Building a Living Democracy

FOR MOST OF THE 20TH CENTURY, the progressive vision of the future has in one form or another revolved around the socialist idea that equality and democracy can best be achieved by a system in which ownership of society's wealth ("the means of production") is vested in a structure beholden to, and controlled by, society. In practice, for the most part, this structure has been the state.

The crisis in Eastern European and Soviet socialism confronts progressives throughout the world with a fundamental challenge: What happens if the traditional socialist ideal collapses, particularly if socialism's "distant cousin" -- the liberal welfare state -- also loses its capacity to achieve fundamental value goals?

It is well to begin with an honest acknowledgment: In criticizing the socialist idea, thoughtful conservatives (as opposed to demagogues and self-serving right-wing politicians) have for more than a century argued that vesting both economic and political power in one institutional structure must inevitably lead to the destruction of individual rights, democracy, and the human spirit. They have applied a similar critique to the expansive welfare state. Freidrich Hayek, whose book The Road to Serfdom became a conservative bible, pushed the argument well beyond narrow economic ideas:

The most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people...The will of [people] is not shattered but softened, bent and guided; [people] are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd.

Most progressives rejected the general conservative argument because it was largely oblivious to the moral and political importance of equality, and because it often served simply to mask a base form of hack conservatism willing to use any argument to justify private enterprise exploitation. They urged (correctly in my view) that to vest the ownership of the means of production in private hands inevitably produces great inequalities of income and wealth, very powerful private interests that tend to subvert democracy, the desecration of the environment, and an equally disastrous spiritual result -- the worship of money, materialism, and greed.

Most threw the important conservative "baby" out with the dishonest "bathwater" for these reasons. Only a very few argued the importance of listening to the main point of the honest critique and of engaging serious conservatives in a serious dialogue on serious matters.

It is undeniably true that the socialist ideal in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was severely handicapped by the devastation of World Wars I and II, and because it was introduced into essentially underdeveloped societies that had only the most minimal historic experience with democracy. Further, the Cold War generated an environment that gave priority to national security, military expenditures, rigorous internal security measures, and a Soviet imperial occupation. The events of the last 40 years provided numerous reasons that permitted many progressives to avoid reflecting deeply upon the conservative argument and upon similar themes in anarchist and libertarian anti-statist thought.

Now the fatal underlying flaw has demonstrated its tremendous importance, and millions in the East have begun a sweeping rush away from a disaster they know directly to a seeming solution they know only vaguely: "democratic capitalism."

BUT IF -- AS MANY IN THE WEST know so well -- democratic capitalism also contradicts important values, what possible alternative can we begin to conceive and affirm for the future? Access to the ballot, Western-style, and freedom of association, of the press, and of individual liberties are fundamental requirements of constitutional democracy. But they are only some of the building blocks of meaningful democratic participation, and the evidence that this is so is now abundant.

Any American reporter in any American city easily finds numerous people chosen at random who express an extraordinary depth of disillusionment with the actual operation of democracy. They do not need to be instructed in the limits of what some have called "electionism" -- a process in which mud-slinging, distorted advertising, and a lack of significant issues make a mockery of the idea of democratic decision making in connection with important public matters.

Here, for instance, are selections from a few recent news interviews. Construction worker Bobby Machicek, on politics and politicians: "When it comes time to vote they all pretend they care about people, and they start cutting on each other, but it's all just a rat race. It doesn't mean anything. One guy says he'll change things, he gets in, and then he leaves and the next guy talks about how bad the last guy was. It goes on and on like that."

Twila Martinzea, a 38-year-old San Franciscan: "It seems like another world to me. It goes on, it functions, but I don't feel like it really directly affects us."

Mechanic David Bradley: "I used to write in candidates when I was unhappy, but I decided that was a waste of time...Our political system is totally ineffective."

Lee Atwater, Republican Party Chair: "Bull permeates everything. In other words, my theory is that the American people think politics and politicians are full of baloney."

So, too, sociologists studying the "crisis of confidence" regularly discover rampant disillusionment with American institutions in general, and the political process in particular. The percentage of people who bother to vote, for example, even in presidential years, slips steadily. In the most recent presidential election, only one eligible person in two voted; this is down from the 80 percent range just before the turn of the 20th century.

And it was not a radical critic but Ronald Reagan who pointed out that in the U. S. House of Representatives, "with a 98 percent rate of re-election, there is less turnover...than in the Supreme Soviet" -- before the recent Gorbachev reforms! It is not too much to say that democracy in America is a slowly dying form: It has all the constitutional appearances of a vital practice, but its heart seems quietly to be weakening.

Is there any meaningful way forward that promises to honor equality, liberty, democracy, ecological rationality -- and even perhaps community? A direction that might begin to define a viable third way beyond both traditional socialism and traditional capitalism as we approach a new century? What is needed is not simply a set of rhetorical goals, but the beginning outlines of an alternative system of institutions and relationships that might nurture, rather than erode, our most cherished values in an ongoing fashion over time.

More urgently and directly: What are the central elements of a new vision which must be considered if we are to replace the two once-great traditions, when the fatal underlying flaws of the capitalist model explode the superficial consensus in the West and a Western demand for true perestroika -- for "restructuring" -- also one day rushes into the open?

Equality

SERIOUS PROGRESSIVES HAVE LONG ARGUED THAT THERE is both a moral and fundamental political case for equality. Democracy, for instance, if it is to be more than a facade for special-interest-group maneuvering and indirect control by the wealthy, requires that everyone have equal capacity to participate.

Innumerable studies show, however, that money and television tend increasingly to dominate elections. Even more basic is the fact that when there are vast differences in income, wealth, education, free time, and personal security, those with low incomes are inherently disadvantaged. They do not have the money to influence politics, their education does not give them as many skills, they don't have the time, and often, fearful of losing their jobs, they prefer silence to speaking their minds.

