WHAT IS POLITICAL EQUALITY? A CONTROVERSY ON LIBERAL AND SOCIALIST IDEAS
Green, Philip
What is political equality? Any simple definition of such a vague concept is unlikely to be more than a slogan. We must begin somewhere, though, and Robert Dahl's recent essay "On Removing...
...Those with capital have greater access to the wellsprings of economic and social life—power over the determination of its contours, in sum—than do those with mere skills, and the latter in turn have more economic power than do wage-laborers...
...His failure has its roots in two aspects of modern liberalism (or its philosophical twin, social democracy): its atomistic individualism, and its concomitant concentration on distribution as the key variable in the search for alternative social formations...
...Professor Dahl is the leading theorist of modern American liberalism, and in his most recent work he has tried mightily to escape from the inhibiting confines of that philosophical stance...
...Society at large must deal solely with a stratum of principals, school superintendents, etc., who have the kind of social power that we associate with ownership or control of the means of production: they control a vital resource...
...For our state exists chiefly as a locus for the resolution of conflicts between and within the social classes generated by the institutional structure of capitalism—and those social classes by their nature, as we have seen, provide political dominance for some, and political exclusion for many others...
...To return to the level of metaphor, those who possess nothing but the vote are political wage-earners, and their labor-power does not earn a return equivalent to a capitalist's political investment: yet why should it, since to vote, or even to write a letter to one's "representative," is to "do" virtually nothing by comparison to what the possessors of capital or even of skill can do...
...They are largely interchangeable and dispensable...
...In any event, the road to political equality can only lead through some form of democratic public control of the core economy, and that requires the abolition of private ownership at the core...
...Whereas the great historical general strikes of labor have usually been disasters for the working class, the general strike of owners of capital is constantly in the wings, and in some nations, such as Great Britain, government is permanently constituted by the necessity of preventing the export of capital, no matter what political party is in power...
...But it would be absurd to deny that—where the political structures of a society incorporate a voting mass on the one hand, and a relatively separated elite of decision-makers and those persons with 355 whom they directly interact on the other hand—Mosca's denial of the possibility of democratic equality must hold good...
...To this criterion Dahl adds two further criteria that would satisfy what he calls "the doctrines of procedural democracy...
...An understanding of the notions of service and representation has to replace the acquisition of technique as the first skill demanded of the professional...
...If the public schools of a nation are run in such a way that teachers have no say in their operation, then something like a political class division is created...
...DAHL HIMSELF is really aware of this tendency in his argument, and this becomes plain when we compare this latest work to his earliest theoretical statement about democracy, A Preface to Democratic Theory...
...A brief review of some inequalities that do not have political implications will highlight the areas in which drastic change is necessary, and those areas in which it is not necessary, in order to achieve political equality...
...the middle class and the working class seek to penetrate the state in turn, in order to protect themselves against corporate capitalism (and sometimes against each other, too...
...In any social unit larger than the commune, to prescribe that "the decision rule for determining outcomes must equally take into account the preference of each member" is to prescribe total chaos...
...Take away the reward and no one will want to do the job—who would be a "private" or even "public" manager of capital if the only substantial reward were to be hounded by works committees, citizens groups, and so forth...
...By virtue of his ownership or control of capital, the capitalist is sure to have either his individual interests, or his version of society's general interests, attended to with great particularity...
...6. Alternative leaders with the greatest number of votes displace any alternative leaders with lesser numbers of votes...
...None of this requires the utopian achievement of an end to the division of labor, or the abolition of careers or professions or (unequal) incomes...
...But rarely are they executed when those officials, whose only mandate is a loosely expressed popular vote, come into conflict with other officials or citizens who have a high stake in a specific policy and the resources to back up their preferences...
...To reject this criterion is to deny the condition of roughly equal qualification, taken all around...
...As we shall see, the escape is finally unsuccessful...
...Above all else then, prescriptions for political equality must be aimed not at minimizing inequalities among individuals but at minimizing inequalities among classes...
...SO WE COME full circle in our escape from the constricting individualism of the liberal version of political equality: abolish the primary social class division and we can begin to attain the equality of communities...
...But in both cases, Dahl could plausibly argue that some individuals (homo politicus) simply maintain a higher level of interest than will the mass of the electorate (homo civicus)—who can, however, insert themselves into the democratic process whenever they really desire to get together and do so...
...Moralists of all kinds, and especially socialists who insist upon wearing a Puritan's hairshirt, might raise objections...
