Many political philosophers argue that all people are entitled as a matter of justice to real access to good work: skilled work that affords workers opportunities for meaningful social cooperation and autonomous decision-making and is performed in decent conditions. In a recent article, I raise the question of how good work might actually be made available to all. What kinds of policies or institutions would be required?
As I argue in that article and in a previous post on this blog, the power of the capitalist class poses a serious obstacle to the stable improvement of work on a large scale. Within the workplace, the content and conditions of work are largely controlled by employers who often have an interest in degrading the quality of work, both to increase productivity and to increase their control over employees in the workplace. Outside the workplace, employers have both an incentive and the power to undermine measures that would improve the quality of work through the political process.
To address these twin problems, it seems that we must directly target the hierarchical organization of the capitalist workplace and the class structure of capitalism more generally. The only widely discussed strategy that does so is workplace democracy. In its most principled forms, workplace democracy abolishes the capitalist class and puts all decisions within the firm, including decisions over the content and conditions of work, into the hands of that firm’s workers or their elected representatives. Like the more familiar device of collective bargaining, this model of economic organization empowers the very agents who have the strongest interest in improving their work. But workplace democracy goes beyond collective bargaining by completely eliminating the persistent pressure to degrade work that emanates from the capitalist class and its managerial and political agents.
Aside from being thus instrumental to the improvement of work, workplace democracy is arguably a constitutive condition of good work. After all, good work is, among other things, genuinely autonomous work, and (as G. D. H. Cole, Adina Schwartz, Ruth Yeoman, and others have argued) workplace democracy seems to be a necessary condition of genuine autonomy at work, since it gives workers significant decision-making powers of which they are otherwise deprived.
Nevertheless, economic democracy that ends at the boundaries of the individual workplace is probably insufficient to meet the challenge of making good work available to all. Consider a distinction that Karl Marx drew between the ways in which productive activity is coordinated within the capitalist firm on the one hand and in the capitalist economy as a whole on the other. As we have already observed, the structure of the individual capitalist firm tends to be hierarchical. Capitalists and managers make decisions; workers execute those decisions. Outside the firm, however, we find, in Marx’s terminology, not “despotism” but “anarchy.” In a typical market economy, no human agent—individual or collective—consciously directs the combined productive activity of multiple competing firms. Instead, each of these firms follows its own independent plan.
Yet for all their deliberative independence, these firms are not free. As Marx argued, the anarchy of the marketplace itself produces a kind of coercion: a subjection not to the will of another person but to “the dull compulsion of economic relations.” In particular, competition generally forces firms to do whatever is necessary to maximize profits. Firms that fail to do so can eventually expect to go out of business, at least if the market is doing its job.
The principal limitation of workplace democracy is that it eliminates the despotism of the capitalist firm but not the anarchy of the marketplace or the attendant competitive pressure toward profit maximization. In the context of a market economy, even workers who are in charge of all decision-making within their own firms must do what they can to maximize profits, on pain of going out of business. They must become, as Marx puts it, “their own capitalist.”
Realistically, this will often mean sacrificing improvements in the quality of work for the sake of productivity and profitability. For example, workers operating their own factory who are not prepared to submit themselves to a punishing rate of work should generally expect to be outcompeted by workers operating other factories who are prepared to do so. In this way, competition can generate races to the bottom that end up degrading many people’s work even in the absence of a separate capitalist class.
It might be possible to temper the anarchy of the marketplace, however, by extending economic democracy beyond the boundaries of the individual firm. In its most principled form, economic democracy at this higher level would dispense with the market altogether, replacing that institution with conscious, democratic planning of the society’s collective productive activity. But if we wanted to preserve the basic power of markets to coordinate social production efficiently, we could still carve out a more limited role for democratic decision-making bodies beyond the firm. With respect to the quality of work in particular, I suggest in my aforementioned article that the role of such bodies could be “to set general constraints and to deal with specific collective action problems as they arise. That is, if a particular form of bad work begins or threatens to become prevalent under the pressure of competition, the supra-firm body should be empowered to coordinate the actions of various firms to limit the relevant practice.” Under this model, individual firms would retain plenty of independence and flexibility to plan their own production.
As I noted above, one of the advantages of economic democracy in general is that it empowers the very people who have both the strongest interest in improving a given type of work and the most accurate and context-sensitive understanding of what would count as improving it. This gives us reason to favor “localist” varieties of economic democracy, in a functional as opposed to geographic sense. In particular, the primary supra-firm decision-making bodies should be sector specific, each consisting of elected representatives of firms within a given industry. Following tradition, I call these bodies “syndicates.” Their closest present-day analogue are the sectoral trade unions that form an established feature of the collective-bargaining landscape in a number of European countries.
Syndicates would have to be supplemented by two further mechanisms. First, an additional, economy-wide decision-making body would be needed to address threats to the quality of work caused by cross-sectoral competition and to adjudicate conflicts between syndicates. Second, some kind of consumer representation at both levels would be important to prevent syndicates from turning into cartels.
The resulting set of institutions would have much in common with the early twentieth-century socialist Cole’s model of “guild socialism,” which he envisioned as a more democratic alternative to both capitalism and central planning. Relative to our current institutions, any such proposal of economic democracy is obviously extremely radical—utopian, even—in the sense that no political force currently exists that could put it into practice anywhere in the world. But I think such exercises in sociopolitical imagination can be valuable. In this case, the exercise helps us understand how far-reaching are the implications of a right to access to good work and how deep are the obstacles that stand in the way of genuinely securing such a right for all.
There are two further problems that I have not yet thematized. One is the problem of global competition, which frequently exerts even more significant downward pressure on the quality of work than domestic competition does. Schematically, we can say, for the reasons already articulated above, that this shows the need for democratic institutions governing the global economy—which is to say, specifically, institutions that give workers democratic control over production decisions across international borders. But what such institutions might look like and how they might be brought into being are difficult and important questions that I have not begun to address here.
A second problem is that of transitional strategy, to which I alluded only briefly in connection with the utopianism of economic democracy. I have been asking what kinds of institutional arrangements would give everyone access to good work. But which agents could bring such arrangements into being, and how? At this point, I think the issue of class returns decisively into the picture. Some of the sources of bad work lie in features of the market economy that are conceptually independent of capitalism’s class structure. But I believe it remains the case that an organized working class would be the single most promising agent of a transformation of those features and that the capitalist class poses the single biggest obstacle to such a transformation. Here and now, then, those of us committed to the goal of making good work available to all should look for ways to strengthen the power of the working class.
Pascal Brixel
Pascal Brixel is a moral and political philosopher at Northwestern University. He writes primarily about freedom and the social organization of work, approaching these topics partly through an engagement with the history of philosophy, especially the thought of Karl Marx.
