Capitalism doesn’t make it particularly difficult for its critics: the market liberalizations of the 1980s resulted in tax-financed state liability for banks that had gambled away. The ideology of open markets, supposedly self-regulating, led to Germany’s energy dependence on a revisionist and imperialist ruler in the Kremlin.
The system’s dependence on growth, the culture of ever more, ever larger, ever faster, is accelerating climate change and possibly endangering the very foundations of our existence. And last but not least, capitalism promotes the inequality of societies to such an extent that it is easy for those on the fringes of the political spectrum to use populist slogans to capture the “left behind” – and to destabilize the political systems from within.
So much for the quick and common (pre)judgments about our market economy system. The zeitgeist is undoubtedly anti-capitalist. And the two US philosophers Nancy Fraser and Michael Sandel can also be sure of attention with their capitalism-critical approach – and a corresponding sale of their books.
“The uneasiness in democracy. What the unbridled markets have made of our society” – is the title of Sandel’s work.
It is a reckoning with “financial capitalism”. Sandel, who also inspired Chancellor Olaf Scholz, provides a well-reflected, readable analysis of the weaknesses of US democracy.
Class struggle sound
His New York colleague Fraser’s interest in knowledge is also primarily focused on the grievances of the largest economy. But the lurid title “The omnivore. How capitalism devours its own foundations” shows: Fraser wants to provoke. The sound is class-struggle, sometimes polemical.
Sandel takes a more delicate approach. He also sees the foundations of our social coexistence at risk. “Capitalism and democracy have long lived in a strained coexistence,” he writes. Capitalism strives to “organize productive activity for private gain”. Democracy, on the other hand, strives to “empower citizens to self-govern. According to the Harvard philosopher, the political economy of democracy was “an attempt from the start to unite these two concepts”.
He considers this attempt a failure. According to Sandel, the guiding principles of economic and social policy were oriented less and less to the “conditions and possibilities of republican participation, and more to economic efficiency concepts”.
Sandel is particularly disappointed by the Democratic US Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In no way would they have broken with the Reagan tradition, but would have intensified the market-believing ideology of the 1980s with its extensive policy of deregulation of the financial markets. And with the bogus argument that this is the only way to create economic growth and distributive justice.
From Sandel’s point of view, that was a myth. And indeed, nothing has thrown capitalism into a crisis of legitimacy like the fact that the losses of irresponsibly speculating banks have been collectivized because otherwise the financial system would have collapsed. Even more: that the system gave the banks the incentive to gamble because they could assume that the state would bail them out. “Too big to fail” – that was a kind of comprehensive insurance in a financial capitalism that had gotten out of control.
Michael J. Sandel: The Discomfort in Democracy
S Fisher
Frankfurt a. May 2023
512 pages
32 euros
The latest bank bailouts in the USA and Switzerland show that this problem, also known as “moral hazard”, has not yet been solved. The possible objection that, then as now, it was not a market decision to save the banks with tax money, but a political one, Sandel does not address. His main concern is to regain the sovereignty of politics over the economy, away from the supposedly rational efficiency thinking towards a politics that is based on an ethically well-founded practical philosophy.
And the philosopher makes no secret of the fact that he sees US President Joe Biden’s change in policy, with his billion-euro investments financed by credit, as a liberation of politics from a dogma determined purely by economic calculation. Only such a policy, which overcomes the reduction of liberalism to market belief, can equally reduce the “discomfort in democracy”. According to Sandel, this uneasiness found its climax in Donald Trump, although his pioneers were Clinton and Obama.
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Fraser, the great American feminist, is far more radical than Sandel. For them there seems to be hardly any evil whose cause cannot be found in capitalism. Fraser names the four most serious: First, capitalism is “closely interlinked with racism”. Secondly, he feeds on “care work”. Means: For its continued existence, capitalism is dependent on the social reproduction taking place outside its circles, such as raising children and caring for them, which it itself constantly puts under pressure, for example through falling real wages.
Third, capitalism burns our limited ecological resources because “its inherent logic compels it to define these resources as part of a non-economic realm and to appropriate them.” And finally, capitalism wears out the “intangible resources of democracy”: It is “dependent on a legitimate state order”, but undermines it because it only allows market forces to apply in the economic sphere.
Borrowing ideas from Marx
More anti-capitalism is not possible – especially since these four “annihilation dynamics” are mutually dependent and mutually reinforcing. Fraser, who sees herself in the tradition of the Frankfurt School around the left-leaning philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (“Dialectic of Enlightenment”), claims to broaden our view of capitalism and “consolidate all the oppressions, contradictions and conflicts of the current situation into a single analytical framework”.
Powerful, emotional and equipped with powerful metaphors, Fraser campaigns against the system that needs to be “tamed”. Whereby capitalism – and here Fraser borrows from Marx – itself provides assistance. Because he carries a “cannibalistic dynamic” in himself, “devours everything, and in the end himself”. Established by humans, it is a gluttony “whose main course we are ourselves”. Self-destruction is part of the “DNA of capitalism”.
Fraser’s tirades are not really convincing: powerful language cannot replace analytical depth and differentiated arguments. When it gets concrete, the author sometimes slips into the absurd – for example where the New Yorker polemicizes against the use of artificial fertilizers.
Nancy Fraser: The Omnivore. How capitalism is devouring its own foundations
Suhrkamp
Berlin 2023
282 pages
20 Euros
For both Fraser and Sandel, both overemphasize the weaknesses of capitalism and largely ignore its strengths: broader prosperity, higher life expectancy, lower child mortality. Or the fact that economic growth in industrialized countries is increasingly being decoupled from the consumption of fossil fuels.
Both underestimate the recent trend toward a powerful, intervening state. The new faith in the state can be seen in Europe and, more recently, in the USA. Everywhere rescue packages and economic stimulus programs in a completely new dimension, everywhere rapidly increasing national debt.
This does not fit with the thesis of the two philosophers that the market is taking over democracy. Market economy and democracy need each other, they are united by the idea of freedom, that the best idea can develop in competition within an open system. Such a system still best guarantees the necessary ability to make corrections and reforms in the long term.
>>Read here: Why there is no end to capitalism
The fact that Western societies’ promises of prosperity and freedom are under suspicion, sometimes even general suspicion, is worrying. Anti-capitalist theses have always been suitable for the masses, but now they are also anti-market economy slogans.
The problem: Neither Sandel nor Fraser name promising alternatives. And what they hide: the market economy is ultimately also an expression of intellectual modesty, i.e. the epistemological insight that nobody knows which is the right, the true way. That too is philosophy.
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