Democracy dies when inequality grows. And capitalism generates extraordinary degrees of inequality -- indeed growing inequality. The roughly 50 million Americans among the top one-fifth of society, for instance, now receive approximately 50 percent of all income (including interest, rent, and dividends). Just about the same number of human beings among the bottom one-fifth of society make do on less than 3.5 percent of such income.

A recent Congressional Budget Office study showed the following statistics for 1988:

- The top 5 percent, or one-twentieth of American families, received almost as much income as the entire bottom 60 percent of American society put together -- roughly 150 million people.

- The top 10 percent received roughly the same income as the bottom 70 percent -- roughly 175 million people.

- A mere 1 percent of American families at the very top had more income than the bottom 40 percent -- the entire group of 100 million Americans among the lower rungs of society taken together.

At the very bottom of the system, of course, is a group of people in extreme poverty, overwhelmingly women, children, and minorities. In 1988, roughly 13 percent of American society lived in poverty by official definitions, or roughly 32 million people. Fifty-three percent of all poor families were headed by women. More than 44 percent of all black children were living in poverty. Estimates of those in extreme distress -- the homeless and hungry -- are disputed; the figures range from several hundred thousand to more than three million.

The traditional American progressive or liberal answer to inequality has been that reform, activism, political demands, or organizing can correct such imbalances and move society toward greater equality. In a sense, politics is seen as somewhat independent from -- and able to correct -- the essential functioning of the system.

The statistical record, however, suggests that there are very deep linkages between the structure of the economic system and the kind of politics it generates or permits. Little evidence exists to show that traditional political activity has had the capacity to move the American system toward greater economic equality in the 20th century.

To be sure, the situation would undoubtedly be far worse without such activities. But it is one thing to say that traditional political activity may have prevented or slowed down a trend toward even more regressive patterns of inequality, and it is quite another to say that it has had the capacity to move society toward greater equality.

For most of the postwar period, for instance, the "relative distribution of income" -- roughly the ratio between what our society's top and bottom receive -- held relatively constant. In recent years, the relative distribution has worsened, moving toward greater inequality. The only brief times of positive improvement occurred in connection with major crises. During World War I, during the Great Depression, and during World War II, the century-long trend toward growing inequality was reversed a bit. World War II was by far the most important crisis, drawing the poor into paying jobs and drawing blacks north from the rural South.

But these shifts, indisputably, were associated with fundamental, system-shaking explosions. They are clearly not evidence that political activity on its own at other times has had the capacity to alter the underlying trend.

During the 1960s, partly as a result of the Vietnam War, but mainly as a result of a delayed reaction to the crisis-approved New Deal Social Security legislation (and the first-time impact of cash in the hands of retired payment recipients), the relative distribution of income also improved for a very brief period. But after the 1960s this minor blip in the trend was also reversed, and the distribution of income once more began to erode. The painful deterioration which has now been in process for a number of years appears in broad perspective simply as a resumption of a much older trend of growing inequality.

But all of this, of course, is an understatement. If you receive $1,000 in one year and I receive $50,000 in one year, and a few years later you have $2,000 and I have $100,000, the ratio between our incomes has not changed. Economists will tell you, correctly, that the relative distribution of income has not been altered. But the gap between us has exploded from $49,000 to $98,000, and the real world inequality between us has increased dramatically.

This is precisely what has been happening in the United States. One recent study, for instance, concludes that the real world gap between those at the top and those at the bottom of the American income pyramid more than doubled in the postwar period. The income gap between families in the bottom 20 percent and families in the top 5 percent, for instance, exploded from $31,000 in 1947 to more than $64,000 in 1985 (all figures calculated in the same 1985 dollars).

The congressional study noted above -- which includes a more complete estimate of all sources of income -- does not give long-trend data. However, it calculates that the gap (measured in 1987 dollars) between an average family in the bottom one-tenth and an average family in the top 1 percent grew by more than $125,000 in the brief period from 1977 to 1988 alone!

If any living form of democracy requires substantial equality to be a meaningful expression of the idea not only of one person one vote, but of each and all having equal capacity truly to impact the governing decisions that determine the fate and shape of the society in which they live, the underlying condition of "living democracy" in the United States is clearly weak and fading in efficacy.

When this fatal flaw at the core of the American system -- this contradiction between affirmed value and actual practice -- explodes is anybody's guess. That the problem is unlikely to go away is obvious, particularly to African Americans and other minority groups who know its importance directly and painfully.

Systemic Architecture, Underlying Structures, and Community

ANOTHER WAY TO CONFRONT THE SYSTEMIC CHARACTER OF the difficulty is to observe that the traditional answer to the problem of inequality under Western capitalism has been "social democracy" (or as Americans put it, "liberalism"). It may be that in very special cases social democratic politics can achieve sufficient momentum so that the underlying structural tendencies of capitalism can be countered by a politics sufficiently powerful to alter significantly the trends and patterns of real world inequality between people. The evidence from countries like Sweden is mixed, but even if it were not, this possibility would clearly be an exception to the general rule -- especially as that rule is exhibited in 20th-century American experience.

To those who reject the traditional socialist solution of state ownership of wealth, another structural possibility commonly discussed is worker ownership of the means of production. In this system it is hoped that the dangers of statism on the one hand and private capitalist ownership and exploitation on the other can be avoided.

There are many important advantages to worker ownership schemes. However, as one who has long urged further development of this form, let me stress that it is clearly no panacea.

First, there is very little evidence that worker-owned firms significantly alter the overall distribution of income -- a matter which is dramatically revealed by the experience of modern Yugoslavia. Second, worker-owned firms tend to develop their own interests. Once more, there is little evidence, for instance, that worker-owned steel mills do not generally seek similar kinds of subsidies (and trade protection) as privately owned mills. Nor for that matter can it be said that worker-owners have a much greater interest in expensive pollution controls that may benefit the larger community but cost a good deal of money. Again, generally, within the local or national community, privileged workers in rich industries do not easily share their advantage with the community as a whole -- with workers in other industries, with the elderly, with the poor, with women and children outside of their own families.

