TOWN MEETINGS AND WORKERS' CONTROL: A STORY FOR SOCIALISTS
Walzer, Michael
Introduction There are 13 arguments for socialism; they have to do with distributive justice, equality, the need for planning, self-respect, fraternity, and so on. But the one that seems to me...
...The dissidence of dissent was absent...
...We would not be paying him proper respect if we denied the efficacy of his choice...
...Whereas feudal property was founded on armed force and sustained and expanded through the power of the sword (even though it was also traded and inherited), capitalist property rests upon forms of activity that are intrinsically noncoercive...
...These outcomes take the form of decisions and rules that can be opposed or ignored by the members only at the risk of penalties...
...They are abolitionists...
...Their claim to govern, to make decisions affecting others, rests on the legal and, what is more important, the moral implications of private property...
...Dead bodies lend dignity to the place where they lie...
...The best response is to point to the other side of that all-important but entirely conventional dividing line: we do not lack for political entrepreneurs, though they cannot hope to own the state...
...was still a gregarious man...
...In a developed economy, as in a developed polity, different decisions are made by different groups of people at different levels...
...They aim at abolishing two kinds of authority relations, those in which men and women are directly, and those in which they are indirectly, subject to the arbitrary will of another...
...There is certainly no other place where it is so important to be safe...
...The citizens of a town are also the consumers of the goods and services the town provides—and they are, except for occasional visitors, the only consumers of those goods and services...
...In these associations, the common life does not require unquestioning obedience, and we respect the new member only if we assume that he does not seek subjection...
...The members of the political community are conceived to have rights of a different sort, simply by virtue of their membership, whether they have invested money in the community or not...
...On both sides, men and women make authoritative decisions affecting others, but the maxim what touches all should be decided by all applies only in the realm of politics...
...It is not the case that the authorities can seek support for their decisions just anywhere...
...Presumably, they would not have had much to say if J.J...
...Nor could J.J...
...your dead are buried on land I gave...
...My own argument requires only this much: that for any authoritative decision seriously affecting others, there is some subset of those affected who ought to authorize the decision or to make it or approve it themselves...
...It would be foolish to create a system that did not bring them forward...
...These two are much nearer to one another than either is to the land I cultivate, the wood I cut, the chair I build, the book I write—the examples that Locke had in mind...
...J.J.'s son had occasion to reflect upon that last remark when the town council, only a few years later, tried to take over the river haulage company...
...nor was there any opposition...
...Now we all make decisions all the time that seriously affect others: when I decide to accept a job, for example, my decision has an immediate impact on the life of the next candidate, who would have received an offer had I declined...
...But this general principle needs to be worked out in detail...
...The satire depends on the commonly accepted principle that the dissolution of the government is a popular right...
...he can't withdraw that authority without himself withdrawing from the common life it makes possible...
...Clearly, democratic argument must challenge and does challenge both these forms of subjection...
...But J.J...
...That does not mean everyone in the world...
...They claim an authority to which they have no right...
...today, the democratic rights of union members are legally protected...
...Upon reflection, it seemed better to imagine a case where the major entrepreneurial activity was focused on the town itself, so that J.J...
...The capitalist economy proliferates what are plausibly called private governments...
...The law did not specify any particular form of government, but J.J...
...When he died, not long after, the town council commissioned a statue, as the insurgent citizens had promised...
...was a natural leader, a man of substance, a man of power...
...it is also a matter of circumstance and expediency...
...What about bureaucracies, for example, or schools...
...The division of power in both these cases is only partly a matter of principle...
...but there is no need for us to accept the conventions of 1789...
...This redefinition established the central division along which social life is organized today...
...I suppose no doctrine commands general acceptance that is, as Hobbes wrote, "contrary to any man's right of dominion or to the interest of men that have dominion...
...But the "citizens" of a company are producers of goods and services...
...What touches all should be decided by all, they said...
...This means that at a certain point in the development of an enterprise, it must pass out of entrepreneurial control...
