This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work, responding to another Ask Prof. Wolff question
from our Patreon community. This question comes from Thomas Brereton,
and it is one that I am particularly interested in responding to. Thomas makes two references—one to
the Rojava (I hope I'm pronouncing that right), a community in northern Syria, and the other one
to the work of Murray Bookchin—and what he's getting at in his question is
the relationship between worker co-ops as a way of organizing business and the whole
question of the society as a whole. In other words, the people who live in a workplace
that might be democratically organized as a co-op. Those people also live in a residential
community, and in modern society those two are separate. In other societies they aren't. History
has often recorded human communities in which the workplace and the living place overlapped,
if they weren't exactly the same, which they often were. So there's nothing fixed about
having a separation. But we live in a society that has been separated that way for quite a while,
so i'm going to continue thinking about social arrangements with that separation.
The Rojava community in Syria is world famous for the extraordinary democracy,
feminism, kind of anti-authoritarianism that informs that community, and has for a long time.
Many people don't know about that part of Syria, badly impacted by the Syrian civil war that's been
going on for years but, nonetheless, retaining its deep commitment to democratic organization.
And Murray Bookchin is relevant because, in his writings, in his adult life, he was known as an
anarchist, but he had had quite a bit of influence from the socialist and Marxist traditions,
and was interested in how to think about the relationship between a democratized workplace
and a democratized residential community. And those two interests led to his thinking
around the concept of municipalization. I haven't the time to go through these two
interesting reference points for Thomas Brereton's question, but it allows me to respond as follows:
As an advocate for the democratization of workplaces—for making workplaces organized
horizontally, every person in a workplace having an equal one-person one-vote influence
on the decisions that are made democratically, with majority rule deciding what to produce,
how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the net revenues (or profits) that such
enterprises can generate—how would they relate to the communities where people live who work at
that enterprise? Communities that make decisions that impact the enterprise, just as the enterprise
makes decisions that impact the community where it is located, or even nearby where it is located.
The way my thinking about that has developed under the influence of things like Rojava
and Bookchin and many other influences is roughly as follows. Precisely because
the decisions of a workplace impact the community, and vice versa, it would be necessary, as a
commitment to democracy, to make their decisions co-respective. To give each side, for example,
veto power over those decisions that impact the other. I am not denying, nor would I not respect
the relative autonomy of each sector. Workplaces are one thing and have their laws, their rules,
their limits, and residential communities are something else. Decisions appropriate
to the residential community with minimal or no impact on the workplace would be the business
of the residential democracy, and the same would apply to the workplace in terms of its democracy.
But because significant decisions in either location impact the other, some mutuality,
some co-respectivity, some co-determination of the decisions that impact both of them
would be part of what the democratization of enterprise and community should share and respect.
If that's close to municipalization, fine, but I do not want to lose the specific focus on making
people in a workplace finally the masters of their own workplace situation. But always with
the caveat that if and when the decisions you make in the workplace impact the community,
as they often do, where people live, well then, those people have to have their input, their
element of control as well. I hope that clarifies the question of the relationship of the Marxist
focus on democracy at the workplace and what Thomas Brereton refers to as a more anarchist
focus on democracy and ground-up government in the residential community. And indeed, the
long-standing complicated affinity of Marxism and anarchism shows up in this conversation as well.
This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work, thanking our Patreon community.