"Industrial " Reconsidered H. T. Wilson

Abstract

Industrial democracy has many variations and is taking many different forms in advanced industrial societies which honour and the rule of law. In this sense it must be understood to constitute a complement or supplement to political democracy and the exercise of citizenship in particular, not a substitute for such institutions and practices. The historical record across many countries and cultures shows that the solution to the problem of what I have called political regression in Political : Redefining the Public Sphere is to resuscitate citizenship both in and through and outside of established mechanisms and proces- ses. Industrial democracy can only work fruitfully and effectively where such citizenly activity and possibility is alive and well in society as a whole.

1. Initial Statement of the Problem

I very much appreciate this opportunity to contribute to a reader on the issue of industrial democracy, especially when it is being dedicated to Professor Günter Dlugos on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday. A reader on a topic of this importance should not only provide a forum for the exchange of ideas on the relation between practice and theory in economic and political contexts. It should also serve to associate Professor Dlugos' name with an ongoing issue of great concern to all democratic countries, one which should be able to benefit from the concepts, frameworks and thinking of political thought and political science as well as economics and the social and cultural sciences. It is because my disciplinary background and training is similar to that of Professor Dlugos that I am pleased to be able to argue from the perspective of political thought that a careful rethinking of the theory and practice of industrial democracy is called for for a number of reasons. To some extent these reasons have been alluded to, and in some cases discussed in detail, in my recently published book "Political Management: Redefining the Public Sphere"1. My main thesis there was that representative democracy in and through political and legal institu- tion is in dire trouble not only in the so-called Third World but in advanced industrial societies themselves. In the first case, it is the cultural nature and historical evolution of these insistutions which addresses the serious difficulties 14 H. T. Wilson

involved in attempting to transpose them to new nations. When the dependence of these political institutions on capitalism and the market system is remembered, the challenge posed by the desire and determination to install them elsewhere is only underscored2. In the second case, however, we must be no less concerned about the presence of political regression in advanced industrial societies. An increasing number of properly political functions are being carried out by non-elected officials and members of the judiciary. The kind of apathy and passivity which American political science in particular has associated with "" and the so-called "civic cultire" is now being formally institutionalized with the active assistance of the rule of law3. Though this problem is quite different from the frequent use of the rule of law in Third World countries as a device for legitimizing repression and violence, the fact that these two pillars of our political and legal system are occasionally at loggerheads can hardly be a source of comfort. Political regression is evident in delegations of authority within the government structure to bureaucrats, technocrats and regulators and within the legal system to judges and magistrates. In the first instance, it means reliance on administrative structure which is necessitated and justified by monetary or fiscal interventions by government, by the or service state, by foreign and military and defense policy, and by the emergence of an international market with its own trade and business cycles. This structure is much more than the standard bureaucratic variant that Weber discussed, because there is no longer any felt need to even maintain the pretense of a separation between politics and administration. However impossible in practice it may be to make all exercises of administrative discretion accountable to politically elected representatives of the people, maintenance of the distinction as a standard of sorts still existed until recently as a benchmark for all administra- tive personnel4. Nowadays the advent of threatens this sense of limit by the very nature of its new pre-eminence. The claim is that political administration is unavoidable because of the technical complexity and need for speed that character- izes decision making in all democratic governments. The new situation is often cited in order to justify what amounts to a corollary breakdown of the distinction between crisis and non-crisis government with the rise of manifestly political administration. Here it is the view that political problems are capable of adminis- trative solutions which informs the breakdown of accountability mechanisms under the new conditions and pressures5. In the event, even the rule of law maxim which says that authority can be delegated but not the respsonsibility for its exercise is lost sight of, save for the occasional plebiscites in which citizens more often that not vote negatively against the party in power. Representation must always be considered a necessary evil given the inability of citizens to "present" themselves on political issues, for whatever reasons6. This being the case, the representative system must be protected and defended in and through those aspects of the rule of law directly addressed to it. None of the "Industrial Democracy" Reconsidered 15 functions and activities mentioned above should be cited as justification for the regression and slippage evident in Western Europe and North America today. Apart from anything else, it gives us less to point to when we try to "persuade" Third World countries, not to even mention those in the Soviet and Chinese orbits, that democracy works and that the rule of law ought to be used to protect and defend representation rather than undermine it. The fact that we have never succeeded in reconciling the problem that Aristotle first encountered and raised in response to the collapse of the polls and its absorption into a larger territorial imperium gives added impetus to the need to hold firm on representative demo- cracy in the face of efforts to either actively undermine it or take it for granted to a point which amounts to the same thing7.

