It is strange that at the age of Nicolás Sartorius (San Sebastián, 1938) and with an intellectual and political biography like his, one launches a book that neither settles accounts with the past, nor magnifies one’s own equestrian portrait, nor accumulates reproaches against what contemporary and its young inhabitants. It is so rare that what Sartorius proposes is exceptional in itself.
Four hundred pages of reflective and calm diagnosis about the past and present and excited ideas for the future built from realism and experience. This is what the historic 85-year-old lawyer, journalist and politician has done in Expansive Democracy (or How to Overcome Capitalism) (Anagrama), an eloquent analysis of what happened and the powers of the future disentailed by biographical readjustments or the issuance of delivery notes to contemporaries, desires so common in a generation that often reveals its difficulties in assuming the result of its passage through the world.
The co-founder of CC OO and former deputy for the PCE and IU is writing a treaty, he explained this Wednesday in an informal meeting with the press in Madrid, in which he looks back at the evolution of Western democracies, with no other vocation than to understand it. better in the light of the present and extract from it the lessons of civilization that can illuminate the future. The title of the book, he explains, alludes to the expansive condition of capitalism, which has been expanding its dimensions and voracity without contemporary democracy being able to keep pace, forced to play inferior to other powers today.
Liberal democracy gave way in the 20th century to social democracy and this to the civilizational leap that was the Welfare State, he maintains. Sartorius claims that a new leap forward is imperative that does not aspire to defeat capitalism, “this neoliberal capitalism,” he specified, but rather to overcome it, hence the purposeful subtitle of his book that alludes to the loss of scale of democracies. and its powers with respect to the formidable adversaries with which it is measured, particularly the global economic powers in the digital and financial revolution. “Either democracy expands to control economic processes or it will be jibarized,” he says.
With the teaching of a professor, Sartorius stops to explain that the Welfare State is not a mere product of the Cold War, a prevention of Western democracies in their competition with the Soviet enemy. Or not alone. “World War II was won by the workers,” he says, which is why Winston Churchill lost the elections immediately after the conflagration: “he lost because his ideas did not win the war.” He recalled that big capital had enthusiastically financed Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Philipe Petain – who signed the surrender of Vichy and the submission of France to the Third Reich – and those were the interests that were defeated. Hence, the social quality of later social democracy and Christian democracy, as a winning idea in the war, sponsored the Welfare State, the great civilizational creation of the 20th century.
At the same time, the author reflects on the failure of the communist experience and attributes it to two reasons: on the one hand, the erroneous idea that socialism could be applied (or, in other words, capitalism could be defeated) within the framework of a single country. “It is contrary to the Marxist thesis,” he emphasizes, supporting what was at the time the Trotskyist thesis enunciated by Lenin years before. And secondly, the thesis of “permanent revolution”, this one promoted by Troski. Sartorius ironizes the error of baptizing the parties that defend the revolution as “communist,” since in the long run that would mean that the eventual political failure of these organizations would also defeat the communist idea itself. “It is naive, that is why there is no party called the Capitalist Party.”
In the book he also pays attention to decolonization, and reproaches social democracy for its inability to lead it, while abjuring nationalism in a framework in which national states have become “Euronational states.” For this reason, the essayist links the destiny of European civilization to the assumption of that scale, to the internationalization of unionism, to Europeanism as the only safeguard, and highlights the urgency of the development of a social Europe that does not exist. “We have built an agrarian Europe, a Europe of currency, a Europe of commerce and even now it seems that a Europe of defense, but a social Europe is still pending.” And that must be expressed in very tangible and simple but decisive issues, such as, for example, “a European minimum wage.”
In his opinion, this struggle is decisive because the Welfare State, “which is an overcoming of capitalism, to the extent that it deducts 40% of the income from the State,” will only survive if it does so within the European framework, which is in which it emerged and unfolded. For this reason, he explains, it is the main objective to be overthrown by neoliberal capitalism. This possibility of taking substantive parts of the economy from capitalism is not utopian, he clarifies, and alludes to clear examples such as the operation of Volkswagen, a company owned by both the German State and the workers themselves, or the Norwegian exploitation of oil resources, of state ownership.
The State, he proposes, should participate in the capital of those companies that are too big to fail, because if things go wrong it will be the State that pays for the damage, in which those that operate under a monopoly or oligopoly regime do not always work. in a market regime, and in those that concern strategic sectors, since it is the general interests that are at stake.
Nicolás Sartorius believes that we missed a window of opportunity to definitively defeat neoliberalism with the 2008 crisis, but the window of opportunity has not closed, he explains, because “the digital revolution is contradictory to existing capitalism,” to the extent that This is the child of the industrial revolution and displays an entropic nature on the present, each time destroying its three supports: nature, equality and democracy.
The author concludes that capitalism must not be defeated but rather overcome through formulas that we already know in part and have been tested – starting with taxation, a concept that in his opinion transcends its economic value and responds to a civilizational pact – and that The digital revolution will accelerate to the extent that it is capable of placing neoliberal capitalism, based on scarcity and industrial production models, in a framework for which it was not formulated.
Nicolás Sartorius closes his volume by advocating for the democratization of the economy, a task, he writes, that could be facilitated by the “enormous concentration of wealth that this capitalism has generated in recent years,” because ultimately, “what has “The system has been doing, despite itself, to socialize production to limits unknown in the past, although maintaining property in private hands.” An example of this vulnerability due to extreme concentration is the decision of Donald Trump, “champion of the most profound liberalism,” to force General Motors, “through a law passed during the Korean War, to produce masks and other gadgets with in order to confront the pandemic. In order to win the elections – and save their capitalism – some become Keynesians, Bolsheviks or whatever it takes (…) so let’s not lose hope,” he concludes.
