Property, Democracy and the Ideal of Industrial Autonomy

Within contemporary political philosophy, two complaints about the democratic deficits of capitalism feature with particular prominence. The first complaint plays out on the level of economic production and identifies a lack of democracy at the workplace. The second complaint plays out on the level of democratic politics and focuses on the limits that economic actors impose on the state’s ability to put democratic decisions into practice. I shall argue that a neglected institutional vision from the history of ideas succeeds in solving both these problems at once. A suitably modified version of council democracy, associated with the traditions of both council communism and anarcho-syndicalism, on which the autonomy of councils is constrained by political democracy, and which distributes different incidents of property rights between the level of economic production and the level of political democracy simultaneously realises the aims of democratising the workplace and re-establishing the effective sovereignty of democratic politics. My argument proceeds in four steps. I present my preferred version of the two prominent complaints in as favourable and systematic a fashion as possible, introduce a general and a particular vision of council democracy, explain how the particular version of council democracy succeeds in addressing both problems, and conclude by briefly elaborating on both the force and the limits of my argument.