Red Star: Elect your boss

A measure of the health of a society is not the opulence of its rulers but the fairness of its social relations. America is terminally ill.

I worked at a restaurant where one of the managers threatened us with a box cutter and used abuse and humiliation to force people to work longer hours at tasks they weren’t trained for. This relationship is normal. Managers have one task: keep profitability up. Owners permit any sort of cruelty to achieve this goal. How many bosses go beyond the standard bullying of the workplace? How many thousands of predators are hidden by this unequal relationship? America is a million tiny dictatorships.

Bosses hold dictatorial power, controlling every aspect of a worker’s schedule, from when they wake up to when they go to the bathroom. This strengthens political authoritarianism by degrading solidarity and preparing workers for life without rights. Authoritarianism springs from daily life.

When the central goal of economic life is profit, as it is under capitalism, the economy produces regardless of the costs for society. In liberal theory, electoral democracy is supposed to balance this power and mediate between the interests of tens of thousands of owners and hundreds of millions of workers. But liberal capitalism preserves the dictatorial relationship between owner, manager and worker and the property relations that sustain it. It is incapable of a long-term solution to inequality and ensures workers can never claim a full measure of dignity. Private ownership of capital and the profit motive necessitate dictatorship.

The solution is democracy in the workplace. The way to ensure fair treatment is to make managers and executives elected officials, responsible to the workers. This shift in power must be accompanied by a shift in ownership. The workers’ interest lies not with infinite accumulation, but with fair distribution, at least when production is managed through collective democracy. Instead of a drive to reduce safety regulations, eliminate environmental protections and render workers more precarious, workplace democracy has at its core a program of sustainability, workplace safety and dignity of life.

Transferring ownership of companies from the new aristocracy to the workers will cause a revolution in social and economic relations. Instead of having to work 11-hour shifts for dismal pay so an Ivy League legacy case can live in absolute opulence, the workers under democracy will have a fairly determined schedule, a manager who is held accountable for problems and an actual stake in the success of the workplace.

There’s a common misconception among silver spoon sons that the only way to ensure people work is through dominance and disempowerment. Hard work is driven by passion, innovation by inquisitiveness, by teamwork and basic (state funded) R&D. Democracy would unleash the human desires for productivity, dignity and pride. Workplace dictatorship mandates forms of resistance like sabotage, slowdowns, loitering and walkouts.

Inequality is not caused by values or norms, but by the relationship between owners and workers. Equality can only come through equality of power, through workplace democracy.