openspace4life: (Default)
As defined by the Center for Economic and Social Justice, the Third Way is a proposal for a new economic system in which all corporations would be placed under employee control. On the face of it, this seems like communism with a thin veneer of capitalist mechanisms, until you realize that the corporations themselves will continue to compete in the marketplace, and that they will still require a governmental anti-trust apparatus to prevent that competition from breaking down.

The trouble is, anti-trust laws aren't really enforced these days, and corporations are growing and merging so quickly that their power is beginning to eclipse that of nation-states. That's a trend we should try to reverse if we can; if we want to solve the environmental crisis and other pressing issues that market forces tend to ignore, we really ought to maintain a powerful government presence that can encourage rapid transitions to new business models, such as those embodied in Natural Capitalism.

But let's assume for a moment that there's no feasible way to bring back the era of strong government, and that the state finally withers away as both Marxists and radical libertarians predict. Then we probably face a cyberpunk-style future of corporate feudalism, but with the Third Way, at least there would be democracy within the corporations (you can call it "communist feudalism" instead, if you prefer). And even if the merger trend continues to its logical conclusion, which libertarians seldom if ever discuss, the all-encompassing corporation masquerading as a world government will be democratic too.

Whatever the future may hold, one thing remains certain: the environmental crisis will continue to seem paralyzingly vast from the vantage point of ordinary people who don't have the right kinds of democratic institutions available to them. Critics of modern environmentalist rhetoric point out that the contrast between the scale of the problems and the scale of the actions we tell individuals to take is working against us. For most people, the mantra "think globally, act locally" is hard to accept when the whole world seems to be accelerating out of control. But if every employee could submit and vote on a proposal to change the way his/her entire company gets its resources and disposes of its wastes, it would go a long way toward curing the malaise of scale paralysis that still grips our world.

These are the main reasons why I support the Third Way. There is one more reason that I should mention: in many cases, the workers really do know best. They may need some managers to guide them in making large-scale economic decisions, but those managers shouldn't be making all the choices when it comes to working conditions, required hours, or which tools the company should provide for the workers to do their jobs.
openspace4life: (Default)
Karl Marx and other philosophers of dialectical materialism believe that on the grand scale, history is about the next overarching politiconomic paradigm replacing the last, over and over. This simple analysis leads Marxists to ignore the fall of the Soviet Union as a temporary blip, and to look to Latin America as the staging area for the next battle between the two great systems of capitalism and socialism. It could also explain the rise of Islamic extremism as a last gasp of the previous paradigm, theocratic dictatorship, and in some sense that might be accurate.

But dialectics leaves out many details in formulating this simplistic model for the large-scale dynamics of immensely complex human societies. For instance, despite their frequent use of the word "materialism," Marxists often neglect the issue of resources such as oil, which Venezuela and many Muslim nations have in abundance, and food and water, which are a constant source of concern in the desert regions of the Middle East.

In general, too, it seems overly fatalistic to presume that history must be so linear and predictable. The Soviet and Maoist command economies have inflicted huge amounts of ecological devastation on their countries, so is socialism (even democratic socialism) really as good an idea as "ecosocialists" would claim? If not, Marx would claim that we'll just have to sit tight and hope to survive until the next paradigm comes along. But why not take the long view, and try to invent a different road?

I'd be the first to admit that it won't be easy. Marxist analysis is seductive because it lets us give in to the admittedly nearly-unstoppable inertia of our vast civilization. But the limits of our global environment form a hard barrier, what one might call a large rock in the path ahead, and like it or not, humanity is probably going to ricochet off that rock and careen away in a direction the Marxists would never have predicted. If we try, perhaps we can reshape that rock so that a) the collision doesn't hurt as badly as it otherwise would, and b) we end up on a course of our choosing. Again, not an easy task, but then again, we're humans. We have something like two million years of experience with shaping rock. We just have to decide what shape we want and then chisel away like mad, taking the problem one doable chip at a time.

March 2015

S M T W T F S
1234567
89101112 1314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Sep. 3rd, 2025 12:13 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios