Economic interdependence between classes historically drove democratic inclusion

Evidence

In early-nineteenth-century Britain, as Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson have shown, the rise of democracy was inextricably bound to industrial capitalism’s dependency on the “masses” and their contribution to the prosperity necessitated by the new organization of production. The rise of volume production and its wage-earning labor force established British workers’ economic power and led to a growing appreciation of their political legitimacy and power. This produced a new sense of interdependence between ordinary people and elites. … In sharp contrast to the pragmatic concessions of Britain’s early industrial capitalists, surveillance capitalists’ extreme structural independence from people breeds exclusion rather than inclusion and lays the foundation for the unique approach that we have called “radical indifference.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1601

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Acemoglu and Robinson’s ‘Why Nations Fail’ inclusive vs extractive institutions framework, and to the Milgrom law merchant work on reciprocity-based institutions. — connects to: Campaign finance dependency structurally undermines formal democratic inclusiveness — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 878; Social democrats faced a structural dilemma between class base and middle-class concessions — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 18
• DEFINE: Establishes ‘radical indifference’ as the contrast term: surveillance capitalism’s structural independence from people, versus industrial capitalism’s employment reciprocities.