Going Public

...Robert Lekachman, one of those searching on the Left, states the case for the European model in his book, Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics: "In Scandinavia, Austria, Great Britain, France, Germany, Yugoslavia, and Canada, the generally accepted commonplaces of public policy include active labor market policy, universal health coverage, incomes standards, and public intervention into strategic private investment decisions...

...FDR did it...

...What was most readily applicable to the United States, he suggested, was "the democratization of the corporate power over basic economic allocations and decisions...

...Britain, Canada, France, and more recently Germany have suffered unemployment rates comparable to our own...

...Many of the book's twenty-four points encompass social programs with which most of the Left would agree: public child care, national health service, affirmative action, and plant-closing legislation, among others...

...The United States does not yet have a political vehicle, but it has a series of converging movements: the embryo of an organization for the unemployed...

...At the same time, the current crisis in party politics and loyalties, sometimes called "de-alignment," offers the possibility that a new and different configuration will emerge—a party based in the working class...

...That approach, the activists were convinced, was too divisive...

...They see these as measures that can slow the march of capital and reclaim some of labor's lost power...

...Most of the arguments are concluded in terms of precedent: They do it in Sweden...

...Another benefit to be derived from the massive expansion of employment through useful public jobs would be the opportunity to unite various social movements...

...In "The Responsibility of the Left," published last December, they reject the idea that reforms within the market system can amount to a solution to the economic crisis...

...they say their program "holds together" as a comprehensive economic solution...

...Their central theme is that the rise of capital "hypermo-bility" in the last couple of decades has destroyed working-class communities and undermined the bargaining power of unions...

...In Sweden, as in the United States, the conventional industrial base has been affected first and most seriously...

...Paradoxically, the Reagan Administration has produced its own version of an expanding public sector in one sphere—the open-ended arms budget...

...Criticism of various plans for worker "participation" or "ownership" should not imply opposition to genuine worker control...

...This is in line with practice in Sweden and other European nations...

...Sweden's greatest success is its low unemployment rate, which has been rising for some time, but was still below 4 per cent this spring...

...The need today is for more, not less, social awareness and political unity...

...Still, the Swedish example invites close study, if not close imitation...

...Worker control should apply no less to the public sector than to the private...

...Historically, industry has introduced formal representational schemes to defuse the threat of genuine worker control...

...Their solution, like Harrington's, is to democratize the economy...

...The national budget deficit will hit J 12.5 billion this year, 12.5 per cent of the gross national product—a considerably larger proportion than the U.S...

...Food, clothing, and health-care items would appear to be obvious areas for a public challenge to the private sector...

...And profitability continues to guide the capital markets, which can frequently outbid the state incentives...

...Those conditions prevail today, but the forms that will emerge to cope with them are largely unpredictable...

...It is, rather, a highly subsidized corporate sector producing for private profit and a source of immense corporate power...

...Bowles, Gordon, and Weisskopf insist, however, that they are not simply offering a grab bag of ideas...

...At a time when the choices, at least in this country, have been reduced to preference of one reform scheme over another, the approach advocated by Sweezy and Magdoff is a useful starting point...

...Such forms arise when workers perceive management as incapable of running things in a tolerable manner...

...The Left would do well to heed the advice of Bluestone and Harrison that some aspects of the program will "emerge out of the ideas and experience of the working people themselves...

...I believe, as a socialist," he wrote, "that corporations should receive subsidies as part of a plan for rebuilding America...

...An unusual political incident took place at the Unemployed Rally and Lobby in Washington last March...

...Bluestone and Harrison's policy recommendations address these trends without claiming to offer a resolution of the crisis...

...This has happened in Sweden...

...One difficulty with the various democratic and "structural" reforms widely discussed on the Left today is that they are enterprise-based...

...something will happen...

...Militant shop stewards' organizations, the workers' councils that sprang to life in Hungary in 1956, and the Polish Solidarity movement, with its proposals for worker self-management, are all examples of the drive toward independent organizations that can exercise real power...

...The Left should not only encourage unionization in the public sector, but should view it as an opportunity to experiment with various forms of workplace democracy...

...August 27 may be the first time elements of these movements come together on a single national platform...

...Would anyone argue that the United Auto Workers union is in a stronger position vis-a-vis Chrysler management today as a result of the Government's bail-out of Chrysler—or, for that matter, as a result of Doug Fraser's presence on the Chrysler board of directors...

...Unfortunately, these "generally accepted commonplaces of public policy" have not sufficed to keep most of the countries on Le-kachman's list from falling into economic crisis...

...And all of this has happened despite planning that has been in place since the mid-1950s and intracorporate labor representation instituted in 1976...

...The most salient fact about the Swedish economy is that it has been in a state of crisis similar to our own—and certainly related to ours...

