Rejecting socialism, the welfare state, and neo- conservative laissez-faire, the author discerns emerging social market strategies that promise to serve the commongood. Gary Dorrien Beyond State and Market: Christianity and the Future of Economic Democracy For the past century, Christian theologians have dreamed of a trans formed economic order. From the social gospel progressivism of Shailer Mathews and Francis Peabody to the social gospel socialism of Walter Rauschenbusch and George Herron to the Anglican social democracy of William Temple and Charles Raven to the neo-Marxism of Paul Tillich and the early Reinhold Niebuhr to the Catholic socialism of Jo hannes Metz and Daniel Maguire to the liberation theologies of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Rosemary Ruether, James Cone and many others, most of this century's major theologians have called for morally defensible alterna tives to capitalism. 1 This yearning has been shared even by numerous conservative theologians, including the major voices of neoorthodox theology. Karl Barth was a lifelong democratic socialist; more stridently than Barth, Emil Brunner argued inThe Divine Imperative (1932) that modern capitalism "is contrary to the spirit of service; it is debased and irresponsible; indeed we may go further and say it is irresponsibility developed into a system." 2 It is thus a truism, as Michael Novak often laments, that in its pol itics modern Christian theology has been predominantly a democratic socialist tradition. But at the end of a century that began with ringing GARY DORRIENis a professor of religious studies and chair of humanities at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Mich. His fifth book, Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal ofAmerican Social Christianity, will be published this year by Fortress Press. 184 CROSS CURRENTS
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social gospel hopes for a new cooperative commonwealth how much
is left of this vision How much of the vision of a democratized social
order can be saved or reconstructed in a political culture in which so
cialism mostly conjures up repulsive images of state authoritarianismWas Niebuhr right in his later judgment that welfare state capitalism is
the best attainable system of political economy How is it possible to
reclaim the social Christian vision of democratized economic power at
a time when corporate capitalism has become globalized
Neoconservatives reply that the time has come to give up on the
social Christian commitment to economic democracy Robert Benne pro
claims for example that Christian ethicists should rather turn their
attention to the possibilities for justice within liberal capitalism 3 Nie
buhrs neoconservative orphans have been especially insistent that the
death of Communism bears fatal implications for contemporary Chris
tian ethics Max Stackhouse and Dennis McCann argue that it was a
mistake for Christian ethicists to commit modern Christianity to a poli
tics of democracy hu ma n rights and democratic socialism because the
future will not bring what contemporary theology said it would and
should4 In their view the verdict of history has come down not only
against the Communist mistake but against even the forms of demo
cratic socialism that militantly opposed Communism Socialism is dead
and with its death lies the end of modern theologys attempt to give it
a human face
For neoconservatives the project that remains for Christian social
ethics is to apply the chastening lessons of Niebuhrian realism to the
economic order Neoconservatives such as Novak disavow the social
Christian project of breaking down existing concentrations of economic
power Though Niebuhr failed to press his political realism into a
critique of social democratic economics Novak believes that neocon-
servatism completes this essential Niebuhrian task by breaking entirelywith the liberal Christian tradition of economic democracy
Niebuhr did not give much attention to economic issues Precisely inNiebuhrs neglect I found my own vocation Surely I thought the nextgeneration of Niebuhrians ought to push some of Niebuhrs deeperinsights into the one major area he neglected5
Novaks assumption of this neglected task has drawn him deeply
into the American political Right where in the 1980s he became a
Reagan supporter and a chief mythologist of American capitalism To
apply Niebuhrs realism to the economic realm he claims is to relinquish the social Christian dream of democratizing economic power
seemingly indispensable conceptual framework and vocabulary formuch of modern Christian social thought progressive Christianity isnot unavoidably beholden to the dubious ideology of socialism9 Progressive Christianity and democratic socialism arose at the same timeand often together sharing similar impulses and moral commitmentsBut at the end of a century in which socialism conjures up at best theimage of an overextended paternalistic welfare state how much of thelong-cherished Christian socialist vision should Christian ethicists seekto redeem How much is left of the dream of economic democracy
