“In one of the classic works of modern comparative sociology, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1967) [Social Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy] focused attention on a particularly malignant — indeed, protofascist — developmental coalition, namely the protectionist one of capitalists and landowners against labor. If the present [Commerce and Coalitions, 1989] approach is correct, such an alliance was likeliest to arise in the formative nineteenth century in countries where land and capital were both scarce and only labor was abundant — that is, virtually all of Europe save its economically advanced northwestern corner, and all of eastern and southern Asia. There capital and land could be expected to unite in support of protection and imperialism; only labor, and the most labor-intensive agricultural and manufacturing enterprises, will normally have supported free trade and a less expansive foreign policy.
What Moore saw — rightly, in my [Rogowski’s] estimation — as the far more hopeful coalition of capital and labor should have arisen, according to the present theory, principally in two quite different circumstances: where both of those factors were abundant, and only land was scarce (essentially northwestern Europe, our first case[)]; and where both labor and capital were scarce, and only land was abundant (the “frontier” societies of the third case). In the former case, workers and capitalists alike will have favored free trade and a foreign policy of restraint; in the latter, both will have embraced protection and imperialism. In either of the two cases, however, the fatal alliance of land and capital is circumvented and, in Moore's perceptive telling, the path to a tolerably free society remains open.”In light of last year’s US presidential election, the rise of Peter Dutton, and the much longer-term rise of geopolitically powerful petro-dictatorships, I get the feeling that Moore wrote his book too early, indeed much too early.
As I have repeatedly emphasised over the past two years, during the era discussed by Moore there existed no example of Rogowski’s “fourth case” — where both capital and land were abundant and only labour was scarce. Under such a situation, which today prevails in:
- North America
- continental Oceania [Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia]
- the Persian Gulf oil states
- the more advanced countries within North and Central Asia
capital and land are expected to unite in favour of free trade and a (theoretically) less expansive foreign policy, while labour and more labour-intensive enterprises will favour protectionism and (theoretically) imperialism. The problem, which Rogowski does hint at, is that the recent history of the United States and the East Slavic and Turkic “core USSR”, alongside the entire history of the Gulf States since oil was discovered, demonstrate the capital and land are never satisfied with whatever suppression of labour they achieve, because their goal, as emphasised here and here by Red Flag Magazine, is always to increase profit. Moreover, the scarcity of labour encourages ruling classes to import labour in order to lower wages in the labour-intensive nontradable sector. This has several critical effects:
- it virtually eliminates the ability of labour in those labour-abundant countries [South Asia, Tajikistan, the Levant, Central America and the Caribbean, non-continental Oceania] from which labour is imported to gain from exporting
- it reduces the ability of the countries noted in 1) to offer competition for the capital- and land-intensive production via labour-intensive production
- it thus eliminates the political power of labour in the countries noted in 1) and further increases the control of capital and land in countries rich in both
- as Christopher Allen Culver of Pennsylvania State University and the US Air Force Academy has noted in his ‘Remittances and Autocratic Regime Stability’ and ‘Manipulating Remittances’, remittances sent back to the countries noted in 1) allow these labour-abundant countries stronger currencies, which further:
- weakens export competitiveness
- strengthens local capital and land against labour
- strengthens the global hand of the ruling elites in capital- and land-rich nations
As discussed most explicitly by the late Sophie Body-Gendtrot in her 2002 The Social Control of Cities: A Comparative Perspective, the ruling elites of this free-trading coalition favour the most extreme possible social control of the domestic underclass. Although it is not explicitly discussed, the fact that the wealthy favour the most intense policing is, plainly, because political activity — requiring international class solidarity — is the only exit route for the ghetto underclass. Mass incarceration is a direct reflection of the political hegemony of America’s very rich, whose primary goal is closing any route to a challenge from the bottom ninety percent. Placing the poorest and potentially most dangerous under direct control is a huge step towards this goal, and the Gulf States do the same thing via their contract system with expatriate workers. Labour, contrariwise, will favour a much more open and free domestic policy, illustrating Sigmund Freud’s principle that economic freedom is opposed to political and sexual freedom.
Free-trading capital and land under expanding trade must ensure trade continues to expand. Externally driven declining trade [via export controls by labour-rich nations, as with Cold War-era Southern Africa] will in these labour-scarce trade-open economies empower previously powerless labour, as discussed by Ron Rogowski, and Texas Tech’s David Letzkian and Dennis Patterson. A free-trading coalition of capital and land must thus ensure labour-rich nations cannot restrict exports to them. Consequently, the theoretically less expansive foreign policy of the free-trading coalition of capital and land becomes much less restrained than Stolper–Samuelson theory predicts. This factor explains the existence of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, whose strict and enforceable trade rules are exceedingly critical to the global power of the United States and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies. Alexander Etkind in his Russia Against Modernity (reviewed here) similarly suggests that Russia’s war against Ukraine is aimed to prevent foreign states decarbonising and Russia losing its fossil fuel profits. Whilst Etkind’s assessment is debatable, massive and influential lobbying by the Gulf States in the West is much more definitively aimed at preventing the loss of profits through reduced global oil and gas use. US wars against Central America (between 1944 and 1996) undoubtedly had the same aim of preventing those nations controlling trade.
Returning to Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Moore did note the importance of the alliance between Southern planters and northern industrialists to US politics — transformed today into an alliance of fossil fuel producers and giant agribusinesses — since the great globalisation following Reconstruction. He noted the possibility of this coalition evolving earlier, which presumably would have shaped the US into the de facto oligarchy it became during the Jim Crow era and more decisively after the expansion of trade that began according to Rogowski in 1963 — but minus the democratising reforms of Reconstruction. In Saudi Arabia, power-sharing between the Al Saud and Al Ash-Sheikh meant an alliance between the rentier capital of the state and the Wahhabi clergy (land) had forged a free-trading coalition even before capital became abundant after oil was discovered. Similar links between imams and sheikhs developed in other Gulf states. This has prevented any possibility of a tolerably free society for anyone except capitalists and the traditional nomadic pastoralists, and, as noted in the preceding paragraph, is potentially much more dangerous in the long term than the better-known protectionist alliance of land and capital.
