what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label worker control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label worker control. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Deepening Democracy?

Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian management professor who, in many ways, can be regarded as having inherited the mantle of the most insightful management writer Peter Drucker. He has the same integrity and clarity that the Austrian emigre brought and, as he has aged, has become increasingly critical of the excesses of modern capitalism and has produced a little book about this - "Rebalancing Society – Radical Renewal; beyond Left, Right and Center" (2015) which argued that we had got it wrong when we imagined that capitalism had won at the end of the 80s

It was balance that triumphed in 1989. While those communist regimes were severely out of balance, with so much power concentrated in their public sectors, the successful countries of the West maintained sufficient balance across their public, private, and what can be called plural sectors. But a failure to understand this point has been throwing many countries out of balance ever since, in favor of their private sectors.

And it was deindustrialisation which destroyed that balance more specifically the power which working class people had been able to exercise in that period through votes and unions - has been undermined. In its place a “thought system” developed - justifying corporate greed and the privileging (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company which I have summarised thus -

  • All political parties and most media have been captured by the “thought system” which now rules the world

  • People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

  • Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few

  • Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of the excesses to which it can now give vent

  • It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

  • Social protest is marginalized - not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”

  • But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project need more detailed exposure

  • as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

  • We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed

  • to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed)

But the elite - and the media which services their interests - noticed something was wrong only when Brexit and Trump triumphed – in 2016. But that was simply the point at which the dam broke – the pressure had been building up for much longer.

If we really want to understand what is going on we have to go much further back – not just to the beginning of the new millennium when the first waves of populist anger started - but to the 1970s when the post-war consensus started to crumble – as Anthony Barnett, for one, most recently argued in his superb extended essay “Out of the Belly of Hell” (2020)

The demos have been giving the Elites a clear warning – “your social model sucks”. So far I don’t see a very credible Elite response. Indeed, the response so far reminds me of nothing less than that of the clever Romans who gave the world Bread and Circuses. Governments throughout the world have a common way of dealing with serious problems – it starts with denial, moves on to sacrificial lambs, official inquiries and bringing in the clowns - and finishes with “panem et circenses”. But my argument was too cynical. It failed to offer a way out.

For more than a decade, people in different parts of the world have been working on what is various called “deliberative democracy” or citizen juries which offer inspiring examples of that way out. Two shortish articles offer the best introduction to developments in this field - first this and then then the second part here

Some people would argue that this is just a fleeting fashion and that a more effective path would be to -

  • increase local government power – ie giving a greater voice to the local public through their local representatives having a stronger legal and strategic role?

  • Or does it require a more open and participative processwith deliberative democracy and citizen juries?

  • Or does it perhaps mean a greater say by the workforce in the everyday management of public services?

  • Or a combination of all the above?

Hilary Wainwright is amongst the very few who have taken such questions seriously – with her “Public Service Reform – but not as know it” (2009) although the Dutch, with the Buurtzog model, are now exploring the question. Cooperatives, social enterprise and worker-owned companies may employ only a tiny percentage of the global workforce but offer huge advantages to the increasing number of people looking for work which gives meaning to their lives.

Background Reading on the growing recognition of the need for greater citizen input

Finally, for those who want to know more about the operation of citizen juries, here’s the site of The Deliberative Democracy Journal whose articles are free (eg this one about different German approaches) and The Citizen Convention for UK democracy