In some circumstances, clearly, worker-owned firms or worker co-ops may be a building block to the future. Some have more equitable internal pay scales, all teach that structural alternatives different from either major system are possible, and many yield experience with participation in general, and with economic matters in particular, that may be important to the future development of still other forms. Any open vision of the future would be wise to include a rich variety of small-scale co-ops, worker-owned firms, and neighborhood corporations. But just as clearly, the structural principle of worker-ownership does not provide a fundamental answer to many problems entailed in a serious and comprehensive vision for the future, or for a system of institutions that might undergird the vision in ways that can hope to nurture such fundamental values as equality, democracy based upon equality, or, as we shall explore, community and liberty.

FOR THESE AND OTHER REASONS, another structural formulation may be important in the development of a vision for the new century. This involves the principle of community directly -- and gives it power through specific institutional forms related to every-day life.

The idea of community is inclusive. It extends beyond the workers in a firm (or even as a class) to include all people. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, perhaps more than any other modern writer, urged that this required the creation of local institutions which embody the principle that the community as a whole should own and benefit from wealth. In a sense, Buber's idea (and related ideas of other thinkers who have historically emphasized principles of community) is similar to the general socialist argument, but focused at a more manageable scale.

Stressing the importance of building up, even if very slowly, the actual experience of cooperation, Buber distinguished between consumer cooperatives, worker cooperatives, and what he called a "full cooperative. " The latter involves a community institution in which consumer and worker cooperation overlaps, as it were, in one geographical area, so that the experience of community can be expanded upon in all aspects of life, steadily, over time.

"Society is naturally composed not of disparate individuals," Buber argued, "but of associative units and associations between them." What is required, he held, is a particular form and structure -- in the places where people actually work and live -- which nurtures cooperative democratic activity through direct experience: "An organic commonwealth -- and only such commonwealths can join together to form a shapely and articulated race of [people] -- will never build itself up out of individuals but only out of small and ever smaller communities: a nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities."

One objective is simply to provide a structural way to remove major industries from the insidious dynamic that commonly develops when private interests move into the political arena to secure special benefits. The notion of the community as a whole locally owning substantial wealth-producing firms attempts to negate this feature of capitalism. On its own, however, the principle is clearly inadequate: No mechanical application of the structural idea can hope to succeed in the absence of a positive vision that gives priority to the development of a much broader and deeply rooted practice and culture of cooperation and community accountability.

In Buber's argument the community must be sufficiently small and local so that each and all can truly participate in decisions affecting them. And, more generally, the social principle of involvement, of participation, of subsuming strictly economic goals to larger social goals, must be given priority. The fundamental question, How do we wish to live, each and all, together? is more important than more limited questions such as, How do we compete? How do we become number one? How do we increase the gross national product?

Related to this is a broader goal -- the development of a new culture in which the principle of equality is seen as a matter of right, and in which a new relationship of wealth -- holding to the entire community is established. The principle of community, based on the experience of structures that begin to express this principle directly, is also clearly important to the development of a lifestyle for individuals (and for the community as a whole) that is less consumption-oriented and less materialistic.

A number of modern ecological thinkers have also urged the importance of building new structural relationships upon the principle of community understood in its local sense and, more broadly, as an important element of a larger vision. Thus, Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb Jr., in their new book For the Common Good on the economics of a sustainable future, urge rebuilding community institutions. And ecologist Murray Bookchin has put forward a concept he terms "libertarian municipalism":

A gap, ideological as well as practical, is opening up between the nation-state, which is becoming more anonymous, bureaucratic, and remote, and the municipality, which is the one domain outside of personal life that the individual must deal with on a very direct basis...Like it or not, the city is still the most immediate environment which we encounter and with which we are obliged to deal, beyond the sphere of family and friends, in order to satisfy our needs as social beings.

Over the long haul, no two societies and no two communities would likely fashion precisely the same community institutional form, and a great deal of experimentation would be necessary to define the scale and limits of new community institutions appropriate to a long-term alternative vision. There are, however, a number of examples of neighborhood or community-owned economic institutions in the United States and elsewhere that a longer term vision might build upon.

Liberty

A SECOND POTENTIAL ELEMENT OF A COMPREHENSIVE vision -- one that is rarely discussed in systemic terms by progressives -- has to do with establishing the necessary underlying conditions of liberty in a new system. The collapse of the traditional socialist ideal -- and particularly the weakness of democratic practices and political liberty in the East -- makes this a matter of considerable urgency.

The thoughtful conservative argument against statist socialism urged not simply that the concentration of economic and political power in the institution of the state was dangerous, but that there had to be alternative sources of independent support for the individual or else liberty could never be sustained over time. The notion, in fact, involves the idea of a balance of forces: At the same time that they contended against a strong state, such conservatives argued the critical importance of small-scale, entrepreneurial enterprise. In their system the underlying structural support for the principle of liberty could not be compromised. A free political culture required, they held, that society rest upon a foundation of true citizenry based on economic independence.

Conservative economist Milton Friedman observes:

It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic arrangements...Such a view is a delusion...The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.

Thomas Jefferson urged a broadly similar theory of the requirements of a meaningful political-economic system. In his 1791 Notes on Virginia, Jefferson wrote: "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition..." His hope for the new system in late 18th-century America had a very specific structural foundation:

Everyone may have land to labor for himself, if he chooses; or, preferring the exercise of any other industry, may exact for it such compensation as not only to afford a comfortable subsistence, but wherewith to provide for a cessation from labor in old age...Such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs, and a degree of freedom...

THE DANGERS OF STATISM IN socialism are now clear to all. However, serious conservatives, like serious progressives, must also confront a direct contradiction of both aspects of their most dearly held theory in the experience of the West. In the United States, for instance, irrespective of the hopes of conservatives and largely irrespective of who has been in power -- including Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan -- the state has grown in size and power. The government accounted for only about 7 percent of the GNP just before the turn of the 20th century and has grown to roughly 35 percent in recent years.

