“The shareholder has become a common good” by Sebastian Mueller, 2/13/2024

“The shareholder has become a common good”

The blind spots of democracy

By Sebastian Müller

[This article posted on February 13, 2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://makroskop.eu/05-2024/der-shareholder-ist-zum-gemeingut-geworden/.]

### We need institutions that do justice to us as human beings, says Armin Groh. This also includes democratizing the economy. A conversation about his book “Die blinden Flecken der Demokratie” (The Blind Spots of Democracy).

The word “democracy” has always held great promise: freedom, human rights, participation, justice, prosperity, and peace are supposed to come with it. But its luster has faded, writes author and educator Armin Groh in his book “Die blinden Flecken der Demokratie” (The Blind Spots of Democracy), published by Edition MAKROSKOP. Western societies are divided, authoritarianism is on the rise, social inequality is increasing, and trust in political institutions has dwindled. MAKROSKOP editor Sebastian Müller spoke with him.

Mr. Groh, when you started writing Die blinden Flecken der Demokratie, who was your target audience?

Most school leavers, who have only a very vague idea of what our political parties stand for and are therefore hardly in a position to make a responsible voting decision. And the 40 percent of German citizens who can’t remember what they voted for last time.

The book reads like a novel and is written from the perspective of a child, Lukas. Lukas is friends with a boy who is his neighbor but comes from a different, far less privileged world than Lukas himself. Do you find memories from your own childhood in the book?

In my elementary school in Stuttgart, there were children from all income groups. The school was located between a poorer neighborhood with a high proportion of immigrants and the Hasenberg, where there are mansions. As I mention in my book, there were actually attempts by the wealthier parents to get their children into a certain class. But I didn’t notice the differences in wealth at the time. It was all about courage, quick wit, and athleticism. It was only much later that I experienced firsthand in my personal environment what it means to fall through the cracks of Germany’s meritocracy.

Did you ever work as a temporary worker before becoming a teacher?

No, only as a temporary worker. To finance my studies, I often worked on assembly lines in metalworking companies. That’s probably why I chose such a company for my book. But temporary workers were the exception back then. To paint a realistic picture, I had to do some research, and a friend of mine who is an industrial mechanic helped me.

The chapter “Economy and Democracy” also deals with co-determination in companies. This was a major issue for trade unions well into the 1970s. Their demands were accompanied by wild waves of strikes. The wage increases that were enforced fueled inflation during the oil price crisis. At the same time, it was also the era of anti-authoritarian revolt.

Even during the Weimar Republic, trade unions demanded not only co-determination but also comprehensive democratization of the economy. This concern is much older than the 1968 movement and its anti-authoritarian ideas. The 1968 movement was not least a reaction to fascism, colonialism, and racism, and against this backdrop it sought alternatives. Although trade unions continue to advocate for more democracy in companies, this issue has indeed receded significantly in the public eye behind collective bargaining.

The blind spots of democracy

However, work discipline is also said to have declined in companies. There was talk of a “crisis of governability.” Had the trade unions gone too far in this climate?

Demonstrations and strikes are a legitimate form of democratic decision-making. This does not mean that the desired reorganisation is characterised by arbitrariness. The protests of 1848 do not mean that unrest and indiscipline are characteristic of an established democracy. Democratic enterprises such as cooperatives are able to compete today, even in highly competitive industries. The accusation of a lack of “governability” is also linked to a problematic conception of society: that citizens must be governable from above. Yet it is a fundamental principle of democracy that the citizens themselves are sovereign. It is not legitimate to subject free and equal people to an authoritarian government. This is also a central idea of democratic companies. Why should it be any different at work, where we spend a large part of our lives? Liberals such as John Stuart Mill have also questioned this, and it is being discussed today by liberal philosophers under the heading of “workplace democracy.”

Are you familiar with the book “The Ungovernable Society” by Grégoire Chamayou?

I am familiar with some of his theses.

Chamayou presents a “history from above,” written from the perspective of entrepreneurs and politicians who wondered how they could regain control of these developments in the face of increasing indiscipline and strikes.

As I said: In the republican tradition of Rousseau and Kant, the core democratic idea is not to control the population from above; rather, the democratic sovereign must control the state apparatus and program it through legislation. Unfortunately, hierarchies tend to reinforce themselves. This is particularly evident in the reaction of companies and politicians to the 1968 movement and the trade unions. Their answer was “discipline through the market.” Chamayou calls this authoritarian liberalism, and indeed it weakened not only the beginnings of democracy in companies, but also democracy as a whole. Privatization, deregulation, and empty-coffers politics significantly restricted the scope for public decision-making.

