"...We cannot solve this systemic failure of regulations to stop capitalist crashes by more or different or stricter regulation. Corporations have demonstrated their drive and capacity to frustrate the regulation strategy. Nor is the solution a state take-over of enterprise. The histories of the USSR and China show that when state officials replace private corporation's boards of directors, what remains in place are antagonistic and undemocratic structures pitting workers against the small groups that make the key production decisions and distribute enterprise profits. State officials, like their private counterparts, frustrate and undermine regulations.
A different solution not yet tried offers us the best chance for success. It entails a radical reorganization of enterprises, whether owned and operated privately or by the state. Democratize the workplace by replacing boards of directors or state officials with the workers themselves functioning collectively as their own board of directors. Enterprises reorganized in this way would have objectives and reward systems, incentives and means to realize them that would all differ from those of capitalist enterprises where workers confront others who make the key economic decisions. Workers who were also their own board of directors would be less likely to disregard the effects (economic, environmental, cultural, and political) of workplace decisions on surrounding communities (where the workers and their families themselves live). Such workers would aim more for securer jobs and rising wages than for rising profits or market shares.
Such a democratization of the workplace would dovetail much more smoothly with genuinely democratic politics: workers accustomed to democracy on the job would more likely resist its exclusion from their residential communities. Economic democracy and political democracy are conditions of each other's existence. The interdependence of workplace conditions and community conditions would require and thus likely promote continuous negotiation between their separate yet overlapping democratic organizations. The regulations that emerged from such negotiations would more likely be respected and enforced by workers-qua-directors than the regulations that were negated so regularly by non-worker boards across the last century.
Why not move beyond the capitalist form of enterprises, whether private or state? We have nothing to lose but our capitalist crises. We have a new world economy to win." Read all here
