was so successfully broken down into separate elements that Verba was able to claim, apparently in all honesty, that he saw no connection between them. Precisely because he addressed them separately, with no attempt to identify the systemic logic which linked to them, the 'organic connections' had been lost, and appeared precisely as if they were 'accidental relations'.
It is not surprising that the halt was called at this point to the attempt to devise a theory of political development, for its protagonists were on the point of being forced to recognize that the logic which they were exploring was not that of universal political functions or individual orientations but that of the politics of advanced capitalist societies. This incidentally explains why it was that they failed to make sense to the politics of the 'developing areas' which were the ostensible object of their enquiries, and why theoretical reflection upon them soon gave way to justifications of authoritarian intervention and calls for the exercise of leadership. It also draws attention to the pattern of evasion which runs through the three approaches considered: political development theory began with a systemic approach – functionalism – which however abstracted away entirely from the specific historic circumstances of modern capitalist societies. It then moved to a consideration of social relations in modern democracy, but did so from the perspective of individual orientations. Finally, it adopted an approach which captured the elements of the specific logic of politics in advanced capitalist societies, but it simultaneously abandoned the systemic approach which was the only virtue of functionalism, and therefore failed to put them put them together into a picture of the whole.
Ironically, Almond had rightly insisted at the outset that it was essential to 'master the model of the modern' if progress was to be made in understanding the dynamics of political change (Almond 1960: 63). However, neither he or any theorist of political development was ever willing to accept that to do so required mastery of the logic of capitalist society. Much, indeed, has happened since the eighteenth century. Almond and his colleagues have devoted much of their energy to the art of forgetting what it is.
The Doctrine for Political Development
If the multiple confusions and contradictions which surrounded attempts to construct a theory of political development suggest that they should be seen as examples of forgetfulness, the doctrine for political development is better understood as a case in which criteria applicable to capitalist society were knowingly smuggled in. For while the various attempts to formulate a theory of political development collapsed as a result of their inability to identify key structural features of capitalism, the doctrine for political development announced by Pye in the early 1960s and developed thereafter by Coleman, LaPalombara, Lerner and others showed a perfect practical grasp of their implications, for all that it couched discussion of them in elite rather than class terms. Pye's formulation, unlike Almond's, rested upon a clear theory of the state in a capitalist society, defining as it did the requirements placed upon the state if it was to promote capitalist development. In fact his contention that the state elite should seek to modernize 'the domain of administration and formal government' and 'the process of politics in the society at large' exactly parallelled the description of states as 'social actors and society-shaping institutional structures' (Skocpol 1985: 6) which Skocpol later sought to counterpose to the allegedly society-centred development theorists of the 1960s. This disposes entirely of Skocpol's claim to have herself 'brought the state back in', but reflects the same tendency to reproduce a standard Marxist reading of the role of the state without being aware of doing so. The Studies in Political Development series can be seen as an extended development of the basic idea that the state has the dual role of governing directly and shaping the process of social change through its institutions.
In order to understand the discomfort of the protagonists of the doctrine for political development in the 1960s, however, it is necessary to introduce a distinction between the general structural requirements for capitalist development, and their specific implications in different conjunctures. Simply put, no direct implications for specific government policies can be drawn from the general structural requirements for relative state autonomy, bourgeois hegemony, accumulation and legitimation. The specific policies required will always depend upon the precise nature of the conjuncture – the state of the global capital economy and of the particular national capitalist economy, the character of the state, the balance of class relations, and the manner in which these elements are systematically related. For example, the global capitalist economy might be an a phase of growth, periodic crisis, or recession; individual national economies might be more or less competitive; the state might be in the hands of declining capitalist groups whose defence of their special interests threatens more general accumulation, or of adventurers who enjoy extreme autonomy but are solely concerned with personal gain. Equally, the bourgeoisie might be more or less securely hegemonic; the pace of accumulation might have been forced so greatly at the expense of generalized consumption that legitimacy is eroded, and coercion replaces consent; or consumption levels might be so out of line with the productive capacity of the economy that accumulation is threatened. Whatever the underlying general principles, the necessary direction of policy will depend upon a correct diagnosis of the mix of circumstances from place to place, and time to time. However, the doctrine for political development assumed that democracy in the developing world require a fixed set of policies regardless of time or place – a state firmly in elite hands, with a broadly liberal orientation of the economy and minimal responsibility for welfare, and a set of social mechanisms capable of securing popular acquiescence in this state of affairs.
