Many people who share the emancipatory aspirations for a more egalitarian, democratic and solidaristic world are nevertheless very skeptical of the strategy of eroding capitalism. At the center of this skepticism is the belief that the character of the state in capitalist societies makes this impossible. The strategy of eroding capitalism combines initiatives within civil society to build emancipatory economic alternatives in the spaces where this is possible, with interventions from the state to expand those spaces in various ways. Thus, while the strategy is not simply state-directed from above, it does require at least partial support from the state. Skeptics naturally ask: if emancipatory forms of economic activities and relations ever grew to the point of threatening the dominance of capitalism, wouldn’t they simply be crushed by the state? And if anticapitalist political forces managed democratically to gain control of the state in order to push forward an anticapitalist agenda, wouldn’t this simply provoke the destruction of democracy itself by pro-capitalist forces? Consider what happened in Chile in 1973 when the democratically elected Allende government pursued a socialist agenda: the government was overthrown in a military coup followed by seventeen years of repressive dictatorship. So, how can eroding capitalism constitute an effective strategy for transcending it, given the class character and coercive power of the state?
To address this question, we have to grapple with some difficult issues in the theory of the state.
The key issue is the extent to which states in capitalist societies are coherent, integrated, effective machines for ensuring the long-term dominance of capitalism.
There is a long tradition in theoretical discussions by critics of capitalism that sees the state in capitalist society as designed to reproduce capitalism. Two interconnected arguments animate this claim: First, the state is controlled by powerful elites deeply linked to the capitalist class. They wield state power broadly to serve the interests of that class and, above all, block any serious challenges to capitalism. Second, the institutional design of the very machinery of the state contributes to reproducing capitalism. The idea here is not simply that the state is used by powerful elites to serve their interests—although, to be sure, that may be true as well—but that the inner structure of the state has built-in biases in favor of the interests of the capitalist class. For this reason, this kind of state is called a capitalist state rather than simply a state in capitalist society. These two arguments reinforce each other: The first argument explains why the people who make decisions in the state are generally hostile to anticapitalist projects; the second argument explains why, even when it happens that political actors with genuine anticapitalist objectives get into positions of power, they are unable to sustainably pursue anticapitalist policies. Together, these arguments imply that the capitalist state cannot serve as a political instrument for maintaining a strategy of eroding the dominance of capitalism.
Here are a few examples that are often cited as features of the capitalist state that contribute to the reproduction of capitalism:
•The capitalist state obtains its revenues from taxing income generated in the capitalist market economy. This means that the state is dependent on a vibrant, healthy, profitable capitalism: without profits, there is no investment; if private investment declines, income and jobs decline; if income and jobs decline, taxes decline. State actions that undermine capitalist profits, therefore, ultimately harm the state itself. Even left-wing political forces, whenever they are in power, must worry about a “good business climate.”
•The mechanisms for the recruitment of powerful state officials—both politicians and bureaucratic officials—systematically favor elites over ordinary citizens. This creates strong biases in favor of preserving inequalities of power and privilege, both because of the specific interests of those who wield political power and because of the ways political elites are embedded in social networks that tie them to capitalist elites. Even if a political party opposed to capitalism wins elections, it will face a bureaucratic structure filled with people hostile to anticapitalism.
•The sanctity of private property rights inscribed in the “rule of law,” combined with the procedural rules that govern courts, insure that capitalist property is strongly protected by the capitalist state.
In the strongest versions of this theory of the capitalist state, these and other structural features of the state insure that its central function is to defend and reproduce capitalism. In weaker versions, these features do not guarantee that the capitalist state will be functional for capitalism—states may do all sorts of stupid things that harm capitalism. Nevertheless, the capitalist character of the state obstructs the possibility of the state engaging systematically in policies that go against capitalism. Sustained anticapitalism is blocked by the nature of the capitalist state even if not everything the state does is optimal for capitalism.
