Wojtek:
> I think that the problem of democratic governance is over-theorized to
> death by the anarchist types...I think that in reality the problem can be easily solved by employing
> principles of reciprocity. Workers' councils making strategic
> decisions or deciding salaries and tenure of management would be an
> example. This is not that difficult to implement in an institution.
> And this micro-institutional level is what that matters the most -
> democracy at a national level is an abstraction and empty word most of
> time.
I agree with most of what you've written on this thread, though I think you're also underestimating how "easily solved" is the problem of democratic control at the "micro-institutional" level. Historically, there has been only episodic and limited demand for workers councils at the enterprise level. Such councils have typically formed in a political rather than economic context, aiming at state power in insurrectionary conditions. More to the point, were workers to demand control over strategic investment decisions, management rights, and fixing salaries and working conditions at the local level, they'd quickly discover that the organized power of the state and the employing class was more than just an "empty abstraction" at the national level. Of course, there's a long history of worker representatives being co-opted onto employer and state sponsored works councils to create an illusion of "joint partnership", but I assume such tokenism is not what you have in mind. They've have only retained some credibility among workers for so long as employers have been willing and able to improve rather than rollback their pay and benefits.
This discussion is reminiscent of our recent disagreement over whether union-sponsored retail cooperatives can flourish within the bosom of the capitalist state.