DEEPENING DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT
Four of the seven pathways to social empowerment discussed in chapter 5 directly involve the state: statist socialism, social democratic statist regulation, associational democracy, and participatory socialism. In all of these the key issue is the relationship between social power in civil society and state power. Unless there are effective mechanisms for subordinating state power to social power in civil society, none of these pathways can effectively translate social power into control over the economy. If socialism as an alternative to capitalism is at its core economic democracy, it is essential, to use the words of Boaventura Santos, that democracy itself be democratized.
The three forms of democracy we have looked at in this chapter—direct democracy, representative democracy, and associational democracy—constitute three solutions to the problem of how to subordinate the state to civil society. In direct democracy this occurs by delegating aspects of state power to the empowered participation and collective deliberations of ordinary citizens. In representative democracy the subordination of state to civil society is accomplished by democratically selected representatives of citizens making decisions on their behalf. And in associational democracy, subordination of the state occurs by associations rooted in civil society being empowered to perform various kinds of public functions. A thoroughly democratized democracy will involve deepening all three of these forms of democracy.
Traditional Marxist accounts of the state and democracy are generally highly skeptical of the possibility of this kind of democratic deepening, so long as the economic structure remains capitalist. The central thesis of most Marxist theories of the state is that the state in a capitalist society has a distinctively capitalist character: it is a capitalist state, not just a state in capitalist society. This means that the institutions of the state are structured in such a way that they strongly tend to reproduce capitalist relations and to block anti-capitalist possibilities. Deviations from this functionally integrated configuration are possible, but when they occur they set in motion disruptions of the functioning of capitalism. These disruptions in turn tend to trigger counter-measures to restore reproductive functionality. The limits of stable deviation of the capitalist state from a form that is functionally compatible with capitalism, therefore, tend to be relatively narrow.
If these arguments are correct, then a meaningful, sustainable deepening of democracy within capitalism is just not possible. Empowered participatory governance may be a reasonable design for citizen participation in direct democracy, but within capitalism this will be confined to marginal niches. A robustly egalitarian system of representative democracy in which the people control the process of representation more profoundly may enhance the democratic quality of that representation, but again, within capitalism such devices would have little effect on the extent to which the state could actually empower civil society over capital. And while associational democracy may be an important ingredient in a radical democracy, within a capitalist economy the asymmetries of power across associations means that associational democracy will always engage in problem solving on terms favorable to capitalism.
These are important criticisms of the possibilities of social empowerment and the state within capitalism. They depend centrally on the idea that societies are coherent, integrated systems in which the parts must fit together fairly well in order for the system to function tolerably. The alternative perspective is that societies are loosely coupled systems rather than tightly integrated totalities. They are more like an ecology than an organism: quite hostile elements can coexist in shifting- uneven equilibria without the system exploding. We have already encountered this idea in the notion of hybrid economic structures in which capitalist, statist, and socialist economic structures coexist in complex ways. The same kind of argument concerns forms of the state. This means that although it does make sense to elaborate the theoretical concept of a capitalist-type of state, actual state institutions can combine capitalist and non-capitalist forms. The state can contain internally contradictory elements pushing it to act in contradictory ways. States, like economic structures, are structural hybrids. So, while it is indeed the case that the state in capitalist society is a capitalist state, it is not merely a capitalist state: it is a hybrid structure within which capitalist forms are dominant.
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CHAPTER 7 – REAL UTOPIAS II: SOCIAL EMPOWERMENT AND THE ECONOMY
At the center of a socialist alternative to capitalism, in whatever way socialism is understood, is the problem of economic
institutions, specifically the social organization of power over
the allocation of resources and control of production and
distribution. In statist conceptions of socialism such power and
control operates primarily through the state, in the strongest
version through the direct state ownership of the principal
means of production and comprehensive central planning. In the
social empowerment conception of socialism proposed here, the
problem of controlling economic processes is less clear-cut. There
are multiple heterogeneous institutional forms along the various
pathways through which social power can be exercised over the
production and distribution of goods and services.