...it works whatever stories about the origin and foundation of the common enterprise are accepted by the participants, including stories about great men, godlike acts, vanguard revolutions, and so on...
...They could not have vetoed his choice for chief of police, but it is possible to imagine grievance machinery that would function somewhat like a civilian board of review...
...What brings them close together is that both of them involve other people, shared interests, cooperative activity...
...They are of no use to us if they just brood in their castles...
...They bargain and they vote, acting simultaneously as men and women with particular interests and as men and women with general interests...
...But let's think about stopping short, exactly as we presently do...
...It was true, the mayor said, that J.J...
...It derives instead, or it is said to derive, from the ownership of the organization by particular persons...
...But the political community is not a collection of brooding places, or not only that...
...His enterprises expanded as the town grew and, to a considerable extent, the town grew because his enterprises expanded...
...a labor organizer arrived one day and departed the next...
...The second difference between towns and companies follows from the separation of residence and work...
...had never lacked for words...
...But it does not draw the line between democratic politics and the capitalist economy, nor does it justify the present authority of owners...
...Most important, it does not give rise to any sort of disciplinary authority over those who join the new community...
...After hardships and excitements not worth mentioning, he staked out a claim to a large and rich piece of land at the bend of a river, one of the smaller western tributaries of the Mississippi...
...He treated criminals the same way...
...He merely wants them to live peaceably and to prosper...
...The implications of ownership were redefined so as to exclude certain sorts of decision-making that, it was thought, could only be authorized by the political community as a whole...
...No doubt, there are problems with this (and every other) restriction on the reach of the maxim, for decisions made within some particular association are certain to affect not only members, but nonmembers as well—and may affect them seriously indeed, as the example of state decisions and international politics suggests...
...What is necessary is to imagine a man who claims to own a town, to tell a story—it must be a success story—about the life of a political entrepreneur...
...What should their role be in company decisionmaking...
...it describes the slave, the serf, the servant, all those who bow before some powerful person, defer to him, obey his every command...
...His son wasn't particularly bold, adventurous, energetic, or smart, and everyone in town knew it...
...This is my town...
...The picture is not entirely unattractive, but it is not what we mean by democracy or, at least, it is not all that we mean...
...went East to borrow some money...
...Here I don't want to answer it again, only to insist that the sorts of arrangements required in a fully developed industrial democracy are not very different from those required in a political democracy...
...When it became necessary to appoint other town officers, he talked to his friends and neighbors and always 328 picked the right man...
...The next weeks were exciting, but the events are not worth mentioning here...
...If we consider deeply why this is so, we will have to conclude, I think, that it should not be acceptable in companies or factories either...
...Revivalist preachers came and went...
...its purpose and its moral effect is precisely to authorize his superior...
...Of course, he encounters supervisors, foremen, company police, as he knew he would, and it may be that the success of the economic enterprise requires his obedience, just as the success of the political association requires that citizens obey public officials...
...It is often said that economic entrepreneurs will not come forward if they cannot hope to own the companies they make...
...For political communities are also created by entrepreneurial energy and enterprise, and it's not implausible to say of cities and towns, if not 327 always of states, that they recruit and hold their citizens by offering them an attractive place to live...
...The subset includes, but is not necessarily limited to, those people whose association makes the decision possible or necessary—as the association of Frenchmen, for example, makes possible the French king's decision to go to war or requires him to oppose an armed invasion...
...There are certainly objects in the world that a man can acquire through enterprise and invention...
...Decisions about whether or not to expand the ferry service, buy new boats, and so on—those could not be made by one man, they said, considering only his private profit...
...We enmesh our towns in a federal structure, and we regulate what they can and cannot do in areas like education, criminal justice, environmental use, and so on...
...Though no one had yet died in the settlement, he provided a cemetery too, sure that people would die and not unhappy about that...
...was in the forefront of the defenders— 12 or 15 people now, mostly heads of families, who recognized and accepted him as their leader...
...J.J., he said, was a heroic figure, a man of the pioneering past, a founding father...