The theory captures an important reality: existing states in capitalist societies have biases that are hardwired into their structure, and these biases broadly serve to support capitalism. But this does not mean that the state, in spite of these structural biases, cannot potentially be used to undermine the dominance of capitalism as well. Two issues are especially important to consider: First, the apparatuses that make up the state are filled with internal contradictions; and second, the functional demands on the state are contradictory. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
A pivotal claim in our discussion of eroding capitalism in Chapter 3 and of democratic socialism as a destination beyond capitalism in Chapter 4 was that the concept of “capitalism” should be treated as an ideal type; actual economic systems are messy combinations of capitalist and noncapitalist relations, and some of these noncapitalist relations may even be anticapitalist. This is why we described capitalism as an economic ecosystem within which capitalism is dominant rather than exclusively present.
The same idea should be applied to the state. The concept of the “capitalist state” is also an ideal type. Actual capitalist states consist of loosely coupled, heterogeneous systems of apparatuses, within which the mechanisms that help reproduce capitalism are dominant. State apparatuses, like economic ones, embody pro-capitalist biases to varying and uneven degrees across time and between places. This variation in the balance of class and other interests embodied in different parts of the state is the result of the specific history of struggles over the state. The trajectory of compromises and concessions, victories and defeats, is thus registered in both the formal design and informal norms within political institutions.
Of particular relevance in the variability in the capitalist character of different state apparatuses is the problem of democracy. The more robustly democratic the forms of decision-making and accountability, the less purely capitalist the class character of a state apparatus. Even ordinary parliamentary democracy has always had a contradictory class character: while it may be true that the rules of the game of electoral democracy have the general effect of constraining and taming class struggles over the state in ways that support capitalist dominance, it is also true that to the extent elections involve real democratic competition, they introduce potential tensions and uncertainties in the class character of legislative bodies. In times of crisis and popular mobilization, those tensions can loosen the limits of possibility for new forms of state initiatives.
Struggles to deepen and revitalize democracy can thus be thought of as potentially diluting—not eliminating, but diluting—the capitalist character of state apparatuses. This is not simply a question of enhancing the democratic processes of ordinary state machinery, but also of the wide variety of commissions and organizations that interface with all modern states. Deepening democracy is also not simply a question of the democratization of centralized national states, but of local and regional state apparatuses as well. Struggles over the democratic quality of the local state may be especially important in terms of thinking about ways in which state initiatives can enlarge the space for noncapitalist economic initiatives.
As mentioned, capitalism is filled with self-destructive tendencies. Familiar examples include:
•Each employer wants to pay employees as little as possible in order to maximize profits, but this then depresses the buying power of consumers in the market, which in turn makes it harder to sell the things capitalists produce.
•If a firm provides good on-the-job training it will have more productive workers, but providing this training is expensive. If some firms in a sector provide this training and others do not, then the firms that provide the training risk having their workers poached by competitors who didn’t have to bear the costs of training. The result is that all firms are hesitant to make extensive on-the-job training investments.
•Financial sectors are prone to speculative “bubbles” in which people borrow money to invest in assets whose price is rising. Investors figure that they can repay the loans easily when they sell the asset because asset prices are going up. As more people borrow money to invest in the asset, this pushes the asset price even higher. Eventually the bubble bursts and the price collapses, which means that many investors default on their loans, which in turn triggers a crisis in the banking sector. The result is periodic serious economic crises that destroy many firms, create great harm to large numbers of people, and increase social instability.
•The inequalities in wealth and income generated by capitalism tend to increase over time; this creates conflicts, especially class conflicts, which can become very costly to contain.
•Firms have strong incentives to displace costs onto others when they can get away with it, the classic example being pollution. Over time, such negative externalities can degrade the environment in ways that are costly for everyone. The climate crisis is the most striking example.
•Capitalist competition among firms generates winners and losers, which cumulatively tends to concentrate power within particular sectors. Such monopoly power enables firms to act in predatory ways, both toward consumers and toward other capitalist firms.
If capitalism were left to its own devices, these and other self-destructive tendencies would undermine the viability of capitalism itself. The idea that the capitalist state serves the function of reproducing capitalism means that the state has the responsibility of providing various kinds of regulations and interventions—steering mechanisms, some call them—to counteract these self-destructive processes.
