I substantially agree with what Wojtek said in response to my missive in
this thread (locality ==> loyalty?). All I was saying is that one can't
simply look at social geography. Class is also important, along with race
and gender.
I wrote > ... democracy is an end in itself, rather than being a means to
an end. Democratic sovereignty seems the only legitimate political
principle.<
Max S. writes: >> Democratic sovereignty is an ideal, maybe a principle,
but far too vague to mean very much in a practical context. I don't want to
have a national assembly on whether my garbage is contracted out or
provided by public employees. On the other hand, I don't want dictatorial
control of, say, civil liberties.<<
Of course, it's abstract, since principles always are. How democratic
sovereignty (DS) works in practice has to be decided on a case-by-case
basis using more information. But it's not especially vague.
What DS means can best be seen in terms of the alternatives: it is a
rejection the principle of "might makes right," even though in practice
might does indeed make right (just as history is written by the victors).
There is no moral basis to the rule of the mighty.
DS is also not a Hobbesian principle where some individual or minority of
individuals -- the sovereign Leviathan -- is seen as the decision-maker of
last resort for society. The only justification of the power of the few is
the conscious and active consent of the people; the decision-maker of last
resort is the societal majority.
It is also not a Locke-style principle where certain rights are asserted to
be "natural" or god-given. Saying that something is "natural" does not
necessarily mean it's good, while it's hard to know what is and is not a
gift from the gods (assuming they exist). Usually, an argument that
something should be a "right" ends up saying that it's good for people, for
society. This seems nothing but an appeal to DS. In practice, rights in
society are created by people; the issue is which people make the decisions
about what rights exist and how such decisions are made.
One thing is clear: DS is not the same thing as democratic decision-making
about all absolutely all issues. Among other things, the societal majority
will, in most cases, grant everyone certain rights (civil liberties, etc.)
Democracy involves not only majority rule but minority rights. After all,
individuals know that they can easily be in the minority. Put another way,
the majority can benefit from civil liberties, directly and indirectly.
Similarly, the societal majority (a national assembly) could easily decide
that municipalities could make their own decisions about garbage
collection. The full application of DS would, in my admittedly
old-fashioned opinion, would involve the abolition of capitalism, so that
the contracting out of garbage collection services to capitalist
enterprises would be ruled out.
I want to stress that the societal majority can easily make the wrong
decisions (though it's hard to tell, since that majority's ability to make
mistakes is so restricted and distorted by our current political-economic
system). But in the end, they are the only ones who can decide whether or
not these decisions are wrong. DS also says that a society should be able
to learn from its errors rather than having some minority make mistakes for
them. (As Luxemburg said, the mistakes of the mass movement of workers are
worth more than the correct decisions of the elite.)
Sure, I have my own moral standards and political views. But I cannot claim
the right to stuff my own morality or politics down the throats of the
majority. Rather, the aim is to educate and convince people, while pushing
for a much less distorted method of the expression of popular sovereignty
than capitalism allows.
>> The issue was whether some kind of plant-level industrial democracy
would necessarily make for more enlightened decisions in national planning,
and my comment was that it is less rather than more likely.<<
As I said, pure workers' control has to be compromised to fit in with a
central plan, which itself must decided upon democratically.
>>Even so, the fact that a democratic process could lead to a decision I
don't like would not delegitimize the process for me. I wouldn't oppose
workplace democracy in general. I simply have grave doubts that it would
accomplish much, and even more that such an arrangement would facilitate
economic planning. Decentralized, democratic deliberation seem to be the
very opposite of the idea of a plan.... <<
That's because you're probably thinking of a "plan" as being the USSR-type.
> Also, Max, it sure seems that your vison predicts that the Economic
Policy Institute would be a collectively self-aggrandizing organization
that would always be opportunistically taking advantage of others...<
Rather than respond to the details of Max's comments, I want to clarify my
point: the EPI contradicts the theory that all decentralized organizations
are anti-social.
>>I would be happy to write for the WT. I've done worse.<<
If the WASHINGTON TIMES were to ask your organization to do research for
them, I for one would worry about the soul of the EPI.
MISCELLANEOUS COMMENTS:
1. Elaine: NAFTA may have been advertised as being only about trade, but in
practice it's also about investment.
2. Colin mentions that capital goods aren't scarce in many cases. For fans
of Roemer's theory of exploitation, R's theory would predict that
capitalist exploitation wouldn't exist. His Walrasian theory can't deal
with unused capacity or unemployment, two perfectly normal phenomena under
capitalism.
3. Wojtek mentions the possibility of people using Communist Party
organizations in Eastern Europe for their own purposes. He's right. A
similar case: in Francoist Spain, the underground CP used the
state-controlled corporatist unions as political organizing arenas. If I
remember correctly, old Vlad the Impaler advocated the use of Tsarist
company unions in a similar way. ("Vlad the Impaler" refers to Lenin, BTW.)
4. Gina Neff mentions the domination of pen-l by the "regs" (regulars). At
my next meeting of Pen-l Anonymous, I will publically admit to being a reg
-- maybe even the main one. Since I will be in Palm Springs anyway this
weekend, I'll stop at the Betty Ford center. More seriously, I'll try not
to dominate pen-l. The problem for me is that when I read pen-l missives,
it stimulates a wealth of ideas in my head and I feel frustrated until I
can put them down on paper or on the e-waves. (It's almost like I'm
Pavlov's dog.) They can't wait for scholarly papers and the like ... Maybe
if I _read_ pen-l less, I'll send fewer messages...
in reg pen-l solidarity,
Jim
