Louise Haagh, The Case for Universal Basic Income
James K. Boyce, The Case for Carbon Dividends
Frances Coppola, The Case for People’s Quantitative Easing
Joe Guinan & Martin O’Neill, The Case for Community Wealth Building
Anna Coote & Andrew Percy, The Case for Universal Basic Services
Gerald Friedman, The Case for Medicare for All
Andrew Cumbers, The Case for Economic Democracy
The Case for Economic Democracy
Andrew Cumbers
polity
Copyright © Andrew Cumbers 2020
The right of Andrew Cumbers to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3386-2
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cumbers, Andrew, author.
Title: The case for economic democracy / Andrew Cumbers.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Series: The case for | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “Andrew Cumbers shows why economic democracy’s time has come”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019034779 (print) | LCCN 2019034780 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533848 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533855 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509533862 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Distributive justice. | Social justice. | Democratization.
Classification: LCC HB523 .C84 2020 (print) | LCC HB523 (ebook) | DDC 330.01--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034779 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034780
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Adam Smith Business School and the wider academic community at the University of Glasgow for providing me with the space, time and collegiality to help me complete this book. Special thanks are due to Robert McMaster who has been my partner on the related project to construct an Economic Democracy Index, and who has been the source of important discussions and insights on economic democracy over almost two decades. I am grateful too to the ESRC for the initial funding for that project ‘Transforming Public Policy through Economic Democracy’ (REf: ES/N006674/1), which helped to develop some of the ideas behind this book. Our other co-investigators on that project, Michael White, Susana Cabaco and Karen Bilsland, also deserve thanks for their support in various ways over the past four years.
Special thanks are also due to David Featherstone for his broader insights on progressive and radical thought. Outside Glasgow, Thomas Hanna, Joe Guinan and Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, Andy Pike and Danny MacKinnon at CURDS, Geoff Whittam and Katherine Trebeck have all in different ways been a source of ideas, debate and creative thinking that have helped me clarify and refine my arguments over the past decade. Thanks also to George Owers, my editor (plus three anonymous referees) for the perceptive and insightful thoughts and comments that have greatly improved the book. All remaining errors are of course mine. Thanks also to George and Julia Davies at Polity for their patience and support through the numerous missed deadlines. Anni Pues has, as ever, been an ever-present source of love, encouragement and inspiration. Finally, thanks to Anna and David for their constant reminders that there is more to life than work.
Introduction
As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the world is at a crossroads with a number of inter-related economic, ecological and political crises. Economically, there are widening inequalities between rich and poor, and a growing chasm between the elite billionaire class and the rest of us. Linked to this unequal and imbalanced system of global capitalism, we face an environmental catastrophe with global warming brought on by two centuries of rampant industrialization and ill-considered economic growth. Even if we can mitigate its worst effects, the rapid depletion of our natural resources in pursuit of profit threatens to leave the planet barely fit for habitation by future generations. Taken together, these economic and ecological crises are producing a third crisis, the focus of much public debate and angst among media, academic commentators and our ruling classes. This is the crisis of democracy itself.
When most people talk of democracy, they are almost certainly thinking about political democracy with a capital ‘P’: elections, representative government, political parties, the relations between parliament and the public. Very little consideration is given to whether the economy itself should also be thought of in democratic terms. Yet, how the economy functions, who controls it and makes key decisions regarding how it functions, what is produced and who benefits, is fundamental to everything else in our lives. Accessing the economic resources to lead decent lives, doing so in a way that is fair to others, and sustainable in caring for the planet and future generations, should surely be at the core of our discussions about democracy.
This book is motivated by the absence of these issues from public debate. In writing it, I aim to put the question of democratizing the economy back onto the agenda, making the case for economic democracy an important step in dealing with the manifold crises that we face. From the outset we should note that democracy – by any meaningful definition of the term – is absent both from the workplace and the wider economy. In the workplace, workers have diminishing rights over enterprise decision making, trade unions are in retreat and collective bargaining is under attack. There is still a tradition of cooperatives and employee-owned enterprises, nominally committed to democratic practice, though these are marginal to the dominant corporate and privatized economy. More broadly, whether we are talking about the big macroeconomic decisions, such as the setting of interest rates, fiscal decisions about how much tax and spending is required (apart from highly superficial election-time debates), or more fundamental questions over what forms of economic organization, ownership