democracy in terms of popular participation?
Over long periods, the involvement of the public in planning or
implementation of public policy has been quite marginal. This is a
business-run society. The political parties have reflected business
interests for a long time.
One version of this view which I think has a lot of power behind
it is what political scientist Thomas Ferguson calls “the investment
theory of politics.” He believes that the state is controlled by
coalitions of investors who join together around some common
interest. To participate in the political arena, you must have enough
resources and private power to become part of such a coalition.
Since the early nineteenth century, Ferguson argues, there’s
been a struggle for power among such groups of investors. The long
periods when nothing very major seemed to be going on are simply
times when the major groups of investors have seen more or less
eye to eye on what public policy should look like. Moments of
conflict come along when groups of investors have differing points
of view.
During the New Deal, for example, various groupings of private
capital were in conflict over a number of issues. Ferguson identifies
a high-tech, capital-intensive, export-oriented sector that tended to
be quite pro-New Deal and in favor of the reforms. They wanted an
orderly work force and an opening to foreign trade.
A more labor-intensive, domestically oriented sector, grouped
essentially around the National Association of Manufacturers, was
strongly anti-New Deal. They didn’t want any of these reform
measures. (Those groups weren’t the only ones involved, of course.
There was the labor movement, a lot of public ferment and so on.)
You view corporations as being incompatible with democracy, and
you say that if we apply the concepts that are used in political
analysis, corporations are fascist. That’s a highly charged term.
What do you mean?
I mean fascism pretty much in the traditional sense. So when a
rather mainstream person like Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of
[British economist John Maynard] Keynes, describes the early
postwar systems as modeled on fascism, he simply means a system