This turns out to be a difficult task for several reasons: Often the complexity of the problems means that it is far from obvious what sorts of policies are optimal for reproducing capitalism; effective solutions to a given problem may involve going against the interests of particular sectors or groups of capitalists, and their resistance may be sufficient to block functional solutions; the multiplicity of the different conditions for reproducing capitalism means that a solution to some of these destructive tendencies may undermine solutions to others. This last issue may be the most vexing. For example, state policies to reduce social conflicts of various sorts through the development of the welfare state may, over time, require levels of taxation and redistribution that encroach on capital accumulation. This is sometimes referred as the contradiction between the legitimation function of the state (fostering consent and thus reducing conflict) and the accumulation function of the state (creating optimal conditions for profits and capital accumulation). Another example is state policies that support labor unions. Such policies can be functional for capitalism in so far as they help to dampen disruptive class conflict and foster constructive collaboration between managers and workers within firms, but over time strong labor unions can introduce rigidities in employment that make it more difficult for firms to respond to competitive challenges internationally. The complexity and multidimensionality of the functional requirements for reproducing capitalism means that there may never be a stable equilibrium: over time, solutions to some problems only intensify others.
Underlying many of these contradictions in the efforts of the capitalist state to support capitalism is what can be described as temporal inconsistencies between the relatively short-term effects of state actions for supporting capitalism and the long-run dynamic consequences. State actions concerned with supporting dominant economic structures are mainly responses to immediate conditions, challenges and pressures. But responses to these challenges may have quite different long-term effects. There is thus often a disjuncture between effective short-term state actions and the longer-term dynamic ramifications of those actions, which sometimes can become real threats to the existing structures of power. As noted in Chapter 3, this is one way of understanding the erosion of feudalism. The feudal state facilitated merchant capitalism in various ways even though in the long run, the dynamics of merchant capitalism corroded feudal relations. Merchant capitalism helped solve immediate problems for the feudal ruling class, and this is what mattered.
Similarly, in the middle of the twentieth century, the capitalist state facilitated the growth of a vibrant public sector and public regulation of capitalism associated with social democracy. Social democracy helped solve a series of problems within capitalism commonly referred to as “market failures”: insufficient aggregate demand to provide robust markets for capitalist production; destructive volatility in financial markets; inadequate public goods to provide for the stable reproduction of labor; and so on. In helping to solve these problems, social democracy strengthened capitalism—but, crucially, it did so while it expanded the space for various socialist elements in the economic ecosystem: the partial decommodification of labor power through state provision of significant components of workers’ material conditions of life; the increase in working-class social power within capitalist firms and the labor market through favorable labor laws; and the deepening of the administrative capacity of the state to impose effective capital regulation to deal with the most serious negative externalities of investors’ and firms’ behavior in capitalist markets (pollution, product and workplace hazards, predatory market behavior, market volatility and other issues). The short-run, practical solutions embodied principles that had the potential in the long term to weaken capitalism’s dominance. Many capitalists may not have embraced these state initiatives and even felt threatened by them, but the social democratic state did help solve practical problems and therefore was tolerated.
The fact that this array of state actions contributed to the stability of mid-twentieth century capitalism is sometimes taken as an indication that there was nothing noncapitalist about these policies, and certainly that they could not in any way be considered corrosive of capitalism. This is a mistake. It is entirely possible for a form of state intervention to have the immediate effect of solving problems for capitalism, and even strengthening it, and nevertheless set in motion dynamics that have the potential to erode the dominance of capitalism over time. This is why in the United States, the right wing always called the New Deal “creeping socialism.” Indeed, it is precisely the tendency of social democratic initiatives to expand in ways that encroach on capitalism that eventually lead to the attacks on the social democratic state under the banner of neoliberalism. As capitalists and their political allies came increasingly to see the expansive state as creating progressively suboptimal conditions for capital accumulation, they waited for the political opportunity to launch an offensive against the affirmative state.
Neoliberalism may have been fairly successful in dismantling, to varying degrees, the socialist elements within the late twentieth-century capitalist state and the capitalist economy in most capitalist societies, but it certainly has not been able to eliminate the contradictory pressures on the state or the internal contradictions in its political structures. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, these contradictions have become acute, generating a pervasive sense of crisis within both the economy and the state. This in turn opens up the state for new initiatives that solve immediate problems in ways that potentially create spaces for the expansion of noncapitalist alternatives.