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Few theorists today hold on to the belief that a complex, large-scale economy could be viable without some role for markets—understood as a system of decentralized, voluntary exchanges involving prices that are responsive to supply and demand—in economic coordination. This does not imply that an economy must be coordinated by largely unregulated “free” markets, or even that the vast majority of economic needs will be met through market exchanges, but simply that decentralized exchanges involving market-generated prices will play a significant role in economic organization. To most contemporary critics of capitalism, comprehensive planning, whether organized through centralized bureaucratic institutions or through participatory decentralized institutions, no longer seems a viable alternative. This leaves open the extent to which markets should operate under tight or weak constraints in relation to democratic priorities established through the state and other pathways of social empowerment, and the precise mechanisms by which the negative effects of market forces would be neutralized.
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THE SOCIAL ECONOMY
The term “social economy” has been used to cover a wide range of economic forms. Sometimes it is simply identified with the “nonprofit sector”; other times it includes cooperative enterprises even if they produce for markets and compete with capitalist firms. Sometimes the social economy is defined in strictly negative terms as including non-state and non-market enterprises. Some writers, like the Quebec social economy activist Nancy Neamtan, include a specific set of internal organizational properties in the definition. A social economy enterprise, she writes, is one that
aims to serve its members or the community, rather than simply striving for profit; is independent of the State; establishes a democratic decision-making process in its statutes and code of conduct, requiring that users and workers participate; prioritizes people and work over capital in the distribution of revenue and surplus; bases its activities on principles of participation, empowerment, and individual and collective responsibility.
I will define the social economy quite broadly as economic activity that is directly organized and controlled through the exercise of some form of social power. Social power is power rooted in the voluntary association of people in civil society and is based on the capacity to organize people for collective action of various sorts.
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Successful interstitial transformations within capitalism mean that economic life becomes less dependent upon capitalist firms and capitalist markets as capitalism continues. Workers’ cooperatives and consumer cooperatives have developed widely and play a significant role in the economy; the social economy provides significant basic needs; collective associations engage in a wide variety of socially empowered forms of regulation; and perhaps power relations within capitalist firms have been significantly transformed as well. Taken together, these changes mean that the economic disruption of the break with capitalism will be less damaging than in the absence of such interstitial transformations. Furthermore, the pre-ruptural transformations are palpable demonstrations to workers and other potential beneficiaries of socialism that alternatives to capitalism therefore, will be marked by periods in which limits of possibility are encountered and transformation is severely impeded. In such periods new interstitial strategies must be devised which erode those limits. In different historical periods, therefore, different kinds of interstitial strategies may play the critical role in advancing the process of social empowerment. Strategies for building workers’ cooperatives may be the most important in some periods, the extension of the social economy or the invention of new associational devices for controlling investments (e.g., union-controlled venture capital funds) in others. The important idea is that what appear to be “limits” are simply the effect of the power of specific institutional arrangements, and interstitial strategies have the capacity to create alternative institutions that weaken those limits. Whereas the revolutionary anarchist scenario argues that eventually hard limits are encountered that cannot themselves be transformed from within the system, in this more evolutionary model the existing constraints can be softened to the point that a more accelerated process of interstitial transformation can take place until it too encounters new limits. There will thus he a kind of cycle of extension of social empowerment and stagnation as successive limits are encountered and eroded. Eventually, if this process can be sustained, capitalism itself would be sufficiently modified and capitalist power sufficiently undermined that it no longer imposed distinctively capitalist limits on the deepening of social empowerment. In effect, the system-hybridization process generated by interstitial strategies would have reached a tipping point in which the logic of the system as a whole had changed in ways that open up the possibilities for continued social empowerment.
