Excerpt

Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers:

"For more than two decades the democratic left has sought to clarify the content of a “post-socialist” political project. The theory and cases studies gathered in this volume are part of that discussion, and their contribution is best understood by reference to it.The socialist project, including its more common social democratic variant,was defined by a characteristic set of moral-political values and an institutional and political strategy for advancing them. The values were egalitarian and participatory, with a strongly economic inflection. The institutional models included Keynesian macro-economic steering, state regulation of market actors,workplace economic democracy, and some measure of direct state ownership and planning. The political strategy centered on the nation state, which was the chief regulator, macro-economic manager, agent of income redistribution, and sometime owner and planner. Debate within the post-socialist left begins from the conviction that this statist and economistic approach to advancing egalitarian-democratic ideals is neither plausible nor adequate under contemporary conditions. In part this conviction follows from greater appreciation of the limits of the state, in part from a more expansive understanding of those values themselves.Appreciation of the limits of state competence and capacity flows from at least two quarters. One, primarily concerning the economy, draws negative lessons from the failures of much socialist planning, and notes the fact that economic globalization— particularly given the current distribution of political and military power—qualifies the capacity of nation states, particularly small ones, to effectively steer the economy within their borders. On the demand side of that national economy, the Keynesian consensus at the foundation of social democracy has substantially collapsed, leaving states much more cautious as economic actors promoting working class well-being. On the supply side, central authorities typically lack the local knowledge needed to carry out potentially pro-worker policies in modernization, industrial adjustment, and training.

This last point generalizes beyond the economy to a second skepticism about the state, of great relevance to the work in this volume. These doubts follow from expansion in the scope and diversity of “local” problems that states are now routinely asked to remedy. Typically, though not always, such problems—in the environment, health, education, public safety, or countless other policy domains—present important inequalities in the power of affected actors. So leaving them to narrowly local solution is unacceptable; indeed, it commonly provides the first impetus to state involvement. But almost by definition, that involvement is immediately vexed. The most efficient solution to such problems requires knowledge of local circumstances and flexibility in adjusting general standards to them—something not easily achieved by central states. This problem only gets worse where, as is commonly the case, regulatory solutions in different policy domains or communities of interest are interdependent, and need to be reconciled. Such reconciliation requires a yet higher order of informed and flexible coordination by central authorities, a task that is typically beyond them.Thus changes in the global economy undermine the state’s capacity as economic manager. And what the state never claimed much capacity for—eliciting and acting on local knowledge, with nearly limitless monitoring and enforcement capacity for regulatory standards and solutions—it is increasingly asked to do. For both reasons, the nation state appears a less plausible agent of egalitarian-democratic advance.On values, meanwhile, the gradual emergence of a more inclusive,tolerant, cosmopolitan understanding of the political public has undermined the appeal of a politics focused on economic-class concerns, to the exclusion of interests in gender or racial justice, self-government by national groups, ethnic rights, the environment, and more. An egalitarian-democratic must respect the heterogeneity of reasonable political demands. But this heterogeneity immediately creates a political problem — how to achieve collective focus,particularly among subordinate groups, on the achievement of any matter of shared concern.Framed by these shifts in the world, debates in the post-socialist left about models of a more just society have been dominated by two distinct, though compatible, lines of argument.The first, growing out of appreciation of the state’s limits as an economic manager, combines socialism’s commitment to material equality with a renewed respect for markets as the preferred arena of economic coordination. Unlike social democracy, which left initial property positions largely intact, or state socialism, which abolished such positions entirely, it aims to promote greater equality through new forms and distributions of initial property assets, which combine with markets to produce the desired result. In the Real Utopias series,John Roemer provides one example of such “asset egalitarianism.” His “clamshell” socialism proceeds from a equalized per capita division of productive assets, and permits lifetime stock trades and consumption of dividends, if not principal.

Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis provide another example. Their work offers models that correct for inequalities in existing markets for essential goods not by direct regulation, but by endowing citizen consumers with new assets and special bargaining powers.