Many theorists point to some version of Oscar Langes market socialist model In the 1930s Lange tried to show that market mechanismsand incentives could be integrated into socialist theory He argued thata large state sector could coexist with and benefit from the pricing andmarket discipline of a private sector of small enterprises In his proposal state planners would simulate and be instructed by the privatesectors pricing system The crucial problem with this scheme howeveris that it retained a highly centralized and collectivist conception of therole of the state Though he granted a larger role for the market thantraditional state socialism Lange still had centralized planners tryingto replicate the innumerable and enormously complex pricing decisionsof markets mdash a task exceeding the competence time constraints andknowledge of any conceivable planning board Langean-style blueprintsfor market socialism invariably founder on this fundamental problem10 Though a considerable degree of state planning is inevitable inany industrial or postindustrial society mdash especially in economic markets where long-term planning is imperative mdash the purpose of economicdemocracy should not be to expand state intervention but to democratize the base of economic power If progressive Christianity is to reclaimits long-held vision of economic democracy I believe that it must turnnot to a Langean-type command model but to the kind of decentralizedmixed-model strategy promoted by Temple
In this perspective the common project for progressive social movements is to expand the modern democratic revolution by democratizingsocial and economic power In a postmodern social context howeverit is not enough for this project to focus on either the workplace orelectoral issues The effort to democratize power must take place notonly at the point of production (as in Marxism) or in the electoralarena (as in liberalism) but also in the postindustrial community or
living place where people struggle to attain sufficient health carechild care housing a clean environment and healthy neighborhoods It
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
social gospel hopes for a new cooperative commonwealth how much
is left of this vision How much of the vision of a democratized social
order can be saved or reconstructed in a political culture in which so
cialism mostly conjures up repulsive images of state authoritarianismWas Niebuhr right in his later judgment that welfare state capitalism is
the best attainable system of political economy How is it possible to
reclaim the social Christian vision of democratized economic power at
a time when corporate capitalism has become globalized
Neoconservatives reply that the time has come to give up on the
social Christian commitment to economic democracy Robert Benne pro
claims for example that Christian ethicists should rather turn their
attention to the possibilities for justice within liberal capitalism 3 Nie
buhrs neoconservative orphans have been especially insistent that the
death of Communism bears fatal implications for contemporary Chris
tian ethics Max Stackhouse and Dennis McCann argue that it was a
mistake for Christian ethicists to commit modern Christianity to a poli
tics of democracy hu ma n rights and democratic socialism because the
future will not bring what contemporary theology said it would and
should4 In their view the verdict of history has come down not only
against the Communist mistake but against even the forms of demo
cratic socialism that militantly opposed Communism Socialism is dead
and with its death lies the end of modern theologys attempt to give it
a human face
For neoconservatives the project that remains for Christian social
ethics is to apply the chastening lessons of Niebuhrian realism to the
economic order Neoconservatives such as Novak disavow the social
Christian project of breaking down existing concentrations of economic
power Though Niebuhr failed to press his political realism into a
critique of social democratic economics Novak believes that neocon-
servatism completes this essential Niebuhrian task by breaking entirelywith the liberal Christian tradition of economic democracy
Niebuhr did not give much attention to economic issues Precisely inNiebuhrs neglect I found my own vocation Surely I thought the nextgeneration of Niebuhrians ought to push some of Niebuhrs deeperinsights into the one major area he neglected5
Novaks assumption of this neglected task has drawn him deeply
into the American political Right where in the 1980s he became a
Reagan supporter and a chief mythologist of American capitalism To
apply Niebuhrs realism to the economic realm he claims is to relinquish the social Christian dream of democratizing economic power
seemingly indispensable conceptual framework and vocabulary formuch of modern Christian social thought progressive Christianity isnot unavoidably beholden to the dubious ideology of socialism9 Progressive Christianity and democratic socialism arose at the same timeand often together sharing similar impulses and moral commitmentsBut at the end of a century in which socialism conjures up at best theimage of an overextended paternalistic welfare state how much of thelong-cherished Christian socialist vision should Christian ethicists seekto redeem How much is left of the dream of economic democracy
