Economic Democracy must replace Economic Authoritarianism – What Does Economic Democracy Look Like?
Over the centuries oligarchs have created economic systems for enriching and keeping the oligarchs in power:
- Slavery with one owner who has total control over one or more slaves who are provided for only minimally for their labor and are subject to severe physical abuse.
- Feudalism with one lord who has less control over one or more serfs who get to keep part of the fruits of their labor and may have to sacrifice family members to the lord’s pleasure.
- Capitalism with one employer and one or more employees who get to ‘negotiate’ a fee for their labor as long as it is less than the sale of the fruits of their labor. And the less the employer has to pay the better. Prisoners, undocumented residents, cheap overseas foreign laborers, union-less gig ‘entrepreneurs,’ are a favorite source of minimally-paid, maximally-abused, workers under capitalism.
There are variants of these systems based on who the oligarchs are, private individuals or public officials. Private control could be an individual oligarch or a group of oligarchs such as a board of directors. Public control is the state or government that represents the state and that state could be elected or self-appointed. The USSR and today’s China used/use state capitalism as their economic system. Over the last century, the United States has shifted from state-capitalism controlled by laws and regulation to private capitalism where the state is run by and for capitalists. Regardless of who’s in control of capitalism, state or private, citizens are suffering varying levels of economic abuse.
Where can we go from here? Surely smart people have been thinking about what has come before and comes next. Hopefully, they are considering how a democratic system could replace the current authoritarian system, capitalism, created by the oligarchs for the oligarchs? Yes they, the socialist economists, are proposing what comes next: Democracy in the workplace to better fit, protect, and empower our democratic political system. Whether it’s state or private capitalism, it’s still authoritarian and abusive to citizens. Democracy embedded in our current economic system is what could admonish and wrest control of the economy from the oligarchs.
To get there, it’s going to take a vibrant democratic political system with massive citizen participation to enable this new democratic economic system called socialism.
Andy Hailey