Economic Democracy. Andrew Cumbers. Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK;

Transcription

1 Economic Democracy Andrew Cumbers Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK; Making Space for Economic Democracy Economic Democracy as Labour Freedom Economic democracy is often thought of in collective terms as the realm of collective bargaining or about giving workers collective ownership of the means of production. These are important ingredients but reflect a rather particularist and workerist (Cleaver 2008) sense of labour, work, and the economy. In embracing a broader and more pluralistic perspective, a project of radical economic democracy must take the individual as its starting point. One of the shared concerns of both Marx and the more radical liberals such as John Stuart Mill (Ellerman 1992) was to give individuals ownership of their labour, with the implication that it is they who choose how it is used, in opposition to the diverse servitudes of slavery, feudalism, or capitalism. 1 For Marx, this liberation of the individual worker is about giving her the power and control over how she uses her labour, thereby overcoming the alienation of the capitalist labour process (see Megill 2002). In the context of massive industrialisation in the 19 th century, it is not surprising that the emergent working class becomes the subject for revolutionary transformation. But in the very different world of the 21 st century of ecological crises, massive wealth inequalities, a growing precariat, and the marginalisation of many from the contemporary labour process the project of radical economic democracy needs a degree of reformulation. Starting with providing the individual with ownership and control of their labour in pursuit of their own reproduction and flourishing is fundamental. 2 Framing economic democracy thus links to a political agenda around the commons or commoning (De Angelis 2016) rather than the clarion call of earlier generations to provide (largely industrial and male) workers with the fruits of their labour. A focus upon individuals operating in free exchange with others about how they use and organise their labour, as well as shared resources, in a sustainable fashion, is key to achieving the social and ecological transformation required. It also poses the question of the individual economic rights of others in the community who are unable or no longer have the capacities to work. How might their ownership rights to flourish be addressed and what mechanisms (e.g. a basic living income, cooperative stakeholding) might serve these purposes? This positive sense of individual economic freedoms articulated here contrasts sharply with the negative freedoms of Hayek and the neoliberal tendency (Burczak 2006). Where the latter views freedom as the right of elites to appropriate the labour of others, a focus on the economic and property rights of labour Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, First Edition. Edited by the Antipode Editorial Collective. ª 2019 The Authors/Antipode Foundation Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

2 Making Space for Economic Democracy 103 leads in a very different direction; that of autonomous self-government for individuals, families, and communities. Moreover, the principle of self-government of one s own labour to meet social needs use value over exchange value can only be realised through collective projects and working with others. One of Marx s fundamental insights was to see labour as a collective social product. We can only survive as a family, community, city, or even planet through our cooperation with others in the management of resources (including labour). What might seem counterintuitive at first but has a strong intrinsic logic is that exercising individual labour rights in a way that also protects the rights of others from exploitation and alienation quickly leads to collective forms of ownership, in opposition to private and corporate 3 forms. Securing the individual s right to participation in decisions about their own labour and the inescapable point that follows that all individuals have this right (Dahl 1985) can only be achieved through democratic and cooperative means. In practice, this is best achieved through diverse forms of public and cooperative ownership. Forging Economic Democracy In, Against, and Beyond the State Addressing the current ecological, political, and economic crises that confront us involves reclaiming space and place from capitalist appropriation and forging new collective organisations, institutions, and identities that can transform economic practices. The resurgence of an agenda around the global commons is critical to this task, with its insistence on carving out new spaces that can reclaim resources, work, and social being for collective and socially useful purposes in environmentally sustainable ways (De Angelis 2016). A critical question arises, however. How do we get there? Can a transformative economic and social project be achieved outside of any engagement with the state as many commons proponents argue? While much is made of radical autonomous projects at the local scale that work at the interstices of capital (Holloway 2010), it is doubtful that more transformative systemic change at higher scales can be achieved without actively reclaiming commons from the state. A sobering point is that the deepening inequalities and crises that we face are not leading to effective Left mobilisations, but rather a resurgence of right-wing populism and even fascism. In parallel it is notable that, as Gramsci (1971) long ago warned, advanced forms of capitalism lead to a deepening of the relations between capital, the state, and civil society. During periods of crisis, political, and economic elites often strengthen their grip on power, rather than being open to challenges from below (Mirowski 2013). The ability to combine coercive state powers with dominant metanarratives (e.g. austerity, taking back control, anti-immigrant rhetoric, Islamophobia) being key to preserving elite rule and wider public support for the status quo. Forging a radical economic democracy requires creating spaces for labour agency in opposition to, as much as independent from, capital in, against, and beyond the state (Angel 2017; Cumbers 2015). This also involves bringing a realistic everyday politics of social reproduction (Pitts and Dinerstein 2017:430) to social struggles in terms of reclaiming spheres of work and life for collective

