Economic Democracy

Andrew Cumbers
Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK;
andrew.cumbers@glasgow.ac.uk

Making Space for Economic Democracy

Economic Democracy as Labour Freedom
Economic democracy is often thought of in collective terms as the realm of collec-
tive bargaining or about giving workers collective ownership of the means of pro-
duction. These are important ingredients but reflect a rather particularist and
“workerist” (Cleaver 2008) sense of labour, work, and the economy. In embracing
a broader and more pluralistic perspective, a project of radical economic democ-
racy must take the individual as its starting point. One of the shared concerns of
both Marx and the more radical liberals such as John Stuart Mill (Ellerman 1992)
was to give individuals ownership of their labour, with the implication that it is
they who choose how it is used, in opposition to the diverse servitudes of slavery,
feudalism, or capitalism.1 For Marx, this liberation of the individual worker is
about giving her the power and control over how she uses her labour, thereby
overcoming the alienation of the capitalist labour process (see Megill 2002).
In the context of massive industrialisation in the 19th century, it is not surprising that
the emergent working class becomes the subject for revolutionary transformation.
But in the very different world of the 21st century—of ecological crises, massive wealth
inequalities, a growing precariat, and the marginalisation of many from the contem-
porary labour process—the project of radical economic democracy needs a degree of
reformulation. Starting with providing the individual with ownership and control of
their labour—in pursuit of their own reproduction and flourishing—is fundamental.2
Framing economic democracy thus links to a political agenda around the com-
mons or “commoning” (De Angelis 2016) rather than the clarion call of earlier
generations to provide (largely industrial and male) workers with the fruits of their
labour. A focus upon individuals operating in “free exchange” with others about
how they use and organise their labour, as well as shared resources, in a sustain-
able fashion, is key to achieving the social and ecological transformation required.
It also poses the question of the individual economic rights of others in the com-
munity who are unable or no longer have the capacities to work. How might their
ownership rights to flourish be addressed and what mechanisms (e.g. a basic
living income, cooperative stakeholding) might serve these purposes?
This positive sense of individual economic freedoms articulated here contrasts
sharply with the negative freedoms of Hayek and the neoliberal tendency (Bur-
czak 2006). Where the latter views freedom as the right of elites to appropriate
the labour of others, a focus on the “economic and property rights” of labour

Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50, First Edition. Edited by the Antipode Editorial Collective.
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Making Space for Economic Democracy 103

leads in a very different direction; that of autonomous self-government for individ-

uals, families, and communities. Moreover, the principle of self-government of
one’s own labour to meet social needs—use value over exchange value—can only
be realised through collective projects and working with others. One of Marx’s
fundamental insights was to see labour as a collective social product. We can only
survive as a family, community, city, or even planet through our cooperation with
others in the management of resources (including labour).
What might seem counterintuitive at first—but has a strong intrinsic logic—is
that exercising individual labour rights in a way that also protects the rights of
others from exploitation and alienation quickly leads to collective forms of owner-
ship, in opposition to private and corporate3 forms. Securing the individual’s right
to participation in decisions about their own labour—and the inescapable point
that follows that all individuals have this right (Dahl 1985)—can only be achieved
through democratic and cooperative means. In practice, this is best achieved
through diverse forms of public and cooperative ownership.

Forging Economic Democracy In, Against, and Beyond the

State
Addressing the current ecological, political, and economic crises that confront us
involves reclaiming space and place from capitalist appropriation and forging new
collective organisations, institutions, and identities that can transform economic
practices. The resurgence of an agenda around the global commons is critical to
this task, with its insistence on carving out new spaces that can reclaim resources,
work, and social being for collective and socially useful purposes in environmen-
tally sustainable ways (De Angelis 2016).
A critical question arises, however. How do we get there? Can a transformative
economic and social project be achieved outside of any engagement with the state
as many commons proponents argue? While much is made of radical autonomous
projects at the local scale that work at the interstices of capital (Holloway 2010), it is
doubtful that more transformative systemic change at higher scales can be achieved
without actively reclaiming commons from the state. A sobering point is that the
deepening inequalities and crises that we face are not leading to effective Left
mobilisations, but rather a resurgence of right-wing populism and even fascism. In
parallel it is notable that, as Gramsci (1971) long ago warned, advanced forms of
capitalism lead to a deepening of the relations between capital, the state, and civil
society. During periods of crisis, political, and economic elites often strengthen their
grip on power, rather than being open to challenges from below (Mirowski 2013).
The ability to combine coercive state powers with dominant metanarratives (e.g.
austerity, taking back control, anti-immigrant rhetoric, Islamophobia) being key to
preserving elite rule and wider public support for the status quo.
Forging a radical economic democracy requires creating spaces for labour
agency in opposition to, as much as independent from, capital “in, against, and
beyond the state” (Angel 2017; Cumbers 2015). This also involves “bringing a
realistic everyday politics of social reproduction” (Pitts and Dinerstein 2017:430)
to social struggles in terms of reclaiming spheres of work and life for collective
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104 Antipode

projects in opposition to elite commodification processes. This can involve new

forms of working in common, such as those typical in community gardening pro-
jects which attempt to reclaim urban spaces from property-based speculation,
commodification and gentrification in cities (Crossan et al. 2016; Cumbers et al.
2018b). These are never completely autonomous from incorporation into domi-
nant agendas, and, as such, need constant struggle creating and recreating alter-
native economic identities and practices. But neither can they be innocent of
broader spatial governance processes and structures, needing strategies for
upscaling and indeed scaling out if they are to have broader transformative effects
(MacKinnon 2011). This involves making claims and advances on state institutions
and structures, such as city planning boards, land registry regimes, and even
changing broader regulatory regimes through parliamentary activity.

