Political Order and Political Decay (65 page)

FIGURE 20.
Growth and Social Mobilization

Smith's description of the changing division of labor was one of the central concepts that preoccupied the major social theorists of the nineteenth century. First was Karl Marx, who made the division of labor integral to his own doctrine by transforming it into a theory of social classes.

MARX'S INSIGHT

Marx's framework can be summarized as follows. Out of the old feudal order, the first new social class to be mobilized is the bourgeoisie, townsmen who were regarded contemptuously by the old landowners but who accumulated capital and used new technologies to bring about the Industrial Revolution. This revolution in turn mobilized a second new class, the proletariat, whose surplus labor the bourgeoisie unjustly appropriated. Each of these three classes wanted a different political outcome: the traditional landowning class wanted to preserve the old authoritarian order; the bourgeoisie wanted a liberal (i.e., rule of law) regime protecting their property rights that might or might not include formal electoral democracy (they were always more interested in the rule of law than in democracy); and the proletariat, once it achieved consciousness of itself as a class, wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would in turn socialize the means of production, abolish private property, and redistribute wealth. The working class might support electoral democracy in the form of universal suffrage, but this was a means to the end of control over the means of production, not an end in itself.

One of the most important scholars working in a post-Marxist tradition was Barrington Moore, whose 1966 book
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
has already been noted in connection with Japan (see chapter 23 above). This complex book presented a series of historical case studies, including Britain, Germany, Japan, China, Russia, and India, and tried to explain why democracy emerged in some countries and not in others. He is probably best remembered for his blunt observation: “No bourgeoisie, no democracy.” By this he did not mean that the rise of the bourgeoisie inevitably produced democracy. In Germany, for example, the industrial bourgeoisie allied itself with the autocratic Junker landowning aristocracy in the famous marriage of “iron and rye” that upheld Bismarckian authoritarianism, and later played some role in the rise of Hitler. Rather, Moore argued that democracy could emerge if a rapidly enlarging bourgeoisie succeeded in displacing the older order of landowners and peasants. This happened in England, he noted, as an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in the countryside succeeded in commercializing agriculture, driving peasants off the land, and using the proceeds to fund the Industrial Revolution. This cruel process had the effect of weakening the power of the old landed aristocracy while producing a modern working class.

Moore also paid particular attention to the form of agricultural production in a way that Marx did not. Marx largely ignored the peasantry, assuming that it would be eliminated by capitalist industrialization as it had been in England. However, revolutions broke out in Russia and China, where the vast majority of the population were peasants. Lenin and Mao came to power on the backs of peasants, despite the fact that Marx believed they were a class destined ultimately to disappear. Moore, taking these cases into account, argued that democratization faced special obstacles under conditions of what he called “labor-repressive” agriculture, in which peasants were tied to the land in large, concentrated estates. The result was the survival of an authoritarian landowning class, which in turn spawned worker-peasant revolutionary movements. Between these two extremes, the prospect of a middle-class democracy was poor. We have already seen this scenario play out in several Latin American countries noted above.

Barrington Moore's book has spawned a vast literature that contests many of the points he made, but particularly his assertion that the bourgeoisie or middle classes were critical to the emergence of democracy.
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Without going into the details of the scholarly controversy, it is clear that his hypothesis would have to be modified in certain important ways. For example, the bourgeoisie is far from being a unified group. It includes large industrialists like the Thyssens and Rockefellers as well as small shopkeepers and urban professionals that the Marxists frequently referred to contemptuously as “petty bourgeois.” The interests of these different segments varied according to circumstance; in many cases, important middle-class groups did not invariably support democracy.
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And though the working class could be recruited into radical antidemocratic Communist or agrarian movements, many working-class organizations in fact lined up solidly in support of democratic voting rights and rule of law.

It is important to note that the two components of liberal democracy—liberal rule of law and mass political participation—are separable political goals that initially tended to be favored by different social groups. Thus the middle-class authors of the French Revolution were not, as many historians have pointed out, committed democrats in the sense that they wanted immediate expansion of the franchise to peasants and workers. The Rights of Man were conceived as legal guarantees that would protect the property and personal freedoms of the bourgeoisie, limiting the power of the state but not necessarily empowering the mass of French citizens. Similarly, the Whigs, who forced the constitutional settlement on the English king during the Glorious Revolution in the previous century, were largely wealthy taxpayers that included part of the aristocracy, the gentry, and the upper middle classes. Their ranks were joined in the succeeding two centuries by the growing numbers of commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, as well as by middle-class lawyers, doctors, civil servants, teachers, and other professionals set off from the working classes by their education and property ownership. These groups constituted the base of support for the British Liberal Party during the nineteenth century. The main interest of the Liberals tended to be rule of law much more than democracy—that is, legal protection for private property and individual rights, as well as policies such as free trade, meritocratic civil service reform, and public education that would make possible upward mobility.

Over time, however, the liberal and the democratic agendas began to converge, and democracy became a middle-class goal. Rule of law and democratic accountability are, after all, alternative means of constraining power, and in practice are often mutually supportive. Protection of property rights against arbitrary state predation requires political power, which in turn can be achieved through expansion of the franchise. Similarly, citizens demanding the right to vote can be protected by a rule of law that restricts the government's ability to repress them. The right to vote came to be seen as just another protected legal right. Liberal democracy—a political system embodying both rule of law and universal suffrage—thus evolved into a single package desired by both middle-class groups and a significant part of the working class.

