The Case for Economic Democracy. Andrew Cumbers

elite removed from public scrutiny and democratic control. In the UK, this has meant that the growing dominance of financial activities over the broader economy (Lapavitsas 2013) is exacerbated by the values of the financial class shaping policy in its own image and to its own advantage.

Making the case for economic democracy in the twenty-first century

      Confronting the various crises and challenges that we face requires tackling both the accumulation of wealth and the control of economic decision-making processes by financial and business interests. This is the renewed project for economic democracy that I outline in this book.

Conventionally, economic democracy is often conflated with industrial democracy or workplace democracy; the extent to which workers have ownership and democratic control over their labour, rather than subservience to managers and private owners. Its subject matter has typically been concerned with collective bargaining rights and employee participation in the workplace, or with the promotion of cooperatives and employee ownership. Matters are further complicated by the existence of the term ‘social democracy’, a dominant reformist trend in labour and progressive left politics in the period after 1945 (though having a much longer lineage) and which also has its roots in workplace trade union struggles and labour politics. While the workplace and the sphere of industrial democracy remain a critical concern here, I want to take a broader and more holistic view (see also Malleson 2013), exploring how we create a democratic economy as a more socially and ecologically sustainable alternative to the status quo. This requires consideration of how economic processes in their entirety, and not just in the workplace, are subject to collective decision making and ownership, widespread public deliberation and full democratic participation (Pateman 1970).

I also emphasize the importance, in a fully functioning economic democracy (Dahl 1985), of recognizing the rights of individuals in all their diversity to participate in this collective process. The individual is largely missing from earlier conceptions of economic democracy, particularly workplace-based forms, which have tended to see it as a collective project on behalf of workers as a class. This has been an error and a gift to the those on the right who have been able to equate the individual, freedom and capitalism – around notions of private property rights – at the expense of the common good. Here I wish to go beyond the needless antagonism between individual and collective rights. If we accept that, as individuals, all our economic activities involve social interaction and cooperation, then it follows that to realize our individual economic rights in a positive fashion – that does not at the same time infringe on the rights of others – inevitably requires forms of collective organization and public engagement.

      In developing my argument here, there are three key ‘pillars’ that run through the remainder of the book. The first is the centrality of individual economic rights. Democracy, as the political theorist Robert Dahl reminds us (Dahl 1985), is fundamentally about individuals being able to exercise their democratic rights by participating in decision-making processes. This applies equally to the economy as it does to other areas of polity and society. Second, and following on from the discussion above, securing these rights requires much greater collective and democratic ownership of firms, resources and property than exists at present. I go on to argue that this requires a mixed (markets and planning) economy of diverse collective ownership as an alternative organizational ethos to the private property dominance of global capitalism. Alongside and enabling these first two pillars is a third: the need to widen and deepen public engagement and participation in decision making to cultivate a more democratic and deliberative political economy. Taken together, these are fundamental supports for transcending capitalism and moving towards a democratic economy.

Following this Introduction, the book consists of four chapters. In the next chapter, I explore a brief history of economic democracy, movements for workplace and industrial democracy, their achievements and weaknesses, as well as the successes but also democratic failings of social democracy. I then develop my own framework for economic democracy, founded around the three pillars in chapter 2. Chapter 3 explores examples of existing initiatives and practice for each of the three pillars, while in the Conclusion, I restate my argument and explore some of the policies required to enact my broader sense of economic democracy. I also consider some of the constraints and vested interests to be overcome and how we might mobilize to make the democratic economy a reality.

Notes

      1 1. See, for example, senior Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s recent dismissal of the Green New Deal in the US.

      2 2. Some research that I carried out for the Scottish public sector union, UNISON, in the mid-2000s showed no significant relationship between level of taxation and economic growth when comparing countries in the OECD (Birch and Cumbers 2007).