If memory
serves we were up to number 5.
5 Overwork
ED
(economic democracy) should be able to do something
about both the length of work and its intensity. Workers in control of an
enterprise, if they desire a healthier balance between leisure and work, have
it within their power to institute just that. “Work-life balance” would become
a reality as opposed to possessing, as it does now, the status of an abstract choice.
Work could
also become more varied. In the co-operative complex of Mondragon in Northern Spain, work tasks are rotated every two hours as
a way of enhancing the mental health and productivity of the worker-owners.
But it is
questionable whether, in a market, ED would be able to do everything about overwork. The imperative of any enterprise in a
market is to survive and if other work-controlled enterprises chose to
prioritise work over leisure and increase production and sales as a result, it
seems likely that fellow worker-controlled enterprises would have to follow
suit whether they wanted to or not.
Cure for Capitalism rating: 6/10
6 Instability
Capitalism’s
instability stems from what (Keynesian and Marxist) economists call the
business cycle. An immense and
growing amount of goods and services are produced which eventually glut the
market and become too much for consumers to absorb. Recession results and, in
time, the process begins again.
In
addition, capitalism, in the last thirty years, has become more volatile. It
has suffered more frequent downturns and financial crises. This, it seems, is due
to attempts to postpone a full-blown depression by bolstering people’s flagging
incomes with consumer debt, and thus, because of spiralling interest payments,
creating far more money at the top of society which just ends up in
speculation.
“The ever-present danger to the
system is deficient demand,” says Schweickart. “When supply outstrips demand,
the economy falters. If goods can’t be sold, production is cut back, workers
are laid off, and demand declines further.”
Would ED
abolish the business cycle? I have to admit I’m not entirely sure. ED would
undoubtedly abolish, or drastically reduce, wage-labour - the material
dependence workers have, under capitalism, on how much money they can negotiate
by selling their labour. Workers in ED enterprises would not be exploited. They would own and direct their
work-places and receive a full share of profits. Labour would not be another
“cost” of production. Because of this, the income of worker-consumers should be
far more stable.
Whether ED
enterprises would accumulate profits and use that capital to produce more
goods, eventually glutting the market, I’m not certain. From what I can gather
ED would substantially ease the business cycle, if not abolish it outright.
Cure for Capitalism rating: 7/10
Is this a market I see
before me?
ED,
compared to traditional socialism, embodies an alien trinity – profits,
competition and markets. ED enterprises make profits and they compete with each
other in a market economy. Historically, the Left has regarded the “market
economy” as the problem, never the
solution. It is, in many leftist eyes, from Friedrich Engels to Murray
Bookchin, synonymous with capitalism and its myriad injustices.
But ED is
unashamedly, a market economy. The “counterfoil” to the market lies in the
practice of social control of investment – the destination of up to 15% of new
investment is determined democratically through public meetings. But the bulk
of the economy takes place in a market.
ED is, as
Schweickart says, decentralised. It avoids the deformations of Communism.
“There is no central authority,” he writes, “dictating
consumption, production or employment.” But at what costs are these defects,
this fatal centralisation of political and economic power, avoided? Does ED
“socialism” cut off its nose to spite its face?
ED is based
on the assumption that our most pressing economic problems stem, not from the
fact that enterprises interact in a market, but the way production is organised.
A hypothetical Martian landing on earth, mused the economist Herbert Simon,
would conclude that human beings live in an organisational economy, rather than
a market economy. Most economic activity takes place within the boundaries of
firms rather than through market transactions between those firms. ED wants to
radically change how these firms are internally organised.
You can,
theoretically, utterly change the way Tesco is organised as a business, without
altering its place in a market competing with other supermarkets
Light and Dark
But markets have inescapable defects. Organisations
operating within them are forced to be institutionally selfish and have little
regard to the people outside the boundaries of their precious organisation.
They become egotistical competitors and, even if organised democratically, can become
in Arizmendietta’s fear,
“collective egotists.” Worker-controlled enterprises can and probably would be
selfish in much the same way that trade unions currently are. Unions do, to
some extent, represent the general interest but in a sense if you are not a
member of a particular union, you don’t count.
But markets also have, it seems to me, certain definite
advantages. They signal consumer preferences to enterprises more effectively
than any form of planning. You can have undemocratic planning – central
planning, the way the old Soviet Union and its
replica states were organised. And you can – though it never been implemented
on a mass scale - have democratic planning. Participatory economics and social ecology both embody democratic
planning. But if you want goods and services to be produced
unconsciously -- to be available merely
because enterprises react to signals that what they produce or do is popular
and has demand – then that means some form of market.
The dilemma, I think, is that the advantages of markets are
intrinsically linked to their detriments. The advantages are that consumer
desires don’t have to be consciously stated. The disadvantages are that markets
only work if there is profit to be made, they have a conservative bent, are
hostile to experimentation and they grow.
Mondragon has an entrepreneurial division that tries to find
consumer niches to exploit. It’s quite possible
that worker-controlled firms may be too successful. The evidence (and we are in
the realm of large bodies here) is that they are more efficient than their capitalist equivalents, so they may
actually be better at exploiting and magnifying consumer desires, and thus
growing.
Shutting your (market) butt down (in certain areas)
What is clear is that there are large areas of society that
should be closed to markets, however organised. “Thinking that we can live by the market alone
is like believing that we can live by eating only salt, because salt is vital
for our survival,” says the anti-austerity but pro-capitalist economist Ha-Joon Chang.
Markets – whether worker-controlled or not – do not work in
health, for example, and cause either over-treatment or no treatment at all. In
the media, the field of the creation and propagation of ideas and
interpretation of everything “out there”, solutions are now focusing on
non-market solutions. Participatory commissioning, for example, eschews markets and concentrates
on public funding of investigative reporting.
Or culture, cinema and TV. The English writer Mark Fisher has spoken of the “the cult of
minimal variation” - the need to make a profit means the risk-taking essential
to artistic and cultural innovation is hamstrung. “Since it is now clear,” he
writes, “that a certain amount of stability is necessary for cultural vibrancy,
the question to be asked is how can this stability be provided, and by what
agencies?” Notice, he does not say state agencies. But neither does he say
market agencies.
Richard Wolff,
another advocate of economic democracy, says you can have the advantages of
markets – that they respond to consumer desires – without their downsides automatically
following in train. If an enterprise in a worker-controlled economy fails, new
jobs or training should be offered to its workers, he says. They are not just
left to fend for themselves.
I can’t give absolute approval to Schweickart’s ED plan.
There are elements I like about it. It gives meaning to democracy when the
current capitalist charade just does a not very plausible impersonation. It
accepts the necessity of markets but doesn’t go far enough in adjusting to
their limitations and downsides. There are articles that consider this issue
more completely than I have. ED
also, rather conventionally, regards employment creation as an absolute good,
when we are moving towards a world where thanks to technology, work is
changing.
But After Capitalism does
debate capitalism as a system and looks it squarely in the eye. “If the
contradictions of capitalism are as serious as I argue they are, and if they
become more, not less, acute, as almost
surely they will, then we will witness another sustained challenge to this most
peculiar economic order,” Schweickart wrote a decade ago.
The contradictions are becoming more acute and another
sustained challenge is brewing. The contents of the intellectual backpack of
this coming anti-capitalist movement are, therefore, of crucial importance.