In contrast, Ingar Solty, a researcher at the Institute for Social Analysis at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, writes about the freedom to say “fuck you, boss.” Should that be a given in the modern workplace with its flat hierarchies?

Are you serious? If employees expect decency from their superiors and want to be treated like human beings, they should show decency themselves.

Physical and verbal violence only provide opportunities to denigrate democratic emancipation movements. Solty meant this metaphorically: Keynesian full employment policy had provided the material basis for feeling free, growing your hair long, showing up at work in jeans, and “letting the spirit run free.”

Wanting and expecting more from life than “9 to 5” jobs, alienating work routines, and the same job until the end of your life. Isn’t that also the message of your book?

This description gives the impression of a luxury trip—but in fact, the search for a different economy is about much more than that. It seems to me that Gabor Maté is quite right when he describes our culture and our way of doing business as traumatic. The culture of performance and radical individualism have a destructive effect on what we need most: connectedness and a sense of self-worth that does not depend on performance.

But isn’t performance necessary to a certain extent and also intrinsically desired by humans?

Activity or creativity are less loaded terms in this context. The economic concept of performance, on the other hand, is extremely problematic because it suggests that individual contributions to the common good can be quantified, which is not possible. As with a machine, it should be possible to determine what a person’s output is and what constitutes their value. This tears people out of their social context and reduces them to machines that become superfluous when their output is no longer adequate. The value of the output, in turn, is determined solely by its “usefulness,” which is to be produced in an instrumental manner. However, a good life and meaning cannot be produced like a product. They have something intangible—like a musician who plays a melody most movingly when he is not aiming to do so, but is in resonance with something greater and has forgotten himself.

What does this mean for society?

This one-sided focus on “usefulness” is currently leading to a loss of meaning in our society. As Michael Sandel has emphasized, the prevailing performance culture threatens to tear our society apart. Traumatized individuals also tend to engage in socially destructive behavior, which can pass on the trauma to future generations. In addition, we naturally have a need for creative fulfillment, which is also thwarted by extreme economic rationalization. For our future, we should therefore think about institutions that do justice to us as human beings. This also includes democratizing the economy.

Prosperity and full employment also created the material basis for experimenting with drugs as a means of “finding oneself,” of living every day as if it were your last. It was the pursuit of great freedom. For those born after the war, it was a golden age. Today, one would say that this was precisely the beginning of the hyper-individualism you criticize. Was this perhaps also the seed of the decline of Keynesianism and collective organizations?

My book does not contain any nostalgia for the 1968 movement. Although, as I said, I believe it made an important contribution overall, I only mention it in passing. The desire for a democratic economy and full employment is much older and much more international. I see no direct link to hyperindividualism or drug use. Indigenous resistance to the economization of their communal economies is anything but hyperindividualistic. The world’s largest cooperative is Mondragon, which was founded in 1956 in the spirit of Catholic social teaching. The 1968 movement arose in a specific historical constellation of our modern age.

So where does hyperindividualism come from?

Indeed, hyperindividualism seems to me to be the cause of many of the problems of the present day, including our atomized economy. However, its deeper origins do not lie in the 1970s, but in the radically individualistic and mechanistic ideas of Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and others. As Hartmut Rosa recently argued, the pursuit of predictability and controllability in modernity has been accompanied by a tremendous loss of resonance. This loss of resonance also affects nature and the transcendent.

What do you mean by that?

If society, nature, and the universe consist only of ultimately dead, isolated substances, then connectedness to a higher meaning, to nature, and even to my neighbor is ultimately an illusion. I become a lone fighter in a world devoid of meaning. Authoritarian liberalism has significantly exacerbated this loss of resonance. While the 1968 generation was a singing movement, today we stare at Black Friday.

The protagonists of your book sympathize with economic democracy and cooperatively organized companies. You have already hinted that, in your opinion, this could be a model that could be applied across the board.

Unfortunately, the question we must ask ourselves today has become very modest: What arrangement of institutions gives humanity a chance to survive? Is there an arrangement that is less traumatic, less conflict-prone, and less harmful to nature? The authoritarian liberalism of shareholders has become common property. It not only determines companies, but is also an influential factor in politics, both internally and externally. That is why it is particularly important in education to think about how we want to proceed in the future. Learners at high risk of a working life in precarious jobs have a right to discuss this.

Groh, Armin: Die blinden Flecken der Demokratie (The Blind Spots of Democracy). A journey of discovery into the history of political ideas. Promedia 2023. 264 pages.

Sebastian Müller studied history, political science, and German language and literature. As an author, he focuses on the interactions between economics and society as well as economic history. He has been an editor at MAKROSKOP since 2016.

The dawn of neoliberalism.