3 104 Antipode projects in opposition to elite commodification processes. This can involve new forms of working in common, such as those typical in community gardening projects which attempt to reclaim urban spaces from property-based speculation, commodification and gentrification in cities (Crossan et al. 2016; Cumbers et al. 2018b). These are never completely autonomous from incorporation into dominant agendas, and, as such, need constant struggle creating and recreating alternative economic identities and practices. But neither can they be innocent of broader spatial governance processes and structures, needing strategies for upscaling and indeed scaling out if they are to have broader transformative effects (MacKinnon 2011). This involves making claims and advances on state institutions and structures, such as city planning boards, land registry regimes, and even changing broader regulatory regimes through parliamentary activity. Reclaiming Space for Public Ownership Public ownership is critical to a project of radical economic democracy. So much of the neoliberal attack on collective institutions has been targeted at existing public institutions at all scales where both direct privatisation of resources and assets and increasingly innovative mechanisms for allowing rent seeking and private profit to flourish in public private ventures where exchange value increasingly expunges use value. The financialisation of basic service sectors like water and energy further alienate, marketising resources for selfish elites in the here and now, rather than sustaining them for future generations. In response, new possibilities for alternative, democratic, and participatory modes of governance need articulating. The re-emergence of new forms of public ownership at local and national levels marks a significant moment in the emerging contours of a post-neoliberal order as the latter s contradictions become more socially and ecologically urgent. Some have tentatively identified the global trend towards remunicipalisation (see Kishimoto and Petitjean 2017) as part of a Polanyian double-movement of social and state re-regulation of key strategic sectors of the economy (e.g. water, electricity, transport, waste) in the wake of the failings and contradictions of privatisation and marketisation (Hall et al. 2013). Although history and Polanyi himself reminds us that such a double-movement can be progressive, it also can turn malign in its implications for society and democracy (Polanyi 1944). Notably, it is the authoritarian, immigrant-hating regime of Viktor Orban that leads the way with renationalisation programmes in Hungary while the superficially liberal EU continues to impose new privatisations as part of its fiscal discipline in Greece and elsewhere. But a refashioned economic democracy around public ownership can achieve two vital things: it can challenge the economic rationality of capital and private appropriation of labour, land, resources, and much else, while also advocating radical and progressive alternatives to earlier forms of flawed state-led projects. Recent experiences against privatisation in Latin America are apposite here. In 2007, the Peruvian city of Huancayo was faced with the urgent requirement to modernise its local sanitation system which was becoming unfit for purpose. The preferred multi-scalar neoliberal option by the national government was a public private partnership (involving the German government and the Inter-American Development Bank), but following a

