On Economic Democracy

I was just listening to a recent speech by Marxist economist Richard Wolf given last month in Berkeley in which he outlines the history leading up to the present crisis and then discusses solutions. He makes a compelling presentation about the new Left party in Germany and then discusses how democracy in the workplace can solve our problems. I fundamentally agree with Richard Wolf, but I want to discuss one thing he said about economic democracy. He said that neither capitalism in the US nor socialism in the Soviet Union has tried it. (I think he goes on to talk about the Mondragon cooperative in Spain later in the same speech.)

Wolf is certainly correct about American capitalism. However, he is glossing over the history of the Soviet Union, which is particularly interesting on this point. I understand that the details are probably too lengthy for the kind of presentation he was making. Still, Soviet history is very instructive. The very word "Soviet" means council, and, at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, there were soviets of workers and soldiers. The Bolsheviks participated in and led them. Let us note, in a slight digression, that the Bolshevik party practiced what they called "democratic centralism." By that, they meant that while making a decision, there was full democracy to argue for and against all proposals, but once a majority voted for the decision, everyone, including those who had voted against it, was required to implement it. Lenin explained that it was profoundly undemocratic to participate in such a process and then try to sabotage the will of the majority. I mention this because Lenin lost a vote of the leadership of his party to start the revolution but decided to do it anyway. The purpose of this digression will become clear soon.

So, in its earliest days, the Soviet Union was a union of workers' and soldiers' soviets in many cities. They elected representatives who became the government. However, at this time, the Soviet Union was under fierce internal (White Russian) and external (the USA joined the attackers) attack, and its economy needed to be jumpstarted both to feed the population and to defend against these attacks. Accordingly, there was a period called war communism, in which the Bolsheviks led by command rather than by implementing soviet democracy. I am certainly not trying to second guess what they did, what they felt they had to do, but I am pointing out how the initial democratic experiment was, in their view, interrupted but, in fact, stopped and never resumed. After war communism, the Bolsheviks came up with what they called a New Economic Program, which encouraged a mix of public and private enterprises to try to revive the moribund economy. That also did not implement democracy at the enterprise level.

As a result of war communism and the NEP and perhaps as a result of Lenin's death and Stalin's ascension to power (we can only speculate about what Lenin might have done had he lived and led longer), the soviets of workers and soldiers lost power and essentially disbanded, and peasants were never really organized in this way. So, Wolf's statement that the Soviet Union did not dare to try economic democracy is not precisely correct. What is correct is that they felt forced to abandon it in the face of attack and economic crises. We will never know whether they would or could have re-established soviet power later when the Soviet Union became stronger. We only know that they didn't and that the worldwide depression of the 1930s and World War II brought on new crises. No other socialist or postcapitalist country, to date, has tried decentralizing both economic and political power.

So, while I agree with Richard Wolf that economic democracy is worth fighting for and offers a way out of the myriad crises we now face, including economic crisis, massive unemployment, global warming, etc., the very name of the Soviet Union should remind us that the intent of the Bolshevik revolution was to institute economic and political democracy together. In 2012, we do not face the severe challenges of 1917--our challenges are heavy but not so severe as that--and we can afford to fight for genuine economic and political democracy. This is not a new idea, but perhaps it is an idea whose time has finally come.