...Stripped down, it would provide at least some of the funds needed to fuel a public sector producing for human need...

...The WPA idea has already been put forth by the United Electrical Workers and the UAW's Washington Report...

...Mass working-class parties crowd the political landscape and hold power from time to time...

...Most of the public-service job proposals advanced today, whether by the AFL-CIO, Felix Rohatyn, or the Reagan Administration, are limited to traditional public construction and repair operations—work on the nation's deteriorating infrastructure...

...The "active labor market policy," including extensive job training, subsidies, and computerized job banks, remains fairly effective, but at enormous cost...

...Until recently, high wage levels in some sectors of the labor force, liberal electoral victories, and the lingering effects of past legislative successes tended to mask the reality that labor's power was declining, along with the power of the black community and the women's movement...

...Despite attempts to involve the communities, the worker-ownership campaigns had not produced a movement of the unemployed or potentially unemployed, but had degenerated into special-interest pleading...

...Beyond the standard notion of coalition-building, not one of the articles or books I have mentioned proposes a political strategy for achieving its program, lending a strangely Fabian flavor to the literature...

...Similarly, studies of worker-owned firms, such as Spain's Mondragon complex, reveal an inward-directed and politically narrow concern with minding the store...

...Later, in a meeting with Michigan unemployed in his office, Conyers said, "The United States is the only Western democracy without a labor party, and until we get one nothing is going to happen...

...Other projects canned meat, fruit, and vegetables for the jobless poor...

...Swedish investment patterns, like those in the United States, have shifted from industrial development to financial specula-tion and overseas investment...

...Particularly refreshing is their conclusion: "Detailed paper programs for economic revital-ization are becoming a dime a dozen...

...The central fact of American political life is the growth of organized corporate power in almost every area of social and political life...

...Sweden joined the world economic crisis in 1974 and has been part of it ever since...

...And the conversion of businesses into multinational enterprises, coupled with the internationalization of money and capital markets, have rendered the financial side of planning virtually unworkable...

...There is no guarantee that labor, consumer, or community representation in public enterprises would result in genuine democratic control...

...The substance of worker control, however, is power, not merely the appearance of influence...

...Sweden's 1976 Joint Regulation of Work Life Act foresees employee stock ownership funds and "worker production committees" that negotiate "cooperative work agreements" over shop conditions...

...In Europe, where many of these notions, including the idea of a productive public sector, are, as Lekachman put it, "commonplaces," political vehicles adequate to the task exist...

...Calling for an expanding public sector, based on nonprofit and noncompetitive production and service, offers an opportunity for broad unity and concerted action...

...Movements do not emerge from the formulation of programs, but political coalitions that grow out of direct-action movements do need the cement of a practicable program...

...Furthermore, it is ineffective as a creator of jobs, as many studies have shown, and does not produce genuine public goods...

...Who will put such a program in place...

...Felix Rohatyn favors some version of it, and so on...

...They had concluded that this approach to the preservation of jobs kept the workers' attention too closely riveted on their own plants...

...The difficulty of this question seems to frighten into silence most writers who have attempted to formulate an economic program...

...Worker control, of which bargaining over investment decisions is one possible component, is a traditional feature of any socialist program...

...advanced social welfare programs have helped cushion the effects of economic disarray...

...According to a 1982 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "Real GDP [gross domestic product] has decelerated more in Sweden than in most other OECD countries: In particular, industrial production and productivity have lagged significantly behind trends in the rest of the area...

...Reaganism has put us all on the defensive...

...At a time when the economic crisis has wiped out the gains and prospects of affirmative action, public jobs offer a way of asserting the rights of women and minorities...

...As a result, ownership and representation within the corporate structure tend to produce "enterprise consciousness," a narrow concern with the well-being of one's "own" firm...

...And direct job creation is certain to have a more immediate and significant effect in reducing unemployment than any corporate subsidy would...

...black mobilization in the August 27 March for Jobs, Peace, and Freedom...

...But arguments from precedent have never carried much weight in American politics, and arguments from foreign precedent have carried no weight at all...

...In today's noxious political atmosphere, any radical reform program suffers a credibility gap...

...another round of Solidarity Day demonstrations...

...For the American Left, on the other hand, the current crisis provides an opportunity to mount an intensive search for solutions...

...Such an effort, they say, would be more profoundly anticapitalist than any planning scheme, since the WPA "was concerned with workers as human beings and with labor as producers of use values, and these are profoundly anticapitalist attitudes...

...The potential is there for a mass movement that can pierce the dense political fog of the 1980s, just as the black civil rights movement shattered the political pall of the 1950s...

...It was Establishment policy and practice that created the mess, after all, and radical changes in policy and practice have never found a place on the official agenda...

