The Ruling Class Rules by Subordinating Government to the Sway of Money

Abstract

One of the great myths of our time is that capitalism and democracy go together like bread and butter, bratwurst und sauerkraut, arroz y frijoles. From one historical situation to another, the norm of political rule in capitalist society is an authoritarian form of the state, most often posed as the ultimate in democracy, too often taking the form of military dictatorship. America is a plutocracy, not an absolute authoritarianism, but a state of formal democracy with withering substance, moving now to what I term an authoritarian State of National Insecurity. This is so because the system of capitalism requires a political institution that manages its structural prerequisites and ensures its reproduction (more on this in analysis of the interrelationship of class, patriarchy, and sexism in Chap. 7). The repressive apparatus of the state is central to governance of the whole. This derives from the social relation of capital’s appropriation of value in the form of profit which, in turn, is transferred for enforcement from the purely economic sphere to the relations of force embodied in the state. The system of law codifies the norms of property and commodity relations of society. The centrality of the agencies of intelligence, police, and military forces can vary in their specific historical expression. The Spanish Republicans lost the civil water to the Franco fascists. The German socialists, communists, and unionists were annilated by Hitler’s fascist forces. Stalin’s dictatorship created a highly privileged elite of party bureaucrats and the enterprise managerial class that eventually decided that their wealth and privileges would be even more enhanced by a reversion to capitalism. This newly formed capitalist class in Russia and the various former socialist Republics today are only mildly less authoritarian than the Soviet regime that collapsed 25 years ago in 1991. In the 1960s to the 1980s, various Latin American countries responded to the class forces demanding fundamental changes with fierce military dictatorship. The regimes in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile were the worst since European fascisms. In Central America, the death squads and U.S. interventions prevailed in upholding oligarchic rule, finally giving way to less repression and more formal democracy in the 2000s. Later, I explore to what extent the United States today approximates a fascist state.