Abstract
The bedrock problem of democracy is not the size of government or the nature of its institutions, though those are serious enough concerns, but rather the social class formation on which democracy is to be erected. In some sense a society of political equals must be a society of social equals: a “classless society.” Democracy in the political division of labor requires democracy, even if not absolutely, in the social division of labor, and democratic theory ought always to proceed on that foundation.
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Notes
See Malcolm Sawyer, “Income Distribution in O.E.C.D. Countries,” Occasional Studies (Paris: OECD, 1976), and John Stephens, The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980), Chapter 4.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), p. 81.
For a fuller discussion of the complicity of the state with private capital, see Philip Green, The Pursuit of Inequality (New York: Pantheon, 1981), pp. 227–237.
See, for example, Herbert C. Reid, “Appalachian Policy, The Corporate State, and American Values: A Critical Perspective,” Policy Studies Journal, 9 (1980–1981), pp. 622–633
Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978)
John Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1980). The definitive study of regional misallocation in capitalist societies is Stuart Holland, Capital Versus the Regions (London: Macmillan, 1976).
On “capital flight,” see Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, Capital and Communities: The Causes and Consequences of Private Disinvestment (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1980). See also Shutdown: Economic Dislocation and Equal Opportunity, a report prepared by the Illinois Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, June 1981. The study points out that capital flight also aggravates barriers of caste, as minorities suffer from its consequences disproportionately.
John Rawls’s attempt to establish his “Difference Principle” is an example of this difficulty. The Difference Principle, which, Rawls argues, would be adopted by us if we were all in “the original position” behind “the veil of ignorance,” holds that no inequality can be justified unless it also improves the position of the worst-off in society. The problem is that fairness and general utility are confounded in this principle, as a multitude of Rawls’s critics have shown. It is unclear—and seems to be necessarily unclear—whether the principle requires that the position of the worst-off be improved relative to that of the best-off, regardless of what happens to the latter; or that it be improved relative to their own position before the new inequality is introduced. In the first case we would be asserting some independent standard of distributive justice; but in the second we would only be asserting a principle of the maximization of general social utility, which the free-market conservative will also cheerfully embrace in the familiar guise of “trickle-down” theory. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), Chapter 11, Sec. 13, pp. 75–83.
And see the critiques of A Theory of Justice by Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)
Robert Paul Wolff, Understanding Rawls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977)
Especially the contributions of James Fishkin and Douglas Rae to “Justice: A Spectrum of Responses to John Rawls’s Theory,” American Political Science Review, LXIX (1975), pp. 615–647.
Robert M. Cook, “Work in the Construction Industry: A Report from the Field,” Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, 2 (1982), p. 230. Cook, who has been both an academic sociologist and (for many years) a construction worker, goes on to give this example: “The safe ironworker is more relaxed and able to concentrate on his job. If he’s protected by nets and doesn’t have to constantly hang on with his toes and worry about falling fifty feet he’s going to·have more energy to put into his work. I’ve watched ironworkers move about on open steel partly protected by nets. No matter how good they are, there is a perceptible change in their stride when they go from a netted to an unnetted area and back. Over the nets their pace is always faster and more confident.”
For an overview, see Carolyn Teich Adams and Katharyn Teich Winston, Mothers at Work (New York: Longman, 1980).
See the summary by Stephen J. Ross, Social Stratification in the United States (Baltimore: Social Graphics Company, 1979), pp. 27–28.
The term is from Peter Drucker, The Unseen Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1976).
Emma Rothschild, “Reagan and the Real America,” New York Review of Books, 28 (February 5, 1981), pp. 12–18.
See also Bob Kuttner, “Growth with Equity,” Working Papers, 8 (September–October 1981), pp. 32–43.
R. H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), p. 130.
See David Noble, America by Design (New York: Knopf, 1977)
Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977).
See also Stephen A. Marglin, “What Do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,” in The Review of Radical Political Economics, 6 (Summer 1974), 60–112
Ibid., p. 384. Cf. Robin Blackburn and Michael Mann, The Worker in the Labor Market (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 180, who note that 80 percent of several hundred workers studied by them in one job market “exercise less skill at work than they would if they drove to work. Indeed, most of them expend more mental effort and resourcefulness in getting to work than in doing their jobs.”
Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City Revisited (Boston: Little Brown, 1974), Chapter 3. For a critique of the erroneous notion that IQ testing has demonstrated the existence of variations in human “intelligence” that are both immense and innate, see Green, The Pursuit of Inequality, Chapters 2–4, and Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).
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© 2014 Philip Green
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Green, P. (2014). Prolegomena to a Democratic Theory of the Division of Labor. In: American Democracy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137381552_10
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