The Defetishized Society: New Economic Democracy as a Libertarian Alternative to Capitalism
Chris Wyatt
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 162356722X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
New Economic Democracy establishes a self-governing civil society, unifying the private sphere of production and the public sphere of citizenship within a non-statist scheme of communal ownership. It provides the premises to seeking a solution to Marx's fetishism of commodities. Only a thorough restructuring of the economic and political institutions can provide the social climate in which the phenomenon of fetishism can be transcended. Defetishizing the commodity implies reversing the concealment of the social relations through which commodities are produced and preventing the tendency to bestow magical characteristics to commodities. The key imperative to the defetishized society is a system of genuinely democratic institutions. iprovides this necessary corrective and also challenges the prediction that politico-economic organizations, like worker cooperatives, are destined to be dominated by the dictates of oligarchs.
The explanatory approach of Marx's concepts combined with an original argument will make the book a valuable research tools to students and researchers in political theory, democratic theory, and political economy.
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Have no choice but to sell their labour power to another class, the owners of the means of production. It is this central social relation in capitalism, wage-labour, that is the bases of alienation. Marx, then, locates alienation at the base of capitalist society (1977: 85). To help explain why ‘the more powerful the work the more powerless becomes the worker’ (1977: 79), he invokes a religious analogy. The maker of a product, Marx suggests, undergoes a similar experience to the maker of god. In.
Beyond his work. This section argues that creative labour can be sustained within the guild cooperatives. In the interests of analytical convenience, I adopt the social/ technical distinction of the division of labour covered in the first part of this chapter. First, in regards to the social division of labour, the immediate question of what is the most optimal role for markets is addressed. Attention then turns to the structures within the guilds. In the sense that they are internal to each.
Itself is indispensable, but as it does not command the kind of monopoly of expertise the leaders of political parties command, its individual members are not. Under these circumstances, they will need to be more receptive to the wishes of the rank and file. As far as the works within the guild cooperatives are concerned, the entrenchment of professional leadership will not signal the end of democracy. Let us now see whether the officials on the district committees will be equally dispensable.
For defending the people, often at great personal cost. The collective feeling of gratitude helps guarantee the leaders’ continual re-election, thus ensuring their perpetuation: The incompetence of the masses is almost universal throughout the domains of political life, and this constitutes the most solid foundation of the power of the leaders. . . . Since the rank and file are incapable of looking after their own interests, it is necessary that they should have experts to attend to their.
Best achieved by making the workplace the centre of democratic participation. In the workplace individuals understand their surroundings, an environment without the vague glamour politicians fabricate to veil their own domain. Guild officers will be unable to follow the politician because the rank and file cannot so easily be deceived. Political demagogues are successful only because the electorate does not possess adequate checks upon them. Imagine that while electing their leaders the workers.