Moreover, for all its other difficulties, pre-20th-century American society did in fact rest upon a footing of millions and millions of individual entrepreneurs. They were mostly farmers (or, more accurately, farmer-businesspeople -- an entrepreneurial breed very different, for instance, from the farmer-peasants of many other societies). A majority of the society (including spouses and children) actually had the experience of individually risking capital and being directly responsible for their own economic enterprises.

By the late 20th century, however, only a very small fraction of Americans -- no more than 15 percent -- can in any reasonable sense be called individual entrepreneurs. The United States has become a society of employees, most of whom work for large or medium-sized bureaucracies, private or public. The difference between a system dominated by General Motors and Exxon and one based upon the individual landholding farmer and small business-person of an earlier day in American history may very well be greater -- in the real life experience of the average person -- than the difference between a system based upon large private bureaucracies in the United States and public bureaucracies in socialist nations.

A half century ago the conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter urged that the rise of the corporate system inevitably meant the death of capitalism -- above all because it destroyed the key structural component of that system, the individual entrepreneur. With this loss, he believed, went both the soul of the system and its foundation. "The political structure of a nation is profoundly affected by the elimination of a host of small and medium-sized firms the owner-managers of which, together with their dependents, henchmen and connections, count quantitatively at the polls and have a hold on what we may term the foreman class that no management of a large unit can ever have."

Moreover, it is no secret that a corporation-dominated political culture has consequences. Repeated academic studies routinely document the power of major private corporations to shape legislation, influence regulatory agencies, dominate important Executive Branch decisions, and influence election patterns and the media.

H.C. Simon, founder of the conservative Chicago School of Economics (and Milton Friedman's revered teacher) argued more than 40 years ago that the "cause of economic liberalism and political democracy faces distinctly unfavorable odds." The central challenge, in his view, came from what he called "private monopoly in all its forms." The movement away from a capitalism organized by individual entrepreneurs to one operated by giant corporations was extreme. Simon challenged conservatives to face up to the fact that "the corporation is simply running away with our economic (and political) system." An important recent study by respected Yale political scientist Charles Lindblom surveys the literature of corporate political power and concludes: "The large private corporation fits oddly into democratic theory and vision. Indeed, it does not fit."

IF THE INDIVIDUAL MUST HAVE AN independent "place to stand," as it were, and if the small entrepreneurial basis of liberty can never be retrieved, what then?

The vast majority of conservatives have avoided this issue. They have mostly looked away even as the institutional basis of their theoretical system has substantially dissipated. Only a very few have had the courage to acknowledge (in the words of Herbert Hoover) that the true free-enterprise system is long dead: "The 18th century thesis of laissez-faire passed in the United States half a century ago," he wrote in the midst of the Great Depression.

Nor, avoiding the gaping hole in their theory, have many confronted the possibility that without some secure new footings for liberty the present system might all too easily be shaken by the scapegoating of minorities, unpopular political groups, or non-conformists in general. That a new institutional theory is needed if liberty is to have meaning has been recognized by still fewer conservatives.

Peter Drucker, to his credit, has acknowledged that in Western society "the overwhelming majority of the people in the labor force are employees of 'organizations' -- in the U. S. the figure is 93% -- and the 'means of production' is therefore the job." He affirms, therefore, that jobs should (and in many ways have already) become a form of property; the right to a job should therefore be accepted as fundamental. Such an approach, in the modern era, Drucker argues, "is compatible with limited government, personal freedom..."

But if the job is to provide the foundation for liberty in the new era, it must obviously be made secure. Liberals and socialists have proposed -- mainly on equity grounds (since few have confronted this aspect of the institutional problem of liberty) -- that there be a legal right to a job. And, in turn, to be meaningful -- to be truly a right and not merely a hope -- this requires absolute guarantees. In the mid-1970s the initial drafts of the proposed Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment legislation contained provisions allowing an individual to go to court to secure a government-guaranteed job if no other possibilities were available.

Another solution suggested by others who have begun to explore longer term approaches to the problem of liberty in the new century involves the direct provision of a substantial share of income to individuals as a matter of right. The aim of such income, it is important to understand, is not simply to help the poor, or because people are elderly, or for any reason other than the most fundamental one that if liberty and democracy are to have meaning, individuals must ultimately have substantial economic security, a structural basis for liberty and democracy.

In his book The State, British political theorist Bill Jordan argues:

In order to reconcile political authority with individual autonomy the state needs to take certain steps to ensure a basis of equality and freedom amongst its citizens...The new principle is that the state should pay to each citizen, simply by virtue of his or her citizenship, an income sufficient for subsistence. This should be unconditional, and paid equally to all, employed and unemployed, men and women, married and single...This state-guaranteed subsistence income (sometimes referred to as the social dividend or social wage) would give every citizen the basis for equal autonomy.

Again, to be quite clear, the issue here is not one of social justice. It is rather how to ensure that the conditions necessary for true democratic participation and liberty are met in societies that are long past the era of the independent farmer and small entrepreneur.

The notion that in the long run there must be an alternative guarantee for some substantial economic security is also a core element in the systemic visions proposed by such diverse theorists as Paul and Percival Goodman on the one hand and Jacques Maritain on the other. In their book Communitas, for instance, the Goodmans suggest a dual vision based on the distinction between necessities and luxury production:

The direct solution...would be to divide the economy and provide the subsistence directly, letting the rest complicate and fluctuate as it will. Let whatever is essential for life and security be considered by itself, and since this is a political need in an elementary sense, let political means be used to guarantee it. But the rest of the economy, providing wealth, power, luxury, emulation, convenience, interest and variety, has to do with varying human wishes and satisfactions, and there is no reason for government to intervene in it in any way.

The divided economy, has therefore, the twofold advantage that it directly provides the essential thing that is in jeopardy, without having to underwrite something else; and it restricts the intervention of government to this limited sphere.

Jacques Maritain was clearly struggling toward a roughly similar formulation:

In order to assure the free basic level of income...each qualifying individual would be required to work half-time -- manually or intellectually -- in the profession of his choice...Let us give the name "basic requirements" to the half-time manual or intellectual work...During the other half of the day, people would...work as it pleased them to do so...Resources would be provided to the institutions and enterprises that any number of citizens would like to found or to direct during that part of the day dedicated to life-enhancement activities.