...Indeed, there he seemed tacitly to endorse the crude formulation of his ex-student Nelson Polsby that if, say, poor people fail to vote in large numbers, it must be because they think they have something better to do on election day...
...The same considerations apply, obviously, to those who make their fortune by marketing their personalities or entertainment skills to the public at large...
...But since they were voted on only as potential leaders, and are the executors of a myriad of policies about which the electorate cannot possibly be closely informed, there is no reason to believe that the detailed policy preferences of the electorate, if one could know what those actually were, will govern their actions...
...It is important to note the qualitative aspect of class differentiation...
...After all, the classical theorists were correct in arguing that, under ideal conditions, "free trade" will secure the real exchange of equivalents among communities with different resource bases...
...If political equality is realized through membership in communities, and if the expert-amateur distinction is (often, if not always) real, then experts must be of and by rather than merely "for" communities...
...A different vision of "the corporate good" would be substituted for that of GM's managers, but it would emanate from the same interests: and this is what it really means for a class to have "political" power...
...In the secondary market, some workers make a temporary and genuinely voluntary commitment: college students, would-be artists, etc...
...We must begin somewhere, though, and Robert Dahl's recent essay "On Removing Certain Impediments to Democracy in the United States" in the Summer 1978 Dissent offers an excellent starting point, for which we should all be grateful...
...In sum, liberal fury at Charles Wilson for his injudicious remark that "What's good for General Motors is good for the country" has always had a good deal of self-deception in it, since the injudiciousness of Wilson's remark is precisely that he was speaking the truth...
...As long as the production of autos and associated goods is legally under the control of private "owners," nothing can be done about its organization that does not meet with the owners' final approval—else they will take their products or their profits or even their actual plants elsewhere...
...and we should support as well public attacks and inroads on corporate power wherever they appear...
...If we come to see, however, that this way of life is not compatible with real political equality, which is also an ultimate good for millions of people in all the liberal societies, then we will at least be able to confront a basic choice with an understanding of the issues that does not effectively preclude one resolution altogether...
...and only then might communities be represented by persons who don't have fundamentally divergent interests from theirs...
...But political equality does require that a citizenry find democratic ways of training "experts," installing them in office, overseeing their performance, and removing them...
...Rather, we should encourage and, if possible, participate in the kinds of spontaneous community or workplace organizations, with their demands for direct representation in decision-making, that have been bourgeoning all over the world in the past dozen years...
...To say this is no more than to say that "the state," that is, some locus for the resolution of conflict, cannot wither away...
...The life-styles of consumpfion classes are more or less like each other...
...Here, too, Dahl's formulation is finally unsatisfactory...
...If Dahl's earlier statement of the conditions of political equality were to be consistent with the realities of liberal individualism, it would have to be rewritten as follows (and these are of course my own rough formulations...
...5. All individuals possess identical information about the alternatives...
...Each of these quite different types of "human capital" provides, on the average, a quantitatively and qualitatively different return...
...Dahl's conventionally liberal understanding of "political equality" prevents him from breaking decisively with the kind of polity, marked by polarities of domination and subordination, inclusion and exclusion—all in the name of "representative government"—which he rightfully styles "pseudodemocracy...
...For in the government's view nothing can be allowed to harm the competitive position of the American auto industry, its ability to provide both mass employment and mass consumption, to enable the government to fend off further balance-of-payment disasters, etc...
...Those relations require of the "owner" merely that he make a competitive profit, and if a different kind of behavior would maintain or improve present rates of profit, it would already have been undertaken...
...In a polyarchy: 4. Only a relatively few powerful members of the society can insert their preferred alternatives among those scheduled for voting—otherwise voters, being a mass, would overload the voting system with their individual preferences...
...In this work he offered eight characteristics, or conditions, of what he called polyarchal (liberal and pluralist) democracy...
...Monopoly in the production of such yachts, therefore, would be completely trivial, and the monopolist who escaped from the strictures of public control would harm no one...
...This power, unlike capital or skill but much like labor power, creates "products" that pass out of our grasp as soon as we have made them...
...but they are not essentially incompatible...
...If a people decides, upon serious reflection, that the price of a desired amount of technological advance is the provision of an economic incentive to inventors, it cannot reward them with sole control over the development of "their" technique without also giving them an excess of political power...