...the speeches were exciting, and the participants went home feeling differently about J-town than they had ever felt before...
...Perhaps it should, but I doubt that Marx's comparison is a good one, for orchestras must express a single interpretation of the music they play, while patterns of work in a factory are more readily negotiated...
...he knew them all, talked to them all, always consulted with them about matters of common interest...
...He was entitled to 329 rent, but they would tax themselves...
...Which matters would lie beyond their reach, once they had conceded the issue of ownership...
...In every society, however, there are positions of recognized power, offices within 325 some organizational structure, from which decisions of a different sort are made...
...J.J.'s reply was a passionate defense of entrepreneurial rights...
...Direct subjection suggests the immediacy of bondage...
...What does it require...
...All of you came here with your eyes open...
...There was a third meeting, and on the following afternoon a delegation of citizens called on J.J...
...was not a farmer...
...The question is often raised in the literature on workers' control, and it is variously answered...
...you knew how this town was run...
...The cohesion that makes it possible to speak of "touching all" and being "decided by all" can only be dissolved by all...
...set out to make his fortune...
...In the course of many years of political conflict and revolutionary activity, the formal structure of feudal rights was abolished and the disciplinary powers of the feudal lords were socialized...
...Not because men and women join a company voluntarily, with full knowledge of the established structure of authority: the settlers in J-town arrived freely, and the same knowledge was available to them, as J.J...
...The argument also assumes that the king cannot decide to break up the association (or to cooperate with the invaders) rather than allow its members to join him in decisionmaking...
...The citizens told the mayor that he could appoint his son to any position he liked in J's River Haulage, Inc., but the town, they said, was not one of his businesses...
...The citizens' insurrection was successful...
...new settlers arrived every year...
...There was an attack of sorts, though only by a small raiding party, and J.J...
...But it would be odd to think of him as my subject, and I am certainly not required to seek his agreement before making up my own mind...
...there will be false starts and failed experiments, as there have been in the previous history of political democracy...
...Would it in that case Not be simpler if the Government Dissolved the People And elected another...
...The factory is distinguished from the manor, the disciplinary system of the first is upheld and that of the second condemned, because men and women come willingly to work in the factory, drawn by the wages, working conditions, prospects for the future that the owner offers, which are made possible by his energy and enterprise, while the workers on the manor are serfs, prisoners of their noble lords...
...The story would then have described how the owners of an economic enterprise created a political community, so to speak, on the side, as a place for their employees to live...
...Yet ownership is not an acceptable source of governmental authority in cities and towns...
...His son never became chief of police...
...It is not a place that anyone needs to own in order to safeguard his independence and solitude...
...Your children are studying, right now, in schools I made possible...
...We see this clearly in the case of towns and also, curiously, in the case of labor unions...
...But this description may be misleading, for the two realms do not seem to me at all distinct...
...Men and women ruled by an absolute monarch are directly subject in that they must obey his commands and indirectly subject in that they must live with the consequences of his political, economic, and military decisions...
...How can I be a tyrant, shouted J.J., when it's my own town...
...time passed quickly...
...For one thing, we can go on building statues of worthy men and women— the founders but not the owners of our common wealth...
...When word came of a threatened Indian attack, he organized its defense, bringing in (and paying for) vital supplies from the East...
...had occasionally confused business and politics, but, after all, that was a confusion not uncommon in American life...
...But it should also be said that the dissolution of the people is a popular right...
...Taxation, law enforcement, conscription: all these ceased to be property rights...
...They did not mean to sound ungrateful, they said, they weren't ungrateful, but political foundation and public service did not give a man the right to tyrannize over others...
...That seems the right arrangement for economic enterprises also, whose participants are concerned both with their immediate returns and with the well-being of the enterprise as a whole...
...He hated domestic animals, and while he could plow as straight a furrow as anyone in the West, the accomplishment gave him no joy...
...Men and women must collectively control the place where they live in order to be safe in their own homes...
