Current failings of democracy are the result of neoliberalism – in a world where people had real institutional power, they would be way more likely to become politically informed and exercise that power effectively

Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, “Taking Control: Arguing for Community Wealth Building,” The Case for Community Wealth Building, Polity Press 2020, non-paginated pdf.

Oscar Wilde, the author of The Soul of Man Under Socialism, understood well the relationship between economic institutions and the inner lives of those living under and within those institutions.35 He put his finger on one potential problem of more democratic forms of collective organisation when he famously quipped (although the attribution may be apocryphal) that ‘the problem with socialism is that it takes too many evenings’. In our terms, the worry would be that a more democratic economy might make unrealisable demands on the citizens who will be its participants. There are two responses to this Wildean line of critique; responses that are individually strong, and jointly decisive. The first is that one should not overestimate what would be required – not endless participation in economic decisionmaking by all of the people all of the time, but only participation by some of the people some of the time. Even extremely successful democratic enterprises such as Mondragón in Spain do not expect or require endless engagement by all worker-owners in every forum, only that there will be a spectrum of engagement sufficient for a critical level of participation.36

The other line of response is that, just as one should not overestimate what is required in citizens’ and workers’ participation in a more democratic economy, neither should one underestimate the capacities of one’s fellow citizens. When people have real power to affect matters that are central to their lives as economic agents, it would be entirely reasonable to expect a level of engagement much higher than what one could expect in contexts where people are powerless. And if there is a guiding idea behind ‘the institutional turn’ in the political economy of the left it is that we should not consider people’s motives and outlooks in isolation from the institutions that shape their lives, but think carefully about how such institutions create beliefs, motives, and perceptions. As with the previous objection, the most natural conclusion to draw from considering this line of possible critique of the democratic economy is that the biggest danger is excessive caution, and the most plausible policies will be those that create opportunities for the dispersal of real power to citizens and workers.