...These are the criterion of "effective participation," by which he means that "every member [of the demosl must have equal opportunities for expressing preferences," and the criterion of "enlightened understandings," which requires that "each member of the demos ought to have adequate and equal opportunities for discovering and validating, in the time available, what his or her preferences are on the matter to be decided...
...Those men and women who are either far from the institutional heart of the system, or lack access to the media of mass communication, can hardly ever affect the choice of alternatives that are to be presented to them...
...Of course, there will always be inequality among communities of people, especially to the extent that communities define themselves geographically...
...There will always be accommodations to be reached between the controllers of different resources, and to imagine that accommodations will be reached by means of 358 the formulation of a set of bargaining rules to be observed by all—rather than by an endless series of ad-hoc fights—is to imagine the existence of public political institutions...
...Collusion between job- and income-protective labor unions and profit- or stability-maximizing managements tends to exclude those who are defined as "nonproductive" workers from both the organized core industries and the skilled trades, which on the average offer both much greater long-term job stability and much greater pecuniary reward to labor than does the less articulated, more chaotic secondary market...
...The existence of such a "state" is perfectly compatible with political equality, as long as we understand that political equality does not, cannot, and need not ensure absolutely equal outcomes from all social bargains...
...But if inventors, instead of being rewarded with an exclusive property right that translates into personal or corporate political influence, indeed are rewarded with a lump-sum payment enabling them to retire on the spot to the Riviera, no political harm is done...
...and thus a society in which class conveys the advantages of entrenchment to a few is not and cannot be politically egalitarian...
...After serious scrutiny, state officials might find that the corporate managers' claims were actually wrong (that is, not factual), but this would demonstrate merely that the latter had been mistaken, not in what is "good for the country," but in what is "good for General Motors...
...For those legal relations, which legitimize the private ownership and deployment of capital, entail the economic and political division of 360 labor by classes...
...V Thus, when Dahl calls for a redistribution of wealth and income ("economic resources"), and then adds that "the form of control should be treated as a problem that is prior to the question of the form of ownership," he still, it seems to me, has not grasped the real problem...
...The voter's "product" is alienated precisely because voters are not able to engage in ti ie kind of political work necessary to make it their own...
...The first often has been noted by critics of Dahl: there is a class of people who set the authoritative agenda of politics that is different from the class of those who merely "prefer" or "participate...
...The same considerations hold, it seems to me, for organizations that are less directly "productive," such as those that provide services...
...The right to a job is not economic equality because, by virtue of circumstances most of which are out of our individual control, some of us have financial or physical investment capital, others have realizable skills, and still others only salable labor power...
...The criterion of "political equality," Dahl writes, is that the "decision rule for determining outcomes must equally take into account the preference of each member of the demos as to the outcome...
...But the concrete marginal return from that vote diminishes sharply with each additional group...
...But by far the greatest number possess only voting power—the "right" of "equal participation...
...To repeat, if institutions can be democratized only by the vote they cannot be democratized, inasmuch as preferences can never enter the decision-making system through the mechanism of voting...
...But if they are in the secondary sector involuntarily, then political equality has been denied them, for they are frozen by no choice of their own into a way of life that precludes effective organization and economic pressure (except for small enterprise owners at the small-town level...
...The corporate capitalist class penetrates and dominates the state in order to protect the productive relations of capitalism, and the resultant distribution of power, from attack...
...Ultimately, too, simply outrageous behavior in the pursuit of profit, even when the latter is legitimized by all the laws and customs of a society, will cause a dangerous backlash, so that profit-seekers are occasionally disciplined, or warned off before they can go "to far...
...Yet, it was my personal act that helped create the office-holder...
...In failing to discuss class rather than distribution, Dahl has missed the most crucial point...
...5. Individuals possess unequal information about alternatives: those for whom voting is the only or chief act of commitment to politics cannot possibly have adequate information about the range of policies, and about the precise options realistically available in each policy area, that are going to be acted on by political leaders...
...Again, of course, one group of capitalists can make mistakes and be less productive than possible, and other capitalists can help them use the state to improve or relocate their operations—that kind of "planning" (on the French model) is always possible under capitalism...
...The form of control should be treated as a problem that is prior to the question of the form of ownership...
...If mass voting is the ultimate act of sovereignty then none of these "characteristics" can possibly characterize the polity (except to some extent 6...
...We have seen also that any hope of achieving roughly equal bargaining and exchange among such communities requires the abolition of the social class known as "owners of the means of production" (they being defined as those persons who have effective legal control over the core sectors of national or local economies), for owners divert the sources of communal strength to their own class uses, thus favoring some communities, despoiling others, and reducing everywhere the political role of nonowners to a secondary or even nonexistent status...