As it happens, the recovery of the advanced capitalist states from the depression had called for quite different policies, as had the international conjuncture of the post-war period. As we saw, LaPalombara took it to be axiomatic that governments in advanced capitalist societies should both intervene in the economy, and engage in the extensive provision of welfare. At the same time, he and his collaborators took the view that the hold of pro-Western elites in the developing world was precarious, and that they would be hard-pressed to contain majority demands for accelerated economic development and the provision of welfare within the limits compatible with democracy and capitalist development. As a result, he was forced into the contradictory position of admitting that the time when public officials could sit on the sidelines and leave the economy to private entrepreneurs was past, yet simultaneously insisting that in the developing world bureaucracies should exercise self-restraint and confine themselves to a purely supportive role. In the same way, in support of Pye's dictum that developing societies wanted too many things which they could not have, he urged them to concentrate on rural investment and agricultural production, and leave industrial activity to the developed West. Finally, competitive democracy was declared to be off the agenda. In other words, the doctrine for political development sought to perpetuate the international division of labour which had characterized the pre--1914 laissez-faire world economy, while endorsing democracy and intervention in advanced capitalist states and condemning it elsewhere, and refusing to enter into an analysis of the history and dynamics of the international capitalist economy. It is not surprising in the circumstances that Tilly was sceptical of the motives of the proponents of this model, or that Frank's crusading attack proved so devastating, despite the crudity of the version of dependency theory which he counteposed to it (Frank 1967a, 1967b). The doctrine for political development owed its character, and the contradictions into which it fell, to the prevailing conjuncture in the global economy, and the conjunctural interests of the advanced capitalist states. As we have seen, it tended to seek to overcome these contradictions by appeals to political leadership. The transitional programme set out by Lerner precisely captured the way in which the doctrine for political development aimed to hold off democratic participation in the developing world until the hegemony of capitalist interests could be guaranteed through the democratic political process.
The tendency to ignore issues of political economy and revert instead to doctrines of elite leadership remained a feature of the theory of political development thereafter. In the 1970s, as we saw in Chapter 6, it was a prominent feature of the treatment of the two 'developing world' cases covered in Crisis, Choice and Change. The individual case studies of India and Mexico each sketched out a 'political economy' analysis which was then submerged by 'explanations' based upon leadership. This twist in the analysis, taking up with alacrity by Almond and Mundt, rendered the cases inexplicable within the analytical framework of relatively sophisticated institutional political economy within which all the 'first world' cases were examined, an outcome which, as we saw, was curiously taken to confirm the virtues of an emphasis on leadership. As a result, Almond and Mundt were able to perpetuate the myth that the politics of developing countries were not amenable to the forms of analysis appropriate for the advanced societies of the 'West'. In fact each case was perfectly explicable in terms of coalitions around conflicting interests. Ironically, by building exclusively upon elements of analysis which abstracted away from the political economy of the cases in question, Almond and his colleagues missed the obvious contrast between the shift from private enterprise to state intervention in Mexico in Cardenas's developmental project of the 1930s, and the contrasting shift from a state-run to a private enterprise agricultural system in India as developmentalism came under pressure in the different context of the 1970s. A political economy approach sensitive to class projects and conjunctural logic would have identified and understood this contrast, but without it Almond and Mundt were as perplexed in their turn as Verba had been by the problematic 'five crises'.
Precisely the same tendency – a disposition to analyse the politics of advanced capitalist societies in terms of political economy and those of the developing world in terms of political leadership – was exhibited in a significant contribution to the O'Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead collection on transitions from authoritarian rule. Writing on the prospects for the transition to democracy in Latin America, Przeworski reversed the argument of his earlier work (Przeworksi 1985), which has suggested that it was the ability of capitalism to provide a material basis for the 'consent' of workers to the system through rising living standards which undermined revolutionary socialism and shaped social democracy. He now proclaimed that such 'Keynesian projects' were out of the question in the Latin American context:
It seems as if it almost complete docility and patience on the part of organized workers are needed for a democratic transformation to succeed ... We cannot avoid the possibility that a transition to democracy can be made only at the cost of leaving economic relations intact, not only the structure of production but even the distribution of income (Przeworski 1986: 63).
On Przeworski's own instrumental logic, this conclusion was impossible. But the need to urge restraint upon citizens and consumers in the Third World proved more powerful than the need to apply the general argument consistently. He has since, incidentally, come to the view that the future stability of capitalism in the developing world does after all require material improvements in the condition of the majority (Przeworski et al. 1995). While this view may well be wrong, it is at least consistent.
