Democracy at Work

As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it.”

Suppose that small, modest producer co-ops were established. Capitalist enterprises would have to worry about such noncapitalist competitors not only in terms of the price and quality of their competing outputs and their potential growth. They would have a new concern: competition with an enterprise that offers an alternative internal organization, a different work experience, and a different vision and path to a new economic system.

The workers in both kinds of capitalism sense their exclusion, politically as well as economically, from making the key decisions in what are endlessly hailed as “democratic societies” in one and “people’s democracies” in the other. This sense leads to resignation, deepening cynicism, and hostility among many workers. Such feelings express themselves in massive disinterest in politics and in economics—beyond securing the weekly paycheck.

The workers in both kinds of capitalism sense their exclusion, politically as well as economically, from making the key decisions in what are endlessly hailed as “democratic societies” in one and “people’s democracies” in the other. This sense leads to resignation, deepening cynicism, and hostility among many workers. Such feelings express themselves in massive disinterest in politics and in economics—beyond securing the weekly paycheck.

The workers in both kinds of capitalism sense their exclusion, politically as well as economically, from making the key decisions in what are endlessly hailed as “democratic societies” in one and “people’s democracies” in the other. This sense leads to resignation, deepening cynicism, and hostility among many workers. Such feelings express themselves in massive disinterest in politics and in economics—beyond securing the weekly paycheck.

The workers in both kinds of capitalism sense their exclusion, politically as well as economically, from making the key decisions in what are endlessly hailed as “democratic societies” in one and “people’s democracies” in the other. This sense leads to resignation, deepening cynicism, and hostility among many workers. Such feelings express themselves in massive disinterest in politics and in economics—beyond securing the weekly paycheck.

The capitalist organization of production must now be dissolved. Workers must become their own directors, receiving and distributing the surpluses they produce. They must become the collective decision-makers in productive enterprises, no longer the directed wage and salary receivers.

reformers prevailed over revolutionaries almost everywhere.

All of the varieties of state socialism in the twentieth century discovered that their progressive reforms—universal health care; public education; subsidized food, housing, daycare, and transportation; guaranteed employment; and so on—were not permanent, not part of the historically necessary transition from capitalism to communism.

A second key difference between the two systems lies in how they distribute productive resources (means of production) and outputs among enterprises and citizens. Capitalism is a market system. In capitalist economic systems, resources and outputs are distributed by means of market exchanges, in which their private owners bargain with one another to reach mutually acceptable price ratios for what they exchange. In contrast, socialism is a system that distributes resources and outputs by means of national planning. Rather than allow market exchanges to determine who pays how much to get what, state officials plan production inside state enterprises as well as how resources and outputs are distributed among enterprises and to the consuming public.