Only a few decades ago the idea that individuals should receive direct funding from the government -- as, for instance, in the Social Security program -- was regarded as illusory. In the coming new century, student grants, unemployment compensation, training assistance, Social Security, and other forms of direct cash payment might well establish partial precedents for a more comprehensive system in which a certain portion of income is received as a matter of right. But this in turn requires that the concept be based upon a much more powerful systemic vision and goal -- in this instance, the fundamental requirement of sufficient independence to make liberty and democracy meaningful.

Planning

IMPLICIT IN ALL OF THE ABOVE IS ANOTHER ELEMENT OF A solution. If, on the one hand, a major objective is the steady build-up of local structures embodying the principle of community and, on the other, the provision of a degree of direct individual economic security so that there can be true individual independence and, hence, substantive liberty as a necessary condition of democratic participation, there must be a way to ensure that this happens. This requires some form of planning.

Neither progressives nor conservatives like the idea of planning. In practice planning has often been bureaucratic and inefficient, perpetuating "top-down" elite management. However, it is all but impossible to imagine a way to ensure the stability of diverse communities unless there is some overall capacity to deal with the economic problems this entails. There is also no way to ensure some degree of individual economic security without a similar capacity.

The crucial issues are whether planning can be made truly accountable and reasonably efficient (not as compared with an absolute ideal, but with the inefficiencies of real-world capitalism and socialism), playing a supportive rather than a domineering role.

A far more balanced appraisal of the pluses and minuses of planned and market systems is needed than that which is conveyed in most accounts. For instance, it is difficult to reconcile conventional criticisms of planning and nationalized industries with the successes of the Soviet space program both on its own terms and in comparison to the American record. Again, to choose an example on the other side of the ledger, the disastrous productivity experience of private American steel companies during the 1970s and early 1980s must be included in any serious assessment.

Above all, it is important to recognize that the United States is not a poor Eastern European country struggling to establish its industrial base and to inaugurate its first true consumer era. For all its difficulties, the United States and other major Western nations stand on the threshold of a truly post-industrial new century -- a period in which social, individual, and ecological goals can and should take far greater precedence over an all-out effort to achieve ever greater production and consumption.

It is also important to understand that a vision that accords importance to ideals both of community and of liberty does not require a totalist form of planning, and should not urge such planning. What is required, first, is sufficient predictability to give stability to local community structures and to allow the long-term build-up of a new culture of community.

In any community of, say, 100,000 people, there are now roughly 45,000 full-time jobs. Children, the elderly, young people in school, people at home taking care of children and the elderly, and those in hospitals make up the rest. If, say, 15-17,000 jobs can be assured, then the people employed -- through multiplier effects -- can also give substantial stability to up to twice as many others if, studies suggest, this is a conscious goal of policy. When a certain percentage of jobs are stabilized, paychecks "recirculate" as people pay for groceries, houses, teachers, doctors -- and these people in turn pay for (and give work to) still others.

In a non-totalist form of planning, various strategies of economic targeting could help achieve a capacity to stabilize one-fourth to one-third of local community jobs. We know, for instance, that when a state university or state capital is located in one area, this helps stabilize the local economy. Again, retirement income (in part Social Security payments) helps in others. In the future, a public decision to build mass-transit systems, solar collectors, and recycling equipment as part of an overall plan for ecological balance could produce contracts and jobs which, in turn, could be targeted for community-stabilizing purposes. Further possibilities include licensing some firms (and the provision or withdrawal of tax benefits) to help provide greater stability to local communities.

Today tax and other government programs often encourage companies to relocate, leaving behind deteriorating houses, schools, roads, and hospitals, and the social disaster of community decay. The policy of "throwaway cities" is wasteful -- and entails the new expense of having to rebuild the same costly facilities elsewhere. Partial planning of key sectors could reverse this, saving both money and community.

The spirit of such an approach is well conveyed by one of the very few conservatives who has confronted the general issue squarely -- and confronted, too, the dangers to liberty that can occur when community decay is allowed to fester. Reflecting on the demagogic rise of fascist and other authoritarian leaders in the 20th century, sociologist Robert Nisbet warns: "The longing for community which now exists [is] perhaps the most menacing fact of the Western World...Conservatives who aimlessly oppose planning, whether national or local, are their own worst enemies. What is needed, however, is planning that contents itself with the setting of human life, not human life itself."

A form of planning is also needed if the notion of a guaranteed right of employment for each individual is to be meaningful. There is no other way to assure that actual jobs exist when they are needed. (One aspect of such planning, long urged here and abroad, involves establishing an inventory of future plans for the construction of needed school, road, bridge, rail, water, and other projects to be taken down "off the shelf" in time of need.)

Similarly, if ecological goals are important, there must be a systematic way to assure new jobs, for instance, for coal miners who would otherwise be thrown out of work when strict provisions aimed at curbing acid rain are established. The same is true in connection with conversion from military production. In these and other cases, several goals -- ecological balance, movement toward a fully peace-oriented economy, individual equity, a secure basis for individual liberty, and the ability to maintain community stability -- all require a meaningful planning capacity if we are to move beyond rhetorical hope to realistic structure as the basis of a new vision.

Community Investment and Community Inheritance

A FURTHER FEATURE OF PLANNING FOR COMMUNITY AND liberty involves still another element of a longer range vision. Businesspeople and conservatives commonly argue that a society's wealth should belong to those who take risks and invest capital. Labor organizers and progressives commonly argue that those who work should receive the fruits of their labor.

A more fundamental understanding, both economic and moral, involves a somewhat different emphasis than either traditional view. Compare, for example, the living standards of most African countries with the United States. Entrepreneurs invest in both Africa and the United States, and workers work, often very long and hard hours, in both societies. Radical differences between the wealth of nations are related to the long history of a much longer and larger community investment over many years and many generations -- the generations of schooling, the build-up of high-ways and waterways, the evolution of overall skill levels, the slow and steady build-up of an alternative productive culture.

