Aisha Ahmad (@aishaismad)

If you take a flight from DC with a layover in Dubai on your way to China and then fly back via London, you’ll hear a common refrain emanating from political cultures as diverse as the languages that constitute them — ‘corruption in politics is the biggest problem facing our societies today’. It seems corruption is everywhere — from the Amazon Basin and the Sahara Desert, to the slums of Mumbai and the streets of Westminster. One might wonder — why are corrupt people most likely to become politicians? One should, instead, ask — what if the problem isn’t people at all?

Though ‘corruption’ has forged its way into political discussions, speeches, and manifestos of all sorts, what exactly does it mean? We have a general sense of what it looks like — the subversion of something good, a departure from rules, all geared towards private enrichment. Most often, it is seen, as economist Jakob Svennsson put it, the misuse of public office for private gain.

Annoyingly, scholars who work on the state-economy relationship have problematized the common wisdom (as they so often do). Some describe machinations of public officials to secure electoral funds as ‘brokerage’. Others call outright bribery for votes ‘patronage politics’. The literal purchasing of politicians for pushing specific policy agendas is defined euphemistically as ‘lobbying’. All refer to the same phenomenon — the abuse of public office for private gain — and we are left with a conception of ‘corruption’ as fluid at best, meaningless at worst.

Whatever it is, corruption isn’t even seen as squarely bad anymore. Some economists argue that engaging in ‘corrupt practices’ may fuel economic growth. Others extol the virtues of ‘good corruption’, where sidestepping hefty bureaucratic structures can facilitate speedy market exchanges and a flurry of efficient, if ever-so-slightly illegal, economic activity. One man’s corruption is another man’s business deal.

Back to the question we posed paragraphs ago — why is everyone talking about corruption and why is the rhetoric around and against it so universal? We need look no further than our own united states, where two of the top Democratic contenders — Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — have made greed and corruption centerpieces of their campaigns. However, while their rhetoric sounds very similar, Sanders and Warren conceptualize corruption very differently. Why wouldn’t they — it’s a slippery concept.

Sanders talks about the greed of pharmaceutical companies, the corrupt practices on Wall Street and the dangers of unfettered capitalism. He compares his brand of democratic socialism to that found in Scandinavian welfarism, a political tone far more temperate than left-of-center Labour MPs in the UK even. One might be tempted to see him as a reformist, if an angry one. But his outlook on modes of political and social change betrays any such assumption. When asked if he is a capitalist, time and again he has said no. When asked which single issue he would focus on as President, Sanders rejects the premise. He preaches people power — no agenda, demand or change is impossible if there are millions of people in the streets demanding it.

Warren, on the other hand, is self-avowedly ‘a capitalist to her bones’, and her policies and politics show it. While Sanders has the people, Warren has a plan. Time and again, she has declared her faith in markets and has attributed failures in public service provision to breakdowns in an otherwise well-oiled machine — specifically, to corruption in Washington. For Warren, corruption is something extraneous, something that infects. As she says herself: “we can’t have capitalism if there aren’t rules”.

And therein lies the proverbial rub. We know corruption is a confusing concept, and defining capitalism isn’t any easier. The violent ejections of the 17th century English peasantry from their lands was capitalism, children working 20-hour shifts in 18th century factories was capitalism, slavery in the 19th century was capitalism. And even though we eventually saw minimum-wage protections granted to the new English working class and child-labor regulations made to protect our most vulnerable and the abolition of a most vicious and oppressive slavery, these changes too were made within a capitalist political economy. The ruthlessness and nakedness of capitalism’s singular pursuit for profit ebb and flow, and the robustness of the ‘rules’ by which the game is played reflects that. But there are always rules.

Warren often points to Reagan-era deregulation of Wall Street as the root cause behind rising income inequality and the shrinkage of the American welfare state. And in order to avoid the shaky conclusion that politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were particularly evil, one only need investigate the health of the global capitalist economy to understand why the 1980s saw massive policy moves in favor of capital over labor all over the world.

David Harvey, Marxist economic geographer and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), has been writing about this very thing for many years now. In his 2003 book, The New Imperialism, Harvey argues that “capitalism has been experiencing a chronic difficulty of overaccumulation since 1973”, citing the “lack of opportunities for profitable investment (as) the fundamental problem”. Simply stated, his argument is that capital had accumulated to a point where spaces of reinvestment were few and far between. And just as Karl Marx argued that primitive accumulation — the first move towards a transition from feudalism to capitalism — saw “great masses of men…suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence”, Harvey argues that the same forces of “predation, fraud and violence” that characterized primitive accumulation remain “powerfully present within capitalism’s historical geography up until now”. He calls this contemporary primitive accumulation ‘accumulation by dispossession’.

