Housing, financialization and the crash

Via Corrente

This video by Richard D. Wolff is a clear and accurate account of the financial crash and the current struggles of American working people.  It dates from 2011, but it is still relevant.  I recommend fast-forwarding through the first three and a half minutes minutes, which are about economic classes, and getting to the meat of the video, which is about the foreclosure and credit crisis.

I can remember when most goods and services were paid for through cash and check, without having to go through credit card companies, other lends and insurance companies.  I don’t deny the benefit of credit or of insurance, or advocate going without either, but it is striking how much we Americans are at the mercy of lenders and insurers.

Can workers own the means of production?

The Marxist economist Richard D. Wolff thinks that a new form of economic organization, the worker self-directed enterprise, can gradually replace the for-profit corporation.

Richard D. Wolff

I hope he is right because the world needs something better than predatory corporations or oppressive government bureaucracies, which are the main choices on offer now.

But successful worker-owned enterprises have been around for a long time, and yet have never reached the critical mass that would enable them to become an important part of the economy.

Advocates of worker-owned businesses cite the example of the Mondragon Corporation, which originated in the Basque country in Spain in 1956 with a half dozen people and now is a federation of 257 businesses and co-ops employing 76,000 people in 31 countries.  But why is there only one Mondragon Corporation?  Why hasn’t it become a template for other successful efforts?

One of the things that limit worker-owned businesses, as I see it, is precisely this lack of critical mass.  There is a societal infrastructure of business schools, business services and business finance to serve the new for-profit business.  Worker-owners would have to learn as they go.  This takes a level of commitment of which many people aren’t capable, unless they are in dire straits.

One of Wolff’s ideas is to provide seed money for WSDEs by giving the unemployed their compensation in a lump sum rather than weekly checks.  This shows how he underestimates the difficulty of implementing his program.

To begin with, starting a successful small business is not something everybody can do, although many people think they can.  If you wanted a pool of people with the ability to succeed in business, you probably wouldn’t choose them from among the unemployed.  You’d be more likely to find them among people who have good jobs and money in the bank.

Then again, the American Dream is to own your own business.  Generally speaking, it is not to be part of a community of comrades who share and share alike.   We Americans think of ourselves as individualists, no matter how subservient to authority we may be in practice, and we only abandon the dream of self-sufficiency for compelling reasons.

Farmers’ marketing co-ops came into existence because farmers thought they were being cheated by middle-men.  Electric power co-ops came into existence because the investor-owned utilities weren’t interested in serving them.  Savings and loan associations, and later credit unions, were formed because people were dissatisfied with banks.

Workers have been known to take over factories from bankrupt employers and restart the businesses.  Some co-ops are formed around political and social movements, such as selling organic food.  But worker-owned and cooperative businesses are not the norm.  There has to be a compelling reason to commit to starting one.

The commitment tends to fade when the compelling reason fades.  Even the successful cooperatives tend to wither away, or be bought out, or to incorporate.  Even the successful utopian communities, the Oneida community in New York state and the Amana community in Iowa, wound up as corporations.

Is economic democracy possible?

Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist economist, wrote in his recent books that capitalism has failed, and that it is necessary to replace for-profit corporations as we know them with what he calls worker self-directed enterprises.

But for-profit corporations aren’t going to go away, even if—which remains to be seen—worker-owned enterprises offer a better alternative.

If economic democracy is the only means by which workers can keep the value of what they produce, then it is going to be necessary to reform existing corporate structures.

The USA needs legislation to curb abuses in corporate management, such as leverage buyouts, in which slick financial operators can gain control of a company with borrowed money and then milk it for their own benefit, regardless of its impact on the company.  We need enforcement of anti-trust laws and prosecution of corporate and financial fraud.

Beyond that, the USA needs to build up labor unions as a countervailing power.  Congress should enact the Employee Free Choice Act, aka Card Check, in which employees get the right to bargain collectively when a majority sign up to join a union.  It should repeal or reform the Taft-Hartley Act and Landrum Griffin Act.

But all of this falls short of true economic democracy.  True economic democracy would mean something like Germany’s co-determination system, in which employees of firms are represented on the board of directors.  I think this should be required of all companies whose stock is publicly traded.  If an entrepreneur doesn’t want to share control of a company,  then don’t sell its shares on the open market.

Economic democracy also would mean letting workers share in day-to-day management of the company, along the lines suggested by W. Edwards Deming.  Knowledge in any institution is widely distributed.  No small group has a monopoly on useful information.  I think a company will be better managed when workers and managers have the same information available.

Banking and finance are a separate issue.  There can be no economic democracy when financiers have a veto over democratic decisions.  Banks should be regulated utilities.  Bankers should be servants of the people, not masters of the universe.

When and if these things can be achieved, there will be a favorable environment for Wolff’s worker-self-directed enterprises.  The government would give them the same kind of support across the board that rural electric co-ops got in the 1930s and 1940s.  Otherwise, probably not.

Is there a better way than capitalism?

Marxists say that the trouble with the capitalist economy is that workers don’t get the full value of what they produce.  Whether or not that’s true as a general principle, it is a good description of the current direction of the U.S. economy.

The Marxist solution is that the workers themselves should own the means of production.  A Marxist economist, Richard D. Wolff, said that where socialists and Communists have gone wrong is in promoting government ownership rather than worker ownership.

I recently read Wolff’s three latest books.  His view of the current economic crisis is the same as mine.   In the 1970s, overall American wages stopped growing.  Working people tried to maintain their material standard of living by putting in longer hours and having more family members in the work force.   When that reached a limit, they kept up their spending levels by borrowing.

Now the spending power of ordinary Americans has reached a limit.  Most Americans are either broke, nearby broke or paying down their debts.  That’s why the government has failed to stimulate the economy through spending or lower interest rates.

The solution, according to Wolff, is the creation of WSDEs – worker self-directed enterprises – in which the workers themselves are the ultimate deciders of what is done with the profits (in Marxist lingo, the “surplus”).

A WSDE would be more than worker participation in management, where corporate ownership remains the same.  And it would be more than a worker-owned business, where board of directors and the rest of the corporate management structure remains in place.   And it would be more than just a co-operative, which can be organized to serve the interests of any group, not just employees.

This would not necessarily solve all problems, Wolff wrote, but it would make other problems easier to solve.  A WSDE wouldn’t lay off workers or reduce wages merely to increase the income of managers and stockholders.  Employees wouldn’t feel alienated from their work.  A worker-owned business would be less likely to be willing to pollute the community in which they live than would a board of directors responsible to stockholders who live far away.

I am in favor of more worker-owned businesses, but I think Wolff greatly underestimates the opposition to his proposed program.   Does he think the interests that engineered the sale of the Postal Service’s assets to private businesses (such as Nancy Pelosi’s husband) or advocate replacing public schools with for-profit businesses (aka charters)—does he think these interests are going to sit still and allow Wolff’s WSDEs to push them aside?

Back in the New Deal era, the federal government fostered electric power co-operatives, which provided electricity at lower rates than the for-profit corporations.  But they did not displace the for-profit corporations, nor become a model for how to operate electric utilities.

Instead the electric power industry successfully pushed for deregulation of the industry, in which competition between electric power providers was supposed to keep rates low.  Deregulation also abolished a requirement that an electric utility have enough reserve generating capacity to prevent future blackouts and brownouts.  Nobody is responsible for keeping the lights on now.

 The fact that something is economically feasible and socially desirable does not mean that it will be politically successful.   There is no substitute for political power.