We have argued repeatedly here that
liberalism and democracy are conceptually contradictory and, therefore, they
have been shown historically time and time again to be incompatible. A liberal
regime aims exclusively to preserve, protect and enhance individual
property rights: as such, therefore, it is incorrect to identify it with
“individualism”, except perhaps as a contrast to “collectivism”, because in
championing the rights of individuals who own property, liberalism quite
obviously will crush the rights of individuals who do not own property or who
own less property. Evidently, the paramount protection of property rights and therefore
the free exchange of claims to property - which, together, form the essence of liberal doctrine and practice -, is entirely inconsistent with the
exercise of political freedom and decision-making by all members of society in a
manner that is not tainted by the ownership of property.
Two of the biggest fallacies in Benjamin
Constant’s oblique championing of liberalism are, first, his assertion that the
ability of property owners to remove their property from a nation-state is an
exercise of democracy; and second that, by removing their property to other
nation-states, property owners actively discipline their nation-state and
establish “competitive tension” between nation-states to foster democratic
principles and institutions worldwide. This is perhaps the biggest non sequitur
in Constant’s entire otherwise most valuable oeuvre: - because quite clearly,
as the history of western liberalism and capitalism reveals, the bourgeoisie
removes property from a nation-state and places it in another nation-state not
at all to promote democratic rights, but rather to ensure that private property
rights are protected! There is a vital difference between the protection of
property rights and democracy that Constant clearly missed! On the contrary,
history reveals that the bourgeoisie is indeed quite willing to move capital to
authoritarian and even dictatorial regimes so long as it can reasonably expect
that such regimes will protect and enhance its property rights! Even under
Hitler, under no less than the Nazi dictatorship, the German bourgeoisie was entirely happy
to keep its property under the protection of that most brutal regime.
Thus, far from enhancing democracy, the
free movement of capital has more often than not enhanced dictatorship. Perhaps
the most colossal example of this in capitalist history is the huge transfer of
capitalist investment to the Chinese dictatorship from 1980 until our present
day! And this occurred in large part not because the bourgeoisie could be sure
of the protection of its rights – though that was reasonable given the ability
of the Chinese dictatorship to enforce them against its own people -, but
rather because the Communist Chinese dictatorship was willing to subject its
population of over a billion people to the exploitation on the part of the
Western capitalist bourgeoisie and, in the process, to turn itself into a
powerful capitalist bourgeoisie in its own right!
As we have argued repeatedly here, it was
Carl Schmitt who perhaps most systematically and coherently demolished the
rationale and ideology of liberalism, precisely by evincing the theoretical-historical
inconsistency of democratic parliamentary institutions and the institutions of
private property. Of course, Schmitt’s aim was manifestly anti-democratic; yet
this does not diminish the potency of the arguments he advanced against Western
bourgeois parliamentary regimes. The false identification of liberalism with
democracy is the reason why every critique of liberalism is immediately denounced
by the bourgeoisie as an assault on “democracy” – by which it means
“liberalism”.
In the present day, aside from the Western bourgeois transfer
of resources to the control of the Chinese dictatorship without first exacting
peremptory guarantees for the democratic representation of its oppressed
workers and wider population, perhaps the worst example of how liberal
principles can demolish democratic institutions is the championing of liberal
economic principles and practices by the German bourgeoisie – what is widely known as Ordo-liberalism -, a practice that
is rapidly leading to the unravelling of the European Union and its lurching
into authoritarian, if not openly dictatorial, waters. So strident and harmful
has this practice been, that even the most prominent commentators of bourgeois
publications have inveighed against it, to no avail.
To be continued.
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