...If that is to be the case, the membership of any economically differentiated community must be voluntary, in the sense that the difference is desired by the members of the community, rather than imposed on them willy-nilly...
...The authoritative owners of capital, by contrast, hold society to ransom without ever lifting a finger...
...Government ownership is as consistent as private ownership with despotic control of enterprises...
...Emphasis added throughout.] If we begin where Dahl begins, we must certainly agree that the "condition of roughly equal qualification" is, as Bentham long ago asserted, the sine qua non of political equality...
...But it can't be said that society is allowing a separate class to develop in its midst, for consumption differences do not cut people off from each other the way classes related to productive work do...
...6. Alternatives (leaders or policies) with the greatest number of votes displace any alternatives (leaders or policies) with fewer votes...
...But in both these respects the voting mass, again, operates simply as an amorphous, abstract threat, possessing only reactive political power by virtue of its mass existence but hardly any initiatory power at all...
...That is to say, we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that all of Dahl's definitional egalitarianism is beside the point, for egalitarian democracy cannot exist...
...These conditions, he said, must exist "in a relatively high degree" for a system to be called polyarchal...
...Unlike all but the worst-off regional communities, the members of the economic working class—which, politically, also is a great part of the voting mass—have little to bargain with in the struggle for political power (and the class of truly marginal persons cast aside in the pursuit of individual economic betterment has nothing to bargain with at all, except their bodies and lives...
...Here more than anywhere, traditional liberalism would properly have us guard against the tyranny of a centralized bureaucracy...
...To say that the former do not and probably cannot exist is to say the same of the latter...
...If we were to take into account only the most obvious possibilities with respect to the internal government of enterprises, external controls, markets, prices, and the locus of ownership together with the rights and obligations of owners, we would quickly arrive at a very large array of theoretically possible combinations...
...Third, the notion of political equality is also indifferent to the existence of (relative) individual wealth based neither on exploitation of workers nor on extortion from consumers...
...The democrat may agonize about how to take control of these agglomerations—but not whether...
...But there remains yet another class division that Dahl does not discuss at all and that is highlighted by this emphasis on communities...
...Conversely, those close to the institutions of governance must have superior information about available policy choices...
...As an aesthetic matter, the existence of riches in the midst of poverty must always be offensive (except to those who are tone-deaf to all considerations of decency...
...Obviously, the problem is an immense one (much more troubling, in fact, than the problem allegedly posed by the class division between "owners" and "workers," which is based on an entirely artificial distinction...
...Few of these can be dismissed a priori as unsuitable...
...He now seems to realize that there is a difficulty in his earlier reasoning, but he still has not perceived the necessity for a structural account of why some people voluntarily become homo politicus and others do not...
...In other words, in striving to equate the impact of individual acts of political preference, we really eschew rather than approach political equality—to produce precisely "pseudodemocracy...
...In this respect "political man" is analogous to "economic man," and the maldistributions of political as well as economic power are therefore secondary to the existence of social classes that set boundaries to one's political existence...
...7. The orders of elected officials are sometimes executed...
...A decision-making system based on that rule can only work if the rule itself is not really observed—if the system is pseudodemocratic rather than democratic...
...At the very least, the question of distribution of wealth and income ought to be high on the agenda of a national politics...
...The main resource of the powerful, by contrast, is that, given capitalist relations of production, they have legal command of "large-scale productive enterprises supplying social necessities," and that the law not only permits them to "operate independently of the people who work for them, live around them, or otherwise rely on them in any decisive way," but actually supports that independence, against attempts to penetrate it, with the armed might of the state...
...Trying now to be an egalitarian, he proposes the provision of an opportunity for "enlightened understanding" to everyone (for realizing that it is time to become homo politicus), almost as though enlightenment were a freely available consumer good...
...and the opportunity for training must be something both desired by individuals and given to them by communities that wish to be represented, rather than being the product of nothing but the drive to advance private interests...
...The problem is that information-gathering entails costs that most people usually do not wish to incur...
...If political institutions can be democratized only by equal and "enlightened" participation through voting— which is what taking into account the preference of each member of the demos must surely mean—then we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that democracy disappears every time mass voting does not govern decisions directly, or every time that unenlightened mass voting does, or every time large numbers of people don't bother to vote...
...Besides, skilled persons also hold the bulk of political jobs...
