Anderson's Solutions

Anderson’s conclusion in chapter 10 argues that recovering the progressive work ethic can help revive democracy against neoliberalism through workplace democracy. By giving workers direct experience of codetermination and union governance, they will be “better informed and organized to revive democracy in their local, state, and national governments” (297). She justifies this through the success of postwar Scandinavia, where strong unions and codetermination correlated with robust civic participation and welfare states.

However, in chapter 9, in describing the failures of Marx’s material conditions predication, she writes that since the “proletariat itself is highly differentiated … it is hopeless to expect them to revolt as a unified body” (237). In fact, she goes on to describe Bernstein’s skepticism in democratically organized workers’ cooperatives, explaining that “once an enterprise grows large enough, it will need a hierarchy of offices to function effectively. This will generate heterogeneous interests among the workers. Managers will need the authority to make decisions that some workers will not like [and] worker-owned enterprises will still have all the same parochial interests that are in potential conflict with … any bourgeois business owner” (238). The exact reasons why Marx’s prediction of the collapse of class into wholly proletariats failed can be applied to why workplace democracy, even under joint management codetermination, fails victim to the same divergence of interests among individuals in the working class. While codetermination may have worked in Scandinavia, I am unsure whether those conditions can be paralleled in the United States. The fissured workplace she describes destroys the organizational infrastructure that made workplace democracy so politically successful and generative in Sweden, a smaller country with existing robust union infrastructure. Moreover, Scandinavian unions have direct pipelines into social democratic parties, something the US does not have at the same scale. 

In terms of her solutions, the Cherokee cash transfer study suggests giving people material resources first (decommodification) works, but wouldn’t political power be necessary to pass the policies that create decommodification? It seems like a chicken and egg problem where “decommodification requires a welfare state substantial enough,” but a robust welfare state requires democratic political power. She even acknowledges that the trend towards neoliberalism was through administrations like Reagan through Trump, meaning without political power, how would social insurance, the prerequisite for democratization, happen? 

Another problem is Anderson does call for updating codetermination, but she doesn’t really explain how. The workers who most need the civic empowerment she describes are probably those least reachable by the institutions she claims need to be strengthened. For example, an Amazon warehouse worker that’s classified as an independent contractor has no meaningful way into codetermination or unions. Her solution attempts to reconstruct a system that neoliberalism has already dismantled.