...He now had visions of a city, for the river bend was a good location, the ferry was busy, there were new farms on both sides of the river, and the farmers needed supplies, schools, sermons, and company...
...I risked my life against the Indians...
...It should be said, however, that in their time democrats also challenged the implications of ownership—as these were understood within the feudal economy...
...on the other, activities called economic...
...The self-government of residents, it might be said, is more obvious and important than that of workers...
...Direct subjection is pervasive in the old regime, and it is not missing in the new...
...And in this sense, an economic enterprise seems to be very like a town, even though, or in part because, it is so unlike a home...
...The best way to characterize these is to say that they are authoritative decisions, for that invites us to inquire as to the source of the authority...
...Many of the new settlers did not remember J.J.'s earlier days, did not really believe the stories of his heroic exploits, or—what was worse—did not think the stories mattered...
...No one took notes that afternoon, but what was said was repeated all over town...
...And what touches all, they said, should be decided by all...
...Today, there are many men and women who preside over enterprises in which hundreds and thousands of their fellow citizens are involved, who make decisions that shape the lives of their fellows, and who defend and justify themselves exactly as J.J...
...himself took no salary...
...most of them worked for it...
...He would have been the newest of new men in Boston or New York, but in this little settlement, he was the oldest, the richest, the most well-established of the inhabitants...
...That is why the meetings in J-town were so exciting...
...It is a common enterprise, a public place where we are seen and heard by others, where we quarrel over the public interest, where we sometimes work together...
...This time more people came...
...About this time, J.J...
...It is interesting to speculate on the range of issues they might have bargained about...
...But since this is a general difficulty for democratic theory, and not a special difficulty for socialists, I am going to put it aside (I'll come back to it briefly later on...
...I built my ferry here, and other people came because of the ferry...
...would pat him on the back and talk about the wide Western spaces...
...But that is not true of a man who joins a company or who comes to work in a factory...
...Should their will be commanding...
...Perhaps the maxim, what touches all should be decided by all, only applies to residential communities...
...But it's not the case that anything can be acquired that way, and if towns cannot be, there is no reason to think that companies can...
...I will consider these two separately...
...And if anyone wasn't pleased, he could always move on...
...Or consider an example that Marx used (in Capital, Vol...
...Not because of the investment ofcapital: J.J...
...Still, the appointment of his son was a political mistake—J.J.'s first...
...nor do the laws of the state constitute the only disciplinary system to which we are subject...
...Soon, he acquired land on the other side of the river and built a ferry, which he ran himself...
...It's not every decision affecting others that must be democratically made, but only those affecting everyone...
...But they could have bargained in detail about living conditions within it, about zoning laws, traffic control, sewage disposal, and so on...
...A few of the newer inhabitants called a meeting at the Odd Fellow's Lodge (the town hall had no assembly room...
...Particular groups of city employees do form unions and .negotiate with the mayor, but their members also vote for the mayor with whom they negotiate...
...But there are two differences between towns and companies that I have not yet considered...
...Indirect subjection is not so easy to recognize, for it has to do not with relationships but with systems of relationships, and the systems are invisible...
...it helps us understand why feudalism was not an ideal political or economic arrangement...
...He was entitled to honor and glory, but not to obedience...
...Imagine that the inhabitants of J-town, instead of calling for elections, had organized a citizens' union and bargained collectively with J.J...
...all its citizens depended on the haulage company...
...The process has outcomes that seriously affect thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, including men and women whose cooperative activity underlies the organization and who are in some sense its members...
...On the other hand, nothing they do or can do gives them a right to rule over others— unless they win the agreement of the others...
...Unless they are already citizens, they cannot even participate in deciding how to spend their own money...
...would stand in the great tradition of the political founder...
...prospered, paid off the loan, delighting himself and the Eastern banker...
...was the founder, not the owner of J-town, they said, and they would happily put up a statue of him in Central Park...
...The argument is not dependent upon an original contract...
...I own this place, they say, I built this factory, I founded this company, I risked my capital, I make the decisons around here...
...Don't talk to me about elections .. J.J...
