feel as though they were “there first” (and indeed, it was British imperialism that created many of the states in the Middle East).
In light of the history of these logics of capitalist power, Ingham makes the crucial point that it was precisely the territorial competition between states (in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, when the modern state system started taking shape) that led to the adoption of national debt as a way to finance military ventures for territorial conquest. Since the debt was financed by the emerging and newly powerful bourgeoisie—the first real capitalists, who increasingly had the money the state needed—this arrangement gave both the state and (what we would now call) capital an interest in each other’s long-term welfare. The state needed a healthy bourgeoisie to lend it money, and the bourgeoisie needed a healthy state to generate profits on its investment in government debt, in access to new resources and markets, and in production (which requires the social peace the state’s coercive power helps ensure).
This development is the basis for Ingham’s most important argument: that this interdependence of the state and its capitalist class is the historical source of the “common sense” understanding of the two as relatively autonomous spheres of social life. Since both the state and capital depended on the welfare of the other, they agreed to leave each other to their respective spheres. If capitalists demanded “freedom”—i.e., laissez-faire economic arrangements—and had the money the state needed to finance its war and imperial conquest, then it made sense for the state to back off. And in return, if the state provided capital with protection of its property rights and essential infrastructure for commerce (like roads), then it made sense to let the state do its thing.
In this relationship, the state (the realm of formal institutional “Politics,” with a capital “P”) came to be understood as providing the social container for the realm of activities we now call “the economy.” By the mid-seventeenth century, at least among the European bourgeoisie, “Politics” and “the economy” were no longer understood as one set of phenomena associated with the functioning of the national collective, but as two distinct realms of collective life. It is a basic argument, for instance, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, an occasionally notorious, oft-misunderstood, and enormously influential tract published in England in 1651. Although what Hobbes was “really” trying to say is still debated, there is general consensus that one of his key claims is that a self-sufficient “civil society” (i.e., the private economy) can thrive of its own accord only where a powerful state guarantees the social order.
Whatever its historical basis, the idea that the Politics-economy separation is “natural” must be rejected. Indeed, as the briefest critical glance at everyday life suggests, it is a myth (albeit a very powerful one), and any common sense it has today is a historical product of liberal capitalism. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about it. Even granting the fantastical notion that the state is the sole realm of politics (I suppose it is the sole realm of “Politics”), the claim that the state and the economy do not constitute and determine each other was blatantly disproven by the world in Hobbes’ time, just as it is disproven today.
But we talk about “the economy” in contemporary capitalism as if it were an independent realm, unaffected, or at least potentially unaffected, by the state and social life more generally, a total and complete impossibility. Yet, precisely because this is how the system is widely perceived, it is crucial to consider explicitly the work these ideas do. Ingham is very good on this. He says there are three main ways the state interacts with “the economy,” and, although they are not so easily separable, the distinctions are useful. They are:
1. State provision/production of social peace;
2. State maintenance of capitalist social relations (often via “liberal democracy”); and
3. Direct and indirect state participation in the economy.
Social peace is both a precondition and a goal of modern capitalist hegemony, and the state is a crucial—but not the only—means by which social peace is maintained. This is not to say, however, that capitalism can only develop in a “peaceful” context. Nor is it to say that the coercive power in capitalism sticks happily to its own “proper” realms of social relations, like policing or the justice system, leaving markets and their participants to “peacefully” pursue their interests. There are times, for example, when capitalist markets—which are supposed to be purely “consensual”—can operate in a context of more coercion and less consensus, and forms of coercive power can certainly move into “spheres” of social life where in theory they do not belong—markets in Mafia protection are a good example. Yet, while capitalism can sometimes work in such contexts, they are not indicative of the capitalist state’s relation to “the economy.” Mafia hits in Moscow and Russian oligarchs’ strong-arm expropriation of public wealth via terror and theft is not really hegemony in any meaningful Gramscian sense, and it tells us little about the role of the state.
Successful hegemonic projects necessitate both coercive capacity on the part of the governors and consent on the part of the governed. In other words, the state and the social relations it protects must be granted, at least by a significant part of the population, sufficient legitimacy. Capitalism requires legitimacy. What is not so clear, however, is the means through which it acquires legitimacy: are we fooled into acquiescing to capitalism by cultural institutions like the church, or by transactions that cheat us in ways we don’t understand? Are we “bought off” by the welfare state, basic amenities, and the possibility of upward mobility? Is capitalism the “best possible” or “least bad” system, thus meriting our reasoned endorsement? Furthermore, to what extent does the state participate in the legitimation process? If we are dupes, is it the state that dupes us? Capitalists? Both? If we are bought off, surely the state is important, but in whose interest is it acting? Is it extracting from capitalists in the interests of workers? Or is it appeasing workers in the interests of capitalists? There is, of course, no one universal answer to these questions.
It seems certain that much of modern capitalism’s legitimacy derives from its supposed mutually interdependent relationship with liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is focused on individual rights, freedom of exchange, and procedural consistency (i.e., the rules of the game apply to all members of the polity, including those who exercise state power). It is commonly assumed that liberal democratic states are the optimal means through which to determine, and enforce, the rules of the capitalist game. The provision and protection of property rights is again a great example—without it, capitalist exchange would be impossible. Who would buy something if they could not be sure that after the transaction they will own it? Who would buy something if they could not be sure the seller had the right to sell it? Because liberal democracy did not exist prior to capitalism, many have claimed that the two co-evolved and are necessarily interdependent. According to capitalist reason, it is obvious that you can’t have democracy without capitalism, and you can’t have capitalism without democracy.
This common sense is not entirely disconnected from the real world, but it is based on selective memory and a naïve overconfidence in our ability to know the future. Consider the following: even if it were true that capitalism and democracy have always gone together (and it is definitively not true), this would in no way justify the claim that they will go together until the end of time. Transhistorical claims originating in particular historical modes of production have never proven true, and there is no reason to expect end-of-history claims about the mutualism of capitalism and democracy are any more correct than previous prophecies.
More importantly, there is an overwhelmingly obvious rebuke to the claim that democracy and capitalism are mutually necessary: the contemporary Chinese political economy. Many analyzes of the Chinese experience, from all sides of the political spectrum, describe present-day China as “authoritarian capitalism.”21 If China is capitalist—and not only is it arguably capitalist, but as Slavoj Žižek loves to point out, it appears to be better at capitalism than anyone else—then the inevitability of the democracy-capitalism marriage clearly does