Gramsci is famous for saying that we need pessimism of the intellect but optimism of the will. But we also need at least a little optimism of the intellect to sustain the optimism of the will. There are two trends that suggest some grounds for optimism about future possibilities for the kinds of state initiatives that could potentially unleash dynamics of long-term erosion of capitalist dominance.
First, global warming is likely to spell the end of neoliberalism as a specific form of capitalism. Even aside from the issue of mitigating climate change through a conversion to non-carbon emitting energy production, the necessary adaptations to global warming will require a massive expansion of state-provided public goods. The market is simply not going to build sea walls to protect Manhattan. The scale of resources needed for such state interventions could easily reach the levels of the major wars of the twentieth century. Even though capitalist firms will profit enormously from the production of such infrastructural public goods—just as they profit from military production in times of war—substantial tax increases and state planning will be needed for such an expansive role of the state in the provision of environmental public goods. While neoliberalism has been compatible with high levels of military spending and planning, the shift of state intervention toward large-scale environmental infrastructure and regulations is likely to undermine neoliberalism ideologically and politically. If these processes occur within the framework of capitalist democracy—a big “if,” to be sure—then this reinvigoration of the public goods role of the state will open up more political space for a broader array of progressive state actions.
The second trend with which the capitalist state will have to contend in the course of the twenty-first century is the long-term employment effects from the technological changes of the information revolution. Of course, with every wave of technological change there is speculation that the destruction of jobs by the new technology will lead to widespread marginalization and permanent structural unemployment, but in previous waves, economic growth eventually created sufficient jobs in new sectors to overcome deficits in employment. The forms of automation in the digital age, which are now penetrating deep into the service sector, including sectors of professional services, makes it much less likely that future economic growth will provide adequate employment opportunities through the capitalist market. The magnitude of this problem is further intensified by the globalization of capitalist production. As the twenty-first century progresses, these problems will only get worse and will not be solved by the spontaneous operation of market forces. The result will be increasing precariousness and marginalization of a significant portion of the population. Even aside from social justice considerations, this trend is likely to generate social instability and costly conflict.
These two trends taken together pose major new challenges to the capitalist state: the need for a massive increase in the provision of public goods to deal with climate change, and the need for new policies to deal with broad economic dislocation and insecurity caused by technological change, especially automation and artificial intelligence. One possible trajectory into the future, of course, is that the combination of these challenges leads to an accelerated erosion of democracy within capitalist societies. We already observe this tendency in the United States, with the suppression of voting rights for poor and minority citizens, intensified gerrymandering of electoral districts to favor right-wing political forces and the unfettered role of money in elections. Particularly given the possibility of militarism as a response to the global disruptions of climate change, an authoritarian state with only a veneer of democracy is certainly one scenario. But there is another possible trajectory: a revitalization of democracy within which progressive popular mobilizations have greater political influence. This would open up the possibility of producing new forms of state intervention that could underwrite the expansion of more democratic-egalitarian forms of economic activity coexisting alongside capitalism within the hybrid economic ecosystem.
More specifically, consider the following scenario.
The necessity to deal with adaptations to climate change marks the end of neoliberalism and its ideological strictures. The state embarks on the needed large-scale public works projects and also takes a more intrusive role in economic planning around energy production and transportation systems to accelerate the shift from the carbon-based energy system. In this context, the broader range of roles for the state is back on the political agenda, including an expansive understanding of the need for public goods and the state’s responsibility for counteracting increasing marginalization and economic inequality, since full employment through capitalist labor markets seems increasingly implausible.