2. Industrial Democracy in Comparative Perspective

It is the temptation to give up on the effort to achieve and maintain as close an approximation to the above objective as we possibly can that present arguments in favour of regression, given the requirement of speed and the presence of com- plexity, only serve to underwrite. Particularly in light of both the theory of economic determinism and the practice of , there has been a very legitimate concern for trying to compensate for the problems of representative democracy by democratizing the workplace through a number of schemes, overlap- ping and interconnected, and different mainly with regard to matters of emphasis. My understanding of industrial democracy would find it only in countries where one or another form of political democracy based on representation and the rule of law exists, and where there has been a tradition of one or another form of capitalism and the market system. Thus I do not treat any of the provisions for "front groups" in the Soviet Union or Comicon countries as indicative of the presence of industrial democracy. The recent situation in Poland only underscores the point that these countries cannot afford industrial democracy because they cannot afford any form of democracy whatsoever. My point in locating industrial democracy in this fashion is to underscore its dependence on representative democracy and the rule of law, alongside the right to join trade unions and collectively bargain with management as the representatives of capital. Industrial democracy tries to build upon and extend democracy in advanced industrial societies through the politicization of the labour-management distinction, moderated by arbitration and mediation when fails. At the same time, collective bargaining is seen to constitute the pre-eminent basis for connecting individuals to the state, even by comparison with both the market and the ballot box as mechanisms of public power and control. This conflict model, designed with an eye to the eventual dismantling of the capitalist system in the United Kingdom, was proposed by Mr. Wedgwood Benn over a decade ago, 16 H. T. Wilson and constitutes an extreme case to be sure. Yet the idea that collective bargaining ought to possess a status equal to the marketplace and the exercise of citizenship through the ballot box has a readily understandable appeal for many. At the other extreme is the effort to delimit the conflict that this model can generate by providing for joint decision making and profit sharing. Trade unions effectively give up their right to criticize management whenever they are coopted voluntarily (or involuntarily, as in some Comicon countries) into this general form of industrial democracy, for the obvious reason that they have participated in the decision process, for better or for worse. The link between such participation in the form of co-determination, and profit sharing with employees, becomes problematic when external international economic conditions and related internal difficulties produce a situation in which labour shows losses rather than profits with manage- ment. This development is precisely what has caused the present strains and tensions in the practice of codetermination in West Germany. The point here is that political-economic models like co-determination really work only when there is a surplus, because it is far more difficult to get agreement on joint decision- making and suppression of a conflict model when the economic situation is poor than when there is economic growth and a surplus. Sitting somewhere between these two extremes are the Scandinavian countries and, to a lesser extent, the Netherlands, with their strong committment to the social service state and to trade unionism, all within a culture and society which is relatively stable and homogeneous even given the presence of multi-party rather than two-party systems. Some have even suggested that it is only in countries like these that a multi-party system is compatible with political stability. In these instances, there are labour and/or socialist parties which, however, can only participate in political power if they share it with one or more parties in a coalition. It is the tradition of compromise, among other things, that has contributed to a situation in which these multi-party systems generate continuous system stability, while the two-party system so central to British political and governmental institu- tions manages to produce intense conflict which austerity only exacerbates because of the status and working conditions of British labour. The reason why industrial democracy tends to be associated with multi-party rather than two-party systems is that coalitions all too frequently generate stalemate, or the sort of compromise on policy that cries out for an alternative, albeit one existing alongside the political, party and governmental system. However frustrating the bias in capitalist systems toward management and against labour, even in the presence of a service and welfare apparatus set alongside the , the victory of a party either directly or indirectly representative of the interests of labour usually leads to policies that even the opposition can roll back when in power only at their peril. This has been the trend in almost every case, save for the United Kingdom under Margaret Thatcher. The likelihood of industrial democracy in England is as slight as in the case of the United States, though for totally different reasons. In the first case it is the titanic "Industrial Democracy" Reconsidered 17 gap between capital and labour, and an accumulated rage that is continually fuelled by a class system with no parallel anywhere in the western world. In the second, it is the success of an individualist ethic underwritten by intense nationalism and patriotism unknown in any other democratic country that leads trade union members to describe themselves as middle class individuals and Americans first and union members second, if at all. The point about industrial democracy is that it seeks to improve the decision and policy process by essentially complementing a representative system which is believed to be incomplete rather than obsolete. Any attempt to dismantle the system of representation, even in and through mechanisms technically subordinate to the rule of law, will provide the conditions which make virtually impossible to sustain. Yugoslavia is an important and intriguing case, and constitutes the closest approximation to an exception to what I have said thus far. However, the model that is far more likely when democratic traditions are not deeply established before they are dismantled is fascism and/or , if history and past practice are to be considered any guide. Industrial democracy requires, as I noted earlier, representative political democracy for it to work; it cannot succeed in the latter's absence. At the same time, It is probably incompati- ble with either excessive or nationalism, for reasons which have already been suggested. Finally, industrial democracy is difficult to establish or extend during periods of economic contraction and austerity, for reasons that Schumpeter understood perfectly when he wrote Capitalism, Socialism and Demo- cracy in 19428. What I want to concentrate on in what follows is the need to resusscitate and/or strengthen and extend representative democracy, at the very least as a prerequisite for industrial democracy if not in place of it in the advanced countries. There may be some sense in the view that the present political apathy and passivity can be left where we find it in advanced industrial societies, on grounds it cannot get any worse. The idea here is that this route to change is sterile and useless, but that no danger is presented by its present condition, whereas I believe that the focus on passivity, apathy, even cynicism and a sense of futility constitutes a grave problem for the present and future. In too many countries is it argued that democratic traditions are deeply rooted enough for this development to cause no problem, but this fails to take account of the regression factor that I have been so concerned about in my recent work. What gives my concern added gravity is the fact that political democracy, far from being something which industrial democracy could conceivably replace, is absolutely essential if there are to be any prospects whatsoe- ver for industrial democracy of the sort being discussed in Western Europe at the present time. 18 H.T.Wilson 3. "Political Management" and Industrial Democracy

