Not without grassroots movements and uprisings. Especially when it comes to stuff like labour laws and slavery. If factory owners got their way, we would still have worked 12 hour workdays 7 days a week. The wealth was not shared with the people, anything gained was taken by force in the form of unrest and movements. In many ways the French Revolution was the subtle threat to every nation unless they gave the people what they wanted.
Then not to mention stuff like women’s rights and civil rights, which were not given thanks to wealth, but again due to grassroot movements and civil unrest. In many ways we still are facing tons of inequality today, due to the profit incentive of the people with wealth. See rising wealth inequality for example. If wealth and capitalism is what gave regular people political power, why do we not see this trend continue today?
If anything, I’d argue we got democracy and political power in spite of capitalism and concentration of wealth. Maybe it has more to do with the developed technology than with the economic system. Stuff like the printing press and easier access to knowledge. Requiring an educated populace to operate factories and producing more complex technological items. These kinds of stuff paving the way towards people getting “funny ideas” and thinking back on their position in the world, no longer accepting what was the status quo, but instead striving for something better.
I’d even argue that today’s capitalism is a compromise, because the people in power tried their hardest to stay in power, but not the ideal that we could have had.
Rulers also knew that if they ended up behind other countries they would end up crushed by economics or times of war. Technology was vital long before democracy got its hold in the modern age. The industrial revolution happened under the British monarchy, after all. Did they block that development? The printing press was also created under the holy Roman empire, long before capitalism, and we can see how well that went with many monarchies trying to suppress it. Maybe they tried, but they failed.
Don’t look at the answer starting from capitalism and working backwards. History is much more nuanced than “the system we have right now is the best and is what caused good things”. It very well could be that the system itself is mostly coincidental, or due to parallell historical factors.
And technology would have been developed no matter the economic or political system. As it did, and as it does. As long as people researching new things get sufficient time and resources to do so. And they do, and did, because being more technologically advanced makes you stronger compared to others.
I mean, hell, saying capitalism is what solely incentivized development is completely ignoring how many resources state actors are pouring into science even today. From the US military to the global academic network. It wasn’t very different back then, at the start of capitalism. Philosophy traces back to ancient Greece, after all, and exists everywhere in between.
My whole point is that saying that “capitalism gave us political power” is the too simple answer. And I argue against it, because it posits capitalism as this objective good that should stay when that is not certain. And it may well be what is actually standing in the way of democracy. Maybe political power would have been spread to the people quicker if it were not for capitalism, hard to say, because capitalism quickly entrenched itself in the whole world. But history can give us clues.
In the end, it’s important to not necessarily attribute too much to capitalism, because, well, we live in, and have been, surrounded by capitalism our whole lives. With no part of the world really escaping it. We don’t have anything else to compare to, as we only have one world. We are always looking from a capitalistic point of view by default. But maybe there is more to everything than just capitalism.
It wasn’t capitalism. The Soviets had science, technology and progress without it. That doesn’t excuse all the bad, oppressive, authoritarian things. Just blows holes in your claims.
The same could be said for China, ignoring their atrocities. And yeah you could even say that about the US too if you ignore their copious atrocities. So it isn’t something endemic to capitalism
