Rentier Democracy

The article proceeds from the thesis that current transformations affecting the capitalist world system will require a correction of the mechanisms used to maintain the political order of contemporary societies. The exhaustion of the market model of development, which remains oriented towards continuous growth, reveals the contours of a future society without economic growth. Due to technological automation and robotisation, such a society will find itself replete with “surplus population”, at the same time becoming transformed into a society without mass labour, but with increasingly dangerous classes (precariat, unemployed, diverse minorities). The emergence of resource limits affecting free markets leads to an increase in protectionism and nationalism, resulting in the tendency to replace market competition mechanisms with the forceful politically-led redistribution of markets and resource flows. However, this coincides with a crisis of the welfare state, under which conditions a depletion of the resource base is accompanied by the growth of rent-dependent groups. In the resultant rentier political order, market communications give way to hierarchical distributive exchange models in which, due to the progressive structuring not by market-led class formation, but rather by the access of citizens and social groups to resources distributed in the form of rents; as a result, rent-seeking behaviour becomes dominant. In this context, social behaviour associated with the search for rents having a guaranteed status starts to become a more advantageous strategy than risky entrepreneurial activity or the pursuit of advantageous positions within a shrinking labour market. The drift towards the rentier democracy model can be attributed to increasing willingness of states to bypass the market and participate in the direct redistribution of resources. The chief feature of this development lies in the fact that the classes competing for access to resources are no longer primarily economic but statist; in other words, the distribution of resources is increasingly shifting from the market to the state. In this context, competition becomes primarily structured not according to the criterion of market value, but in terms of its utility to the state. According to the emerging rentier democracy model, a social group achieves success by elevating its status in the hierarchy as a means of increasing its access to resources. However, in resolving the accumulated structural contradictions to form new influential social groups, the transformation into a rentier society creates burgeoning antagonisms between the new rentier-estate social core and increasingly peripheralised market-oriented groups, which continue to be focused on progress.

Keywords: contemporaneity; market; rent-seeking behaviour; rentier society; democracy; social structure; stratification; estates; centre-periphery; global future