Introduction to Property-Owning Democracy

Abstract

Property-Owning Democracy

[Excerpt] 1. Inequality, democracy and the philosophical debate on economic alternatives

Inequality has been on the rise for the past three decades and the pace at which it has been progressing has accelerated vertiginously in the past twenty years (Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015).[1] The fall of the URSS and, with it, of the “socialist threat” and the market globalization that quickly ensued, creating an extremely unfavourable relation of forces between (organized) labour and capital, took their toll. The closely related phenomena of systematic recourse by national governments to privatizations of public services and assets, and the retrenchment of the welfare state, in some cases in a radical form, may be added as additional causes of this surge in inequality (Glyn, 2006). Moreover, the recent financial crisis of 2007-2008, followed by the massive transfer of public resources to private banks, and combined with austerity policies that were supposedly implemented so as to improve the economic situation, have only aggravated both the crisis itself and the rise in inequality. In fact, this recessive economic tide affecting the whole world, but Europe more intensely, does not seem to be receding any time soon. Meanwhile, the debacle of “real socialism” in 1990 in the east and the triumphalism of advocates of western capitalism that quickly ensued made discussion of alternatives seem somewhat pointless beyond the walls of the academic world. To be sure, even as socialism crumbled, there were attempts to resist the neoliberal avalanche and among scholars there were many who sought for egalitarian economic alternatives to capitalism itself, even when conceding that state socialism of the sort that had so far existed was no longer a viable option (Nove, 1991; Elster and Moene, 1989; Roemer, 1993, 1994). These attempts continued, for instance, with the Real Utopias project, organized by Erik Olin Wright (Cohen and Rogers, 1995; Bowles and Gintis; Fung and Wright, 2003; Ackerman, Alstoot and Van Parijs, 2006). Notwithstanding such efforts, these authors faced (and still face) an unfriendly environment that puts them in the defensive: it is the alternatives they propose that need justification and evidence of its efficiency and justice and not capitalism as it exists, even as it has become more aggressively neoliberal, attacking the foundations of its social-democratic variants. At about the same time, an emerging discourse on the alleged economic inefficiencies and relative injustices generated by European-style welfare states progressively became pervasive, if not dominant, and part of their once consensual legitimacy was eroded, paving the way for subsequent alterations and attacks. Indeed, most reforms – and there have been many -, big or small, on welfare-state rules and institutions have been preceded by and premised on this dominant discourse. It has often happened that many of these reforms have also been presented as if they were undisputable and inevitable, much in the vein of Margaret Thatcher's TINA rhetoric. [...]