With inflation and unemployment jointly escalating in defiance of
Keynesian precepts, there are new moves astir to achieve popular
control of corporations. Carnoy (Stanford) and Shearer (UCLA) here
present a summary of most of the efforts aiming at "economic
democracy," along with a tenative strategy for implementing and
extending them. Acknowledging an American bias toward free
enterprise, consumerism, and narrow-focused labor organizations,
Carnoy and Shearer play down the extension of government ownership
of enterprises, restricting that area to little more than public
utilities; instead, they stress such tactics as democratizing
investment through union pension funds, increasing worker
participation in management, subjecting technological changes to
considerations of worker control over the workplace, establishing
producer cooperatives, etc. - along with limited government
planning. In each case, they review the record in America and
abroad; and overall they argue that these moves would not hurt
productivity - indeed, they envision increases in productivity -
though profits might suffer. Assessing the Swedish experience, the
authors also argue for a national policy of public job creation
instead of welfare payments, since the welfare approach both
ignores structural change and provides no impetus to
democratization. They also include a long-term strategy for
fighting inflation, based on action at all levels of government
combined with citizen activity; advocating price controls, for
instance, they call for federal controls on the Fortune 500
corporate giants, together with state utility regulation and public
interest advertising, city price commissions, and consumer price
monitoring. The effort to comprehensively combine disparate
movements for economic democracy while taking into consideration
the proclivities of the American people is laudable, but the
conceptual and political bedding-down of Ralph Nader and insurgent
UAW workers is more problematic than the authors allow. Excessive
enthusiasm aside, the best overview of this subject to date.
(Kirkus Reviews)
This text discusses the economic, social and political implications
of redirecting labour and capital from a military-based to a
post-Cold War economy.
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