This is a response to a member of our patreon community, Andreas Clark.
Andreas poses the interesting question of how in the kind of new economic system we
talk about, one based for example on worker coops, on worker running their own enterprises,
what we like to call workers self-directed enterprises, Andreas asks, whether and how
systems of checks and balances would work in a society like that?
Which wasn't capitalist anymore, which wasn't built around the struggle the conflict the
shared disinterest in collective activity that so bedevils capitalist systems based
on employers and employees.
Well, my first response is to say that the system of checks and balances is one that
I certainly like.
I think it's one of the better parts of what was done in the American Revolution, setting
that up and trying to hold on to it.
But it would of course function differently in a different economic system from the way
it functions here if indeed functioning is what we want to say.
Watching for example the Trump administration manipulate the courts from the Supreme Court
on down.
Watching the struggle between the legislative and the executive branch about who has one
authority over whom shows and proves—and the Trump administration is not the only one
that behaves this way— that it's a very iffy question.
How much real check and balance we have?
How well it has worked, given how often it has failed?
But put that aside.
The idea is a good one.
How might it work in a differently based economy.
One way to approach it is to look at some historical examples.
Back in the early 1920s in Germany socialists took over the government there.
It was a consequence of the collapse of Germany in the process of losing World War One.
In that process the old regime collapsed the Kaiser (that's the kind of government they
had) abdicated.
Socialists ended the war and basically took over.
And here's an interesting thing they did that incorporated one idea of how checks and balances
would work in a socialist arrangement and of course there are many kinds of socialist
arrangement.
But here's what the Germans did in the 1920s.
They wrote a constitution that tried to establish some of this in the German city of Weimar,
Called the Weimar Republic or the Weimar Constitution and here's how it worked: you had one legislature
that people voted on based on where they lived.
That's what we're familiar with in the West, in the United States.
You vote based on your residence and you elect people for a political government that governs
you based on your residence.
You have a mayor.
You have a governor.
You have senators and representatives all the way up to the president.
The Germans did that kind of residence based political representative government, but they
instituted a very interesting check and balance on anything that government would do and here's
how they arranged a second house.
Over there, Parliament was based also on voting on representation but not according to where
you live but instead according to where you worked.
That's right in the store, in the factory, in the office you and the other workers there
would elect representatives to a parliamentary house, a Congress, a House of Representatives
if you like based on your interests, your attitudes, your needs as a working person,
which are different than Germans thought from your interests, activities, and concerns as
a resident of a particular place.
And now you get the interesting idea, these two houses can operate a system of checks
and balances on one another.
In other words for a piece of legislation to become law you might
insist that both houses, the house based on your residence and the house based on your
job both have to agree.
That would be a little bit like making the Senate and the House agree, but of course
both of them depend only on where you reside, in terms of where your votes are not where
you work and it might be important to give workers, One-person one-vote, on the job a
kind of democratic voice through their workplace that could operate as a check on the democratic
voice in the neighborhood where they reside.
Beyond that you could of course have a judiciary.
You could give it a considerable amount of independence, so that disputes between people
and enterprises, between enterprises and so on could be adjudicated.
It could be worked out in a separate branch of government.
That was judicial.
That was also Democratically rooted, more so for example than the one here in the United
States, where a great deal of a judiciary is nominated by a politician, not elected
by people, etc.
So you could replicate.
You could develop a system of checks and balances in a socialist system, in a system whose economy
was based on worker cooperatives, I think you could do it in a more democratic way.
But in any case it is a good idea and it is one that we learned from.
Just as we learn from other things in history, as you move forward, as we do better than
capitalism.
It doesn't mean we reject everything about capitalism.
We look for what's worth preserving and then adjust it to the new circumstances.
Just like in capitalism, they took things from the past like the Magna Carta or all
kinds of declarations of human rights and then tried to adjust them, more or less, to
the new capitalist reality.
We would do the same with the next phase of human history in terms of economic systems
Thank You Andreas Clark and again, thank you to the entire Patreon community.
I hope you found this response interesting.