It is clear from all these examples of the logic of the doctrine for political development was invoked precisely when a consistent political economy perspective prompted conclusions which the theorists of political development were either unable to comprehend, or unwilling to contemplate. Recognition that the conditions were not yet right for the introduction of the political institutions of Schumpeterian liberal democracy in the developing world consistently produced at the interim call for 'quasi-pluralist' authoritarian elite leadership. It is necessary to explore further, therefore, the relationship between the doctrine on the one hand, and the changing international political economy on the other.
Capitalism and Democracy in the Developing World Today
A consideration of the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the developing world today requires as a starting point some reflection on the curious manner in which the doctrine for political development triumphed in the 1990s despite the final abandonment by the theorists of political development of hope that their goal of theoretical understanding could be achieved.
In fact, the demise of the theory and triumph of the doctrine of political development are intimately related, and simply explained. What has happened is that changes in the global political economy (of a kind which the theory of political development never took into account) have simultaneously proved the theory to be inadequate precisely because it never took account of them, and created the conditions for the virtually global dissemination of the doctrine. As we have seen, theories of political development have persistently broken down precisely when they have been confronted with issues of global political economy which they are unable to comprehend. But the literature has always had a doctrine core concerned with the problematic character of mass political participation in the developing world, and the consequent need to identify mechanisms by which it could be controlled by elites. This has existed independently from attempts to produce a suitable theoretical framework through which to sanctify it, and it has outlived such attempts at theory-building as have been made.
From the beginning then, political development theory addressed the issue of mass political participation in the developing world from the perspective of the interests of leading capitalist states of the West. It did so, too, in the light of the emphasis emerging within the behavioural approach upon the need for and the normative acceptability of elite control and relatively limited popular participation. Its consistent message was that popular participation should be strictly limited and the demands of the majority deflected and contained by elite control and institutional constraints if stable democracy was to be achieved. Hence its constant programme: the institutional autonomy of the state, and elite hegemony. In this context, the democratic institutions of the West were not valued so much for their own sake as for the stability they might potentially deliver.
In other words, the political development literature can now be seen to have addressed in its own way, from the point of view of the ruling class, two of the structural imperatives for the survival of capitalism: its need for bourgeois hegemony and for a relatively autonomous state. In suitably abstract form these twin imperatives shaped the doctrine for political development.
However, in the 1950s and 1960s, the circle could never be squared, as every line of research that was pursued suggested that there were real obstacles to the achievement of the objective of pro-Western political stability through the export of Western political models. The political development theorists were perfectly aware of these obstacles, which were identified over and over again as the main elements of the international particular economy of the post-war world: the global confrontation between capitalism and socialism, the expectation throughout the world that the state should play an interventionist role in remedying social deprivation and inequality, and the enormous pressure for a swift response to the social needs of populations throughout the developing world. Despite being aware of them, however, they were capable of doing little more than recognizing them as apparently insoluble problems.
Much, however, has happened since the 1960s. The phase of global confrontation between capitalism and socialism to which the Bolshevik Revolution gave rise has ended. At the same time, crises of accumulation in the advanced capitalist economies, global instability and recession, and the intensification of inter-capitalist competition have led to a renunciation of the policies of intervention and welfare provision that was unthinkable to many three decades ago. And the same global forces, along with specific local effects such as those set in motion by the boom and bust of international lending from the mid-1970s onwards, have reduced the prospects and expectations for social improvements across a large part of the 'developing' world. The relevance and apparent realism of the agenda of political development theory today arises, then, from the simple fact that the key structural elements of the post-war international political economy have been transformed. The socialist alternative appears to have been removed from the agenda; the tendency towards 'excessive' state intervention has been reversed; and the expectations of the majority populations of the world have been effectively lowered, both by internal failure and by international pressure.
In these circumstances, it is now possible, it what appears a new global situation, to conceive of pro-capitalist and pro-Western democratization of the kind envisaged by the theorists of political development without it appearing immediately as an impossible dream. As a result, from the point of view of Western elites and interests, the doctrine which was the true core of the political development literature is today more consistent, more coherent, and more realizable than it ever was in the days when such efforts were expended to develop an accompanying theory of political development. In these circumstances of immediate practical opportunity, the apparently comprehensive failure of efforts to theorize political development is genuinely of little moment.
