Socialism Is Democracy Extended.

There has been a centuries-long trend of growth in the share of the population having a serious say in the way things run. Significant exceptions are easy to find and there have been terrible reversals, but still it is a big picture trend. I will call the agents behind reallocation of power from smaller to larger social groups “the left,” conceding that this is an oversimplification as well as anachronism, the “left/right” terminology arising only with the French Estates General.

You however will get the point of saying that the barons at Runnymede were to the left of King John and the House of Lords was left of the Stuarts and the Commons left of the Lords. Way farther back the Athenian democrats overthrew the Thirty Tyrants in a rebellion from the left.

Left movements, so understood, have sought to do three things: first, transfer the prerogatives of the top elite downward; second, expand the group gaining that additional power – eventually to the point that it includes, democratically, “all the people”; third, to expand the sway of the democracy to issues otherwise made by inertia or by elites of wealth, connections, or threat advantage.

Pressure from the Whigs/Liberals/Radicals extended the franchise in one after another of the British Reform Acts, although it was sometimes the Tories who sponsored the legislation that finally became law – in an effort to cabin it as much as politically possible. In this century, the remaining queens and kings are mostly constitutional monarchs of republics-in-all-but-name. Across the developed world, and beyond, qualifications for voting have diminished. Beneficiaries have included, in roughly this order: laborers, freed slaves, women, racial minorities, older teenagers, parolees and recently, and in a few places, prisoners. 

A universal franchise in a democratic republic may still fall short of giving equal say to everyone because of such structural barriers as the US Electoral College and equal Senate representation. The wealthy always, one way or another, have far more effective power over elected representatives than the poor, a power differential the US Supreme Court increased, with eyes wide open, in its Citizens United decision.

Even a thoroughly democratic government might not amount to much, however, if most of the real decision making about how the society runs is not public but private. Imagine a society in which the following are private and for profit: schools, roads (toll or subscription), postal service, policing (subscription, rent-a-cops), medicine, utilities (usually monopoly). All this, then, would be subject only to private investment decisions and markets – markets perhaps untouched by any regulation, even antitrust. The government might be wonderfully democratic and yet almost all decisions about the general shape of the society and its future might well be in the hands of very few.

Fortunately, no developed country is much like that, although there are disturbing trends in some and very disturbing trends in others.The right wants to privatize as much as possible, and a little more. (Private prisons, for example, have a wonderful benefit for politicians that traditional prisons lack; they  contribute to the reelection war chests of the very representatives who voted the privatization. That is, for many politicians, more than ample compensation for the private prisons’ negative incentive to limit recidivism.)

Socialists, by contrast, look for opportunities to expand democratic control farther into the economy. Traditional public ownership is important in most developed countries, especially in transportation and medicine. Even the United States, in addition to roads and public education, has Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and municipal utilities. Owned by various public levels from national to neighborhood are parks, forests, seashores, beaches, libraries, museums, and halls.

How much should investor profit maximization control decisions about the structure and reliability of the electrical grid, or the communications-computing web, or the transportation network, the oceans, the atmosphere, the climate? Markets, even when they cannot be gamed by outsiders or rigged by insiders, may be too short sighted for long range or even medium range planning. A good profit next year may market-outweigh a disaster in ten years. Regulation is one remedy; traditional national or state or local ownership is another. Either increases, if sometimes imperfectly, the potential for genuinely democratic infrastructure and environmental policy.

It has to be conceded that there is nothing about the public ownership of a utility that automatically makes it reluctant to externalize costs by polluting air or water. Its mandate, however, is not to maximize investors’ profit, but to realize the priorities of the voting population. That population may well be concerned about the health risks of bad water or bad air. Then there is the externalized cost of global and catastrophic dimensions – climate change. For most private greenhouse polluters, direct and indirect, this is a public relations issue. For an enterprise democratically controlled by ordinary people, it can be mission-defining. Seattle City Light has been net greenhouse gas neutrality since 2005.

Citizen control through public ownership does not exhaust the socialist interest in giving ordinary people more say over the social and economic world. Such voluntary associations as credit unions and co-operatives make their contribution. It is the workplace, however, that is the big item.

