A Democratic Economy and a Democratic Worklife.

• Author: Fitz, Don

Though most cultures consider dreams to be unique manifestations of reality, the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, wrote:

A dream is a fragment of life, broken off at both ends, not connected either with the part that goes before, or with that which follows after...It is a kind of parenthesis inserted in life. (Robert van de Castle, The Psychology of Dreaming, 1971).

The beginning of the 21st century sees many progressives having a strikingly similar attitude toward their worklives. It is as if organizing should stop when one goes to work and resume at 5:00. The late 20th century saw demands for people to change relationships of domination based on gender, gender preference, ethnicity, religion, nationality and disability. But when issues of work are addressed, they are typically confined to areas such as wages, hours and benefits--even the most progressive unions rarely challenge relationships of domination in their members' worklives.

Has the entire progressive movement accepted the loss of all rights of democratic empowerment at work? There has not always been a taboo on discussing worklife. Very early unions, such as the Knights of Labor and Industrial Workers of the World, assumed that "solidarity" included struggling for collective control of work.

When I was 18 and protesting the Vietnam War, I ran across a book that has long influenced my thinking about work: Erich Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man (1961). Fromm has a long introduction to the first English translation of the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts," which Marx wrote in 1844. He explains that Marx's economic analysis began with the assumption that labor is essential to people's consciousness of who they are:

Labor is the factor that mediates between man and nature; labor is man's effort to regulate his metabolism with nature. Labor is the expression of human life and through labor man's relationship to nature is changed, hence through labor man changes himself. (p. 16).

Marx's critique of capitalism was based on his early understanding that exploitation robs people of essential aspects of humanness. This theft comes via the boss owning the worker's time. Marx saw alienation as stripping labor of its creative potential and transforming it into a dull, dead process for the accumulation of wealth.

Capitalism alienates people from the PRODUCT OF PRODUCTION, since what they create has no connection with them but disappears into the market. Capitalism alienates people from the PROCESS OF PRODUCTION as labor becomes a time they loathe rather than defining part of their lives. Capitalism alienates people from OTHER PEOPLE as work loses its community-building dimension. Capitalism alienates people from THEMSELVES, since work is hardly a time of creativity, imagination and dreams. And capitalism alienates people from NATURE, which they must despoil on the alter of profit.

For Marx, the goal of socialism would be to redefine labor:

It is to create a form of production and an organization of society in which man can overcome alienation from his product, from his work, from his fellow man, from himself, and from nature; in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the world. (Fromm, pp. 58-59)

Alienation and Environment

Undoubtedly, many environmentalists would perceive this discussion as so much philosophical drivel which has nothing to do with halting the destruction of life on this planet. To them, protecting the environment means passing a set of laws which halts the production of bad things and forces corporations to produce good things.

Such "non-social environmentalism" seriously errs in thinking that laws begin in legislative chambers. Laws can halt planetary destruction if and only if they rest upon fundamental social changes:

* First, there must be changes in the economic system which remove incentives for destructive production.

* Second, there must be a change in consciousness so that people desire to produce in harmony with nature.

* Third, there...