period can describe them as noncapitalist. Indeed, Germany’s remarkable performance during the 1930s, when much of the world was down and out, made fascism very appealing to many at the time, including a heck of a lot of capitalists—and, it must be said, quite a few workers too.23 Moreover, one cannot attribute the failures of fascism to its incommensurability with capitalism, as if it were a contradictory system never meant to be. Fascist Germany was a capitalist economic growth machine—cheerfully endorsed by both German capital and much of German labour—that was crushed, thankfully, by the war. However hateful the regime was, there is no evidence that fascist capitalism itself was doomed to failure on its own. Indeed, some have made the compelling argument that fascism helped save German, Italian, and Spanish capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s, by overcoming capital’s resistance to full employment, thus providing a “political” solution to a nominally “economic” collapse.24 When fascism fell, at least in Germany and Italy, it was not due to some flaw in its “variety” of capitalism; it was fascist leaders’ hubris, Allied bombing, and internal resistance that killed it. Indeed, Generalísimo Francisco Franco, whose victory over the Spanish Republicans in 1939 was partially funded by Texaco and other capitalist firms, peacefully “retired” from almost four decades of autocratic brutal-tyranny-in-capitalism in 1973, bequeathing Spain a degenerate constitutional monarchy and decades of political turmoil.
Add to this the unfolding history of developing-world dictatorships propped up by the US and western Europe over the years—none of which are easily classified as noncapitalist—and any claim that capitalism needs democracy is on shaky ground. It may be that liberal democracy needs capitalism, but it is definitely not the other way around. In fact, whatever anticapitalism’s prospects, the future of anything like democracy will depend very much on which of the terms dominates the capitalism-democracy pairing. Even if in the short term it seems democracy is tied to capitalism, there is clearly no necessary mutual dependence between the two. What is certain is that we can no longer leave democracy to the capitalists (see Chapter 8).
But that does not mean it is merely accidental that the two are so often paired. For Ingham, the origins of democracy lie in the political contradictions generated by the capitalist mode of production. The ideological fundamentals of liberal democracy—“universal” human rights, individual liberties, procedural consistency—were the same as those put forward by the proto-capitalist bourgeoisie in their effort to gain some freedom from the yoke of the state. When these classically “liberal” ideas became culturally dominant, they unsurprisingly trickled down from the elites to the workers and other noncapitalists, who mobilized those ideological tools in their own interests.
This is partly the story of how liberalism became hegemonic, and its plausibility depends on workers having at least some power to realize their interests. This means, despite many “radical” critiques, that the state is not simply a crude instrument of capitalist rule.25 For the power of liberalism to work as this account suggests, capital cannot entirely dominate and coordinate the state. The exercise of capitalist hegemony via the state must have some degree of popular legitimacy; the state must also hear the workers and the rest of the population. This would appear to be a reasonable characterization of the history of many states in Europe and the Americas where democracy appeared.
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