...there was money in the treasury...
...Anyway, they all paid him rent, and it did not seem strange to pay him taxes too—a per-capita levy for the salary of the schoolteacher, the maintenance of public buildings, and other minor expenses...
...Town government was the public business, and henceforth the public would have to be brought into it in some regularized manner...
...Later on, he went East for a second time to raise money, signing the papers in his own name and bringing home the capital that made it possible to rebuild J-town...
...Possession is not the goal of public life, but that does not mean that there are not attractive and even compelling goals...
...activities called political...
...The new mayor made a fine speech when the statue was unveiled...
...I will assume that this maxim expresses a genuine moral imperative...
...There will, of course, be many difficulties in working these out...
...It is important that there be options short of leaving, connected with the appointment of the officials and the making of the rules they enforce...
...Indeed, the political argument for socialism is strongest insofar as it suggests the radical similarity of decision-making in the two realms...
...Monasteries and unions are immediate counterexamples, monasteries because they are residential communities to which the maxim does not apply, unions because they 'are nonresidential communities to which it does apply...
...The settlers were not surprised...
...The Story LONG AGO, when the frontier was still somewhere east of the Great Plains, a young man named J.J...
...None of them accounts for, let alone justifies, the privacy of a private government...
...It was a well-built and well-run ferry...
...In Marxist terms, the state was emancipated from civil society, that is, from the property system...
...and the visitor did not find it necessary to talk to anyone else...
...Its founders have created, or they have led other men and women in creating, apublic thing, which must now be run in some public way...
...Thus the medieval maxim was invoked in disputes about authority relations in guilds, churches, towns, and states...
...Members of pressure groups participate in the same dual way, though the arrangements are less formal...
...fell...
...The political rights of individuals are relative to the character of the activities in which they voluntarily engage...
...Socialists argue that this is not a tenable claim, and it is at this point that many democrats part company with them, insisting that economic enterprises are unlike political associations precisely because the former are subject to ownership and the latter are not...
...Surely we grant that point whenever we require union democracy, and having done that, there seems no principled reason to stop short of company democracy...
...the Republican party sent someone to talk to J.J...
...If I settle in a state founded and ruled by a powerful despot, my knowledge of his despotism does not make the act of settlement into an act of consent...
...They demanded that elections be held, and they intimated that they had a candidate for mayor in mind whom they preferred to J.J...
...Proportional representation, single member constituencies, mandated and independent representatives, bicameral and unicameral legislatures, city managers, regulatory commissions, public corporations—the common business is done and should continue to be done in many ways...
...That may be the case with a man who joins a monastic order requiring strict and unquestioning obedience...
...The citizens insisted, however, that it wasn't possible...
...Or so it was until J.J., aging now, appointed his son chief of police...
...What is at issue here is the right of a single person, acting on his own, for reasons of his own, to make decisions seriously affecting the welfare of his fellowmen, without the agreement of those whom his decisions affect...
...Here the new member seems to be choosing a way of life, and his choice entails a particular disciplinary rule...
...He had a knack for making decisions, not only decisions that paid off, but ones that pleased people...
...What justifies the contemporary version of property rights, we are commonly told, is the entrepreneurial zeal, the risktaking, the inventiveness, the capital investment, through which economic enterprises are founded, sustained, and expanded...
...Now there were tax-payers who did not pay rent to J.J., though he still owned most of the town and continued to serve as mayor...
...But he is clearly comparable, despite that, to the figures celebrated by Machiavelli and Rousseau—Lycurgus, Solon, Romulus— who made or remade the political community...
...This town wouldn't exist without me and, what's more, I still own most of it...
...He got the money from a young banker who was bold, adventurous, energetic, and very smart...
...As a feudal baron retired to his castle to brood over public slights, so I retire to my home...
...Nor do men and women who buy municipal bonds come to own the municipality...
...What do you mean...
...What is important is that it be known to be common and that our participation in it be recognized as a matter of right...
...Hence there are large numbers of other people, outside the company, who have a direct and material interest in what goes on inside...