Many theorists point to some version of Oscar Langes market socialist model In the 1930s Lange tried to show that market mechanismsand incentives could be integrated into socialist theory He argued thata large state sector could coexist with and benefit from the pricing andmarket discipline of a private sector of small enterprises In his proposal state planners would simulate and be instructed by the privatesectors pricing system The crucial problem with this scheme howeveris that it retained a highly centralized and collectivist conception of therole of the state Though he granted a larger role for the market thantraditional state socialism Lange still had centralized planners tryingto replicate the innumerable and enormously complex pricing decisionsof markets mdash a task exceeding the competence time constraints andknowledge of any conceivable planning board Langean-style blueprintsfor market socialism invariably founder on this fundamental problem10 Though a considerable degree of state planning is inevitable inany industrial or postindustrial society mdash especially in economic markets where long-term planning is imperative mdash the purpose of economicdemocracy should not be to expand state intervention but to democratize the base of economic power If progressive Christianity is to reclaimits long-held vision of economic democracy I believe that it must turnnot to a Langean-type command model but to the kind of decentralizedmixed-model strategy promoted by Temple
In this perspective the common project for progressive social movements is to expand the modern democratic revolution by democratizingsocial and economic power In a postmodern social context howeverit is not enough for this project to focus on either the workplace orelectoral issues The effort to democratize power must take place notonly at the point of production (as in Marxism) or in the electoralarena (as in liberalism) but also in the postindustrial community or
living place where people struggle to attain sufficient health carechild care housing a clean environment and healthy neighborhoods It
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
seemingly indispensable conceptual framework and vocabulary formuch of modern Christian social thought progressive Christianity isnot unavoidably beholden to the dubious ideology of socialism9 Progressive Christianity and democratic socialism arose at the same timeand often together sharing similar impulses and moral commitmentsBut at the end of a century in which socialism conjures up at best theimage of an overextended paternalistic welfare state how much of thelong-cherished Christian socialist vision should Christian ethicists seekto redeem How much is left of the dream of economic democracy
Many theorists point to some version of Oscar Langes market socialist model In the 1930s Lange tried to show that market mechanismsand incentives could be integrated into socialist theory He argued thata large state sector could coexist with and benefit from the pricing andmarket discipline of a private sector of small enterprises In his proposal state planners would simulate and be instructed by the privatesectors pricing system The crucial problem with this scheme howeveris that it retained a highly centralized and collectivist conception of therole of the state Though he granted a larger role for the market thantraditional state socialism Lange still had centralized planners tryingto replicate the innumerable and enormously complex pricing decisionsof markets mdash a task exceeding the competence time constraints andknowledge of any conceivable planning board Langean-style blueprintsfor market socialism invariably founder on this fundamental problem10 Though a considerable degree of state planning is inevitable inany industrial or postindustrial society mdash especially in economic markets where long-term planning is imperative mdash the purpose of economicdemocracy should not be to expand state intervention but to democratize the base of economic power If progressive Christianity is to reclaimits long-held vision of economic democracy I believe that it must turnnot to a Langean-type command model but to the kind of decentralizedmixed-model strategy promoted by Temple
In this perspective the common project for progressive social movements is to expand the modern democratic revolution by democratizingsocial and economic power In a postmodern social context howeverit is not enough for this project to focus on either the workplace orelectoral issues The effort to democratize power must take place notonly at the point of production (as in Marxism) or in the electoralarena (as in liberalism) but also in the postindustrial community or
living place where people struggle to attain sufficient health carechild care housing a clean environment and healthy neighborhoods It
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
seemingly indispensable conceptual framework and vocabulary formuch of modern Christian social thought progressive Christianity isnot unavoidably beholden to the dubious ideology of socialism9 Progressive Christianity and democratic socialism arose at the same timeand often together sharing similar impulses and moral commitmentsBut at the end of a century in which socialism conjures up at best theimage of an overextended paternalistic welfare state how much of thelong-cherished Christian socialist vision should Christian ethicists seekto redeem How much is left of the dream of economic democracy