Still more fundamental, of course, is the even longer and larger community investment that produced centuries of science -- from before Newton to after Einstein -- and the development of technologies and inventions among hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers and millions of skilled working people. This investment is the most important factor. When a bright young computer inventor in the late 1960s produced an innovation that made him a millionaire, he commonly thought he "deserved" all that he had received. His invention, however, would have been literally unthinkable without the previous generations -- indeed centuries -- of knowledge, skills, wealth. He picked the best fruit of a tree that stood on a huge mountain of human contribution.

We rarely explicitly recognize this "community inheritance." A new vision might make it a central feature, both morally and politically. Building on inheritance laws and public land precedents, we might slowly evolve our thinking so that all major wealth (not necessarily small businesses and homes) would regularly be returned to the community that ultimately made the creation of the wealth possible.

A public trust to establish community ownership of such wealth -- at the national, state, regional, and local levels -- could in turn produce a stream of income, part of which might be used by the community as a whole to offset taxes and provide needed services and part of which might be allocated to provide direct economic stability and security to individuals in the interest of a new structural basis for human liberty and democratic participation. Public-trust control of substantial economic wealth could also help in the implementation of planning for more stable communities.

A tiny group of Americans owns huge shares of the nation's wealth today. A recent Federal Reserve Board study shows that the top one-tenth of American households owns almost as much of the nation's household wealth as the entire bottom 90 percent taken together. The top 1 percent alone owns just under 32 percent of such wealth.

The moral case for this wealth being passed on through inheritance to those who do not even claim to have earned it is exceedingly weak. A major tightening of inheritance laws could become one important basis of a new approach. Within local communities, major buildings and major land ownership (again, not necessarily individual family homes) might pass over time to the local community as a whole -- a shift that could both produce revenues and help in the development of new community-building land use and location strategies.

A more creative use of "eminent domain" powers might also ultimately play a part in a comprehensive strategy. At the same time, a new approach might wisely allow true individual entrepreneurs to pass on a significant share of what they personally earn in one lifetime.

(Noteworthy in this connection is the current Alaskan practice in which an acknowledged community-wide interest in oil royalties has built up a large "permanent fund" that presently yields a direct annual cash payment of almost $1,000 to each resident; at the same time an equal amount is allocated to publicly determined uses. Precedents of this kind may be of particular interest when longer range technological projections that might provide the basis for new approaches in the coming century are taken into account.)

Recognizing that the community as a whole plays a fundamental role in the creation of wealth and of new technologies, and in the overall development of education and skill levels, could also help undergird a revitalized effort to "reclaim our communities" -- at the local, state, regional, and national levels -- from the developers and special interests and their current bureaucratic allies who now commonly dominate "public" decision making.

Free Time

A FINAL QUESTION RELATED TO PLANNING INVOLVES provision for greatly expanded amounts (and substantial equality of) free time for democratic participation and individual self-development and fulfillment.

Even with all its economic problems, the United States is so wealthy that if its gross production were divided equally among all its citizens today, each family of four would receive roughly $80,000. Allowing for only moderate growth, a conservative projection of 20th-century trends suggests that this figure could well reach $160,000, then $320,000, and then substantially more by the end of the next century (all in today's dollars; more if inflation is assumed). Indeed, a straightforward projection of 20th-century trends would yield almost $500,000 for every four people. This implies no change in our roughly 40-hour workweek. The numbers would be much larger if Japanese trends were projected.

An alternative possibility would be to maintain incomes at the "average" $80,000 level (with adjustments for different family size and other factors) and, slowly, over time, reduce what might be called the "necessary" workweek to 20 hours, then 10 hours, or even lower. Another logical option would be to work longer hours and allocate a share of the production to the Third World. Of course, in any of the options, recycling and ecologically oriented planning would be necessary to reduce environmental costs.

The most interesting choice from the perspective of democratic participation involves reducing the workweek, because a greater amount of free time would permit involvement in community decision making. If greater democratic participation (and personal liberty) is defined as a necessary and fundamental requirement of a new system and new vision, the time available must be fairly divided. Today some people work an 80-hour week and some are unemployed and without income. This is an inevitable result of the haphazard functioning of the market. Planning is needed to ensure both that greater amounts of free time are available and that a reasonable degree of free time is assured to each and all.

More free time does not necessarily mean time spent not doing productive work. If a portion of "necessary work" is required for overall economic goals, as the Goodmans and Maritain suggest, other time might be spent in small independent enterprises, worker-owned ventures, or cooperatives. A dual conception of future economic life -- one in which a portion of work is defined as necessary for overall community goals and another portion is defined as totally free -- is a common-sense, if all-too-little-discussed, emphasis. Such an economic conception also mirrors a dual moral emphasis that gives weight both to community and to individual independence, liberty, and fulfillment.

Implicit in the above structural conception is also what might be called a potential community-building cycle of relationships. In contrast to the vicious cycle in which economic inequality limits democratic participation, in turn weakening a politics of reform that might hope to achieve positive movement toward greater equality, a community-building cycle would establish a public trust to manage the "community inheritance" and target economic activity in order to sustain both community and individual liberty.

Not only is the requisite planning premised upon non-totalist objectives, but its specific goal is to produce greater individual security and greater individual free time. These in turn are the conditions needed to sustain both individual liberty and real participation, and to ensure, therefore, that planning itself can be made increasingly democratic and accountable.

Scale

IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT A MAJOR AIM OF the elements of a new system so far discussed is the development of a structural basis for an alternative, more egalitarian culture. In removing major wealth from private control (and allocating the proceeds democratically), in establishing democratic control of local economic institutions, in moving toward increasing amounts of free time, in attempting to build a more stable community (and potentially a healthier social environment for individual development), in building an evolving structure of cooperative institutions -- the goal is to anchor questions of equality in a new culture which is based upon an evolving set of new institutional relationships.