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- Institutional pluralism and heterogeneity: multiple pathways of social empowerment The long-term project of social empowerment over the economy involves enhancing social power through a variety of distinct kinds of institutional and structural transformations. Socialism should not be thought of as a unitary institutional model of how an economy should be organized, but rather as a pluralistic model with many different kinds of institutional pathways for realizing a common underlying principle. In chapter 5 I identified seven such pathways: statist socialism, social democratic economic regulation, associational democracy, social capitalism, social economy, cooperative market economy, and participatory socialism. These pathways are embodied in different ways in the specific real Utopian innovations and proposals we explored in chapters 6 and 7: urban participatory budgeting, Wikipedia, the Quebec social economy for childcare and eldercare, unconditional basic income, solidarity funds, share-levy wage-earner funds, Mondragon, market socialism, and “parecon.” No one of these pathways and specific proposals by itself is likely to constitute a viable framework for a socialist economy, but taken in combination they have the potential to shift the underlying configuration of power that controls economic activity.
- There are no guarantees: Socialism is a terrain for working for social and political justice, not a guarantee for realizing those ideals Social justice, as I defined it in chapter 2, requires that all people have equal access to the necessary social and material means to live flourishing lives; political justice entails that all people have equal access to the political means to participate in decisions that affect their lives. The dominance of social power over the economy does not guarantee the realization of these radical
democratic egalitarian ideals. Civil society is an arena not only
for the formation of democratic egalitarian associations, but also
for exclusionary associations rooted in particularistic identities opposed to universalizing the conditions for human flourishing.
Enhancing the role and power of associations within an economic
structure could have the effect of reproducing oppressions within civil society rather than eroding them.
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The whole point of envisioning real Utopias and thinking about the relationship between institutional designs and emancipatory ideals is to improve the chances of realizing certain values. But in the end the realization of those ideals will depend on human agency, on the creative willingness of people to participate in making a better world, learning from the inevitable mistakes, and vigorously defending the advances that are made. A fully realized socialism in which the arenas of power in society—the state, the economy, civil society— have been radically democratized may foster such willingness and increase the learning capacity of people to cope with unanticipated problems, but no institutional design can ever be perfectly self-correcting. We can never relax.
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Earlier generations of socialists had greater confidence that a radically democratic economy in which capitalism had been overcome was actually possible. In the terms we have been using in this book, they were confident that social power, especially when it worked through the state, could become the dominant form of power over economic activity. Marx put forward the most forceful argument for such a view. He believed that he had discovered the laws of motion of capitalism with sufficient rigor to be able to predict that, in the long run, capitalism itself would destroy its own conditions of existence. As a result, capitalist economic power would eventually become a fragile and ineffective basis for organizing economic activity. The predicted long-term erosion of capitalist power, then, provided a fairly strong basis for the complementary prediction of the rise of social power organized by the working class to the dominant position within a radically transformed economic order. This thesis was based less on systematic theory about how a deeply democratic and egalitarian structure of economic relations would function, and why it would be sustainable, and more on the claim that capitalism in the long term itself becomes impossible.
Once this strong theory of the demise of capitalism is dropped as I argued in chapter 4, it becomes much more pressing to demonstrate that socialism itself is viable. It could be the case, however, that, contrary to aspirations for social emancipation, it is impossible in a complex economic system to construct a sustainable institutional and structural configuration within which social power would be the dominant form of power. A radical, democratic egalitarian economic system simply might not be viable under the conditions of scale and complexity of the contemporary world. Attempts to create such a socialist configuration might always prove unstable and degenerate into some form of either a statist or a capitalist economy. The best we can do might be to try to neutralize some of the most harmful effects of capitalism. In spite of the will there might be no way. That could be true.
But it could also be the case that the apparent limits to the expansion of social power are much weaker than we might suppose. And it could certainly be the case that, under future conditions which we cannot anticipate, those limits will be radically different from what they are today and that dramatic advances in social power
would become possible. The world might then look something like this: Unconditional basic income frees up time for social economy participation. Share-levy wage-earner funds and solidarity funds
enhance the capacity of unions and other associations to control
firms and investments. Worker-owned cooperatives are revitalized by new information technologies which make cooperation among cooperatives easier, and new cooperative market infrastructures are developed which buffer producer cooperatives from destructive market pressures. Direct state involvement in the economy is combined with new forms of associational participation which improve the efficiency and accountability of state enterprises. Participatory budgeting diffuses across a wide range of cities and extends to new domains of government spending. And entirely new institutions as yet unforeseen are invented to push forward social empowerment in new ways. This too could be true.