[lbo-talk] Re-intro

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at dodo.com.au
Mon Jul 17 18:45:22 PDT 2006


At 6:13 PM -0400 17/7/06, Doug Henwood wrote:


>But I don't think you can have consensus decisionmaking in a
>large-scale enterprise. You'd need executives with some degree of
>power to make big decisions, though god knows how things would
>evolve over time. My impression is that anarchists don't like
>representative democracy very much, but that's exactly the kind of
>model I'm talking about in the economic realm.

In my experience, democracy (in the sense of majority rules) is not necessarily an efficient or even fair way of making economic decisions. The problem is that majority rules decision making leads, at best, to the majority of effective political operators ruling over the minority.

In my little housing co-op, which is an economic organisation on a micro scale, we've never made any decision by majority vote. In fact our constitution permits every member a veto. So we have to make economic decisions that are OK with everyone.

Of course you can't run a political organisation like that. But that's the whole point, an economic organisation is a different kettle of fish to a political organisation. If you try to run an economic organisation like a political party it is inefficient, or (if you refuse to acknowledge what is really happening) much worse. I've seen co-ops (co-operatives in name only, obviously) operate like that, from the inside as well as from the outside. Its disasterous, decision making descends into a hell of political intrigue and squabbling over who gets the biggest pieces of the pie.

The solution is simple in principle, policy based day to day management, as opposed to ad-hoc decision making. With policy determined by consensus. This takes the politics out of it. If we can do it in the context of a capitalist economic system, where everything is against us it could surely work in a co-operatively structured economic system.

Of course consensus can only work where there are no irreconcilable conflicts of interest. So it can't be adopted as a decision making structure in a capitalist business. Nor in a political organisation, including political government. These types of organisations must make the best of majority rule, where irreconcilable conflicts of interest are decided in the interests of one or another side of a conflict, at the expense of any other side. So long as our economic system is based on competition, then of course economic decisions will usually have winners and losers, so co-operative decision making is inappropriate.

So before we can have a co-operative economic system, we must eliminate irreconcilable conflicts of interest of the economic kind. That is to say, eliminate economic class difference.

A market economy is a competitive economy, fundamentally irreconcilable with co-operative decision making. Likewise, a co-operative economy (a socialist economy that is) is simply irreconcilable with decision-making by political (majority rule) decision making.

In short, the kind of model you're talking about in the economic realm doesn't sound realistic to me. Either for capitalism, or for socialism. Although I must add that I have long held the view that calling for economic democracy is a fine slogan. Obviously it implies the end of capitalism, since making the economy was subject to majority rule would be irreconcilable with an economy that operates to benefit the interests of a minority ruling class. But a majority-rule economic system won't be any more than a transition to socialism, because political decision making would cripple socialism too. Political decision making is competitive. Socialism is co-operative, it needs a co-operative decision making process be viable.

You say consensus decisionmaking can't be done, but I think you're making that judgement on the basis of how a competitive economy and culture operates. You have to think through the implications of a radically different kind of economy and therefor culture. Once you do that, you'll see that not only is it possible, but that a competitive decision making structure, like majority rule or political government is absurdly inappropriate for a socialist economy.

Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas



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