Introduction

A democratic firm is a company “owned” and controlled by all the people working in it—just as a democratic government at the city, state, or national level is controlled by all of its citizens. A market economy where the predominant number of firms is democratic firms is called an economic democracy. The more subtle point is that the abolition of the employment relation does, nevertheless, make a change in property, markets, and entrepreneurship. In a slavery system, “private property” included property in human beings and property in slave plantations. “Markets” included slave markets and it even included voluntary self-sale contracts. “Entrepreneurship” meant developing more and better slave plantations. In socialist countries, in the Third World, and even in Europe, there are occasional attempts to redefine “socialism”— to move from the notion of “state socialism” towards “self-management socialism” which contemplates worker self-managed or democratic firms operating within a political framework of multi-party political democracy.