Two responses by the state to these pressures could significantly increase the democratic socialist elements within the hybrid capitalist economic ecosystem. First, these ideological shifts and political pressures could foster the expansion of state-funded employment in the provision of public goods and services. Wealthy countries can certainly afford such an expansion; the issue is the political willingness to raise taxes for this purpose, not the economic constraints on doing so. Second, the state could take seriously the possibility of more fundamentally changing the connection between livelihoods and jobs through the introduction of UBI, a policy proposal that is already being given increased public discussion in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Unconditional basic income is a possible form of state intervention that responds to the decline of adequate employment opportunities within capitalist markets while also expanding the potential space for social power within the economy. From the point of view of reproducing capitalism, UBI would accomplish three things. First, it would mitigate the worst effects of inequality and poverty generated by marginalization, and thus contribute to social stability. Second, it would underwrite a different model of income-generating work: the self-creation of jobs to generate discretionary income for people. UBI would make a wide range of market-oriented self-employment opportunities attractive to people even if the self-created jobs did not generate a livable income. One can imagine, for example, that more people would be interested in being small farmers and commercial gardeners if they had a UBI to cover their basic costs of living. Such income would also make participation in the “gig economy” more viable for many people. And third, UBI would stabilize the consumer market for capitalist production. As a system of production, automation in capitalist firms inherently faces the problem of not employing enough people in the aggregate to buy the things produced. UBI provides a widely dispersed demand for basic consumption goods. For these reasons, unconditional basic income may become an attractive policy option for capitalist elites, especially in the context of the exhaustion of neoliberalism as an ideology in the face of a rehabilitated activist regulatory state.
If UBI is an attractive solution to problems facing capitalism, how can it also contribute to the erosion of capitalism? A central feature of capitalism is what Marx referred to as the double separation of workers—their simultaneous separation from the means of production and from the means of subsistence. Unconditional basic income reunites workers with the means of subsistence, even though they remain separated from the means of production; it thus directly modifies the basic class relations of capitalism. As discussed in Chapter 4, a tax-financed UBI provided by the state would enable workers to refuse capitalist employment and choose, instead, to engage in all sorts of noncapitalist economic activities, including those constructed through social power—the social and solidarity economy, worker cooperatives, noncommercial performing arts, community activism and much more. Unconditional basic income thus expands the space for sustainable socialist—i.e., socially empowered—economic relations. All of these possibilities may be further enhanced by the same technological developments that have created the problem of marginalization, since IT broadly reduces economies of scale of production.
The combination of a UBI (to facilitate the exit of people from the capitalist sector of the economy), new technologies (to facilitate the development of noncapitalist forms of production) and a congenial local state to provide better infrastructure for these initiatives means that, over time, the sector of the economy organized through social power could develop deeper roots and expand in as yet unforeseen ways.
All of this would occur, it is important to stress, within capitalism, and thus inevitably these noncapitalist forms of production would have to find ways of positively articulating their opposition to the imperatives of capitalism. Many inputs to the noncapitalist sector would be themselves produced by capitalist firms; producers in the noncapitalist sector would purchase a significant part of their consumption from capitalist firms; and the state’s production of public goods would also often involve contracts with capitalist firms. UBI facilitates exit from capitalist relations, but it also in a sense subsidizes precarious work for capitalist corporations, most notably in the gig economy. Even after this new configuration stabilized, the state would still be superintending an economy within which capitalism remained prominent, and almost certainly dominant. But the dominance of capitalism would be reduced insofar as it would impose much weaker constraints on the ways people gain their livelihoods. This opens new possibilities for ongoing struggles to enlarge the scope of social power within the economy.
In Chapter 3, I referred to reforms that have this double character—both strengthening capitalism by solving problems and expanding the possibilities for building emancipatory alternatives—as symbiotic transformations. Often anticapitalists are deeply suspicious of such actions by the state. If UBI ends up subsidizing low-wage jobs in the gig economy, then isn’t this a bad thing? Doesn’t this mean that the reform has been co-opted by capitalism? This, however, is precisely what makes this kind of reform sustainable. A reform that directly undermined capitalism by promoting anticapitalist alternatives without providing any positive benefits for capitalism would be perpetually vulnerable to being dismantled whenever the political strength of progressive forces declined.
