for proposing that a political trade cycle would develop, what is perhaps more striking is that Kalecki straightforwardly identifies the contestation as being between capitalists (referred to mostly as “business leaders”) and the workers. He points out that in the 1930s business leaders opposed state policies aimed at restoring full employment, and sets out the many ways in which the material interests of capitalists and workers stand in direct opposition to each other. Although expressed differently, the pluralist tradition in postwar political sociology adopts a similar approach, seeing political parties as most likely to represent opposing interests; this can be contrasted with the alternative mainstream approach arguing that modern ‘industrialism’ and the growing power of technical experts were leading to an ‘end of ideology’ (Bell 1960).

Within the Marxist tradition, such contestation was a theme of structuralist analysis (e.g. Poulantzas 1973), and is continued more recently by the neo-Gramscian school in international political economy (e.g. Cox 1987, van der Pijl 1998, Gill 2003). However, a Marxist version of the concept of depoliticisation has been offered by Burnham, one of a group of authors drawing tradition.8 on the ‘open Marxism’ He defines it as “the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making” (Burnham 2001: 127). The underlying standpoint is that there is a contradiction at the heart of how capitalism is constituted, between the liberal ideals of the free market and of political democracy. The free market, in its capitalist form, requires the establishment and enforcement of property rights; historically, this entailed a struggle against absolutism, under which property was held only under the authority of the sovereign, and led to the rise of a propertied bourgeoisie. Political democracy, however, implies that the authority of the sovereign is replaced by that of the people or their representatives. The ascendant bourgeoisie thus has to find a means whereby the sovereignty of the people is prevented from interfering with the property rights that they now possess. This need to limit the scope of democratic politics is not simply a matter of choice or conjuncture, it is a constitutive feature of capitalism as a mode of production.

Importantly, this contradiction is recognised not only by some Marxists, but also by the German ordoliberal school, which flourished in the 1920s-1950s, played an important role in the post-war reconstitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (the ‘social market economy’), and is beginning to be credited as the real ideology of contemporary neoliberalism (Bonefeld 2012). For example, Bonefeld (forthcoming) identifies as a central ordoliberal concern the tendency of capitalism to generate a propertyless proletariat, which can only protect itself from the fluctuating fortunes of a free market economy by demanding a redistributive state that necessarily encroaches on property rights. Their solution was to make a property-owning democracy viable, not by restricting suffrage (as in the 19th century), but by creating opportunities for all citizens to own property, in other words for the embourgeoisification of the workers:9 workers will then identify with the market freedom of the capitalist, and cease to depend upon, or even to support, a redistributive state. A cognate but more widely acceptable political concept, certainly in the UK, is that of ‘equality of opportunity’, while the contemporary imperialism of mainstream economics has translated the ordoliberal approach (albeit with only rare acknowledgement) into the theories of ‘social’ and ‘human’ capital (Fine & Milonakis 2009, Fine 2010).

In this light, the current course of action being taken by the political élites within the European Union cannot be viewed as a response to an essentially exogenous change. Although