However, this apparently favourable set of circumstances has come about as a result of a period of intense crisis in the international capitalist system. What is more, as noted above, this has been as much a crisis of interventionist welfare capitalism in the advanced capitalist economies of Europe and the United States as it has been a crisis in the developing world. A significant consequence is that the doctrine for political development is no longer preached in the developing world alone. Rather, it has become a global ideology which aims to adapt political participation everywhere to the constraints imposed by a global system of competitive capitalism. As such, its intimate connection to the structural imperatives of capitalist reproduction is clear. It is the product of a conjunctural and to some degree structural and permanent global shift in the balance between investment and consumption, reflected in the adoption of new strategies of accumulation (broadly, the policies of neo-liberalism) and legitimation (broadly, again, the switch from legitimation through material improvements to insistence on the negative message that there is no alternative). It must be understood, therefore, in that context.
In the light of these considerations, it cannot come as a surprise that the most recent statements of the 'doctrine for political development' reviewed in the previous chapter are explicitly committed to a particular vision of capitalism, to which the version of democracy they espouse is directly related. As we saw, O'Donnell and Schmitter urge the adoption of narrowly political democracy, excluding social and economic initiatives under the heading of 'socialization' and describing it as a 'persistent (if remote) goal' (1986: 12). They tie the fortunes and character of political democracy throughout to its ability to meet the interests of the bourgeoisie. Contradicting their insistence elsewhere that 'structural' determinants are of limited significance in a context of uncertainty, they consider 'one class condition which does seem unavoidable for the viability of the transition' to be that the whole or important segments of the bourgeoisie regard the authoritarian regime as dispensable, 'either because it has laid the foundations for further capitalist development or because it has demonstrated its incompetence for doing so' (27). In the same spirit, they regard as indispensable features of the process that 'the property rights of the bourgeoisie are inviolable', that 'to the extent that the armed forces serve as the prime protector of the rights and privileges covered by the first restriction, their institutional existence, assets and hierarchy cannot be eliminated or even seriously threatened', and that 'the only realistic alternative for the Left seems to be to accept the above restrictions and to hope somehow in the future more attractive opportunities will open up' (69). In case the newly enfranchised populations of the developing world should be unimpressed by this logic, the further suggest that in the transition 'parties of the Right-Center and Right must be "helped" to do well, and parties of the Left-Center and Left should not win by an overwhelming majority' (62), while in general parties should be seen as 'not only, or not so much, agents of mobilization as instruments of social and political control' (58). By this point, the carefully maintained separation of procedural agreement and substantive content in the process of transition has collapsed. In fact the procedural logic flows directly from the substantive goal of securing of political conditions for capitalist development. In other words, 'uncertainty' operates only within limits which are defined by the presumed requirements for capitalist accumulation, and it is the analysis of those presumed requirements which shapes the injunctions with regard to the transition, and the character of political institutions.
The first step, therefore, towards a critique of the literature on political development and a better understanding of the processes which it seeks to analyse is to accept at the outset that the object of its enquiry is indeed the relationship between capitalism and democracy in the modern world. It is precisely because current accounts of the transition are underpinned by a particular understanding of the relationship between capitalism and democracy, and propose a set of institutions which are intended to support capitalism on a global scale, that their authors are impelled either to deny that their work is informed by any theory at all (as O'Donnell and Schmitter have done) or to insist (as Diamond, Linz and Lipset do) that the very concept of capitalism is 'so vague as to be almost meaningless'. Following the guidelines presciently laid down by Marx when bourgeois social science was in its infancy, they introduce their argument in abstract and general terms, then smuggle in specific features of capitalist society in the precise form of 'inviolable natural laws'. Private property and capitalism are assumed, and their logic informs the whole from start to finish. As a result, the line drawn between structure and choice silently treats the basic requirements of capitalist reproduction as structural parameters, and designates the limited space within them as the realm of choice. Within this framework, the role of leaders is to persuade the majority that the limits thus designated should be observed, and it is the ability to do so which qualifies as 'leadership'. Thus a framework which affects merely to identify the scope for choice in fact serves to limit it in a highly particular way. The literature on democratization is highly ideological, and fundamentally bourgeois in character. In being so, it echoes precisely the character of the revisionist theory of liberal democracy from which it springs.
Because this literature is more concerned to deliver an ideological message than to clarify the relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy, or more generally between political economy and types of political regime, it does more to obscure than to illuminate the dynamics of the political processes to which it directs its attention. In general, as examples from the two collections reviewed in the previous chapter will show, this is because too little attention is paid to the conjunctural circumstances of particular transitions, with the result that differences between them are not noted, and their individual dynamics are not understood.