Let me now turn to some central features of the diagnosis that informs Political Management in order to make a case for beginning with the extant political and governmental system in any effort to improve the quality and frequency of democracy. Let me note in passing that political science has been far less concerned than in should be with the fact of political regression, but that this has much to do with its determination to distance itself from "practical" political problems in pursuit of professional and scientific status as a discipline9. In this study, I make reference to politics as an activity that can be effected either in and through established governmental and political processes or through a form of display outside these channels in other sectors of Society. Display can occur no matter which alternative is chosen, and it is important not to feel that there is any greater authenticity attaching to the second form of political expression than the first. Individuation takes place in either case, and it is less the mode or manner used than the way in which it is addressed and discussed in whatever form we choose10. Another point which I feel is very important relates directly to the question of the viability and necessity of industrial democracy. Here I am concerned that we not entertain the idea that acting in and through established process is in a zero- sum relation to some more "authentic" form of display and individuation, because this leads us to support the view that we need do nothing to ressussicitate and utilize these processes but can rely on others to take over their functions and do them better. It must be clear from what I have already said that I believe such an attitude in practice will make industrial democracy of any type less possible, if not impossible altogether. Thus my argument in the book that often it is harder to work thrugh established processes precisely because the goal is more difficult to realize, so it would seem, than appealing to some form of display outside them. The mass media of public communication, particularly broadcasting, provide the most tempt- ing platform to engage in such activity. While there is little doubt that the effects in the short-term are often exponenti- ally greater for this type of display, the long-term effects do not provide us with the same sort of assurance at all. Political concerns of pressing moment come in all types and sizes, and the mass media in a (late) capitalist system like ours will pick and choose who and what to present and publicize and when and how long to do so. Often it is difficult to know whether they are responding to the apparent fickleness of publics for news, entertainment and stimulation, or whether they are assisting in the creation of such overall attitudes and mind sets. I suspect that this process involves a great deal of both, but have no way of guaging relative importance, which, in any case, would have to be looked at on a case by case basis. What I do think is important to keep in mind is the fact that the processes themselves, and those elements of the rule of law that undergird them, are the sine qua non without which the rights and so central to display outside these processes can and will eventually be undermined. "Industrial Democracy" Reconsidered 19