Increasing democracy in the workplace has been a subject for many discussions and some experiments. Often greater worker participation in decision making improves the quality of the enterprise’s policies in raw bottom line terms. Many studies, mostly by business school faculty, have shown superiority to the CEO-as-czar model of more diverse groups of decision makers stretching all the way down to the local, ground floor jobs. (For example, internal “prediction markets” often prove dramatically better than the projections of upper management.) Economic success is great, of course, but even more important is the fairness of giving more people more say in the organization in which they spend so much of their lives. 

Worker participation is not a socialist goal only in capitalist enterprises.  State ownership does not automatically bring shop floor democracy, which is just as important for the Seattle City Light worker or the National Health Service doctor as for the Volkswagen assembler.

Investment bankers have developed many ways of redefining ownership, financing and control. These have usually been at the behest and for the advantage of the very rich, the CEOs, and, not surprisingly, for the particular advantage of investment bankers themselves.

Less creativity has gone into new ways of arranging financing and control to benefit a broader constituency. We have the model of outright employee ownership at one end of the spectrum and the suggestion box at the other. These do not exhaust the space of possibilities – any more than do the alternatives of no markets or ubiquitous, unfettered markets.

We have been told that “workers don’t want to run things, they just want a good paycheck.”  Or maybe it is the “good workers” or the “productive workers” who have no interest beyond their income.  The Premier of Manitoba, in 1914 assured his constituents that “Nice women don’t want the vote.”

More generally, it is agreed across a broad political spectrum that socialism, any socialism, any advance of democracy into capitalist business, must fail. Some economists will demonstrate this with a couple of well-drawn curves. A closer examination of these models will, if the past is any guide, turn up assumptions that are naïve, or involve breathtaking idealizations, or are unsupported by evidence.

“Just look how worker participation it bankrupted enterprise X.”  (Compare: “A republic will never work, just look at Rome, and Cromwell, and the First French Republic . . . ”)  We recall, however, that there have been a few businesses without the least shred of worker input have gone bankrupt. A famous owner or two have even led plural businesses into bankruptcy. Some enterprises with a great deal of worker participation, even up to the overall policy level, have done and are doing quite well. The “socialism can’t work,” meme flies in the face of a lot of empirical data: all the places and ways in which socialism is already working.

Then there is view that any form of  socialism is unjust because the families Koch, Bezos, Walton, Trump, Adelson, Blumberg, Saud, Ma, and the rest, deserve to have an outsized say about the economy and the working lives of millions or that they are so entitled by fundamental human rights and historical facts (See Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia).

Even where there is something to the desert or the entitlement claims, they do not always take priority over other facets of justice, and there is often much less to the desert or entitlement claims than at first appears. In any event, both political theory and the real world would benefit from a less rhetorical, less ideologically committed, and deeper discussion of democracy and socialism in relation to liberty, equality, and rights.  

A Note on Rhetoric and the Word “Socialist”

 

There are many who call themselves “socialists” who would be hostile to the idea that socialism is about extending democracy – that is real, one person one vote, unmanaged, free press, free association democracy. Stalin, Mao, and Castro had no use for that kind of “people’s power”. (They might have claimed that the people “really rule democratically because the party, and I at its head, know and always act in the people’s true interest.” We have reason to doubt that what they represented went much beyond their own interest and that of the top levels of their party.)

There has long been identity of interest between the friends, protégés, and followers of Stalin and the red baiting anti-socialists. Both sides maintain stoutly that Stalinism is true socialism.  We should take seriously that it was the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”  That’s what the Soviet government said, so it must be true!

Peculiarly, few of the anti-socialists would take the same line with “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” Granted, Kim Jong-un, like his father and grandfather, would insist that it is absolutely accurate to call Stalin’s Russia and his own Korea both democratic and socialist. In fact, despite the state’s owning everything worth owning in that country, North Korea isn’t socialist exactly because it isn’t democratic. The people don’t control everything. In fact, the people don’t control anything. It is not a culmination of the general trend towards democracy, but one of history’s most tragic backwaters.