In political reason, the formula “x or y” denotes a choice that one is obliged to make, a choice in favour of either one thing or another. “Socialism or barbarism” would be one instantiation of this formula. Another would be “democracy or totalitarianism”. By “socialism or barbarism” we are not to understand that every non-socialist society in the past - that is, every society that has ever existed - was barbarian, but that the choice now to be made is between a socialist future and an increasingly barbarous one. Is this the case with “democracy or totalitarianism”?

Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom projected a “totalitarian” future, engineered by the well-meaning but hubristic and economically illiterate “totalitarians in our midst” (economic “literacy” here would consist in having absorbed the wisdom that, whatever you want, you can’t have it - that you must settle for what you’ll get, for the hand the market deals you). Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies similarly conjures a variety of forces that are opposed to the dynamism put in play by democratic institutions, that are enemies precisely of “openness”. That which the which the “totalitarian” wishes to regulate, to subject to coercive intervention, is that which makes a society free, vigorous, capable of responding to new challenges, innovative and so on. Democracy is the absence or abeyance of such regulation, the maximisation of “freedom” in precisely those spheres in which the “totalitarian” has most often expressed a concern.

“Totalitarianism” is then not radically other to “democracy”, not a viable alternative choice, but merely the closure of that which democracy holds open: a regulatory impulse that must be resisted, lest its hubris endanger society by committing it to goals that the true democrat will always reject as “politically impossible” - goals such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions, say, or providing basic nutrition, water, healthcare and education to the whole of the world’s population. The politically impossible is always tragically impossible, doubly tragic in that the desire to make it come true will always betray itself to the enemies of the society of the possible, the totalitarians in its midst.

What “the left” wishes to think, and is prohibited from thinking within this schema, is a democracy that would not be the suspension of regulation (in certain fields), but rather the generative matrix of regulatory instances. Left-wing democrats wish to make rules, and are chided for their “authoritarianism” whenever they express this wish; but this reproach ignores the fact that Capital itself is regulated into existence, and acts in the economic-liberal schema as the regulatory authority par excellence. Democracy is not the absence of rules in general - no actually existing democracy is absolutely deregulated, to the point where literally anything goes - but a particular response to the question of whence “the rules” derive their legitimacy.

Does the form of democracy in Western societies legitimate capitalism? The answer I am tempted to give is: not unless there is a choice. Not unless it could equally well legitimate something else - starting tomorrow. But this does not address the problem of why there appears to be no choice, why no choice is on offer or why the desire for an alternative is always able to be caricatured as totalitarian, simply because it is a desire for something rather than the suspension of desire demanded by the prophets of the inevitable. At the root of that problem is neither a Platonic “economic reality” corresponding with the eternal verities of mathematics, nor a consensual phantom that might be banished on a collective whim, but a something else that is both the object and arena of political struggle. If we are marxists, we will have one notion of this something else; if we are Lacanians, perhaps another. What is important is not so much the analysis to which it is subjected, but the fact of its contestability.