Thus there are two types of display and individuation, but activity "outside" established processes must not be seen to have a privileged place vis a vis that which occurs (or hopefully will occur) "inside" them. The frustration of working through established processes is more than compensated for by the fact that those who do so are both reaffirming these processes through utilization, and providing the sort of guarantee that will make other modes, including various forms of industrial democracy (at least in their formative phases) possible. There is also the contact, direct or indirect, that citizens have with formal power holders in govern- ment, as well as those in political parties and interest groups, as a consequence of acting through established processes. While it is no doubt true that public posturing does occur and is unavoidable in such activities of individuation, the same can be said for political activity outside these channels. Against the likelihood of a more immediate impact in this latter case, one must stand the greater long-term effect of working thrugh established processes, along with the latent function of affirming the system by so doing. The history of the mass media's attention to serious issues in our society does not make me feel satisfied that broadcasting in particular ought to be seen as a device for supplementing or supplanting, such processes. While the latter instance is not likely to happen, there have been attempts to achieve greater politicization by employing the new automated electronic and audio-visual technology in order to allow citizens to "vote" on a vast number of "issues" that certainly do arise in the effort to manage a polity democratically and with legality. Such proposals simply show how depoliticized, passive and apathetic citizens have become in advanced industrial societies. They reaffirm not politics and citizenship, but audience and consumer roles instead. Further, They treat the "vote" as citizenly display when it should constitute only the last act of citizenly display in the formal context of democratic elections. The vote, so understood, is then viewed as a registry of opinion detached from larger contexts and nothing more11. Once the vote is understood to be the last step in a particular type of citizenly display and individuation - formal elections - rather than something that can be transferred to the nightly news, the point I have been making about process is only underscored in its urgency and significance. Citizens acquire a sense of the issues not from "" on an endless series of individual concerns that are detached and taken out of larger contexts of concern, but from considering these problems over time, and in ways which stress their interrelation and interdependence. Process is time-consuming, I readily admit, but isn't the point precisely that present pressures on governments from many sources are trying to achieve speed and efficiency, and that the ideal of "voting" in this fashion would really disempower citizens and reinforce an already dangerous tendency to instant policy-making on the part of governments? In a sense, it is not too much to argue that process, seen in this light, is indeed its own justification, as are the political acts which seek to reaffirm process in politics12. I have cited the university and higher education, political and social sciences, 20 H. T. Wilson local, municipal and metro-urban politics, and the mass media of public communi- cation as alternative vehicles for political management in the book. My reasons for not discussing industrial democracy relate to the context from which I write, and the wholesale nature of these proposals. I am certainly not "against" industrial democracy in any sense, but only wish to suggest that such an approach, as in all cases of political display outside established channels, presupposes and is heavily dependent on the good health and functioning of these channels. Indeed, nothing is clearer than the highly contingent character of all forms of organizational politics based on conflict and/or cooperation between labour and management in periods when the formal machinery of government and politics has broken down. In these cases, the ability of a tyrant or dictator to take control of the media effectively turns the apparant "silk purse" of display outside established channels into a "sows ear" for groups working against the status quo, the status quo ante, or outright repression. The history of the Twentieth Century is already replete with major and minor instances, by global standards, of the inability of less formal intermediate institu- tions (churches, unions, cities, parties, bureaucratic organizations, science, higher education, even capital itself) to effectively defend representative democracy, and the rule of law on which representative institutions are based, from the attack of totalitarian and autocratic leaders, parties and ideologies. The fact that occupancy and effective pre-emption of state and governmental organizations and functions has so often led to suppression of politics and the political as I have defined it should not lead us to despair about the hopelessness of such concerns, efforts and approaches and the embrace of apparently more viable alternatives. This illusion is something that those who have survived the wholesale destruction of labour- management collective bargaining and cooperation, along with other instances of institutional collapse in such situations, could readly verify and authenticate. The successful suppression of politics and the political as they are expressed in and through established representative and legal processes, as well as the processes themselves, and their reconstitution as state power through the aegis of totalitarian ideologies, parties and leadership groups, virtually guarantees that all intermediate forms dependent on these processes will themselves be coopted or collapse altogether13. Industrial democracy could only function in a different capacity from the way I have described it if it were in fact of a type which sought peacefully, but actively, to bring about an alternative to capitalism in any of its variants. This would in turn raise the question of whether the workplace, even aggregated and generalized to Society as a whole, could ever be capable of replacing these forms and processes, or whether democratic principles and practices, and the rule of law undergirding them, would in turn disappear with the creation of this very different form of collective life. While I readily admit that capitalism, broadly understood, and these particular forms and processes still "belong together", today no less than they did a century ago, this does not mean that I am sanguine about capitalism14. But neither "Industrial Democracy" Reconsidered 21 does it mean that I take these forms and processes for granted. The only sensible way to transform the world capitalist system into something that is qualitatively superior is to fully and thoroughly utilize the institutions, mechanisms and proces- ses that I have been at such pains to defend. While there is a great deal of scope to operate "outside" them in the ways indicated, working in and through them can now be seen to serve not just the two purposes cited above, but a third concerned with system transformation. No other approach, not even industrial democracy, can do this, for the simple reason that it depends upon and takes totally for granted both representation and the rule of law as a prerequisite for its own effective functioning. Industrial democracy, far from constituting an alternative to what I have called political management, has a vested interest in the resusscitation of the very forms and processes that political manage- ment is so concerned about and preoccupied with.