Barrington Moore was not himself a Marxist in the sense of wanting to see the victory of communism around the world. He saw liberal democracy as a desirable outcome while appreciating the powerful social forces that often made it unattainable. In this spirit, the Marxist analytical framework as modified by Moore remains extremely useful as a means of understanding how and why democracy spreads. The key insight is that democracy is desired most strongly by one specific social group in society: the middle class. If we are to understand the likelihood of democracy emerging, we need to evaluate the strength of the middle class relative to other social groups that prefer other forms of government, such as the old landed oligarchy who are inclined to support authoritarian systems, or radicalized groups of peasants or urban poor who are focused on economic redistribution. Modern democracy has a social basis, and if we don't pay attention to it, we will not be able to properly evaluate the prospects of democratic transitions.

We can summarize the major social actors whose relative strength and interactions determine the likelihood that democracy will emerge in a given society. These were the dominant groups that existed in Europe as the continent democratized during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they are also groups that exist in many contemporary developing countries.

1. The middle classes, defined in occupational and educational terms rather than by level of income. They tended to support the liberal part of liberal democracy. That is, they wanted legal rules that protected their rights and particularly their property from predatory government. They may or may not have been supporters of democracy, understood as universal political participation, and they were even more ambivalent about if not overtly opposed to economic redistribution that might affect their own property and income. Middle-class groups were the primary leaders of the democratic transitions that took place in Denmark, Greece, France, Argentina, Portugal, and Spain in the nineteenth century, and were important parts of the coalitions that pressed for full democratization in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Britain in the early twentieth.
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2. The working classes—Marx's famous industrial proletariat—were conversely more interested in the democratic part of liberal democracy, meaning their own right to participate politically. They joined forces with middle-class groups to press for full expansion of the franchise in Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain.
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However, they were more interested in economic redistribution than the middle classes and often more focused on redistribution than liberal guarantees of property rights. For this reason significant parts of the working class around the world were willing to support nondemocratic anarchosyndicalist parties in the nineteenth century (as in Southern Europe or much of Latin America), or Communist or Fascist parties in the twentieth, parties that promised redistribution at the expense of liberal individual rights.

3. Large landowners, and particularly those making use of repressive labor (slavery, serfdom, or other nonmarket conditions of labor), have almost everywhere been authoritarian opponents of democracy. One of the most enduring of Barrington Moore's insights is the need to break the power of this particular social group by one means or another before full democracy can flourish.
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4. The peasantry had complicated and sometimes inconsistent political aspirations. In many societies they were an extremely conservative group, embracing traditional social values and willing to live in subordinate positions as clients of the landowning class. One of the earliest counterrevolutionary movements was the peasant uprising of the Vendée in 1793 that opposed the revolutionary government in Paris. As we saw in the Greek and Italian cases, they could be mobilized by conservative parties using clientelistic methods. Under the right circumstances, however, they could be radicalized to join forces with the working classes as supporters of revolution. They became the foot soldiers of the Bolshevik, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions.

These four groups constituted the major social actors whose interactions determined the course of political development and democratic transition in the nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period, virtually all of the world's most advanced countries were dominated by the last two of these groups, a landowning oligarchy and the peasantry. Increasing industrialization induced peasants to leave the countryside and enter the working class, and by the beginning of the twentieth century they were the largest social group. Under the impact of expanding trade, the number of middle-class individuals began to swell, first in Britain and the United States, then in France and Belgium, and by the late nineteenth century in Germany, Japan, and other “late developers.” This then set the stage for the major social and political confrontations of the early twentieth century.

THE CENTRALITY OF POLITICAL PARTIES

Useful as it is, one of the weaknesses of Marx's analytical framework is his use of “class” as a key determining variable. Marx sometimes talks as if social classes—the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, feudalists—were clearly defined political actors capable of purposive rational decision making. In reality, social classes are intellectual abstractions, useful analytically but incapable of producing political action unless they are embodied in specific organizations. Newly mobilized social groups can participate politically in a wide variety of ways: through strikes and demonstrations, by use of the media, or today, through channels like Facebook and Twitter. Citizens can organize civil society groups to press for particular causes, or for mutual support. But if participation is to be enduring, it needs to be institutionalized, which for the past two centuries has meant the formation of political parties.

Thus the four groups listed above did not spring into the world as cohesive political actors like Athena from the head of Zeus. They had to be politically mobilized and represented by political parties. It is for this reason that political parties have been considered necessary to the success of any democracy, despite the fact that they were unanticipated by many early democratic theorists. Conservative parties like the Tory Party in Britain or the German Imperial Party started out as elite political factions that only later were forced to organize themselves as mass parties that could contest elections. The middle classes were represented by various liberal parties, like the Liberals in Britain or the Progress Party, the Left Liberals, or the National Liberals in Germany. The working class was mobilized under the banner of Socialist parties like the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party, or, by the early twentieth century, the various Communist parties that had begun to appear on the fringes of the political landscape in virtually all industrializing societies. The peasants were the least well-organized social group. In Britain, the United States, Denmark, and Sweden, they had largely disappeared by the late nineteenth century because they had been converted into independent family farmers, or else simply driven off the land. In Greece and Italy, peasants were actually represented by conservative parties that used patronage to control them; in Bulgaria, they succeeded in forming their own party.