...What corporate leader ever turned down an invitation to a meeting at the White House because he had something better to do that day...
...The U.S...
...He then offered as examples of democratic polyarchies certain aspects of the governments of nation states such as the United States, Great Britain, the Dominions (South Africa possibly excepted), the Scandinavian countries, Mexico, Italy, and France...
...nothing about me as a person enters into the office-holder's decisionmaking calculus...
...Again, only a (perhaps) defensible, but politically pointless, moralism objects to the special reward that such persons can gain in capitalist society (or even in contemporary Communist society, though less of that reward takes a monetary form...
...7. The orders of elected officials are executed...
...The only question we need to ask, then, is whether a privately owned corporation is more effective in achieving our social purposes, including procedural democracy, than all the possible alternatives to it...
...In choosing among the large number of possible combinations available in any particular instance, however, citizens of a country committed to procedural democracy would obviously want to avoid consequences adverse to procedural democracy...
...On the other hand, if there are only a handful of preparatory schools run by autocratic headmasters who manage to attract, on a voluntary basis, like-minded (or submissive) staff, no harm is done to the polity at large...
...for different geographical communities are based on different physical resources, some much more valuable to the world at large than others...
...government must pay attention to any 359 claim made by General Motors' management about the viability of their industry...
...The crucial question is whether control is in the hands of the few, a separate and ultimately independent class, or is shared among various publics operating when practically necessary through delegates but retaining the legal powers of ownership...
...Surely, the latter condition always does hold in "pseudodemocracies," and so often also does the former...
...But the factor-shares model works for the average voter, as for the average worker, in a different way...
...This potential exists when we speak of an elected works manager or a local civil servant as much as it does when we speak of an independent, self-employed professional or a "faceless bureaucrat...
...No doubt, the political power of those who control the lifeblood of a nation's economy can never be eliminated...
...a] country committed to procedural democracy must either place effective limits on the extent to which economic resources can be converted into political resources, or else ensure that economic resources are much more equally distributed than they are in the United States at present...
...Still, the previous discussion suggests a possible argument...
...states and provinces, such as the states of this country and the provinces of Canada...
...Yet, the existence of the kind of state with which we are presently familiar (and of which Marx spoke in his few utterances on the subject) is not at all compatible with political equality...
...Certainly, there can be no objection that they are "unproductive": so was the get-rich-quick inventor of the hula hoop, and he probably provided less pleasure to American society than did Willy Mays...
...In other words just as the theory of political equality is indifferent to the quality of truly voluntary relationships among workers and owners, so is it indifferent to the quality of truly voluntary relationships among suppliers and consumers...
...From being a real individual at the moment of voting, I become part of a hypothetical mass, relevant as a mass to the office-holder's desire for reelect ion—no more...
...To begin with, when we think about democratic political economy with class relations rather than distribution in mind, we see that one "theoretically possible combination" with respect to the governance of enterprises can and indeed must be ruled out tout court—despite the "technical" advantages it might occasionally demonstrate...
...IN THE POLITICAL REALM, capital exists in the form of built-in access to decision-makers...
...To overcome the advantages of entrenched class positions through the mechanisms of either industrial militancy or the vote—through mass mobilization— is, though possible, both painful and time-consuming...
...Socialization, of course, would only be the first of many tortuous steps necessary to make sure that the kind of "pseudodemocratic" representation we are presently familiar with in the political sphere does not simply replicate itself in the corporate sphere (as has happened, notoriously, in Great Britain, France, and Italy...
...Therefore, a class of people who, as Marx said, contribute nothing to actual production (except to satisfy the legal requirement that there be a private owner) but have formal control of all the proceeds from it, must dominate the capitalist state regardless of whether the people who man political offices are from Harvard, Georgia Tech, the local commercial college, or even the executive offices of a labor federation...
...Yet, plainly, the monopolistic control of the provision of that information by a handful of rich men makes political equality impossible...
...Moreover, however "democratic" our intentions, there is nothing even in smallscale human relationships that necessarily conduces to client control over experts, or community control over elected representatives where the representation is itself based on expertise...
...If we are truly locked into the way of life of individualism we will not, of course, give it up in response to moralizing appeals...
...Two centuries ago, Bentham and Hume made the point unarguably: if knowledge of their self-interests is what most people pursue, they will never be able to play an "equal" part in the definition and pursuit of general interests...
...Moreover, the capitalist state is also necessarily undemocratic in a fundamental sense...