Remarks

1 Wilson 1985. 2 Wilson 1987. 3 See for example Crick 1960; Almond/Verba 1965. 4 See Wilson 1985, chapter 6, pp. 93-122. 5 Ibid.; Wilson 1983, pp. 152-238, and Wilson (forthcoming). 6 See Voegelin 1952, pp. 27-106, and Wilson 1985, chapter 4, pp. 45-67. 7 Wilson 1985 especially chapters 2 and 12, pp. 5-22, 253. 8 New York, Harper and Row. 9 See Crick 1959; Storing 1962; Wilson 1985, chapter 7, pp. 123-124. 10 Wilson 1985, chapters 10 and 12, pp. 193-221, but especially at pp. 253-288. 11 Ibid., pp. 89-91; Thomas 1960. 12 At the same time, this should not be detached from the claim that process lends superiority to the outcomes realized in and through its utilization, because such utilization performs latent as well as manifest functions for the system. 13 See Neumann 1944; Arendt 1960, 1951; Buchheim 1968. 14 See generally Wilson 1977 and Wilson 1984.

Literature

Almond, G. / Verba, S. (1965): The Civic Culture. Boston. Arendt, H. (1960, 1951): The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York. Buchheim, H. (1968): Totalitarian Rule: Its Nature and Characteristics. Middleton, Conn. Clegg, S. / Dow, G. / Boreham, P. (Hrsg.) (1983): The State, Class and Recession. London. Crick, B. (1959): The American Science of Politics. Berkeley. Crick, B. (1960): In Defense of Politics. Harmondsworth. Massey, H. (Hrsg.) (forthcoming): Political Leadership in Canada. Toronto. 22 H.T.Wilson

Neumann, F. (1944): Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944. New York. Storing, H. (Hrsg.) (1962): Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics. New York. Thomas, A. (1960): Audience, Market, Public: An Evaluation of Canadian Broadcasting. Occasional Paper 7 (April), University of British Columbia, Department of University Extension. Voegelin, E. (1952): The New Science of Politics. Chicago, pp. 27-106. Wilson, H.T. (1977): The American Ideology. London and Boston. Wilson, H.T. (1983): Technocracy and Late Capitalist Society. In: Clegg, S. / Dow, G. / Boreham, P. (Hrsg.), The State, Class, and Recession, pp. 152-238. Wilson, H.T. (1984): Tradition and Innovation. London and Boston. Wilson, H.T. (1985): Political Management. Berlin and New York Wilson, H.T. (1987): Notes on Achievement of Communicative Behaviour and Related Difficulties. In: Dialectical Anthropology. Wilson, H.T. (forthcoming): Elites, Meritocracy and Technocracy: Some Implications for Political Leadership. In: Massey, H. (Hrsg.), Political Leadership in Canada. Toronto.