> But over time it consistently turns out that democracies are making consistently better decisions than the authoritarians. Similar to how liberty usually gets much better results but high-status people refuse to accept that the plebs can make decisions for themselves.
And still, corporations are mostly authoritarian, with top down decision making and big hierarchical structures. And worse, the majority of people are ok with this even if they champion democracy outside the workplace.
Most of us don't have a lot of influence in current democracies except by electing some representatives, but we do in the workplace, and there is where it's most restricted.
> And still, corporations are mostly authoritarian, with top down decision making and big hierarchical structures. And worse, the majority of people are ok with this even if they champion democracy outside the workplace.
Public corporations are imperfect representative democracies, if you keep in mind that the citizens are the shareholders, not the workers. You can reconcile both if the employees have a controlling stake in the corporation, either because they collectively have most shares, or because their shares have more voting weight. This is more or less the European social-liberal model. This is being torn down following neo-liberal ideology because there seem to be more money to be made on short-term stock trading than developing a company over the long term, and that the interests of employees and shareholders are badly misaligned. Also, these employee-owned corporations are vulnerable to profit-oriented, corner-cutting companies willing to jeopardise long-term stability to race to the bottom. So this needs a specific regulation framework to work at scale.
> You can reconcile both if the employees have a controlling stake in the corporation, either because they collectively have most shares, or because their shares have more voting weight. This is more or less the European social-liberal model.
Not really. This sort of model was an aim of many social-democratic (not social-liberal: those are the FDP in Germany, the Liberals/LibDems in the UK, etc.) parties before the neoliberal turn in the late 70s, but it was never actually achieved. Germany comes the closest: workers get 50%-1 board seats at large employers, but that's not the same as ownership.
I think the sense in which that counts as 'voting' (in the sense of a democratic political system) is only analogous in such a distant tenuous way that it is really a poor use of the word
There is a pretty big difference to an authoritarian state: Companies have to obey local laws that other people make, and they have to treat their employees good enough that they don't quit.
Once companies start making their own laws (by bribing officials) or when they treat employees like shit (because they don't have other options), then they are just as problematic as other autocracies.
Good, healthy corporations work together with the society, and while decisions are made top down, they are not made in a vacuum -- no corporation can decide that their employees need to work 7 days a week, when the local laws prevent that.
“Companies have to obey local laws that other people make, and they have to treat their employees good enough that they don't quit.”
This would be true if one person quitting meant anything other than a job opening and search for a fill. Having worked under terrible conditions, I can tell you the person they hire will have no idea why the previous person left. It might not take long for the new person to figure it out. But market realities tend to make it take months to years for that new person to then turn around head to a new position. Meanwhile this is all enough for bad management to claim success.
Companies only obey local laws in so far as the threat of prosecution is real. This threat is undermined way too easily.
It usually does apply to skilled labour, as the new worker will need to be trained to fill the position, with profit loss for the duration. Everything is a tradeoff.
> Once companies start making their own laws (by bribing officials) or when they treat employees like shit (because they don't have other options), then they are just as problematic as other autocracies.
I don't think it is as clear cut as you say. I think for example, that there is some lobbyism that is justified, in that they communicate with politicians in a way that can enable, say, innovation. But there's also lobbyism which might as well be called corruption. It doesn't seem obvious where exactly to draw the line here, so it is hard to conclude if and how problematic a company is.
> It doesn't seem obvious where exactly to draw the line here
In my opinion it's pretty clear: Lobbyism is okay as long as it is public and doesn't involve bribes. It's bad when it happens behind closed doors and involves either direct or indirect payments (eg. awarding contracts to friends of lawmakers).
This is only a problem for really big corporations (the ones that are too big to fail). But even then, in a dictatorship country the biggest corporations tend to be rife with corruption. This tends to hollow out the middle and make them unfit to compete without a guarantee of monopoly by the state.
It’s also not restricted to corporations. Look at the Russian military. It is a textbook case study of how years of corruption and nepotism can lead to a culture of abject incompetence and equipment decay. They can’t even provide bandages for their conscripts!
Technically you're free to buy a super yacht although funding that purchase might be a challenge.
Worker co-ops tend to do quite well once they're funded. They're not exactly prone to blowing up into unicorns (although there is e.g Mondragon) but their survival rate tends to be quite high. Suma wholefoods is an example of the resiliency of co-ops, they've basically totally discarded market based compensation rates in favour of a more ideologically driven, flatter model yet have been going strong for decades.
The problem is usually securing that funding in the first place. They seem to actually be more likely to pay off loans but less likely to get them. This is partly because banks generally want an individual to take responsibility for any loans and are uncomfortable with making a larger group collectively responsible. I suspect there's also a degree of prejudice against them because of the association with socialism even though they still operate in a market.
Equity is generally a difficult one as well as generally the members' control of a workers' co-op is derived from their ownership stakes. There are hybrid co-ops where some of the shares of the company are sold to external investors, but obviously this dilutes the model.
Worker co-ops have some success but require atypical financing to get off the ground which has limited the success of the sector.
Judging power structures by how often they turn into unicorns is nonsensical at best. The concept of a unicorn is exactly why you can't judge based on that. There have been so few co-op unicorns because there have ben so few co-ops, the fact that there has been at least one already is a statistical anomaly (because unicorns are statistical anomalies by definition)
Bureaucrats are not elected either. Most government workplaces are no more democratic than a corporation.
Democracy is probably a better macro-level organizational system, but on smaller scales having a chain of command and an executive function is a godsend. Anyone who’s ever been on a consensus driven committee can tell you how well democracy works on smaller projects.
Corporations have external pressures though. If a corporation is run in a manner that is inefficient, it tends to be overtaken by a different corporation that does better. Or the board gets involved and fires the boss and replaces them with someone who promises to do better.
Countries also have external pressures, and will also be overtaken by other counties if they become unfavorable market competitors. The only real difference is that corporations aren't top of the food chain, governments are.
Not really comparable as long as the corporations are still subject to market influence. Corporations that become so powerful they can ignore the wishes of their customers exhibit many of the same flaws as totalitarian governments.
I wonder how the average large corporation age compares to the average democracy age. Of course we can identify some outliers, but only because they are famously, exceptionally old.
The key savers of democracy/capitalism seems to me to be the free flow of information, as well as people in short-lived roles (to avoid single-mindedness), such that on average good decisions can be made at all levels. Strict hierarchies like militaries and corporations can have these properties (and do well) or not (and do poorly).
The whole liberty thing _needs_ to be enforced vigorously to stop someone perverting the system into a dictatorship. In corporate life employees have some liberties - often some degree of choice in their role, trying to get a job at a different company or switch career, etc. While in a role you may be relatively constrained but constraints are common with other commitments in life like marriage, raising children, leading a volunteer organisation in your spare time, etc.
Maybe the market is more democratic, but we still mostly work at corporations and have very little decision power over them. Plus, markets follow laws, and those we can't influence much either.
When optimising one constraint, dictators work great. Democracy + Capitalism is a two tiered system - the we set up lots of dictators in competition, work out which ones are good at what constraint, then allocate resources among the dictators based on the complex machinery of markets and voting.
We want corporations to be dictatorial. We're simulating dictatorships when we need single-minded focus. It just doesn't work for government because you get people who forget to grow food.
And still, corporations are mostly authoritarian, with top down decision making and big hierarchical structures. And worse, the majority of people are ok with this even if they champion democracy outside the workplace.
Most of us don't have a lot of influence in current democracies except by electing some representatives, but we do in the workplace, and there is where it's most restricted.