Capitalists Are Political Second Movers

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[Ich beziehe mich in diesem Post auf ein Zitat (siehe unten), dessen Aussagen unterstellen, dass "Kapitalisten" als homogene Klasse mit einheitlichem Willen und aufgrund anspruchsvoller theoretischer Überlegungen ihren politischen Einfluss geltend machen. Angeblich verfolgen sie ganz bewusst eine Strategie, die dazu geführt hat, dass das Wirtschaftswachstum auf einen hohen Verschuldungsgrad seitens der (breiten) arbeitenden Bevölkerung angewiesen ist.

Ich dagegen vertrete die Auffassung, dass die beschriebenen Entwicklungen nicht durch eine Klassen-Politik zu erklären sind, zumal die seit 30 Jahren zu beobachtende paradigmatische Dominanz des Neoliberalismus auch auf breite Unterstützung durch die Linke stößt.]


The problem that I have with the kind of argument presented below is that I find it impossible to reconcile my experience of "capitalists" with people smart and informed enough to conceive and push the suggested agenda. Entrepreneurs are far too "practical" to comprehend that nothing is more practical than a good theory. They are far too much driven by daily concerns and immediate interests to consider sound theoretical arguments at much length, if at all.

Capitalists are inclined to being takers of politics rather than makers of it—except when it comes to mostly short-term operational interests. Or when ideological convictions are concerned. But articles of (political) faith are malleable, ephemeral and replacable, and they are not driven by capitalists as a class—in fact, the monolithic homogeneity of a class is an ideological figment that completely misrepresents the amorphous and heterogeneous variety of entrepreneurs. 

Many of them are decent and honest humans, many of whom being prepared to accept personal costs, so as to advance the ideas they believe in. Ideologically, they tend to be copy cats, like (almost) all of us, and children of their times. If they were not, nonsense like the German Energiewende could not happen (without massive resistance from the capitalist class).

In fact, catastrophic short-termism as manifested by the Third Reich or the EU or the Energiewende are more likely to be supported by capitalists not because they are capable of lobbying from the basis of a soundly reasoned theory of class interest but because they possess a professional flair for assimilation and tend to dexterously accommodate all kinds of exogeneous (political) fads, pursuing their personal advantages within the confines of the fashion's possibilities, rather than seeking to engineer society according to their own blueprint.

(If capitalists are as theoretically astute as the below quote implies, what keeps them from defending "the golden era of capitalism", when wages increased in line with productivity, keeping aggregate demand and profits high and growing? Why should they support finance capital, which is a drag on them, too? After two hundred years of capitalism, do we expect capitalists to be still crude exploiters with no experience in coopting workers by means more sophisticated than the kind of repression and manipulation that makes labour, dumb, docile and complacent?)

Instead, I suspect much that is going wrong in our hemisphere is thanks to rather gratuitous cultural and intellectual developments. Neoliberalism is an accident — not a premeditated design. It happens to the entrepreneurs no less than it befalls the Left, who have adopted it with ardency.

(We may adduce more or less plausible considerations explaining why neoliberalism has come to be culturally dominant with capitalists as well as with the Left during the last 30 years, but I cannot see how any social force has been able to achieve the outcome by virtue of deriving from a unique set of interests a theory and a scheme of action leading to a cultural pattern consistently serving that unique set of interests. That's an old Marxist myth, whose falsehood is direcetly proportional to its emotional appeal.)

Capitalists exhibit a clear preference for a growth strategy that centers on private debt-financed consumption rather than fiscal policy and worker-friendly regulations. The postwar class compromise only came about through massive mobilization of workers and the mounting of immense political and industrial pressure for progressive change. Ever since, capitalists have pushed back hard, putting us in our present malaise. Capitalists prefer a system based on private debt at least partly because:

•  Finance capital can extract higher interest from private debtors than from currency-issuing governments. Any payment of interest by a currency-issuing government is purely at its own discretion, and can be zero (e.g. employing overt monetary financing or zero interest on reserves) if so desired.

• Capitalists prefer it when workers are docile and compliant. Private indebtedness helps to keep them so.

The political opposition to growth induced by government expenditure rather than private consumer debt underscores the need for grassroots efforts capable of pushing government policy in a more desirable direction.

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