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UW-Madison SOC 621 - The Democratic Capitalist State and Social Reproduction

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Lecture 22. Sociology 621 The State & the working Class: The Democratic Capitalist State and Social Reproduction November 30, 2011 We have discussed general problem of the debates over the class character of the state and explored claims that the state in capitalist societies has a distinctively bourgeois character, a form that systematically produces class effects. In this lecture we will look much more closely at one particular type of capitalist state, capitalist democracy, and explore in more detail its actual mechanisms of operation, the ways in which it structures and restructures class struggle. 1. The Puzzle Marx, in a famous passage from Class Struggles in France portrayed the linkage of democracy and capitalism as an intensely contradictory couplet: The comprehensive contradiction of this constitution, however, consists in the following: the classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts into the possession of political power through universal suffrage. And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power. It forces the political rule of the bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile classes to victory and jeopardise the very foundations of bourgeois society. (Marx/Engels, Selected Works in Three Volumes, vol.I, Moscow, pp.235-6) Lenin, writing some sixty years later in The State and Revolution, claimed that parliamentary democracy was the “best possible shell” for the perpetuation of bourgeois rule. Can these two positions be reconciled? Do they reflect distinct theoretical stances towards the problem of “bourgeois democracy” or do they simply reflect the changing conditions of bourgeois rule from the mid-19th century to the twentieth century? How can capitalism be effectively reproduced when the vast majority of the electorate is propertyless and elects the political leadership? This is the puzzle we will address in this section. These issues are hardly simply questions of textual interpretation: the debate over the class character of parliamentary democracy remains at the very heart of both theoretical and political debates over the state on the left today. Can the state be “used” by different classes in the pursuit of their class interests, or does the state have a monolithic class character? Does the parliamentary form of the capitalist state contain within itself contradictory principles? Particularly since the “problem of democracy” has become such a central political concern given the history of “actually existing socialist” states, the answers to such questions are of fundamental importance.Lecture 22. The State and the Working Class 2 2. Electoral Politics: Przeworski’s Analysis Przeworski’s work offers a radical alternative to conventional pluralist approaches to studying voting (see the appendix to these notes for a discussion directly of pluralist approaches). The central point to get out of Przeworski is that he insists that a theory of voting cannot be reduced to a theory of voters. To understand voting one must understand the logic/dynamics of the social structures within which this activity takes place. A theory of voting, therefore, is a theory of the ways in which social structures shape the possible actions of parties and individuals and how those actions in turn restructure the constraints in subsequent elections. 2.1 The Model: The basic model of the analysis is thus something like this: Party strategies directly mediate the process by which individual, micro-processes take place. Parties organize voters, and the extent to which workers will vote like workers depends to a large extent on the choices of parties, on whether they will attempt to mobilize workers as workers into politics. Those party strategies, of course, do not take place in a void, and are themselves shaped by the class structure faced by the party on the one hand, and by the outcomes of previous elections (which depends in part on the strategies of other parties on the other. limitsmediatesselectsselectsCLASS STRUCTURESTRATEGIES OFPOLITICAL PARTIESINDIVIDUAL VOTERS'ATTRIBUTESVOTING PATTERNSLecture 22. The State and the Working Class 3 [Drop from lecture Alternative explanations for party strategies] Let us see more precisely how Przeworski develops this analysis. He begins by asking a fairly straightforward question, one that might well be asked by any social scientist: why do socialists invariably end up reproducing capitalism? Why do parties formally dedicated to the advancement of the interests of the working class into the workings of a capitalist system of domination? Two solutions to this question are dismissed from the outset: 1) simple economistic explanations which see cooptation/integration as the result of the inexorable march of economic development. 2) voluntaristic explanations which explain the sell out of socialist parties by the “misleadership” of party elites. Both of these “explanations” are inadequate because they fail to provide any sustained account of the actual mechanisms which produce integration. In the misleadership arguments there is no explanation of why leaders become misleaders. Either one has to adopt, by default a Michelsian iron law of oligraphy argument, or it is necessary to posit explicitly the structural conditions which produce a certain form of leadership. The economistic argument equally fails by failing to show how economic development is translated into structured options for parties, options which are embodied in strategies which have the effects of integration. 3) The correct strategy for dealing with this question is to try to sort out the complex economic-political-ideological conditions under which this sort of integration can take place: Economic conditions: Exploitation is the necessary condition for realising any short run goals within a capitalist society. What is good for GM is good for America (and the working class) in the specific sense tht workers suffer from bankruptcies and dislocations given the continuedexistence of capitalism. Political conditions: Bourgeois democracy provides a mechanism for redistribution of the surplus already extracted: workers as workers have no claim on th surplus, but as citizens there is a social mechanism (electoral parliamentary


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UW-Madison SOC 621 - The Democratic Capitalist State and Social Reproduction

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