Building a Living Democracy
Beyond Socialism and Capitalism
by Gar Alperovitz
Sojourner, April 1990

Page 3 of 9
Systemic Architecture, Underlying Structures and Community

Another way to confront the systemic character of the difficulty is to observe that the traditional answer to the problem of inequality under Western capitalism has been "social democracy" (or as Americans put it, "liberalism"). It may be that in very special cases social democratic politics can achieve sufficient momentum so that the underlying structural tendencies of capitalism can be countered by a politics sufficiently powerful to alter significantly the trends and patterns of real world inequality between people. The evidence from countries like Sweden is mixed, but even if it were not, this possibility would clearly be an exception to the general rule--especially as that rule is exhibited in 20th-century American experience.

To those who reject the traditional socialist solution of state ownership of wealth, another structural possibility commonly discussed is worker ownership of the means of production. In this system it is hoped that the dangers of statism on the one hand and private capitalist ownership and exploitation on the other can be avoided.

There are many important advantages to worker ownership schemes. However, as one who has long urged further development of this form, let me stress that it is clearly no panacea.

First, there is very little evidence that worker-owned firms significantly alter the overall distribution of income--a matter which is dramatically revealed by the experience of the former Yugoslavia. Second, worker-owned firms tend to develop their own interests. Worker-owned steel mills, for instance, generally seek similar kinds of subsidies (and trade protection) as privately owned mills. Nor for that matter that worker-owners have a much greater interest in expensive pollution controls that may benefit the larger community but cost a good deal of money. Again, generally, within the local or national community, privileged workers in rich industries do not easily share their advantage with the community as a whole--with workers in other industries, with the elderly, with the poor, with women and children outside their own families.

In some circumstances, clearly, worker-owned firms or worker co-ops may be a building block to the future. Some have more equitable internal pay scales, all teach that structural alternatives different from either major system are possible, and many yield experience with participation in general, and with economic matters in particular, that may be important to the future development of still other forms. Any open vision of the future would be wise to include a rich variety of small-scale co-ops, worker-owned firms, and neighborhood corporations. But just as clearly, the structural principle of worker-ownership does not provide a fundamental answer to many problems entailed in a serious and comprehensive vision for the future, or for a system of institutions that might undergird that vision in ways which can hope to nurture such fundamental values as equality, democracy based upon equality, or, as we shall explore, community and liberty.

For these and other reasons, another structural formulation may be important in the development of a vision for the new century. This involves the principle of community directly--and gives it power through specific institutional forms related to everyday life.

The idea of community is inclusive. It extends beyond the workers in a firm (or even as a "class") to include all people. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, perhaps more than any other modern writer, urged that this required the creation of local institutions, which embody the principle that the community as a whole should own and benefit from wealth. In a sense, Buber's idea (and related ideas of other thinkers who have historically emphasized principles of community" is similar to the general socialist argument, but focused at a more manageable scale.

Stressing the importance of building up, even if very slowly, the actual experience of cooperation, Buber distinguished between consumer cooperatives, worker cooperatives, and what he called a "full cooperative." The latter involves a community institution in which consumer and worker cooperation overlaps, as it were, in one geographical area, so that the experience of community can be expanded upon in all aspects of life, steadily, over time.

"Society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals," Buber argued, "but of associative units and associations between them. What is required, he held, is a particular form and structure--in the places where people actually work and live--which nurtures cooperative democratic activity through direct experience: "An organic commonwealth--and only such commonwealths can join together to form a shapely and articulated race of [people]--will never build itself up out of individuals ut only out of small and ever smaller communities: a nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities."

One objective is simply to provide a structural way to remove major industries from the insidious dynamic which commonly develops when private interests move into the political arena to secure special benefits. The notion of the community as a whole locally owning substantial wealth-producing firms attempts to negate this feature of capitalism. On its own, however, the principle is clearly inadequate: No mechanical application of the structural idea can hope to succeed in the absence of a positive vision that gives priority to the development of a much broader and deeply rooted practice and culture of cooperation and community accountability.

In Buber's argument the community must be sufficiently small and local so that each and all can truly participate in decidions affecting them. And, more generally, the social principle of involvement, of participation, of subsuming strictly economic goals to larger social goals, must be given priority. The fundamental question, How do we wish to live, each and all, together? is more important than more limited questions such as, How do we compete? How do we become number one? How do we increase the gross national product?

Related to this is a broader goal--the development of a new culture in which the principle of equality is seen as a matter of right, and in which a new relationship of wealth-holding to the entire community is established.

The principle of community, based on the experience of structures that begin to express this principle directly, is also clearly important to the development of a lifestyle for individuals (and for the community as a whole) that is less consumption-oriented and less materialistic.

A number of modern ecological thinkers have also urged the importance of building new structural relationships upon the principle of community understood in its local sense and, more broadly, as an important element of a larger vision. Thus, Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb Jr., in their new book For The Common Good on the economics of a sustainable future, urge rebuilding community institutions. And ecologist Murray Bookchin has put forward a concept he terms "libertarian municipalism":

A gap, ideological as well as practical, is opening up between the nation-state, which is becoming more anonymous, bureaucratic, and remote, and the municipality, which is the one domain outside of personal life that the individual must deal with on a very direct basis... Like it or not, the city is still the most immediate environment which we encounter and with which we are obliged to deal, beyond the sphere of family and friends, in order to satisfy our needs as social beings.

Over the long haul, no two societies and no two communities would likely fashion precisely the same community institutional form, and a great deal of experimentation would be necessary to define the scale and limits of new community institutions appropriate to a long-term alternative vision. There are, however, a nubmer of examples of neighborhood or community-owned economic institutions in the United States and elsewhere that a longer-term vision might build upon.