...The alternative economic program that emerges from the Left's deliberations will, in all likelihood, stop considerably short of socialism...

...But if a growing public sector is to challenge, not simply underwrite, the private corporate sector, it must enter the transportation and goods-producing sectors as well...

...Rather than usurping management prerogatives, they involve sharing of those prerogatives...

...The concept of forging an independent labor party in the United States does not seem to hold much favor on the Left right now...

...They had observed or taken part in fights to keep various steel mills open by means of worker or community ownership in Youngstown, and later through the Tri-State Conference on Steel...

...As their title implies, the authors of Beyond the Waste Land argue that economic malaise is primarily the result of accumulated economic waste—a consequence of corporate and governmental policies that are wholly indifferent to the public interest...

...In times of crisis, however, when social prioriDAVID SUTER ties clash with private goals, the imperatives of planning rarely prevail...

...To be sure, Austria and the Scandinavian countries have managed to hold down their unemployment rates, and everywhere in Europe Kim Moody is director of the Labor Education and Research Project and a staff writer for Labor Notes...

...Ironically, it also enhances the corporation's ability to undermine long-range planning by directing its new wealth toward targets outside the state's reach...

...The CIO unions of the 1930s ignored the workers enrolled in the WPA, but the radical Workers' Alliance, which grew out of organizations of the unemployed, achieved some success in improving working conditions...

...Aside from a proposal to establish a publicly owned, democratically controlled national railroad corporation, however, Harrington offered only one specific route toward public direction of investment decisions: the use of public subsidies...

...Representative John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, the only politician invited to address the rally, told the jobless demonstrators that the Democrats in the House of Representatives were selling them out on the jobs bill...

...The question is whether the Left will be in a position to shape the something that will be America's future...

...The creation and expansion of a genuine public sector, beginning with a WPA approach, points away from the corporate subsidies toward worker subsidies—a transfer in the right direction...

...They see no reason to seek ways of perpetuating the shaky economic order, arguing that it "is not our business to tell them how to solve the problems created by their system...

...Proposals by Harrington and others for public transportation and energy corporations could offer vital points of expansion, and might establish pricing policies that bring these "commodities" within the reach of everyone...

...Any program that is to help turn this situation around must address real sources of power...

...Still, creation of an expanding public sector will not resolve the economic crisis, nor will it be a back door to socialism...

...Just as American corporate liberalism has looked longingly to Japan for answers to the economic dilemmas confronting the United States, the Left tends to look to the welfare states of Western Europe, and especially to Sweden, for credible policy options...

...Ultimately, however, even Bluestone and Harrison seem to have fixed their sights on the Swedish experience...

...To most Americans, a socialist solution still seems remote at best, repellent at worst...

...As the crisis unfolds, more subsidies are channeled into the traditional sectors, leaving little of the surplus available for new investment and expansion...

...The Gordon, Bowles, and Weisskopf proposal for a national "needs inventory"—a vast survey to determine what people, rather than advertising agencies, believe they need most—could provide the yardstick by which we would direct the expansion of public goods production...

...Sweezy and MagdofT recognize, of course, that "the problems created by their system" fall heavily on us...

...Unlike some of the Swedish-style reforms, it would also have the potential of uniting various forces for concerted political action...

...deficit...

...Surely not the Democrats: Beyond modest and badly compromised jobs bills, they seem incapable of coming up with any progressive ideas...

...Harrington, who heads the Democratic Socialists of America, took pains to argue that Sweden offered not socialism but "the third stage of the welfare state...

...The WPA "sewing projects" manufactured clothes and mattresses for relief clients and surgical gowns for hospitals...

...When the subsidy or incentive is a transfer of payment from labor to business, as is almost always the case, it amounts to a power shift toward capital...

...Radical economists Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf present a far more detailed set of recommendations in their forthcoming book, Beyond the Waste Land, setting out a twenty-four point, 130-page program to attack the economic crisis...

...democratic control will presumably reduce waste...

...The Left can help popularize this idea within the various social movements with which it is aligned...

...Cooperative work agreements," stock ownership schemes, and provisions for union representatives on corporate boards are not simply invasions of management's rights, but of the management structure itself...

...But the disarray is there, casting cold water on the Left's search for solutions...

...They also point to the shredding of the nation's social safety net as a factor in the declining power of unions and communities...

...The Socialist government of France, with a far more broadly based public sector, has been moved toward similar austerity measures after a year in office...

...But it would, by means of massive job creation, begin to limit the corporate power to destroy working-class communities, demoralize the black and Hispanic population, and undermine labor's bargaining power...

...They propose a massive jobs program along the lines of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) of the 1930s...

...To subsidize private investment in return for the setting of planning goals, for example, strengthens the hand of corporations...