Unconditional basic income thus has a paradoxical relationship to capitalism. On one hand, it can help solve a range of real problems within capitalism and contribute to the vitality of capital accumulation, at least in some sectors. On the other hand, it has the potential to help unleash a dynamic that expands the space for democratic-egalitarian interstitial transformations in ways that reduce the dominance of capitalism and point the economic ecosystem on a trajectory beyond capitalism. If, then, a generous UBI can be implemented and defended, it could both erode the dominance of capitalism within the overall economic system and strengthen conditions for capital accumulation within the reduced spaces where capitalism operates.
If the limits of possibility inscribed in the capitalist character of the state are so narrow as to prevent state actions that might facilitate the growth of these kinds of noncapitalist economic processes, then the prospects of eroding capitalism are remote. But if there are significant disjunctures between present problem-solving and future consequences, and if popular social forces mobilize around a political agenda of consolidating alternative economic spaces, then a significant expansion of economic activity embodying democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic values could be possible. And this, in turn, could provide the foundation for a potential trajectory beyond capitalism.
The capitalist state is not well designed for emancipatory social transformation; it is systematically biased to support the dominance of capitalism, both because of privileged access by corporations and the wealthy to state bureaucracy and because of its institutional structure. But it is also not a perfect machine for reproducing capitalism’s dominance. The trick for socialist political forces is to exploit the state’s internal inconsistencies as well as the contradictions it faces in solving the problems that capitalism itself creates; taking this action will expand possibilities for creating democratic, egalitarian, solidaristic economic alternatives. Crucial in this prospective change is the quality of democracy within the capitalist state: the more deeply democratic the capitalist state, the greater the possibility of state policies supporting the conditions for noncapitalist alternatives. Struggles to “democratize democracy”—to use the expression of Portuguese sociologist Boaventura Santos—are thus pivotal to eroding capitalism.
Democratizing democracy requires both reversing the antidemocratic effects of neoliberalism on the state and deepening democracy through institutional innovations.
Neoliberalism has undermined democracy in four principal ways: First, reducing the constraints on the global movement of capital has increased the external pressures on states to be attentive to the interests of capital. Second, deregulating the financial sector has increased the power of finance to constrain state policy. Third, privatizing a range of state services has undermined the effective capacity of the state to democratically govern the quality and character of many public services. And finally, weakening the labor movement has undermined the most important sources of working-class associational power in the political arena, not simply within the labor market. One of the conditions for a more democratic capitalist democracy is to reverse these trends: reintroduce sufficient controls on the global movement of capital to give states more maneuverability over economic priorities; reregulate the financial sector in ways that reduce the intensive financialization of the economy; restore direct state involvement in the provision of privatized public services; and create a more favorable legal environment for labor organizing.
Simply undoing neoliberalism’s damage to democracy, however, is not enough. The era before neoliberalism should not be treated nostalgically as a golden age of robust democracy. Democracy before neoliberalism was constrained and incomplete in all capitalist states. To make the capitalist state a more congenial setting for fostering the democratization of the economy, it is also necessary to deepen democracy wherever possible. Some of the critical factors here include: democratically empowered decentralization, new forms of citizen participation, new institutions for political representation and democratizing electoral rules of the game.
The idea of decentralizing the state has an ambiguous relationship to democratization. One hallmark of neo-liberalism, in fact, has been calls for decentralization, on the grounds that centralized political authority is overly bureaucratic, economically inefficient and often corrupt. Typically, however, neoliberal decentralization is a cover for privatization, marketization and reductions in state spending. Democratically empowered decentralization, in contrast, rests on the idea that for many issues, problem-solving can be more effective when real decision-making power is given to democratic public authorities located closer to the problems. Of particular importance is giving more jurisdiction, autonomy and necessary resources to cities, regions and other decentralized subunits of national states; since meaningful popular participation is also much easier at smaller scales of government, this likewise opens the possibility of vigorous democratic experimentalism with high levels of citizen involvement.
The decentralization of political power is certainly not enough to enhance democracy. Local levels of government can be corrupt and authoritarian, run by political machines organized around patronage. What we need is a combination of deepening democracy within decentralized levels of government, along with giving such units the necessary power and resources to do things.
