ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Paul Gomberg assesses the necessary preconditions of genuine workplace democracy and offers a critique of those who believe such can be accomplished in a market economy. The mistake John Rawls and market socialists make is to neglect the truth that the competitive discipline dictated by market exchange relentlessly limits workers’ scope of action, resulting in workplace egalitarianism being undercut, workers being subordinated to managerial elites, and workplace democracy becoming merely a sham. To address that mistake, Gomberg turns to historical examples of workers’ movements and democratic power in planned economies, specifically the experiments in worker self-determination undertaken in the late-1920s and early-1930s Soviet Union. Although these experiments were eventually stymied by developments, in particular the rise of privileged elites, they reveal that true workplace democracy depends upon relations of communist equality in which production and its organization benefit all in a similar manner. If such equality is not in place, we cannot really speak of democratic work, of cooperative worker power, or even of a shared common purpose.