Many theorists point to some version of Oscar Langes market socialist model In the 1930s Lange tried to show that market mechanismsand incentives could be integrated into socialist theory He argued thata large state sector could coexist with and benefit from the pricing andmarket discipline of a private sector of small enterprises In his proposal state planners would simulate and be instructed by the privatesectors pricing system The crucial problem with this scheme howeveris that it retained a highly centralized and collectivist conception of therole of the state Though he granted a larger role for the market thantraditional state socialism Lange still had centralized planners tryingto replicate the innumerable and enormously complex pricing decisionsof markets mdash a task exceeding the competence time constraints andknowledge of any conceivable planning board Langean-style blueprintsfor market socialism invariably founder on this fundamental problem10 Though a considerable degree of state planning is inevitable inany industrial or postindustrial society mdash especially in economic markets where long-term planning is imperative mdash the purpose of economicdemocracy should not be to expand state intervention but to democratize the base of economic power If progressive Christianity is to reclaimits long-held vision of economic democracy I believe that it must turnnot to a Langean-type command model but to the kind of decentralizedmixed-model strategy promoted by Temple
In this perspective the common project for progressive social movements is to expand the modern democratic revolution by democratizingsocial and economic power In a postmodern social context howeverit is not enough for this project to focus on either the workplace orelectoral issues The effort to democratize power must take place notonly at the point of production (as in Marxism) or in the electoralarena (as in liberalism) but also in the postindustrial community or
living place where people struggle to attain sufficient health carechild care housing a clean environment and healthy neighborhoods It
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
seemingly indispensable conceptual framework and vocabulary formuch of modern Christian social thought progressive Christianity isnot unavoidably beholden to the dubious ideology of socialism9 Progressive Christianity and democratic socialism arose at the same timeand often together sharing similar impulses and moral commitmentsBut at the end of a century in which socialism conjures up at best theimage of an overextended paternalistic welfare state how much of thelong-cherished Christian socialist vision should Christian ethicists seekto redeem How much is left of the dream of economic democracy
Many theorists point to some version of Oscar Langes market socialist model In the 1930s Lange tried to show that market mechanismsand incentives could be integrated into socialist theory He argued thata large state sector could coexist with and benefit from the pricing andmarket discipline of a private sector of small enterprises In his proposal state planners would simulate and be instructed by the privatesectors pricing system The crucial problem with this scheme howeveris that it retained a highly centralized and collectivist conception of therole of the state Though he granted a larger role for the market thantraditional state socialism Lange still had centralized planners tryingto replicate the innumerable and enormously complex pricing decisionsof markets mdash a task exceeding the competence time constraints andknowledge of any conceivable planning board Langean-style blueprintsfor market socialism invariably founder on this fundamental problem10 Though a considerable degree of state planning is inevitable inany industrial or postindustrial society mdash especially in economic markets where long-term planning is imperative mdash the purpose of economicdemocracy should not be to expand state intervention but to democratize the base of economic power If progressive Christianity is to reclaimits long-held vision of economic democracy I believe that it must turnnot to a Langean-type command model but to the kind of decentralizedmixed-model strategy promoted by Temple
In this perspective the common project for progressive social movements is to expand the modern democratic revolution by democratizingsocial and economic power In a postmodern social context howeverit is not enough for this project to focus on either the workplace orelectoral issues The effort to democratize power must take place notonly at the point of production (as in Marxism) or in the electoralarena (as in liberalism) but also in the postindustrial community or
living place where people struggle to attain sufficient health carechild care housing a clean environment and healthy neighborhoods It
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