...What is the source of that authority...
...331 work (though not only there), and some distinction might be drawn along these lines...
...The central commitment of socialist politics has often been put in a phrase that must be intuitively appealing to democrats: the abolition of the power of man over man...
...THE CASE IS SIMILAR with the particular constitutional arrangements necessary within companies and factories...
...No doubt, companies would be similarly enmeshed...
...And everything he said was true...
...The townspeople could hardly imagine another mayor...
...Only a small number of people came, but they shouted a lot, worked one another up, formed a citizen's committee, and called another meeting...
...He provided a small lot for a small church and happily watched the settlement grow...
...In the U.S...
...was a gregarious man, and he entertained his passengers as he took them across...
...But the town was well-run, and they were content not to worry about it...
...On land I gave you, muttered J.J...
...But in neither case do we want to say (what we might say to the novice monk): if you don't like these officials and the orders they give, you can always leave...
...For we don't, after all, grant absolute 332 authority to town governments, even over the goods and services they produce for internal consumption...
...Now, in that tradition, founding or reforming the state generates no right of ownership and none of the subsidiary rights that ownership brings with it in feudal manors or in capitalist factories or companies...
...Since they everywhere encounter established sovereigns, authorities, hierarchies, conventional claims to rule, they begin with denials and rejections...
...LIFE WAS PLACID in J-town...
...The enterprise was a success, and after a year or so a few men settled nearby, a storekeeper, a blacksmith, even a preacher, renting the land from J.J...
...III) to illustrate the nature of authority in a Communist factory: cooperative labor requires, he wrote, "one commanding will," and he compared this will to that of an orchestra conductor...
...They are entitled to a specified rate of interest, and that is their only entitlement...
...you knew who made the decisions around here...
...He didn't like locking people up, and he thought it enough of a punishment to have to leave J-town...
...I think we should take it to mean everyone associated in some common enterprise the existence or success of which requires that decisions be made...
...333...
...He was bold, adventurous, energetic, and very smart, and he left Boston and New York, even Pittsburgh and Cincinnatti behind him...
...A strange comparison, for conductors have historically been tyrannical figures...
...invested his own money in J-town without becoming an owner...
...They represented the discovery or creation of a local republic, a public thing, which by its very nature had to be shared once it was known to exist...
...Not self-government, but rather the protection of a private sphere, a piece of nonpolitical space for withdrawal, rest, secrecy, and solitude...
...The principle of the second challenge is nicely expressed in an old maxim, a rule of law, I believe, in medieval times, honored regularly in the breach: what touches all should be decided by all...
...He represents the liberal form of that tradition, which is to say, he has no deep convictions about the shape of the town or the moral character of its citizens...
...Why are economic associations any different...
...again had something in mind...
...For feudalism, like capitalism, rested on a certain view of property rights, specifically on the view that the ownership of land entitled the owner to exercise direct disciplinary (judicial and police) powers over the men and women who lived on the land and also to make decisions (to go to war with some neighboring landowner, for example) seriously affecting their lives...
...On the one side are...
...One recognizes it in those forms of speech, those bodily postures and motions that connote weakness, inferiority, humility, a certain zeal for service, which we are disinclined to accept as spontaneous or voluntary...
...His ferry was doing well, and he had begun to transport goods up and down the river...
...When the flood came, I did it all again, giving money, raising money, organizing reconstruction...
...told the citizens' delegation...
...He incorporated the town in accordance with territorial law and gave it the name he had always had in mind: J-town...
...he said...
...It has been my purpose to argue that people who speak this way are wrong...
...Within capitalist organizations a process of decision-making can be marked out, dominated by officials, which has the 326 crucial characteristics of a political regime...
...Nor should we expect a single resolution of all problems...
...But the one that seems to me the easiest and best is a political argument, an extension of the defense of democracy...
...a town with a cemetery has staying power...
...He did not have to make things up, for he was indeed a great man and had done great things...
...J.J...
...in any case, I will not question it now...
