The institutions of representative democracy and middle class jobs are deeply entwined, so much so that the diminishing of one is accompanied by the diminishing of the other. This entwinement is rooted in the rise of middle class populations in Europe and North American over the course of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1700s through 1900s). The rising affluence of those middle class populations shifted the balances of power between and among ruling class populations and middle class populations and gave rise to the formation of new nation-based political coalitions.
When the Industrial Revolution kicked off in England in the early 1700s (with the invention of a usable steam engine), achieving affluence became available to a growing proportion of England’s population. Expanding populations of owners of capital, agricultural lands and new industries and expanding populations of agricultural, manufacturing, industrial, service, and government workers created new flows of income and new and expanding stocks of modern wealth. Demands for and conflicts over the expanding flows of income and wealth spread and intensified. Representative democracy was an institutional compromise among the ruling classes and the emerging classes of middle affluence worker/consumer populations. The royalty gave up a bit of their claimed total control of wealth and the rising middle class populations obtained institutional mechanisms for redressing grievances and making demands.
As the wealth producing technologies and cultural practices of the Industrial Revolution spread to the Americas and then other parts of the world, the world’s middle class populations formed, diversified, and grew in more and more nations, eventually to include populations of high wage industry, government, and science workers. Popular demands for participation in the high level decisions about producing and distributing wealth came with those trends. Middle class populations that formed in the world’s colonies not only agitated and fought for representative democracy institutions they also agitated and fought for national independence. By the middle of the 20th century, demands for representative democracy were global and almost every government on the planet claimed to be a representative democracy, even though many of those claimed democracies were clearly shams and worse. Despite the growth of popular demands for participation in government decision making, well functioning representative democracies never became the dominant forms of government for the world’s people.
The Accumulating Costs of Representative Democracy
As middle class populations gained representational footholds in national governments, the costs for maintaining well functioning representative democracy institutions increased and increasingly fell on ruling class populations. The expenses tied to assembling representatives and paying their salaries and expenses are not a problem for ruling class populations. Those costs are easily passed along to the middle and poverty class populations in a nation. Rather, the major expenses for ruling class populations are the income and wealth redistributions required to maintain the contentment of the very large populations of middle and poverty class populations represented in the institutions of government while still holding onto sufficient control over wealth production and distribution institutions (including government institutions) to ensure that their shares of income and wealth meet their growing expectations for income, accumulated wealth, domestic and geopolitical power, and status enhancement. Satisfying these two competing worlds of expectations is enormously costly, so only the more affluent nation-based ruling class populations have been willing to tolerate a functioning representative democracy for very long.[1]
The Decline of Representative Democracies in the 21st Century
It is widely observed that the institutions of representative democracy are in trouble, not only in the weaker nations where they have always been fragile, but now in the affluent nations of Western Europe and North America. Given the association of the growth of middle class populations (and the increasing affluence of those populations) with the spread of representative democracies since the 1700s, this should not be surprising. The world’s middle class populations are no longer growing and most of the existing middle class populations are no longer obtaining real improvements in their standards of living. A growing number of those populations are experiencing net losses of income and wealth.[2] The response of many in those populations is not unusual in the history of the modern world-economy: a turn against the time consuming practices of democracy and to the promises of a quick restoration of income and wealth growth made by proponents of authoritarian rule. Needless to say, the spread of those promises is paid for by the ruling class populations that have only tolerated the institutions of democracy and now see that if they actively and successfully subvert popular belief in democracy, they won’t have to.
Just as the Great Depression intensified conflict over incomes and wealth that resulted in governmental upheavals (e.g., the New Deal in the U.S. and fascism in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere in Europe), the expanding domain of necessary expenses relative to incomes and wealth for the world’s middle class populations has intensified conflict and governmental upheavals in our own time. However, unlike the income and wealth recoveries of middle class populations after the Great Depression and WWII and the return to a long phase of growth of middle class populations in the world, no such recoveries will happen this time.
