Cong ’18 [Wanshu; September 30; Faculty of Law at European University Institute - Department of Law (LAW), Global Academic Fellow at The University of Hong Kong; “Privacy and Data Protection: Solving or Reproducing the Democratic Crisis of the Neoliberal Capitalism?” p. 13-14] SPark
But the sort of democracy driven by financial capitalism cannot be more socially and politically-detached. Under financial capitalism, corporations compete no longer on the basis of their manufacturing capacities but their stock values, “immediately through gimmicks and trickery, but more basically through firing workers, moving production, and raiding pension funds”. 26 Connected to the expansion of the global value chains, manufacturing is outsourced to overseas and organized at a global level that further separates the labour supply and consumption. Financialized companies thrive fast and collapse even faster, unable to provide long-term employment and other benefits to the employees while benefiting the corporate managers who cannot consume their incomes and must reinvest the money. The pathology of the neoliberal, financial capitalism is a much-discussed subject. Suffice it to say here that the interdependent and reciprocal relationship between capitalist economy and people that gave favourable conditions for democracy is significantly undermined and reaches to a breaking point. The break of the positive and reciprocal interdependence further deprives people of the means of production and alienates people from the commodities that bear capital value, as the generation and accumulation of financial capital is largely independent from the work and consumption of the wage-labour. Without the need to rely on the masses, financial capitalism successfully removes its social-embeddedness and detaches itself from democratic regulatory frameworks.27 The change of the means and relationship of production has also profoundly weakened the bargaining power of the masses. 28 Furthermore, it is also increasingly difficult to form meaningful labour movements that push forward institutional changes for common good and public interest, as people in the neoliberal and consumerist age are left to take care of themselves, in the name of so-called self-development or self-entrepreneurship. 29
One consequence of the undermining of the reciprocal interdependence is the deepening ofsocioeconomic inequalities which neoliberal governments retreat from dealing with. Socioeconomic inequalities cause serious problem to democracy, as they lead to unequal political participation and more selective political representation. 30 That socioeconomic inequalities lead to political inequalities can be vividly testified by the turnout rates and demographics of the elections in the western countries of recent years.31 They also form the large social background of the recent scandals aboutcyber security breaches, data breaches and fake news in elections. It can therefore be argued that the current democratic crisis is deeply rooted in the economic structure and relationship of production of the neoliberal financial capitalism.
