I salute the decision of choosing Rueschemeyer. The early description of its density scared me, but I must admit I felt at home with Rueschemeyer. He speaks my language or I understand his; in any case I could not agree more with his analysis. Knowing that such content is being assigned to students at a place like HKS relieved me of my long held stereotype about business/ capital driven academic centers. (It might be too soon though to arrive at a final judgment on this.)
The ground upon which Rueschemeyer’s analysis stands is that democratization, the drive towards political equality develops as a result of the contradictions of the capitalist socio-economic structure, where for the first time such a complex set of classes appeared. His emphasis on class driven power relation and his class based analysis of social structure makes him distinctive. Who gets to exercise political rights and have a say in political decision making is determined by their relation to the means of production and their position in the production equation is what I see as political superstructure, the political system growing out of an economic infrastructure, the process of production. He singles out the working class as a unique class for the right characteristics. The fact that the working class is the only class that fights to the end, to put in the revolutionary jargon, is determined by four features. Access to machines and industry thus higher level of mental growth, geographic concentration which makes flow of information and mobilization easier, routine of working in a unit that strengthens their natural ability to work and be productive as a team, and having literally nothing to lose in terms of private property leads to an unprecedented degree of commitment in achieving political, social or economic rights as compared with lower classes in early socio-economic structures such as feudalism.
I do not understand though, why he would treat state separately from social classes, especially since he argues that political power of the state grows out of class contradictions in a capitalist society. My understanding is that the upper class which can be formed by either capitalists with elements of middle bourgeoisie or the former in an alliance with feudal land lords makes and therefore is the state. The main conflict in a capitalist society revolves around the contradictions between the upper and the lower class, characterized by capitalists and the working class with the rest of the social classes joining either of the sides on the basis of which front promises better interests. And that the divide between the upper and lower classes reaches to extreme in a capitalist society because many of the middle and lower middle class elements find it hard to survive and therefore join the working class ranks or in rare cases, manage to gather more wealth and therefore join the upper class. In addition, while I agree with the role that the contradictions of capitalism play in advancing the cause of democracy, strengthening the working class and weakening the landed aristocracy, I do not see how it strengthens middle bourgeois class in particular considering the role of the transnational powers. Considering the publishing year of the book, 1990s was the time when the role of transnational corporations that operate beyond the borders of one country and mostly are more powerful than single governments, had already become more of weakening the middle bourgeois class than strengthening them. Marx or Engels believed in capitalism’s initial positive role towards strengthening middle bourgeois class because that is how things were in their times, which are no more now. Multinational or transnational corporations not only do not strengthen middle bourgeois class in developing countries such as Afghanistan, but destroy them and their initiatives, because national bourgeoisie with the small capital that they have cannot compete with the high quality and low prices of products of multinational corporations, and thus gradually disappear from the market; many local businesses of carbonated beverages in Afghanistan die because they cannot compete with Pepsi and Coke, which means higher Afghan market dependency on multinational corporations and thus MNC’s major role in influencing and shaping production and markets in Afghanistan.
Collier’s analysis of the path towards democracy is superficial in particular when it is being seen in comparison to Rueschemeyer. Complete democratization for her is “the transfer of power to an elected government”, while from the Rueschemeyer perspective that is only a beginning in the fight for equal political rights for all classes. Whether that elected government is representative is a question that Collier does not consider. She sees and suffices to consider the surface only and doesn’t decide to see what is happening under and within the apparent “elected government”, where most things go wrong.