This is the case with O'Donnell and Schmitter's treatment of pacted transitions to democracy, in which a composite procedural model is built from the cases of Colombia and Venezuela in the 1950s, Spain in the 1970s, and a number of Latin American cases in the 1980s. The first invoke Otto Kirkheimer's suggestion that pacts should be seen as involving adjustments to 'standing contradictions between social content and political form', and note his discussion of 'modern, "post-liberal" pacts based on complex exchanges between public and private groups, mutually guaranteeing their collective right to participate in decision-making and their respective privilege to represent and secure vital interests' (37). They suggest that at a later stage in the process there may be 'a change in the nature of the compromises and in the identity of the actors entering into them, as new contradictions between social content and political form emerge' (40). Here parties enter the process, and the pact 'involves a package deal among the leaders of a spectrum of electorally competitive parties to (1) limit the agenda of political choice, (2) share proportionately in the distribution of benefits, and (3) restrict the participation of outsiders in decision-making' (41). Finally, at some point a social and economic pact may be negotiated to conclude the process, in order to 'reassure the bourgeoisie that its property rights will not be jeopardized for the foreseeable future, and to satisfy workers and various salaried groups that their demands for compensation and social justice will eventually be met' (47).
This composite picture, described as a single sequence of 'moments' in the pacted transition, obliterates the organic connections between the various elements of the cases from which it is drawn, conceals their dynamics, and gives them a misleading appearance of commonality. It draws on the 'duopoly' of political positions and patronage agreed in specific circumstances in Colombia and Venezuela in the 1950s, and the 'corporatist' pacts of continental Europe in the 1960s, without regard for the circumstances, or the content of the bargains struck. In so doing, it ascribes to socio-economic pact-making in the wake of the withdrawal of authoritarian regimes a content which is arguably appropriate for the cases of Colombia, Venezuela and Spain, which occurred in quite different national and global conjunctures, but is quite false for contemporary Latin America.
O'Donnell and Schmitter abstract away from the conjuncture of transition in two ways. First, they fail to locate the transitions in a 'world-historical' context. In Spain and Portugal authoritarian regimes which were remnants of the upheavals of the post-depression period in Europe were replaced by new democracies which joined the post-war institutional and economic order symbolized by the European Community, at a time when economic boom and social progress appeared possible as a result. In Latin America, authoritarian regimes which had appeared in response to social upheavals prompted by 1960s developmentalism were replaced by democratic regimes offering a much narrower agenda, in a very different global context. Second, they comment in passing that for a transition to proceed the bourgeoisie must believe that the outgoing regime is dispensable 'either because it has laid the foundations for further capitalist development or because it has demonstrated its incompetence for doing so' (27), but they fail to incorporate this crucial contrast systematically into their analysis. In other words, they focus neither on the global conjuncture, nor upon the significance of the regime in terms of the process of capitalist accumulation.
Diamond, Linz and Lipset's treatment of the prospects for democracy in Latin America similarly abstracts away from the organic connections between society, economy, and political forms in the region, most notably in the grotesque discrepancy between the account they give of the Latin American past, and the aspirations they voice for its future. They provide a relentless documentation of the past failure across the region to produce states and executives capable of maintaining order and the rule of law; strong and independent political parties free from dependence on prominent personalities, and capable of cross-cutting and softening class cleavages; public policies capable of securing steady and broadly distributed growth, the economic and political inclusion of majorities, and broad and deep legitimacy; and strong, autonomous popular organizations and associational life. They then vacuously appeal to the 'capacity, courage, judgement and values of domestic actors' and 'effective political leadership and action' (Diamond, Linz and Lipset 1989b: 51) to remedy the situation, while urging patience and a judicious lowering of expectations on their citizens. This approach enables them to air their normative and ideological preferences, but is otherwise analytically feeble, precisely because of its refusal to explore the organic connections between the political economy of the region and the political forms they find so defective. Those deficiencies require explanation in terms of the inability of the bourgeoisie in the region to exercise hegemony through democratic means after the collapse of export-led regimes in 1930, and resulting patterns not only of widespread intervention, but also of adaptation of forms of personalism, populism and clientelism as elements of 'second-best' strategies of accumulation and legitimation. Such an analysis would of course reveal quite different connections, dynamics and trajectories from case to case, and it would need to be complemented by similar analyses of new configurations in the period of regional transition to democracy. In their absence, resort to the call for patience and responsible leadership is simply a gesture, and an index of prior ideological conviction. More generally, the account given of the economic, social and political circumstances of Latin America makes it apparent that the preference expressed by Diamond, Linz and Lipset for the introduction of political democracy without immediate social or economic reform is a contradiction in terms, precisely because social dependency and economic inequality are shown conclusively to make the enjoyment of the standard rights associated with political democracy impossible.