...Not that there is a hidden conspiracy of the wealthy to place some issues "on the agenda" rather than others...
...The multiple qualifications in the italicized phrase are essential, not incidental...
...But whereas wealth made in manufactures and resource development or in the provision of such necessities as housing is directly related to, and in some senses causative of, the existence of mass poverty, the wealth of the beautiful individual lies mostly outside the causal nexus of "poverty amidst plenty...
...Each (except for that of the totally excluded) has interests that lead it to aim at dominance...
...II Y et, this alienation of the voter's commodity from the voter is perfectly compatible with Dahl's seemingly egalitarian decision rule of "procedural democracy...
...The] number of polyarchies is large [he added, but the] number of egalitarian polyarchies is probably relatively small or perhaps none exist at all...
...Thus communities can begin to regain control of the ways in which their needs are met and participate equally in attenuating the force of the secondary social class division...
...First, the small, owner-operated firm (or 356 retail establishment), which employs casual local labor, does not create cumulative inequalities unless such firms form part of a more complex system of dual labor markets...
...Under corporate capitalism the dual labor market is a restrictive device...
...T III he approach to political equality via conventional liberalism—an approach that by its nature, as it turns out, can only fail to attain its object—leaves us with a critical insight: whatever political equality is, it cannot be something that is obtained by maximizing individual choices...
...Rather than belonging to me (to us, the whole class of merely individual voters) and becoming a potential extension of our joint human powers, the office-holder—the voters' "commodity"—is installed by us in a realm that is apart from and even potentially opposed to us...
...Meanwhile, democrats should not concentrate their efforts (which are bound to be chimerical), on finding ways to increase 362 individual participation or enlightenment in Dahl's sense...
...Dahl's critique of pseudodemocracy is certainly one of the most trenchant ever produced from within the liberal tradition— but by setting up impossible standards the critique turns on itself and ends in an implicit denial of the possibility of real political equality, even if that is not what Dahl intends...
...Luxurious ocean-going yachts, however, will never be a massconsumer product, and neither their availability nor their nonavailability has the slightest effect on an estimation of the pleasures that are a part of the way we live now...
...In no sphere are the dangers of public control of capital more obvious than with respect to the media—such as television and the press— which provide information on a mass basis...
...But many others are locked into a less rewarding and more isolating job structure through no choice of their own...
...nor is it even that some people find access to decision-makers more difficult to obtain than do others...
...That excess is not uniquely available to members of the capitalist class, but they are its chief possessors...
...In an individualist society the point of corporate ownership and control is to have power, both over the workplace and over the nation...
...This failure, a commonplace of liberal theory, renders his definition of "political equality" otiose...
...And in a general discussion of what these criteria might imply about the social order, he writes: 351 If privately owned enterprise can be justified at all, it must be on the grounds of comparative social effectiveness: that is, of all the possible alternatives, this form provided the greatest social advantage with least social disadvantage...
...But now, too, he fails to perceive a second and even deeper pitfall of liberal individualist theory...
...The professional salariat, by contrast, makes rules that the rest of us must obey, and quite independently of whether it is overworked or underpaid by some general social standard...
...The Emersonian injunction to reward the builders of better mousetraps appears as a historical accompaniment to the birth of American capitalism, but it does not have to be linked to that kind of inegalitarian social formation...
...Put most simply, small private firms at the periphery of the economy, employing labor according to the hierarchical principles, do not interfere with the search for political equality as long as job provision, for all who want it, takes precedence over "marginal productivity" at the democratically controlled core...
...It is a problem not susceptible to solution by formula...
...They can threaten to strike, but that is a greater threat to themselves than to the polity at large, and is thus credible only when restricted to a predefined set of situations involving only limited demands...
...It is not even conceptually possible to discuss a hypothetical "bankruptcy" of General Motors, for that would be a consequence, not a cause, of the "bankruptcy" of the United States...
...Whatever methods we devise for delegation and rotation in office, the permanent requirement of representation in some manner or other defines the social class division between experts and their clients (which includes the division between representatives and constituents...
...Except under unusual conditions of social cohesion and primary resource abundance (as in Sweden and Norway), governors who are constrained by the legal relations of capitalism cannot really engage in the planning required to wipe out regional and other disparities caused by uneven capitalist development...
...And when all groups finally share in the game of representation they benefit, on the whole, only to the extent of their social positions rather than, as liberal mythology would have it, because of their actual number...
