Scaling up democratic ownership: Adapting the employee ownership model to build truly democratic businesses

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The form of globalisation that has prevailed – one that primarily serves the interests of financial and corporate elites – is, to a large extent, a political and legal artefact, not an inevitable outcome of an increasingly interconnected global economy. More specifically, it is primarily attributable to the commodified nature of the business enterprise, which is essentially a human organisation but legally treated as a commodity in our economies.

Your book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism (2010), challenges the "neo-Tocqueville consensus" that the development of a vibrant civil society is always associated with liberal democracies. While an “associational boom” may well have a tendency towards creating more democracy, the book explores the consequences of political disorganisation at the state level and how "thick civic societies" – in some instances – can actually lead to authoritarian politics in the cases of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania.

Can you outline your core argument and explain why it suggests we should restructure our theoretical understanding of the relationship between civil society and regime outcomes? I.e., weak civil societies lead to totalitarianism, and strong civil societies lead to liberal democracy.

First of all, I want to paint the picture of the intellectual context in which I was writing at that time, as it was very different from where we are today. Peter Mair's Ruling the Void was based on articles published in the 2000s, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone was based on articles published in the mid-1990s. The discussion of civil society and the emergence of the Tocquevillian discourse, at this point, were really emerging out of the collapse of state socialism. This was associated with the ‘Fukuyama moment’, and with that came the idea that one of the fundamental problems was an over-focus on the economy and the state, on these realms of political action, and that actually what we needed to do was to think about civil society as the basis for establishing a good society. That played out in different ways across the political spectrum. By the 1990s, I would say that the consensus – seen particularly in the work of John Keane, for example – was that we were in this moment of ‘civil society against the state’.

The other point to make about The Civic Foundations of Fascism is that I'd initially started my research on the rise of Italian fascism but was struck by one point that was just inescapable – the empirical observation that fascism is fundamentally a phenomenon of the north and centre of the Italian peninsula. These were, if you think about Putnam's initial book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1994), exactly the regions and towns that he had said were the basis of associational life and vibrant civic and Republican forms of politics going back to the Middle Ages. By his account, this tradition of good government and civic activism continued right up until the late 1970s and early 1980s. But that's where fascism was most organised.

I started reading a very rich historical literature about associational life in these areas in Italy, and then I looked at the specifics of how Italian fascism as a party organised itself in relation to the largely agrarian, consumer, and producer co-operatives in those regions. It forced me to rethink the significance of the transition of the socialist co-operative milieu into early fascism, which is a characteristic of Italian fascism, and how, to a certain extent, that works to form the raw material for the party organisation.

I extended the framework of the book to explore this point about associational life in these different areas. I don't think The Civic Foundations of Fascism was an account of authoritarianism as such, because there are many factors that have produced authoritarianism, but it was an account of one of the central preconditions for the organisation of fascism, and particularly the organisation of the fascist party. Authoritarianism, as a broad basket of phenomena, should be distinguished from fascism, which requires a highly mobilised civil society.

Your book – The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession – traces the anti-political uprisings in the years following the financial crisis. As a period – from 2008-2022 – it exemplifies the shift to the “cheap affiliations” of the movement model that are mainly characterised by spontaneous – “gaseous” – responses to the shortfalls of our economic and political systems.

Can you explain why you call this period a “story of disorganisation” and also outline the historical preconditions – such as the deinstitutionalisation of politics and civil society – that inspired these particular responses to economic and political breakdown?

The first ambition with that part of the argument was to avoid moralising about why the approaches to the populist moment of the 2010s took the form they took. There’s often a sense in which you just have to attribute it to ideology or a fetish for horizontalism, which almost makes it a personal failing on behalf of certain organisations, or somehow accepts the idea that any institution which is hierarchical and authoritarian is undesirable. There were certainly ideological factors at play here – it’s not as if there were no horizontalists or anti-authoritarians, but at the same time, we were more interested in asking this question: what encouraged the prevalence of this ideology, or what were the factors that made it so plausible and so powerful at this point?

Review of Peter Mair's Ruling the Void

There seems to be no end to the interest in the decline or “death of democracy” and no lack of efforts to renew or reformulate it. But while we may no longer be in a period of political disengagement, the “hyper-politics” of the post-crash era seems to be markedly different from – and less effective than – the popular politics of the past. So what explains the changes in the nature of democratic participation across Europe over the last 50 years?

In Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy – originally published in 2013 and reissued last year by Verso – the late political scientist Peter Mair retraces the history of citizen and elite withdrawal from politics and the “void” that opened up between the electorate and the state. With a new separation between citizens and the state, this contemporary classic explores how institutional changes in party democracies would create the career vehicles and electoral machines we recognise today, and in turn, provoke a crisis of legitimacy that continues to undermine public trust in representative politics.

So, what caused the current separation between citizens and the political class? What implications does it have for efforts to rebuild democratic power in society? And do we have to accept that a post-popular democracy is the only option?