...It clearly does not derive from the participants, else it would not be called private...
...The moral independence of the men and women who work in a factory requires shared decision-making and not the protection of a private sphere...
...Interpretation of the Story I HAD originally planned to write about a company town, drawing upon actual historical accounts...
...withdrew from public life, did not vote in the first town elections, never attended town meetings, turned away from his friends and neighbors...
...There seems no reason not to make the same distinction in economic associations, marking off investors from participants, a just return from authoritative decision-making...
...they didn't think of politics as something that was missing from their lives...
...Nor is my prompt departure the only way I can express my opposition to despotic government...
...He proved himself again when the flood came, risking his boats on the rapidly rising river in order to evacuate the settlers and their movable possessions, contributing freely to the relief fund...
...I risked my capital to buy this land and raise on it the buildings people needed...
...The town lines were redrawn...
...They are subject, of course, to conventional definition...
...Now, it is the socialist claim that these two forms of arbitrary power—the power of persons and positions—have not been abolished through the establishment of a democratic state...
...Hence socialism has commonly been described as the extension of democratic decision-making from the political to the economic realm...
...For the state is not our only common enterprise...
...Here are participants who are subjects, officials who act with authority...
...and his heirs...
...Hence another ancient maxim: a man's home is his castle...
...It has been put forward often over the last 100 years, but it has never, in this country at least, commanded general acceptance...
...Back home, he bought more land, laid out a square, set aside lots for a school and a town hall...
...All this may well be true...
...a company is an association of workers, who live somewhere else...
...I found this place...
...When the town hall was built (at his own expense), he moved in...
...Nevertheless, it is true that ordinary democrats have generally tried to organize people where they live, socialists where they *There are other sorts of organizations that raise more difficult problems...
...But the rights of company employees are only indirectly protected insofar as they are unionized (and insofar as their union has won some share in company decision-making).* Entrepreneurial vision, capital investment, the freedom to join or not to join: none of these satisfactorily distinguish economic from political associations...
...And yet there is some sense in which we are all democrats, so I shall start from there, assuming that we have good reasons, and see how far I can go...
...It is not a place of withdrawal, but of cooperative activity...
...The town owed him a profound debt, a spiritual debt, of which the statue could only be a lasting reminder...
...to all appearances they didn't think about it at all...
...Making them or mixing his labor with them, as John Locke argued, produces at least a presumption of ownership...
...Thus Bertolt Brecht's satiric poem, written in Berlin, 1953: After the rising of the 17th of June The Secretary of the Writers' Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee In which you could read that the People Had lost the Government's confidence Which it could only regain By redoubled efforts...
...If it were possible to own a town, he certainly deserved to own this one...
...had decided to relocate the town (since it was "his" town...
...In both towns and companies one looks for energetic people, willing to innovate and take risks...
...And this is true however the association was made and whatever the role of the king or the authorities in making it...
...Years went by...
...Not because of the entrepreneurial vision, energy, inventiveness, and so on, that goes into the making of the company: the making of J-town required exactly the same qualities...
...No one ever thought of saying, a man's factory is his castle...
...They acquire no political rights 330 at all...
...Perhaps there had been murmurings before that, but they were scarcely audible...
...First of all, a town is an association of residents...
...they are only sometimes consumers, and they are never the only consumers...
...J-town prospered...
...They misunderstand the prerogatives of foundation and investment...
...They would have paid him handsomely, had the state supreme court allowed the take-over, but money, they insisted, was all he was entitled to in return for his father's investment...
...It has not been my purpose, however, to deny the significance of entrepreneurial activity...
...That authority belongs to the members, even if they were passive or entirely absent during the period of foundation...
...The whole town was a transportation center...
...And what is crucial in systems of indirect subjection is that the subjects are not the source...
...Neither democrats nor socialists begin with an assertion of popular sovereignty...
...As at the time of the Indian raid, his leadership was recognized and accepted...
...he was warm and funny and full of stories...
Vol. 25 • July 1978 • No. 3