A structural underpinning of this kind could also help establish the preconditions of a less materialist culture, and it could facilitate planning to implement ecologically sound decisions. Such a culture is ultimately the only serious basis upon which more narrowly defined political measures to achieve greater equality (taxes and social programs) and greater ecological health (resource conservation and pollution controls) can hope to rest in the long run.

A final element in a solution both to the systemic problem and to the institutional-cultural problem has been little discussed by either theoreticians or citizens. This is the issue of scale. It is a matter of common sense that ideas of a living democracy and of serious participation require smaller scale units of governance.

The United States now spans a continent. It includes 250 million people. (By way of comparison, the state of Oregon is bigger than West Germany.) Does anyone really believe that participatory democracy can be meaningful in a nation that includes such huge sweeps of geography and such large numbers of people?

Very large scale entities, furthermore, give enormous advantages to those who have money. In towns and cities, and even in small states, people know each other. It is also much easier to learn directly, and with some confidence, the reputation of people who are not known personally.

Furthermore, organizing efforts by grassroots groups -- which depend heavily upon individual contacts and person-to-person relationships -- are much easier in smaller scale units. In large geographic systems involving large numbers of people, what counts is the media -- which means, as the saying goes, that "money talks." Indeed, the disproportionate advantages the rich enjoy in a highly unequal society are multiplied, as it were, when large numbers and large areas are involved.

There is a further consideration -- one which James Madison, the "architect" of the American Constitution, understood very well. Long before Karl Marx, Madison argued that the "principle political division" in society was between those who owned the means of production and those who did not: "...the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society..."

As a representative of the former group, Madison worried that the majority would overwhelm the people he believed should guide the new republic. His "checks-and-balances" system was one method of slowing down the majority, but far more important (though less discussed) was his argument that large geographic scale gave the wealthy elites special advantages.

First, Madison argued that a government aiming to ensure private rights "must operate not within a small but an extensive sphere." The goal is not to accept the decision of the democratic majority. Rather, Madison asked:

What remedy can be found in a republican Government, where the majority must ultimately decide, but that of giving such an extent to its sphere, that no common interest or passion will be likely to unite a majority of the whole number in an unjust pursuit? In a large society, the people are broken into so many interests and parties, that a common sentiment is less likely to be felt, and the requisite concert less likely to be formed, by a majority of the whole.

Madison recognized that he was playing with fire with this idea. Writing at a time when the nation extended little beyond the Appalachians, he saw even then that large scale -- and the power it gave elites to divide the people into contending interests -- could be dangerous. Writing to his friend Thomas Jefferson, he admitted that he was indeed arguing that "Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny, is, under certain qualifications, the only policy by which a republic can be administered on just principles. "

And at the very outset of the nation -- in a society that was little more than a strip of colonies on the very edge of the ocean -- he recognized that if the nation grew too large, "in too extensive a [society] a defensive concert may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those entrusted with the administration."

WE DO NOT LIKE TO CONFRONT THIS argument head on. It implies that if we wish to take the idea of a living democracy seriously in the new century we must come to terms with the need for smaller scale units. The late William Appleman Williams, a very thoughtful radical historian, argued that a large nation like the United States would be wise to consider the possibility of long-term restructuring into its regional units of, say, 10 or 12 "groupments" of states. The "United States" would then comprise a confederation of these units. There would be much greater decentralization of authority, and at the same time the regional units would work together in matters of defense, foreign policy, and ecological balance.

One way to think about an evolutionary process that could move toward decentralization is to consider the possible longer term trajectory of large states such as California and Texas. Given national political stalemates over many important problems, such states may well be forced to develop ever greater political-economic autonomy. Many are already experimenting with a wide range of special development policies. In turn, groupings of smaller states could well be required to join together in collaborative efforts -- partly to undertake joint projects, partly as a defensive strategy.

But leaving aside possible evolutionary strategies, the fundamental question that must be confronted if we are serious about developing a meaningful new vision is whether our nation's huge scale inevitably contradicts the values we want to affirm. If so, we have no choice but to consider an ultimate American perestroika involving smaller units. Meaningful planning would also logically take place -- and management and stewardship of a substantial share of the "community inheritance" would occur -- at the regional, subnational level.

Ethnic and so-called nationality questions often overlap and confuse the fundamental issue of scale, but while both scale and ethnicity are important, they are different. Within the huge empire of the Soviet Union, for instance, it is by no means obvious that centralized decision making could ever be made to work even if no ethnic or national divisions existed. Smaller scale, or regional, decentralized authority makes sense for its own reasons. Similarly, in Canada, the Quebec separatist argument entails both an argument for smaller scale and a cultural challenge.

In Europe at present there is a rush toward greater economic and political integration aimed at 1992. However, in any serious historic perspective it is also obvious that there are strong possibilities for a "backlash" reaction once the difficulties of economic adjustment in a very large continental system are fully experienced, and people are forced to come to terms with their loss of decentralized authority. When such a backlash occurs, its main locus will likely be national, or in a few cases, such as France and Spain, perhaps regional within nations. Implicit here, too, is the fundamental problem of scale -- and the importance of smaller, semiautonomous units of governance in any serious conception of participatory or living democracy.

Reconstruction

THESE THOUGHTS ON SOME POTENTIAL ELEMENTS OF A long-term vision are offered in the hope that they may contribute to a serious discussion of possibilities. Only through a wide-ranging dialogue can a solution to the deeper problems of an alternative system be developed as many people -- in diverse walks of life -- work and talk together over an extended period of time.

I have three final points. First, perhaps the most important lesson of recent developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is that fundamental problems in any society -- despite misleading appearances of superficial calm -- are very difficult to "paper-over" forever. Unresolved issues -- especially ones of deep significance involving profoundly important human values -- may be suppressed for a long period, but they have a way of eventually coming to the surface. People know the difficulties, pain, contradictions, and hypocrisy all too well. Sometimes it only takes one spark to ignite the flames of deep-rooted resentment.