...British employers agreed to bargain with national craft unions during World War I to circumThere is potential for a mass movement, focusing on Job creation, that can pierce the dense political fog of the 1980s vent the power and unity of their shop stewards' movement...

...The six-month-old government of Socialist Premier Olof Palme has proposed to reduce the subsidies to public enterprises while increasing the inevitably regressive value-added tax...

...If the investment is successful and yields a decent return, it has reinforced the position of the corporation...

...Their program entails broader public representation within corporate structures as well as national and regional planning based on a system of incentives...

...The rise of conglomerates and multinational corporations has immeasurably strengthened the power business has over labor...

...Despite a disclaimer early in the book, most of their ideas are also drawn from the Swedish experience...

...A program that focuses on massive job-creation in an expanding public sector offers the greatest promise of providing that cement...

...Nothing comes closer to a laboratory test of that assumption than Sweden itself...

...In a recent discussion with activists from the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, I was struck by the attitude these militants displayed toward the concept of worker ownership...

...Furthermore, profit rates have declined since 1974...

...That sort of public sector, dedicated to nuclear annihilation and conventional military adventures in the Third World, is obviously repellent to the Left and to all humane values...

...The multi-step labor grievance procedure, hailed as a form of industrial democracy, was instituted during World War II to undermine the power of the CIO shop stewards' organizations and to curtail spreading wildcat strikes...

...Affirmative action should be a central criterion for public hiring...

...Any concrete work plan is going to emerge out of the ideas and experience of the working people themselves...

...No such vehicle exists in the United States, and there is no comparable source of political credibility...

...Conyers didn't mean, of course, that nothing would happen...

...Even the workplace reforms legislated in Sweden in 1976 were a response to strikes over working conditions...

...To be sure, there is friction among these movements, but there is also a growing common emphasis on the link between arms expenditures, unemployment, and social welfare cuts...

...With the bulk of the economy—more than 90 per cent in Sweden—in private hands, the portion of economic surplus available to the state for incentives and subsidies is limited...

...In Sweden, though, the results have been less than spectacular...

...Planning in the context of a capitalist market economy remains a contradictory phenomenon...

...State subsidies to industry grew fivefold from 1976 to 1981...

...They caution, for example, that no sure-fire cure is to be found in plant-closing legislation, worker representation in the corporate structure, employee stock ownership, or even planning by incentives...

...This, in turn, has complicated the planning process...

...As Dwight Hansen and Mike Parker recently argued in The Progressive ("The Circle Game," January issue), quality-of-work-life programs are designed to achieve that sort of consciousness by providing some semblance of representation and influence...

...Going Public In search of an economy that works BY KIM MOODY It should come as no surprise that America's business and political leadership has failed to find an effective response to a decade and a half of economic crisis...

...National planning in Sweden is accomplished by means of various publicly controlled investment funds...

...Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison adopt a more modest approach in The Dein-dustrialization of America...

...resistance to further concessions in the unions...

...Awholly different approach has been proposed by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review...

...But the economic reality of Sweden indicates they expect too much...

...For one thing, a WPA-type program would not merely try to shore up the corporate sector by subsidies or incentives...

...Like Harrington, Lekachman, and the authors of Beyond the Waste Land, they tacitly assume that their programmatic recommendations would lead us out of crisis and usher in an era of investments with beneficial social results and higher productivity...

...A program that hopes to attract a broad base of political support must be one that people can believe in...

...That search is under way, and it has already produced a variety of approaches—and even some specific proposals—that deserve close scrutiny...

...it would begin to push back the borders of corporate prerogative by creating public-sector jobs for millions...

...It is often forgotten that the WPA did engage in the production of goods...

...Capitalist planning functions best under conditions of growth, when state and corporate efforts tend to work in tandem...

...But though consideration of independent political action may sound as unrealistic these days as deliberation over grand economic programs, the two are inseparable...

...they engaged, that is, in direct production to meet human needs...

...From the vantage point of governmental, corporate, and even labor bureaucracies, orderly representation, consultation, or participation are usually preferable to the unruly exercise of power by workers...

...But the contract concessions route, the escalation of physical—and economic—violence, and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment revealed a deeper shift in social power...

...Community- and worker-owned enterprises could be an important source of jobs and innovation, Beyond the Waste Land suggests...

...Perhaps the example of Solidarity's self-management proposals could inspire public-sector workers...

...They imply not the imposition of labor's will on capital, but a working out of common goals...

...At one level or another, more of the Left than ever before is involved with the Democratic Party...

...Since massive unemployment is a major source of corporate power, a public works program would help redress the balance...

...Last fall, Michael Harrington outlined the thrust of Swedish policy in an article for Dissent entitled "A Path for America...

...the growing peace and disarmament movements...

...The market continues to confound the planners and undermine achievement of their goals...