One innovative institutional design for accomplishing this is participatory budgeting (PB). In a participatory budget, all or part of an organization’s budget is allocated through a process of direct participatory decision-making by the organization’s members. PB can be applied to cities, schools, public housing units or any organization that has at least some control over its own budget allocations. The idea originated in the city of Porto Alegre in the early 1990s and from there has spread around the world.
There are many different institutional designs for PB in cities. In New York City, for example, each city council district is allocated a discretionary budget controlled by the elected city councilmember from that district to be used for various kinds of infrastructure projects, from filling street potholes to improvements in parks. The councilmember can thus have the district’s residents decide how these discretionary funds are to be used. The amounts allocated in council district PBs vary, but they are generally in the $1–2 million range per year. Residents of the district then volunteer for committees to develop project proposals to use the funds. After the city government’s technical staff determines each proposal’s costs, residents in the district then can vote on their preferences for implementing the projects. In the New York City case, teenagers and undocumented immigrants could fully participate in both the project development and voting processes.
Participatory budgeting in one form or another now exists in hundreds of cities around the world. Sometimes the powers of a PB are quite marginal, providing recommendations to the city government but not actually controlling part of the budget. Sometimes a PB process becomes another way for politicians to distribute favors, becoming a new kind of patronage machine rather than an expression of democratic participation. And almost everywhere, the amount of funding directly controlled through participatory budgeting is relatively small. Nevertheless, the institutional principles of participatory budgeting and other forms of direct democracy at the local level have the potential to become a significant way of deepening democracy by enhancing the possibility of empowered popular participation.
Participatory budgeting is only one of a variety of innovative institutional devices that are being experimented with to enhance meaningful democratic participation. Another innovation for deepening democracy involves the random selection of citizens to participate in certain kinds of decision-making bodies. The most familiar example of this is a jury, in which randomly selected citizens decide on the outcome of court proceedings. Random selection has also been used in consultative bodies—sometimes called “mini publics”—in order provide input into the decisions of various kinds of government agencies and departments. A more far-reaching proposal is to replace, within a two-chamber legislative system, one of the elected chambers with a chamber filled through random selection. There are, of course, many details to fine-tune for this to be workable, but the basic idea is that a legislative chamber of randomly selected ordinary citizens would more accurately reflect the demographic composition of the population than is the case in elected legislatures, which are invariably filled by relatively privileged people. A random assembly would be in a better position to deliberate over issues in ways that reflect the spectrum of interests in the society and seek compromises in ways that are less dominated by elite interests.
While novel forms of empowered citizen participation could contribute to a more robustly democratic society, it is almost certainly the case that any viable democratic system will continue to rely heavily on elections to choose a range of political officials. A central problem for democratizing democracy, therefore, revolves around the problem of how to make electoral democracy more robustly democratic.
The specific problems with existing electoral rules vary from place to place. The kind of electoral system used in the United States is especially flawed because of the ways single-member districts are prone to gerrymandering. But every system, even those with reasonable mechanisms of proportional representation, operates in ways that violate democratic values. Above all, there is a failure to insulate the electoral process from the influence of private wealth.
It is not a simple matter in a capitalist economy, particularly one with high levels of wealth and income inequality, to block the private use of wealth to influence politics in general and elections in particular. So long as capitalism remains dominant, it will generate levels of economic inequality that will spill into politics. But there are ways to dampen this effect. The key issue is to ensure the core funding for electoral politics is public rather than private. One way to accomplish this, proposed by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayers in their book Voting with Dollars, is to give every citizen a certain amount of money per year (perhaps in the form of a dedicated debit card)—say, $100—to spend on politics. Any person or political organization accepting funding through such direct citizen disbursements would be prevented from accepting any private money. This would provide an egalitarian distribution of democratic funding as a counterweight to the inequalities in private funding.
If it should come to pass that the democratic processes of the capitalist state were revitalized and deepened, then there would be a significant possibility of using the capitalist state to gradually erode the dominance of capitalism. Still, there is no guarantee whatsoever that such possibilities would be actually realized. Whether or not this happens depends on the capacity to struggle successfully for symbiotic reforms. This, in turn, raises the question: who is going to participate in such struggles? Where is the collective agent capable of sustaining struggles to erode capitalism? This is the subject of the next chapter.