99.9% of all institutions in my life are at best feudal orders, run by aristocrats so far removed from my life that they wouldn’t even know how to survive without their armies of servants, nannies, and assistants. Democracy needs to extend beyond the state. Democracy must be present in every part of our society, or it will, as it has now, inevitably become nothing more than another oligarchy for and by the rich.
Recommended readings:
Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire.
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti.
Neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah.
Anarchism and other Essays by Emma Goldman.
Recommendations from the comments:
/u/BallShapedMan - The Dictator’s Handbook by by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
I work in continuous improvement, think Henry ford stuff.
If the workers had their say nothing would improve and the business would be a disaster.
"No not doing that" "why?" "Well we always did it this way and it works so we aren't changing" " the other way has been proven to work better" "doesn't matter we always done it this way so we aren't changing"
"We are working 9-5 no more shift work" "the machines will idle for 2/3rds of the day. That's horribly inefficient and are products will be uncompetitive and we will get closed down"
"We aren't using that new machine" "why it is digital and uses machines to create accuracy 10x better than a person." "I spent 40 years learning how to do it manually that's the way I'm doing it and all the new kids are going to learn when I teach them"
"Look at this machine it makes 10x the output as a traditional team" "no it uses 9 people instead of 10. Someone will get made redundant we aren't using it"
The only reason this happens is that capitalism ties survival to labour. Automation should be liberating us, and yet the structures of capitalism and "protestant work ethic" cause it to do the opposite :/. People would act this way because otherwise the greater efficiency acts as a detriment to their survival ability.
None of what you said is an argument against worker democracy, but an argument against the fundamental models of capitalism and """free""" market ideology ^.^ (or more generally, any system and ideology which gatekeeps access to basic resources behind their perceived ability to provide "value" or perform labour).
It's too inefficient to be worker ran. Not everyone is capable of running a busines and understanding what it entails.
I think we should push for a 4 day work week standard personally. And move towards ubi.