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The Case for Economic Democracy

The global capitalist crisis that began in 2007–2008 has understandably given rise to a lot of discussion about alternative socioeconomic models that could avoid the vast human suffering and ecological degradation that have long accompanied the operation and reproduction of the capitalist socioeconomic system. In much of this discussion, there is an interest in “economic democracy” that is informed not only by the undemocratic nature of the capitalist socioeconomic system itself but also by the failures and shortcomings of the now-defunct model of the Soviet Union and many of its client states in Eastern Europe and beyond. Correspondingly, while there is no universally accepted definition of economic democracy and not every scholar who points in that direction uses the term, the appeal of the term stems both from a realization that political democracy is hollow when it is embedded in undemocratically structured economic systems and from the lesson, drawn from the twentieth century, that, to be desirable, alternative economic models have to be more, rather than less, democratic than capitalism.