The second line of argument grows out of an appreciation of the more general limits of the state’s regulatory capacity. Building on the participatory,radical-democratic strand of traditional socialism, it seeks to construct models inwhich “local” players can be involved more directly in regulation and collective problem solving, albeit with some form of center that coordinates local efforts.The idea is that empowering citizens, and then on more equal terms, is an intrinsic good, and a means of ensuring a fairer distribution of material resources.But it is also an important strategy for achieving more effective solutions to collective problems—informed by local knowledge, engaging local energies, and otherwise improving on the performance of a distant command and control central state.Traditionally this radical democratic strand of the socialist project has been associated with ideas of economic democracy, including self-management and worker ownership, as well as more ambitious projects of democratic coordination above the level of the firm. But changes in firm and work organization and career patterns— more fluid firm boundaries, more discrete and shifting “communities of interest” within them, less sustained firm-specific employment, increased payoff to heterogeneous skills, greater integration of work and family life—suggest that the firm may not be the right locus of economic democracy. At the same time, the virtues of participatory, radical-democratic strategies are not confined to the economic arena. They seem to “travel” well to many areas of policy, including those areas of “local” coordination already noted. So the fact of political heterogeneity, while a challenge to socialism’s traditionally privileged site for participatory democracy, here seems to invite its direct extension to a wider areaof social life.

The work in this volume, and some of our own, exemplifies this participatory strand in post-socialist thought. Our work on associative democracy,which inaugurated the Real Utopias series with a volume on Associations and Democracy centered on the idea of improving democratic process and performance by a deliberate “politics of association.” Instead of taking as fixed the strength and distribution of secondary organizations intermediate between state and market, liberal democratic governments would explicitly encourage an associational population better suited to representing underrepresented interests or adding to state capacities for regulation. In the concluding essay to that volume, we came around to the view that the point was not simply to foster associations of suitable kinds, but also to build new arenas for solving problems through citizen deliberation. Thus the idea was both to foster greater equality of power and to discipline the exercise of power directly through the common reason of citizens: to build a more democratic society, and a more deliberative democracy.The present volume builds on this second strand of argument.

Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright offer a model of “empowered participatory governance”(EPG), very much about the construction and use of citizen arenas for practically-inclined democratic deliberation. The contributors then seek to assess the robustness and appeal of that model by considering some contemporary cases that arguably exemplify it. The cases vary widely: from Chicago schools and policing, to participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, to the design of a range of public programs in West Bengal and Kerala, to the planning of complex regimes of habitat conservation in various parts of the United States. And at the very least, they present impressive evidence of social capacity for political invention.Across radically different circumstances, we see new forms of participation, all devised for attractively mundane purposes: making sure that schools work, that roads and water pipes get built where people need them, that jobs and endangered species both get protected, and that public safety improves in dangerous places.

These innovations are animated by and give evidence for the truth of the hopeful, radical-democratic assumption that explicitly animates this book — that ordinary people are capable of reducing the political role of untamed power and arbitrary preference, and, through the exercise of their common reason, jointly solving important collective problems.In our comments, we explore what more the book tells us about this hopeful assumption.

In particular, we focus on the role in EPG of deliberation — the idea of subjecting collective decision to the rule of reason—and its relation to power. We find some important evidence here for the view that deliberative democracy is not, contrary to some of its critics, simply a way to empower the verbally agile and increase the returns to cultural capital, nor is it emphasis on reasons unduly respectful of the status quo. But we also criticize the presentation in the book for its inattention to conditions of background power. The cases discussed here differ sharply from one another in those background conditions,and on how they, or their remedy, figure in the activities under discussion here. By treating these cases as all instances of a common model, Fung and Wright may obscure the importance of this difference, and may exaggerate the capacity of deliberation itself to neutralize the effects of unequal power." (http://www.scribd.com/doc/47256140/Power-and-Reason-Joshua-Cohen-and-Joel-Rogers)

Issues of Power and the Problems with Deliberative Democracy

Excerpt

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