Social scientists who study trends, media commentators who offer opinions on current events, politicians who benefit from the status quo -- all tend to believe nothing fundamental can change. Indeed, they have a vested interest in this view, because the alternative possibility -- that there is something missing from their analysis -- directly threatens their own work and credibility. So, too, most ordinary people assume very little can change until a minor event -- sometimes only one person refusing to accept an existing practice -- ignites an explosion that reveals far more widespread alienation than any one person, alone, might have believed existed.

Despite repeated boasting that we have "won the Cold War," there are fundamental problems in the West as well as the East. Values of equality and liberty, of meaningful democracy, are proclaimed, yet the people do not believe. The silence concerning fundamental issues at the very core of the meaning of democracy is as thundering as it was for years in the East -- before the recent explosions. It would be surprising if the superficial calm lasted forever.

Quite simply -- for this reason alone -- there is a need to abandon cynicism and begin thinking about a fundamentally different positive vision for the future. This is especially true as the two great traditions, systems, and visions that have dominated most of the 20th century lose their capacity to inspire.

SECOND, IMPLICIT IN THE ABOVE suggestions -- and, I believe, in the modern world -- is a conception of a possible path to long-term change. It is a path which is different from conceptions that have characterized most 20th-century thinking about real-world options available for industrial and post-industrial societies. "Revolution," I believe, is unlikely in the West, and if attempted would likely lead to consequences that contradict the values of the proponents of change. Again, however, "reform" as it is usually conceived also appears unable to achieve the fundamental value objectives that give power and meaning to its efforts. "Reform" involves attempting to achieve proclaimed goals without altering underlying structures. The central idea of reform -- liberalism or social democracy -- is that the institutions of corporate capitalism exist and, in practice, should not be considered for fundamental change. But if 20th-century experience teaches us anything, it is that despite the gains of the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the New Deal, and the Great Society, progress toward reducing real world inequality of fundamental economic circumstance has been virtually nil.

Real inequality between real people has grown, not diminished. So, too, in connection with the most important institutional underpinnings of liberty, there has been regress, not progress. The result is what I have called a "dying democracy," not a "living democracy": a society in which money gives more, not less, undue influence to elites and corporations; and in which democratic participation as a whole, despite occasional and important bursts of success, fades in its capacity to alter the larger dynamics of the system.

This does not mean that reform efforts should be abandoned. Quite the contrary. Whatever gains can be achieved -- and, more important, whatever capacity reform has to prevent a greater worsening or a faster deterioration of the unfavorable trends -- are important. People are in pain; the environment is threatened; military interventions abroad are an ever-present reality. However, an uncritical affirmation of the achievements of reform all too easily obscures and mystifies larger and deeper trends of failure.

Since reform involves accepting the basic structure of the existing system and then attempting ("after the fact" as it were) to improve what can be improved, and since this conception of change, it appears, cannot promise positive fulfillment of important values affirmed by millions in the West, a fundamental truth must be recognized. If there is ever to be a way forward to a living democracy it will almost certainly have to involve a different conception of change than that which is embodied in either the tradition of revolution or of reform.

Martin Buber used the term "reconstruction" long before the word perestroika had entered modern vocabulary to denote and connote a third way. Buber was developing a particular approach to long-term change which, unlike reform, aimed to change the most fundamental underlying structures of the system and, unlike revolution, aimed to do so in an evolving, nonviolent fashion. The central notion is that it may be necessary -- and possible -- to accept a slow, steady elaboration of alternative institutions, building "within the shell of the old society" step by step until enough experience, vision, moral energy, and political organizing has occurred -- enough social and political momentum has been built up -- to allow a more general perestroika to take place. As we have noted, Buber urged especially the need to begin developing cooperative local community economic institutions that embrace many more aspects of community life, and that provide the possibility of an evolving social environment and culture different from the dominant culture.

This is the long view of change -- an organic view. It assumes, indeed, that were the system to collapse tomorrow, the dominant institutions of the Right would likely control events. The notion of reconstruction -- of the difficult path of slowly building new ways, and as these gather force, adding to them both institutionally and through political demands oriented to new institutional goals -- may be particularly appropriate to a time in history when a full-scale collapse is not likely. But reconstruction is also appropriate when reform has lost its force. In the emerging context of a possibly long era of decay and disillusionment, the traditional ways of change, as well as the traditional systemic alternatives, may well be closed.

All that may be left -- the only open door -- may be to start now, where we are, building the new society from the ground up -- and hoping (confidently expecting!) that because meaning is collapsing all around us, others will inevitably be forced to consider both what really makes sense and how a new society can be reconstructed, starting here and now.

The African-American historian Harold Cruse recalls W.E.B. DuBois in his comments on the depth of the crisis facing the black minority as well as the larger crisis of the society. He too urges an approach which "involves much more than sheer economics. It takes a certain community point of view...in order to exert impact (political, economic and cultural)...It means the studied creation of new economic forms -- a new institutionalism -- one that can intelligently blend privately-owned, collectively-owned, cooperatively-owned, as well as state-sponsored, economic organizations."

From a very different perspective, the late British cultural historian Raymond Williams observed:

The making of a community is always an exploration, for consciousness cannot precede creation, and there is no formula for unknown experience...It is, in practice,...a long conversion of the habitual elements of denial; a slow and deep personal acceptance of extending community. The institutions of cynicism, of denial and of division will only be thrown down when they are recognized for what they are: the deposits of practical failures to live.

A THIRD AND FINAL POINT: For political activity to be powerful requires committed energy. Committed energy requires both ideals and values -- and a very clear sense of direction. Committed energy is precisely what the old systems and the old politics cannot inspire. They do not have the capacity to fulfill the deep values that people affirm as fundamental to any meaningful, living, democratic vision of the future.

That is why it is so important to grapple now not only with the immediate problems of a society in pain, but also with the most difficult questions of a positive long-term future. The combination of a new vision and a clear conception of a process that might lead to it is required to ignite the human energy, power, and commitment needed if we ever hope to lay foundations for a new society to be built in the coming new century and new millennium.

Gar Alperovitz was president of the National Center for Economic Alternatives, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and the author of Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (Penguin, 1985) when this article appeared.