Despite the common assumption that market societies have a natural affinity with liberal-democratic forms of rule, historically, capitalists’ attitudes toward democracy – defined minimally as a set of procedures for alternating governing teams through formally peaceful methods – vary widely. Capitalists have been the major backers of the most notoriously authoritarian regimes in history, including Hitler’s Reich, Franco’s Estado Nuovo and Mussolini’s Stato Totalitario. Capitalists are neither irreducibly hostile to, nor invariably supportive of, democracy. Rather, their political interests, like that of other classes, flow from their specific location within the class structure of a society.
What are the distinctive political interests of the capitalist class? In order to identify these, it is important to resist describing capitalists using categories that seem accessible but which are imprecise – such as “the rich”, or the “1 per cent”, or “the corporate elite”. Rather, capitalists are a group of agents that occupy a distinctive structural location by virtue of their ownership of a society’s main productive assets – the major means of production – as private property. Much of the character of politics in advanced capitalist societies flows from the distinctive political behaviour of this group.
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