Economic democracy is key to real freedom

From the Editors
The American people have always held high the ideal of democracy, and fought and died for it. From the American Revolution and the abolition of slavery after the Civil War, to the Civil Rights struggles for voting and other rights, people were led by the vision of the democratic rule of ‘we the people.’ Yet despite the aspirations and the bravery of generations of visionaries—who have indeed won many triumphs—true democracy’s promise has not been fulfilled. Instead, we see many of the rights we fought and died for stripped away.
The recent Supreme Court decision striking down a key part of the Voting Rights Act eliminates many of these hard-won rights. Detroit and other cities and towns in Michigan have come under ‘Emergency Manager’ dictatorships, whole local governments thrown out and replaced by non-elected corporate interests. Schools are being shut down and teachers fired in a push to privatize education. The Supreme Court and the Citizens United decisions have given the rights of citizens to corporations—‘corporate personhood’—and the corporations the right to buy elections, while stripping individuals of Fourth Amendment privacy rights, changing the laws to allow indefinite detention, stripping the right not to self-incriminate, and many other reversals. We are seeing the rise of fascism—the takeover of the government by the corporations.
Fascism arises from the changes in the economy and the needs of the rulers. A growing mass of workers, thrown out of the economic system by vast labor-replacing technologies based on automation and computers, are dispossessed and disenfranchised. These workers and former workers can no longer depend on selling their labor to get what they need to survive. The capitalist class can’t allow democracy under these conditions, or the politicians that don’t represent the people’s interests would be voted out of office. Even the limited form of democracy of the past period, when politicians of both parties represented the same exploiting class, is being dismantled.
The bottom line is that there can’t be political democracy without economic democracy. Whoever controls your bread and butter controls you. People are waking up to the fact that they are going to have to fight to be in control of the means of their survival.
Only with an economic system that no longer depends on exploitation can we fulfill the promise of democracy—a cooperative society based on distribution ‘according to need,’ collective control over the necessities of life. This will be the fulfillment of the dream of the ages, and of the demands of the movement on all fronts of today’s struggles.
The many struggles today are actually a struggle for the bigger picture, to gain control over what sustains us, led by a vision of what kind of a society and world we need. The struggles of people for education, health care and housing, the gatherings of people in the upcoming Democracy Convention in Madison WI, the Occupy Gathering in Kalamazoo MI, and the Washington DC rally to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, are all expressions of people’s desire to come together around this broader vision of democracy and social transformation.