...In their interchanges all communities must be represented —be they great or small, watershed areas or city blocks, giant factories or collections of craftspeople just as within such communitites individual members will often require representation in dealing with each other...
...If people attain their most effective relationship to political life not as "individuals" but rather as the members of communities, then the communities that make up a society must themselves be of roughly equal effectiveness...
...and there is much that militates against it...
...Except for some bleak Soviet anti-Utopia of gigantic GUM department stores with endless lines of would-be consumers, there will always be a peripheral sector and a secondary labor market—not merely because of consumer pressure, but because there will always be workers and entrepreneurs who prefer the more independent and casual style of the small parochial enterprise...
...To arrive at a correct answer depends as much on technical as on philosophical or ideological judgments, and perhaps a good deal more...
...It is in the pursuit of this distinction that we discover that• a "procedural" definition of political democracy is unsatisfactory, and that whatever the "technical" advantages of the privately owned or controlled corporation might turn out to be, the latter can only be the enemy of political equality, not its potential handmaiden...
...All the above reformulations, in the end, are only an updated version of Gaetano Mosca's insight that an unorganized mass can never control a cohesive elite...
...The former especially, but the latter also, gives a direct return to the person who has them...
...It does require the abolition of particular kinds of class division, but only insofar as they have political implications...
...What distinguishes all members of this class from the traditional working class is that the latter has no means other than the selfdenying weapon of the strike of imposing its 361 will on either employers or employers' customers...
...The philosophy of political equality is not a philosophy requiring absolute equality in the realm of income, or the abolition of money or of the division of labor 'n the workplace...
...polyarchy that approaches the realization of Dahl's conditions "in a relatively high degree" is a contradiction in terms...
...Dahl did in fact argue exactly this point in his well-known book Who Governs...
...The critical condition that alone could make the existence of a dual labor market compatible with the demands of political equality, then, is that the primary labor market be open to anyone who prefers instead a life of organized work in large-scale, highpaying productive enterprises with established democratic relations among workers and managers...
...More: social classes under capitalism are neither regional nor sectional...
...Polyarchal democracy" indeed is a strange 354 conception...
...A good many more of us possess realizable political skills: the trained capacity to do research, argue effectively, work with compilations of esoteric materials, write well, etc...
...By virtue of their ownership of a politically useful skill, the members of the professional or paraprofessional political class also have access to decision-makers, though usually only insofar as their ideas and skills are useful to those with more power than they have themselves...
...We do not need to accept Mosca's further assertion that any society must always be divided into a mass and an elite...
...The vote, of course, can hardly be deemed worthless, for otherwise the struggles to possess it would not be so prolonged and bloody...
...Having said as much, Dahl went on to present polyarchal democracy as a model to be approximated "as closely as possible...
...Yet it is helpful to engage in a critique of his effort, not because he is so far from a useful solution to the problem of achieving democratic equality but rather because he comes so close to it...
...Second, the existence even of quite large firms under strictly private control is compatible with political equality, if those firms supply society with luxuries rather than necessities...
...Neither redistribution nor "industrial democracy" will take place to any significant extent as long as the present legal relations of corporate capitalism persist...
...is a isx . by Wtvkpt;rtsand controlled simply through the mechanisms of direct democracy," the picture conjured up is one of technocrats flanked by [self-management commissars}—a prospect which hardly frightens the various specialists, who are even manifesting a sudden passion for self-management because they know that, at the end of the day, the masses will propose and the State will decide...
...General Motors, furthermore, is defined by the financial and productive capital it commands, and by its organization for producing and distributing—not by the bulk of the human beings who actually work for it...
...they fill secondary positions of authority merely by virtue of their skills, and thus develop some degree of political power on that basis...
...Although the usefulness of this metaphor, within or among self-defined national communities, is presently limited by the existence of deforming, and man-made, regional imbalances ("uneven development"), it is only in extreme cases of imbalance that the relations among regions would "naturally" be those of dominance and subordination rather than merely quantitative advantages or disadvantages (and a community so resourcepoor that even in an egalitarian society it could not strike a decent bargain for itself would simply be deserted...
...numerous cities and towns...
...Only then might the inhabitants of such communities have truly common interests that can be represented to the outside world without every single individual necessarily possessing an equally "enlightened understanding" of those interests...
...The existence of any large-scale productive enterprise supplying social necessities, which is operated according to rules formulated independently of the people who work in it, live around it, or otherwise rely on it in any decisive way, is incompatible with political equality...