For Diamond, Linz and Lipset, as for O'Donnell and Schmitter, then, the failure to address the links between capitalism and transition to democracy leads to a doctrinal conclusion which meets the ideological needs of the moment precisely because it abstracts away from the structural dynamics and conjunctural context of the cases in question. In each case, the continued propagation of an ideologically driven doctrine for political development depends upon a refusal either to acknowledge the assumptions on which it is built, or to explore the connections which might lead to an appreciation of the real dynamics of the interaction of political economy, institutions, and choice from case to case.
Conclusion
It is possible to describe the capitalist system in the 1990s, for the first time in world history, as genuinely global in the scale. After a long period in which military and economic competition seemed intertwined, competition for military supremacy has given away to what Stopford and Strange (1991) describe as competition for world market shares. This outcome reflects the culmination of a process which has been under way since the since early in the last century, and was of course memorably anticipated by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto nearly 150 years ago (see Box 9.1).
Box 9.1 Marx and Engels on global capitalism
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists it is drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find a new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old and local national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations ...
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Source: Marx and Engels 1973: 71.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists it is drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find a new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old and local national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations ...
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Source: Marx and Engels 1973: 71.
As a holistic Marxist perspective suggests, this competition is driven more by the dynamics of the system as a whole than by particular state or non-state actors, however powerful they may appear to be. At a national level, each state in the system seeks to protect, improve or change its place through the adoption of a set of policies (a 'project') which reflects its place within and orientation toward the system as a whole. Such projects will reflect an internal balance of power between various interests, not necessarily sympathetic to the imperatives of global capitalist competition, and may be secured by quite different political arrangements from case to case. They may seek to internalize, advance or resist them, or even pursue strategies based on an altogether different logic, such as territorial expansion through military power. They will do so however, in the context of the global dominance of the imperatives of competitive capitals. It is curious, to say the least, that orthodox political science, as reflected in the political development literature of today, should at one and the same time be so sure of the global triumph of capitalism, and so reluctant to analyse its character and it' political implications.
If comparative political science is to be more than mere ideology, it must endeavour once again to seek a theoretical understanding of its subject-matter. As suggested above, this demands an examination of the connections between global and the national political economy and the form of political regimes around the world, or in concrete terms an examination of the relationship between capitalism and democracy. This is not to say, of course, that forms of political regimes are reducible to their social and economic underpinnings, or that 'democracy as a system of government' can simply be equated with 'capitalism as a system of production and exchange'. It is to argue, against Diamond, Linz and Lipset in this case, that liberal democracy cannot be understood without a concurrent analysis of capitalism.
Such an undertaking is not as difficult as it might appear. One of the most striking conclusions to be derived from the analysis of the literature on political development offered here is that it shares many of the perspectives central to a Marxist analysis of the relationship between capitalism and democracy. As we have seen, theories and doctrines of political development alike attach primary importance to the relative autonomy of the state and to bourgeois hegemony, and approach issues of public policy with a clear awareness of the significance of accumulation and legitimation for its reproduction over time. In other words, orthodox comparative political science already has to hand, perhaps to its own surprise, the basic elements for an analysis of the structural imperatives of capitalism and their implications for liberal democracy.
Secondly, as the reference to Stopford and Strange reminds us, the newly defined field of international political economy is capable of providing the materials for an understanding of the conjunctural character of global capitalist competition and its implications for politics. There is, then, no reason to believe that bourgeois social science cannot turn, if it wishes to do so, from peddling ideology to providing explanation.
The analysis provided over the preceding chapters should make it clear that there is a great deal to be gained in terms of understanding from the adoption of an approach to comparative politics rooted in political economy. At the same time, there is a price to pay. It will be necessary to acknowledge the justice of Marx's critique of 'bourgeois social science', amply borne out in these pages, and the living power of his analysis of the dynamics of the modern world, rooted in the capitalist system of production and exchange. Without such an acknowledgement, the future of comparative political science, at least as represented by the literature on political development, is bleak. Perhaps it is not too much to hope, however, that the theorists of political development today will stop trying to change the world, and try instead to understand it.