seemingly indispensable conceptual framework and vocabulary formuch of modern Christian social thought progressive Christianity isnot unavoidably beholden to the dubious ideology of socialism9 Progressive Christianity and democratic socialism arose at the same timeand often together sharing similar impulses and moral commitmentsBut at the end of a century in which socialism conjures up at best theimage of an overextended paternalistic welfare state how much of thelong-cherished Christian socialist vision should Christian ethicists seekto redeem How much is left of the dream of economic democracy
Many theorists point to some version of Oscar Langes market socialist model In the 1930s Lange tried to show that market mechanismsand incentives could be integrated into socialist theory He argued thata large state sector could coexist with and benefit from the pricing andmarket discipline of a private sector of small enterprises In his proposal state planners would simulate and be instructed by the privatesectors pricing system The crucial problem with this scheme howeveris that it retained a highly centralized and collectivist conception of therole of the state Though he granted a larger role for the market thantraditional state socialism Lange still had centralized planners tryingto replicate the innumerable and enormously complex pricing decisionsof markets mdash a task exceeding the competence time constraints andknowledge of any conceivable planning board Langean-style blueprintsfor market socialism invariably founder on this fundamental problem10 Though a considerable degree of state planning is inevitable inany industrial or postindustrial society mdash especially in economic markets where long-term planning is imperative mdash the purpose of economicdemocracy should not be to expand state intervention but to democratize the base of economic power If progressive Christianity is to reclaimits long-held vision of economic democracy I believe that it must turnnot to a Langean-type command model but to the kind of decentralizedmixed-model strategy promoted by Temple
In this perspective the common project for progressive social movements is to expand the modern democratic revolution by democratizingsocial and economic power In a postmodern social context howeverit is not enough for this project to focus on either the workplace orelectoral issues The effort to democratize power must take place notonly at the point of production (as in Marxism) or in the electoralarena (as in liberalism) but also in the postindustrial community or
living place where people struggle to attain sufficient health carechild care housing a clean environment and healthy neighborhoods It
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
locally defined areas of need such as housing soft-energy hardware
infrastructure maintenance and mass transit
Beyond Cooperative Ownership
The crucial task for any large-scale project in economic democracy
would be to construct an appropriate mix of cooperative and mutual
fund forms of ownership There are serious reasons why a politics
of merely expanding the cooperative sector is not enough Because
they prohibit nonworking shareholders cooperatives generally attract
less outside financing than capitalist firms because they are commit
ted to keeping low-return firms in operation cooperatives tend to stay
in business long after they become unable to pay competitive wages
because cooperatives are committed to particular communities cooper
ative capital and labor are less mobile than corporate capital and labor
because they maximize net income per worker rather than profits co
operatives tend to favor capital intensive investments over job creation
because cooperative workerowners often have all of their savings in
vested in a single enterprise they are often disinclined to invest in
risk-taking innovations All of these problems can be mitigated to some
extent with productivity-enhancing tax incentives and regulations but
all of them pose trade-offs that inhere in any cooperative strategy It
seems instructive to keep in mind that the same problems inhere in
any serious strategy to promote environmentally sustainable develop
ment In a world in which the pursuit of unlimited economic growth
has brought about the prospect of utter ecological disaster worker own
ership offers the beginning of an alternative not only to the capitalist
modes of production and distribution but also to the capitalist fan
tasy of unlimited growth The kind of economic development that does
not harm the earths environment will require a dramatically expanded
cooperative sector consisting of worker-owned firms that are rooted
in communities committed to survival and prepared to accept lower
returns
This is not to write off the fundamental problems of external finance
innovation and social justice however Worker ownership increases
economic risks to workers and it privileges workers in more profitable
sectors Moreover workersowners in successful firms are often biased
toward capital-intensive (rather than job-creating) investments because
they dont want to dilute their profits-per-existing-worker ratios The
problem of capitalization can be mitigated to some extent by institutinginternal capital accounts mdash such as Mondragoacuten s retirement accounts mdash
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
