This is Richard Wolff, responding to an AskProfWolff question sent in from our Patreon community.
And this time in particular,
from Jim Quinn.
Jim asks a frequently posed question and a good one. It has to do with how
decisions would get made in a worker co-op
that does not have the typical capitalist top-down
hierarchy, where one or a few people at the top make all the key decisions.
The rest of us, as employees, have to live with them but have no control over them. Which, by the way, is the
definition of no democracy. And
Jim further asks that a capitalist friend of his
keeps saying that you could not have a worker co-op, because that would mean that the janitor, or the custodian, would have somehow
say over decisions they are not trained to be experts in.
Let me respond as best I can.
First of all, the basic decisions in most corporations that are made by the board of directors.
Let us remember who those people are.
They are bankers. They are rich people who own big chunks of stock.
They are all kinds of people who have exactly no
expertise in many of the basic
decisions that a corporation makes.
They are considered to be a reliable,
independent source of
decisions.
Their job is to consult with experts, both inside and outside the company,
in order to reach the best decision.
That is exactly what a worker co-op would do. But the difference is, it is everybody,
including the janitor. That is right. You would have to bring in the experts
from inside or outside the worker co-op to advise everybody to
explain what is involved, not in the high technical level of the expert. That is why you need an expert;
worker co-ops will need them too.
But that does not mean that a tiny group of people have to make the decision. It never did.
We have a congress in our political system,
composed of people who mostly have little or no technical
expertise, but make some of the most important decisions. You know
how? They get experts to come and to explain it. And if it is difficult to
understand, you get some more experts who are good at translating the technical information
into the basic parameters of what a decision
requires. It has always been
the traditionalist
conservative argument that somehow
the people who now make the decision are some supermen and women who have some special capacity
to do the right thing. They are not.
Long ago, the people who run big corporations stopped having any technical expertise in them,
basically at all. And
if you hear to the contrary, you are listening to that old traditional
conservative idea. And
by the way, you know, the custodian has his or her
particular understanding of aspects of the business that the clerk does not have,
that the technician does not have, that the person on the assembly line does not have. Those people have other
perspectives. And that is why a collective decision
democratically arrived at in the long run is the better way to go.
Do not exclude anyone. We all have things to contribute if only the
opportunity is provided. In the long run, the decisions will actually be better.