Workplace Democracy and Human Development: The Example of the Postsocialist Transition Debate
Rent from DeepDyve- Workplace Democracy and Human Development:The Example of the Postsocialist Transition Debate
In the 1990s, a debate raged across the whole postsocialist world as well as in Western development agencies such as the World Bank about the best approach to the transition from various forms of socialism or communism to a market economy and political democracy. One of the most hotly contested topics was the question of the workplace being organized based on workplace democracy (e.g., various forms of worker ownership) or based on the conventional employer-employee relationship. Well before 1989, many of the socialist countries had started experimenting with various forms of "self-management" operating in more of a market setting, Yugoslavia being the most developed example. Thus one "path to the market" would have been to push those experiments all the way to some Western form of employee ownership or worker cooperatives operating in a full market environment. Alternatively, all these decentralizing experiments could be condemned as "vestiges of communism" to be eradicated by renationalizing all the decentralized firms and then privatizing by some alternative means.
In this essay, I will first review some of the human development arguments made for workplace democracy by social philosophers.1 [End Page 333] Then I will contrast this with the way the issue of workplace democracy actually played out in the postsocialist debate.
Democracy and the Development of Human Capabilities
Human Development and the Democratic Franchise
There has been little disagreement in the past about the detrimental effects of subordination and servility on human development, such as the capacity for self-government. But there have been two opposite responses to this little-doubted relationship. In the civic republican tradition of political theory (e.g., Simon 1994; Skinner 1998), if servility and subordination retarded the capacity for self-governance, then steps should be taken to reduce those causes, such as through the broad distribution of sufficient property to undergird economic independence (e.g., the homesteading laws in the development of the American frontier).
But often social philosophers would take the property distribution as a historical "given" and then advocate restricting the political franchise to those who were not subordinate as evidenced by some minimum amount of property.2 The reasoning was that without some amount of property, a person would have to be dependent on and subordinate to another person, so that the subordinate would not qualify as an independent decision maker in social affairs.
The subordinate position of employees (or "servants" in the older parlance) and women was given as a reason for the denial of the voting franchise.3 For instance, Immanuel Kant held that to be "fit to vote, a person must have an independent position among the people." The person must "by his own free will actively participate in a community of other people." Thus Kant distinguished between "the active and the passive citizen," where "the latter concept seems to contradict the definition of the concept of citizen altogether": "Apprentices to merchants or tradesmen, servants who are not employed by the state, minors (naturaliter vel civiliter), women in general and all those who are obligated to depend for their living (i.e., food and protection) on the offices of others (excluding the state)—all of these people have no civil personality" ([1797] 1991, 126, sec. 46).
For women, the legal framework for subordination was not the master-servant relation but domestic law based on the concept of paterfamilias and the coverture marriage contract: "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is [End Page 334] suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law-French, a feme covert, and is said to be under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture" (Blackstone [1765] 1959, 83, section on "Husband and Wife"). A female was to pass from the cover of her father to the cover of her husband (with the present-day vestiges of...
