Industrial Democracy

One of the mighty few -- oh, so very few... -- encouraging things to emerge from American politics this past year was surely the introduction of Elizabeth Warren's "Accountable Capitalism Act." Not because it is a flawless proposal. Still less because it is likely to go anywhere as legislation any time soon -- as we all realize it won't. But simply because it is the first flickering I've seen -- maybe in my whole lifetime -- to indicate that some U.S. politicians of any stripe have recognized that the moral problem with capitalism goes deeper than anything that can be fixed purely with more social spending -- but is fundamentally one of a deficit of democracy.

It is one of the first signs that someone in office realizes that the end goal of human justice is not for people to receive a variety of means-tested public benefits that could always be defunded after the next election, but to exercise some real and meaningful control over their own lives and destinies.

This makes it far more interesting than the Sanders campaign ever was. Warren's proposal is simply an inching, an inkling, a nudging toward democracy as a norm of economic -- as well as political -- life.

And how else did we know this bill was shoving off in the right direction? It distressed all the right people.

Samuel Hammond, writing in the National Review, is terribly concerned that if workers can cast a vote in decisions made by the corporations to which they belong -- decisions that profoundly concern their futures, their families, their communities, and their most basic interests -- then certain geniuses of industry will be unable to pull off any more Randian feats of achievement. Writes Hammond:

"When Steve Jobs took over Apple in 1996, for instance, he famously forced the resignation of most of its board of directors, installing close friends who would be loyal to his vision. He then proceeded to lay off 3,000 workers and shuttered a number of the company’s biggest boondoggles. This earned him a reputation for ruthlessness, but it also set Apple on the path to become America’s first trillion-dollar company. It’s simply impossible to imagine Jobs’s unilateral vision succeeding in an environment of constant stakeholder management and worker negotiation."

Very true. It is in fact more difficult to upend the lives, dreams, plans of thousands of people when they are given a say in the matter. Frederick the Great might have had a harder time sending so many troops to the slaughter if he had been accountable to an electorate.

I am reminded of Alasdair Gray's comments on the end of Faust -- a section in which Goethe asks us to believe that the poem's anti-hero is redeemed at last simply because titanic effort and achievement is praiseworthy in the eyes of God, regardless of the human cost. Writes Gray, leading with a quotation from the poem:

"man must strive and in striving must err, and [...] he who continually strives can be saved. Yah! [...] The writer of this book was depraved by too much luck. He shows the sort of successful man who does indeed dominate the modern world, but only at the start and near the end shows the damage they keep doing." 

Much later, on the same theme, Gray writes:

"'He who unweariedly kept trying, we have the power to free' -- an excuse for Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and all such tyrants who could honestly say, 'To the end of my days I never had a moment's rest.'"

The artistic failure of Faust, writes Gray, "is its unstinting sympathy for a a billionaire businessman always enriching and aggrandising himself without a sign of remorse[.]"

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Supposing, then, it is true that there are certain expressions of individual "glory," achievement, striving, and genius that become impossible -- or more difficult -- under democratic conditions. Is this sufficient argument against them? Are there not concerns that weigh against this?

Hammond's argument is really an argument against democracy in any form, and an old one. Tocqueville, as one of the wisest commentators ever on the subject, had sense enough to consider that there might indeed be trade-offs on both sides. He confessed that in contemplating the disappearance of concentrations of absolute power in the hands of a few princes or families, there was, for him, an element of sadness:

"When the world was full of men of great importance and extreme insignificance, of great wealth and extreme poverty, of great learning and extreme ignorance, I turned aside from the latter to fix my observation on the former alone, who gratified my sympathies." (Reeve trans.)

Unlike Goethe, however, Tocqueville recognized that this favoring of the individual achiever and superman was not God's view; quite the contrary, it was a product of his own mortal and circumscribed vision:

"I admit that this gratification arose from my own weakness: it is because I am unable to see at once all that is around me, that I am allowed thus to select and separate the objects of my predilection from among so many others. Such is not the case with that almighty and eternal Being whose gaze necessarily includes the whole of created things, and who surveys distinctly, though at once, mankind and man. We may naturally believe that it is not the singular prosperity of the few, but the greater well-being of all, which is most pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of men." (Reeve trans.)

 A United States with industrial democracy -- or even something just slightly more closely approximating it -- might well be one with fewer Steve Jobs -- one where a Steve Jobs is harder to produce. But perhaps that is not the only or highest end for which our nation was constituted. The Constitution, for one, gives something else priority: "the general Welfare."