which facilitate reinvestment of savings and enable workerowners toplan for the long term Tax incentives and regulations promoting jobexpansion reinvestment innovation and bank lending to cooperativescan also help cooperative firms succeed even by capitalist standards ofsuccess
But expanding the cooperative sector is not enough The most successful experiment in cooperative ownership reveals why other formsof decentralized democratic control are needed Mondragoacuten succeedsbecause it imposes fairly high borrowing fees upon its new membersworkers have to buy their way into the cooperatives As noted thisapproach excludes less driven less risk-taking members It is capable
of producing highly successful cooperative enterprises but it addressesonly a part of the problem of distributive justice To address the distributive problem by universalizing the cooperative approach wouldnegate the source of Mondragoacutens success since a universal Mondragoacutenwould be unable to impose high entry fees If everyone had to belongto a Mondragoacuten-style cooperative many of them would fail and thenthe state would be forced back into its familiar capitalist role of socializing the economys losses Economic democracy requires a governmentthat supports cooperative initiatives but economic democracy cannot
succeed by requiring workers to join themThe trend in modern economic democracy theory is therefore toward
mutual fund (or public bank) models of decentralized social ownershipMutual fund models typically establish competing holding companiesin which ownership of productive capital is vested The holding companies lend capital to enterprises at market rates of interest and otherwisecontrol the process of investment including decision-making power toinitiate new cooperatives and shut down unprofitable enterprises Theholding companies are generally owned by equity shareholders the
state or other cooperatives The most extensive project undertaken inthis area thus far has been the Meidner Plan in Sweden Rudolf Meid-ner is a pioneering economist in the field of collective capital sharingand control whose proposal in modified form was enacted in 1982 bythe Social Democratic government in Sweden The plan called for anannual 20-percent tax on major company profits to be paid in the formof stock to eight regional mutual funds The funds are controlled byworker consumer and government representatives As their proportionof stock ownership grows these groups are collectively entitled to rep
resentation on company boards Voting rights of the employee sharesare jointly held by locals and branch funds In the compromised form
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
Social market strategies offer a third way between the systems of thecompetitive market and the state Under capitalism businesses are notstructured to be fully accountable to their constituencies and surrounding communities nor are they self-regulating nor are they chartered tooperate in the public interest Capitalist enterprises are driven by thelaws of the competitive market to maximize profit while leaving the social and environmental ravages of market economics to the state It isgovernment that is left with the task of regulating or coping with environmental destruction corporate monopolies consumer exploitationdeserted cities unemployment cycles of inflation and recession speculation corporate debt and maldistributed wealth mdash all in addition to its
responsibilities in the areas of national defense protection of propertyand civil rights infrastructure maintenance and educationWhile accepting that both the state and market perform indispens
able functions in a dynamic society social market strategies seek toexpand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems Producer cooperativestake labor out of the market by removing corporate shares from thestock market and maintaining local worker ownership community landtrusts take land out of the market and place it under local democratic
controls to serve the economic or cultural needs of communities community finance corporations take democratic control over capital tofinance cooperative firms make investments in areas of social need andfight the redlining policies of conventional banks21 To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies wouldwork on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them The social vision of economic democracy canonly take shape over the course of several decades as hard-won socialgains and the cultivation of cooperative habits and knowledge build the
groundwork for a better societySuch a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particu
lar economic model it does not rest upon illusions about human natureit does not envision a transformed humanity Niebuhrs epigrammatic
justification of democracy will suffice for economic democracy Thehuman capacity for justice makes democracy possible but the humaninclination to injustice makes democracy necessary Niebuhr did notdeny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuinefeelings of compassion and solidarity but to him it was evident that all
such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives Thecrucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtu-