...If governance must wait on the acquisition of an enlightened understanding of their own interests and of the general interest by all, it will never take place...
...We have seen that communities of choice, rather than idealized but actually powerless individuals, are the only possible building blocks of genuine political equality...
...Moreover, since this product would be socially irrelevant, he could not possibly 357 accrue any political power (except in a community of the wealthy, and if any such existed we would surely not worry about the democratization of their public lives...
...If, for example, we now imagine the present life-style of Americans transposed to a realm of political equality, we might surely be able to say that the existence of a supply of small power-boats at a price low enough to be afforded by the average skilled worker might be a part of the way we then would live, make our lives more enjoyable, and would be intimately and naturally related to the existence of an immense number of glacial lakes and rivers on the North American continent...
...and thus, as producers, voters are devalued by those who truly govern...
...There are two 353 reasons for the inadequacy of Dahl's procedurally individualist, value-neutral approach to political equality, and the two are closely linked...
...By far the greatest number of voters possess neither capital nor a particular skill but only their voting power...
...The equality referred to must exist among groups, or communities, to which people belong by virtue of their work, or place of residence, or any other fundamental way in which they define their lives...
...As Nicos Poulantzas has remarked about the "neo-technocratic talk of a State which...
...As a result, the capitalist state is necessarily oppressive, since not accommodation but dominance is the purpose of controlling it...
...It is of course historically quite true, as Dahl says, that "government ownership is as consistent as private ownership with despotic control of enterprises," but this is not nearly as true of community or cooperative ownership...
...BUT THESE RULES for egalitarian polyarchy are equivalent to the criteria of "political equality" and "effective participation...
...The capitalist gets political profit, the possessor of skill gets the political version of economic rent (as the skills are fairly widespread, the rent is minor by comparison with the profit of the much rarer capitalist...
...Dahl himself asserted that the condition he describes in 4 exists "in no organization of which I have any knowledge," and that "much the same remarks apply to the fifth condition...
...This is the politicized form of what Marx called the division between mental and physical labor, which obviously carries with it a tremendous potential for freezing in place another form of political inequality...
...To be fair, Dahl obviously considers a much broader range of factors than mere suffrage as elements of equal citizenship, but in the end his conception of civil rights extends only to those 352 aspects of citizenship that make possible the kind of "participation" we have learned to expect from representative government: being heard, or unheard, as an individual...
...All our notions of the training of experts must be turned around...
...These products are not commodities but rather are office-holders and, as Rousseau argued two centuries ago, the moment we install them is the very moment in which we lose whatever power we had over them...
...Nothing about me as a person enters into what might be called the calculus of reelectability (indeed, if I knew th, ; officeholder as a candidate but on a merely, personal basis, then the act of election depersonalizes that very relationship...
...Dahl's problem—the problem of liberal theory in general—is that an individualistic approach to political equality contradicts the egalitarian ends...
...In that sense, indeed, "life is unfair": but it is not necessarily oppressive...
...Among them are the following: 4. Any member who perceives a set of alternatives, at least one of which he regards as preferable to any of the alternatives presently scheduled, can insert his preferred alternative(s) among those scheduled for voting...
...But how essential the first step is we can best see by way of an apparent paradox...
...It is certainly a long and useful step from the traditional recommendations of liberalism to his endorsement of some aspects of democratic socialism: yet, a lingering value-neutrality with respect to economic organization ("few of these can be dismissed a priori as unsuitable") and an unrealistic concentration on "redistribution" undercut its potential impact...
...FYI inally, we must emphasize one other element in search for a usable definition of political equality...
...To be sure, none of this implies a direct answer to the question of how a large enterprise should be organized, controlled, or owned...
...Polyarchy as a system of competing elites with slightly different preferences on certain issues can and does exist...
...and that it not think of political, professional, or managerial life merely as a series of individual incentives and rewards...
...Yet, individual voting power (or the power to engage in any similar form of "participation") is strikingly different from the control of social capital or the possession of an individual skill...
...The extreme Rousseauian individualism of Dahl's formulation about political equality, which makes it so attractive at first glance, is precisely its irremediable flaw...
...In sum, for both those classes, though clearly for one much more than the other, the factor-shares model of neoclassical economics works well in the political realm (with hardly any metaphorical component at all...
...But it cannot be political equality, any more than the right to hold a job "is" economic equality...
...T his discussion of exceptions, thenIV, suggests a rule for any definition of political equality...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