The Earth’s Inescapable Growth Limits and the Impoverishment of Middle Class Jobs
The period in the history of the modern world-economy we are now entering will not be like the long period of recovery and renewal from the 1950s into the 1990s. A fundamental characteristic of middle class jobs – the growth of income and wealth faster that the rising costs of living and working and the routine deterioration of tangible wealth (homes, cars, workplaces, equipment, etc.) cannot continue for all middle class populations. In fact, that characteristic of middle class jobs is already history for large numbers of the world’s middle class people. The inescapable reason is that the earth-system conditions that allowed the Industrial Revolution to produce increases in incomes and wealth by exploiting earth-system processes and shunting away costs over such a long expanse of time and over so much of the earth no longer exist.
The carrying capacity of the earth-system is finite and global economic activities are now up against some of its most formidable carrying capacity limits. Before the last quarter of the 20th century, those limits were generally thought to be finite supplies of resources such as oil, arable land, and certain rare minerals. We have managed to outmaneuver those kinds of limits by deploying technological fixes and can probably continue to do so for a while longer. However, technological fixes have brought us more rapidly up against much more intractable earth-system limits: the earth-system’s slow rates of processing the vast waste flows from human economic activities (e.g., carbon, industrial chemicals, spent nuclear fuel). Those limits are not as easily overcome through the deployment of technological fixes. Over time, successes with such fixes will become increasingly difficult to achieve because they add to the waste flows earth-system processes already cannot handle. Rather than decreasing the number and scale of human encounters with earth-system limits, deploying those kinds of fixes add to their exponential growth.
The Fate of Representative Democracies
The repercussions from our encounters with the carrying capacity limits inherent in the earth-system are rapidly rising expenses relative to the incomes and wealth savings of middle class populations. Extreme weather events, more frequent and more devastating forest fires, massive rainstorms that generate instant floods, species kill-offs due to diseases (e.g., bird flu devastation of commercial chicken populations in the U.S.), losses of arable lands, and forced adaptations to changing agriculture conditions are adding rising costs to the costs of living for everyone faster than incomes can keep up. Inevitably, standards of living are declining for many of the world’s populations, including middle class populations.
As costs are rising, ruling class populations are forging ways to shift those costs away from themselves. They are doing this, in part, by taking advantage of the growing insecurities of middle class populations to organized ruling class-middle class coalitions of support for authoritarian government policies. In general, most middle class people find it very difficult to accept the reality that adapting to earth-system limits requires middle class life to have fewer modern forms of comfort and convenience and to include more physical work both on the job and at home. Consequently, those who are finding themselves on the slippery slope downward are susceptible to the arguments for authoritarian policies that accelerate government decision making and exclude certain populations from voting, access to good jobs, and rights to government assistance programs. As always, the leaders of ruling class populations divide and conquer by identifying populations to include and exclude using identity characteristics (race, gender, nationality, religion, residence status, dialect, etc.) and promising the included populations that they get the spoils of the ensuing political battles while the excluded take the brunt of the general decline in living standards.
All is not lost. While middle class jobs and representative democracies are very unlikely to survive in their current forms, ruling class authoritarian governments can only protect some middle class populations from rising costs and dramatic job changes over the short term. During that time, the excluded populations will grow and become better organized and more powerful. The domestic and geopolitical upheavals we are now experiencing will continue and probably become more widespread and intense. Many will be very violent (like the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and the Democratic Republic of Congo) or marginally violent (like the political skirmishes with injuries and some deaths we have seen recently in affluent nations). Eventually, the excluded populations will become well enough positioned to counter the power of ruling populations and create new forms of democracy and new forms of work that are well aligned with earth-system limits.
[1] The world’s ruling class populations are organized into numerous industry factions and nation-based coalitions. The more affluent of those nation-based coalitions are the ones that have tolerated representative democracy institutions most successfully. Being the most economically successful, they have been more inclined to accept the high costs required for representative democracies to function well. Less affluent nation-based ruling class coalitions strenuously and often violently resist representation concessions because such concessions threaten their smaller shares of global income and wealth.
[2] Restoration phrases like Build Back Better and Make America Great Again recently used in political campaigns in the U.S. are not just political slogans, they are acknowledgements that middle class conditions of life are not meeting expectations.
IWE WORK FUTURES 