4 Making Space for Economic Democracy 105 grassroots protest and mobilisation, the city opted for its own trans-local public public partnership involving local NGOs and technical assistance from another innovative municipal enterprise, ABSA of Argentina. 4 Such creative spatial strategies help reclaim local public spaces for social ends over exchange value while also enlisting broader support and participation from both the state and civil society. Remunicipalisation campaigns in the energy sector in Germany notably in Berlin and Hamburg have attracted much attention because of the way that diverse radical grassroots coalitions have mobilised against privatisation, with varying degrees of success (Becker et al. 2015). To some extent, these initiatives can be viewed as articulating alternative social and ecological visions in line with right to the city movements (Beveridge and Naumann 2014). But they were also partly enabled by the particularities of German federal state and constitutional structures that provide opportunity spaces for social movement actors to reshape public institutions. In neither Berlin nor Hamburg has the outcome (yet) been a transformation to the kinds of participatory and deliberative public organisations that we would wish for, but the mobilisations have renewed grassroots agency while also contesting dominant state logics, framing alternative discourses around social and ecological justice. Beyond these specific examples, radical geography needs to fashion a new spatial architecture around public and collective ownership and the wider goal of economic democracy if we are to realise the full emancipation of our labours. In the 20 th century, the dominant Left traditions of socialism and social democracy tended to have highly verticalist and nation-centric spatial imaginaries where the forms of ownership were heavily centralised and top-down, often eviscerating older localist forms of mutualism and municipal socialism. The adherence to what John O Neill has described as a Cartesian rationalism and the technocratic conception of planning (2006:67) resulted in the autocratic imposition of centrally imposed state projects with neat geometries onto messy, disordered on the ground economic realities. Some autonomous writers (e.g. Holloway 2010) lean in the opposite direction, celebrating a trans-local commons, evoking moments and fragments of commons without much sense of the dynamics required to achieve more transformative systemic change at higher spatial scales. An urgent task for radical geography in the 21 st century is surely to navigate between these opposing tendencies with a spatial politics that is sensitised to local autonomy, individual empowerment, and decentred economic decision-making while still being alert to broader responsibilities to social and ecological justice. This requires institutional forms and arrangements around diverse forms of collective ownership, in and outside the state, rather than essentialising one or the other. Endnotes 1 These ideas are developed in much greater depth in Cumbers et al. (2018a). 2 From a Marxist perspective, some of the most compelling arguments here from those working in the autonomous tradition who write against workerist and immaterialist accounts (e.g. Cleaver 2008; Dinerstein 2015; Pitts and Dinerstein 2017). 3 Corporate forms of capitalism have over time been sanctified by states as individualised forms of property rights of course by national and supranational state bodies such as the EU and WTO.

5 106 Antipode 4 ABSA was formed as a result of a remunicipalisation struggle against a foreign consortium involving the now defunct and disgraced corporation Enron in It is an interesting hybrid, part owned by the water sector trade union and part owned by the provincial government of Buenos Aires (Kishimoto et al. 2015). References Angel J (2017) Towards an energy politics in-against-and-beyond the state: Berlin s struggle for energy democracy. Antipode 49(3): Becker S, Beveridge R and Naumann M (2015) Remunicipalization in German cities: Contesting neoliberalism and reimagining urban governance? Space and Polity 19(1):76 90 Beveridge R and Naumann M (2014) Global norms, local contestation: Privatisation and de/politicisation in Berlin. Policy and Politics 42(2): Burczak T A (2006) Socialism After Hayek. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Cleaver H (2008) Deep currents rising: Some notes on the global challenge to capitalism. In W Bonefeld (ed) Subverting the Present, Imagining the Future: Insurrection, Movement, Commons (pp ). New York: Autonomedia Crossan J, Cumbers A, McMaster R and Shaw D (2016) Contesting neoliberal urbanism in Glasgow s community gardens: The practice of DIY citizenship. Antipode 48(4): Cumbers A (2015) Constructing a global commons in, against, and beyond the state. Space and Polity 19(1):62 75 Cumbers A, McMaster R, Cabaco S and White M J (2018a) Reconfiguring Economic Democracy: Collective Agency, Individual Economic Freedom, and Public Participation. Working Paper 1, Economic Democracy Project, University of Glasgow Cumbers A, Shaw D, Crossan J and McMaster R (2018b) The work of community gardens: Reclaiming place for community in the city. Work, Employment, and Society 32(1): Dahl R (1985) A Preface to Economic Democracy. Oakland: University of California Press De Angelis M (2016) Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London: Zed Dinerstein A (2015) The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan Ellerman D (1992) Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy. Oxford: Blackwell Gramsci A (1971 [ ]) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (eds and trans Q Hoare and G Nowell Smith). New York: International Hall D, Lobina E and Terhorst P (2013) Re-municipalisation in the early 21 st century: Water in France and energy in Germany. International Review of Applied Economics 27(2): Holloway J (2010) Crack Capitalism. London: Pluto Kishimoto S, Lobina E and Petitjean O (2015) Our Public Water Future: The Global Experience with Remunicipalisation. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute Kishimoto S and Petitjean O (eds) (2017) Reclaiming Public Services: How Cities and Citizens are Turning Back Privatisation. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute MacKinnon D (2011) Reconstructing scale: Towards a new scalar politics. Progress in Human Geography 35(1):21 36 Megill A (2002) Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Mirowski P (2013) Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso O Neill J (2006) Knowledge, planning, and markets: A missing chapter in the socialist calculation debate. Economics and Philosophy 22(1):55 78 Pitts F H and Dinerstein A C (2017) Corbynism s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction. Capital and Class 41(3): Polanyi K (1994) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time. Boston: Beacon Press