Reclaiming Space for Public Ownership

Public ownership is critical to a project of radical economic democracy. So much of
the neoliberal attack on collective institutions has been targeted at existing public
institutions at all scales where both direct privatisation of resources and assets and
increasingly innovative mechanisms for allowing rent seeking and private profit to
flourish in public–private ventures where exchange value increasingly expunges use
value. The financialisation of basic service sectors like water and energy further alien-
ate, marketising resources for selfish elites in the here and now, rather than sustain-
ing them for future generations. In response, new possibilities for alternative,
democratic, and participatory modes of governance need articulating.
The re-emergence of new forms of public ownership at local and national levels
marks a significant moment in the emerging contours of a post-neoliberal order
as the latter’s contradictions become more socially and ecologically urgent. Some
have tentatively identified the global trend towards remunicipalisation (see Kishi-
moto and Petitjean 2017) as part of a Polanyian double-movement of social and
state re-regulation of key strategic sectors of the economy (e.g. water, electricity,
transport, waste) in the wake of the failings and contradictions of privatisation
and marketisation (Hall et al. 2013). Although history and Polanyi himself reminds
us that such a double-movement can be progressive, it also can turn malign in its
implications for society and democracy (Polanyi 1944). Notably, it is the authori-
tarian, immigrant-hating regime of Viktor Orban that leads the way with renation-
alisation programmes in Hungary while the superficially “liberal” EU continues to
impose new privatisations as part of its fiscal discipline in Greece and elsewhere.
But a refashioned economic democracy around public ownership can achieve two
vital things: it can challenge the economic rationality of capital and private appropria-
tion of labour, land, resources, and much else, while also advocating radical and pro-
gressive alternatives to earlier forms of flawed state-led projects. Recent experiences
against privatisation in Latin America are apposite here. In 2007, the Peruvian city of
Huancayo was faced with the urgent requirement to modernise its local sanitation
system which was becoming unfit for purpose. The preferred multi-scalar neoliberal
option by the national government was a public–private partnership (involving the
German government and the Inter-American Development Bank), but following a
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Making Space for Economic Democracy 105

grassroots protest and mobilisation, the city opted for its own trans-local public–pub-
lic partnership involving local NGOs and technical assistance from another innovative
municipal enterprise, ABSA of Argentina.4 Such creative spatial strategies help reclaim
local public spaces for social ends over exchange value while also enlisting broader
support and participation from both the state and civil society.
Remunicipalisation campaigns in the energy sector in Germany—notably in Berlin
and Hamburg—have attracted much attention because of the way that diverse radi-
cal grassroots coalitions have mobilised against privatisation, with varying degrees
of success (Becker et al. 2015). To some extent, these initiatives can be viewed as
articulating alternative social and ecological visions in line with “right to the city”
movements (Beveridge and Naumann 2014). But they were also partly enabled by
the particularities of German federal state and constitutional structures that provide
opportunity spaces for social movement actors to reshape public institutions. In nei-
ther Berlin nor Hamburg has the outcome (yet) been a transformation to the kinds
of participatory and deliberative public organisations that we would wish for, but
the mobilisations have renewed grassroots agency while also contesting dominant
state logics, framing alternative discourses around social and ecological justice.
Beyond these specific examples, radical geography needs to fashion a new spa-
tial architecture around public and collective ownership and the wider goal of
economic democracy if we are to realise the full emancipation of our labours. In
the 20th century, the dominant Left traditions of socialism and social democracy
tended to have highly verticalist and nation-centric spatial imaginaries where the
forms of ownership were heavily centralised and top-down, often eviscerating
older localist forms of mutualism and municipal socialism. The adherence to what
John O’Neill has described as “a Cartesian rationalism and the technocratic con-
ception of planning” (2006:67) resulted in the autocratic imposition of centrally
imposed state projects with neat geometries onto messy, disordered “on the
ground” economic realities. Some autonomous writers (e.g. Holloway 2010) lean
in the opposite direction, celebrating a trans-local commons, evoking moments
and fragments of commons without much sense of the dynamics required to
achieve more transformative systemic change at higher spatial scales. An urgent
task for radical geography in the 21st century is surely to navigate between these
opposing tendencies with a spatial politics that is sensitised to local autonomy,
individual empowerment, and decentred economic decision-making while still
being alert to broader responsibilities to social and ecological justice. This requires
institutional forms and arrangements around diverse forms of collective owner-
ship, in and outside the state, rather than essentialising one or the other.

Endnotes
1
These ideas are developed in much greater depth in Cumbers et al. (2018a).
2
From a Marxist perspective, some of the most compelling arguments here from those
working in the autonomous tradition who write against “workerist” and “immaterialist”
accounts (e.g. Cleaver 2008; Dinerstein 2015; Pitts and Dinerstein 2017).
3
Corporate forms of capitalism have over time been sanctified by states as “individu-
alised” forms of property rights of course by national and supranational state bodies such
as the EU and WTO.
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106 Antipode

4
ABSA was formed as a result of a remunicipalisation struggle against a foreign consor-
tium involving the now defunct and disgraced corporation Enron in 2001. It is an interest-
ing hybrid, part owned by the water sector trade union and part owned by the provincial
government of Buenos Aires (Kishimoto et al. 2015).

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