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
7 Gustavo Gutieacuterrez The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll NY Orbis Books
1983) 37-38 45-46
8 William Temple Christianity and the Social Order (Middlesex Penguin Books 1942)
101 see Temple The Hope of a New World (New York Macmillan 1941) 54-599 For discussions of this problem see Dorrien The Democratic Socialist Vision 15
Dorrien Reconstructing the Common Good vii
10 Cf Oskar Lange and F M Taylor On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York
McGraw-Hill 1964 copy1931)
11 Cf Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld When Workers Decide Workplace Democ
racy Takes Root in America (Philadelphia New Society Publishers 1991) Eileen McCarthy
and Corey Rosen Employee Ownership in the Grocery Industry (Oakland National Center
for Employee Ownership May 1987) Corey Rosen Katherine Klein and Karen Young
Employee Ownership in America The Equity Solution (Lexington Mass Lexington Books
1986) Michael Quarrey Joseph Raphael Blasi and Corey Rosen Taking Stock Employee
Ownership at Work (Cambridge Mass Ballinger Publishing 1986)12 On Mondragoacuten see H Thomas and Chris Logan Mondragoacuten An Economic Analy
sis (London Allen and Unwin 1982) William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte
Making Mondragoacuten The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca
NY ILR Press NYSSILR 1988) K Bradley and A Gelb Co-operation at Work The Mon
dragoacuten Experience (London Heinemann Educational Books 1983) R Oakeshott The Case
for Workers Co-ops (London Routledge and Kegan Paul 1978) Terry Mollner Mondragoacuten
A Third Way (Shutesbury Mass Trusteeship Institute 1984)
13 Quoted in Len Krimerman and Frank Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace
Democracy in the United States Taking Stock of an Emerging Movement Socialism
and Democracy (September 1990) 117 cf Joyce Rothschild and J Allen Whitt The Co
operative Workplace Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation(Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1989)
14 Cf Joseph R Blasi Employee Ownership Revolution or Ripoff (New York Harper
Business 1988) 189-219
15 Cf Krimerman and Lindenfeld Contemporary Workplace Democracy in the
United States 113-26 Blasi Employee Ownership 189-251 Thomas H Naylor Redefin
ing Corporate Motivation Swedish Style The Christian Century (May 30June 6 1990)
566-70
16 On the concept of membership rights see Ota Sik For a Humane Economic De
mocracy trans Fred Eidlin and William Graf (New York Praeger Publishers 1985) Sik
proposes that worker-owned capital could be owned collectively and that all workers
could become members of internal democratically managed assets management andenterprise management associations See also the working paper of Ann Arbor Demo
cratic Socialists of America Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth (Ann Arbor Mich
Ann Arbor DSA 1983)
17 Cf Rudolf Meidner A Swedish Union Proposal for Collective Capital Sharing
in Nancy Lieber ed Eurosocialism and America Political Economy for the 1980s (Philadel
phia Temple University Press 1982) Meidner Employee Investment Funds An Approach
to Collective Capital Formation (London George Allen amp Unwin 1978) Jonas Pontusson
Radicalization and Retreat in Swedish Social Democracy New Left Review (September
October 1987) 5-33
18 See especially Alec Nove The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London Allen amp Un
win 1983) Nove Socialism Economics and Development (London Allen amp Unwin 1986)David Miller Market State and Community Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Ox-
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association
As an ATLAS user you may print download or send articles for individual useaccording to fair use as defined by US and international copyright law and asotherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement
No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without thecopyright holder(s) express written permission Any use decompilingreproduction or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be aviolation of copyright law
This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permissionfrom the copyright holder(s) The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journaltypically is the journal owner who also may own the copyright in each article Howeverfor certain articles the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the articlePlease contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specificwork for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or coveredby your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement For information regarding thecopyright holder(s) please refer to the copyright information in the journal if availableor contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s)
About ATLAS
The ATLA Serials (ATLASreg) collection contains electronic versions of previouslypublished religion and theology journals reproduced with permission The ATLAScollection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association(ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc
The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the AmericanTheological Library Association