Workplace Democracy, Workers’ Councils, and the Political Economy of Investment

This paper enlists two seminal arguments for workplace democracy to defend the idea of a workers’ democracy. A workers’ democracy is a form of socialism with a federated structure, in which workers, organized in democratic workers’ councils, possess certain control rights over the conditions of production in the economy as a whole. This idea is therefore stronger and more demanding than workplace democracy, the view that workers possess control rights over their workplace conditions of production. I mount this defence by showing that two arguments for workplace democracy, republican (Gonzalez-Ricoy 2014) and relational-egalitarian (Christiano 2008, 2010), tell in favour of a workers’ democracy. This defence of a workers’ democracy draws upon debates on the political economy of investment (Kalecki 1943, Rowthorn 1980, Schweickart 2011) to show how the private ownership of capital, whether by capitalist or by democratic enterprises, abrogates democratic equality. The remedy, I argue, consists in vesting control rights over aggregate investment in worker-constituted democratic assemblies.