In his 2010 book, The Enigma of Capital, Harvey furthers this analysis through something all humans, regardless of political persuasion, find quite powerful: numbers. Here, Harvey uses common economic wisdom to define a ‘healthy’ capitalist economy as one that “expands at 3% per annum”. In order for the global economy to maintain this compound growth rate, he argues that “profitable outlets would then have to be found for an extra $3 trillion investment”. Suffocated, overaccumulated capital needs space to breathe — $3 trillion worth of space. And this search for space may explain why the world’s capitalists had a collective epiphany to deregulate.

And deregulate they did. Through the privatization of public assets, the devaluation of capital and labor, the creation of new financial products and instruments of debt etc., accumulation by dispossession post-1973 released “a set of assets…at very low (and in some instances, zero) cost…(and) overaccumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use”, according to Harvey.

At the heart of this search for space was financialization. If you’ve seen the Big Short, you know what I’m talking about — the need to find a new place to invest and outdo your competitor which necessitates the invention of a new financial instrument to back up that investment which itself becomes a commodity of exchange on the stock market which, then, needs its own new instrument of debt — and the cycle goes on and on and on until everything comes crashing down. We saw this happen in the 1920s, the 1970s, the 1990s, 2008, and some say another recession is just around the corner.

This is the biography of capitalism — a life defined by expansion and contraction, a life marred by crisis and regulation and deregulation and crisis again. When Elizabeth Warren argues capitalism took a wrong turn in the 1980s, she needs to zoom out and see that turn as part of a larger journey, one that swerves and accelerates and retreats depending on which routes are open, on where tolls are lower, on which one will get capital to its profitable destination faster. One woman’s corruption is another woman’s capitalism.

It might be clearer, now, why Warren and Sanders have such markedly different approaches to solving American society’s greatest problems — from Medicare for All and student debt, to criminal justice reform and climate change. Take corporate regulation, for instance: while Sanders wants big companies to give their workers ownership stakes in the form of 20% of corporate shares, Warren wants CEOs to voluntarily sign non-binding pledges to act in good faith.

Warren is the careful engineer — a little tinkering here, a twist of the screw there, add some means-tested social policy to the mix and we can recover a corrupted capitalism. Sanders is the visionary architect who believes we cannot construct a shiny new building on a crumbling road network — when the very foundation you’re building on is rotten, you’ve got to tear everything apart and build from the ground-up.

Nowhere is this distinction more obvious than in Sanders’ and Warren’s approach to big-money donations to their campaigns. Not only has Sanders refused to accept corporate PAC dollars of any sort, he has called for a ban on corporate contributions to the DNC’s convention next July — a direct confrontation with capital and the sway it holds over politicians.

Warren, on the other hand, has been decidedly confounding on the matter — transferring lobbyist donations from her senatorial campaign to her presidential one, proudly declaring her willingness to accept ‘dark money’ to fight Trump in the general, retracting that declaration, and then clarifying she will still raise big-money for the DNC if she is the nominee. For a candidate who talks about the corrupting influence of money in politics, this might seem like very strange politicking by an otherwise decent person.

But it’s not strange — not to anyone who can detect the worldviews and different conceptions of ‘corruption’ clashing in this election. There is a reason why Warren was a Republican in 1997 and is a ‘progressive’ Democrat today — whichever team rids the market of distortions is the one she roots for. Similarly, there is a reason Sanders has been repeating himself ad nauseam about wealth inequality in America, regardless of decade or President — for him, markets are never distorted. They bend, stretch, crook and curve but they are never distorted. After all, how ‘distorted’ can a system geared towards wealth-generation be if it is constantly and successfully generating it for its wealthiest members?

A look around the world today is enough to highlight the pitfalls of anti-corruption political agendas that miss the forest for the trees. As Imran Khan administers Pakistan’s newest IMF loan and Narendra Modi continues to preside over an unemployment crisis in India; as Jair Bolsonaro burns down the Amazon in Brazil and Recep Tayyip Erdogan bombs Turkish and Syrian kurds, remember that all of these men placed corruption at the center of their campaigns.

Capitalism is accumulation through the market. Corruption is accumulation through the state and its institutions. The sooner the American electorate sees both as two sides of the same coin, the sooner its grievances can be addressed. At this moment, we are at least fortunate enough to have one candidate for President who already does.