To what extent do markets pose a threat to democracy - Essay Example

While accepting that both the state and market perform indispensable functions in a dynamic society, social market strategies seek to expand and create new social sectors that belong to neither the competitive market nor the regulative state systems. Producer cooperatives take labor out f the market by removing corporate shares from the stock market and maintaining local worker ownership; community land trusts take land out f the market and place it under local democratic controls to serve the economic or cultural needs f communities; community finance corporations take democratic control over capital to finance cooperative firms, make investments in areas f social need, and fight the redlining policies f conventional banks.

(Bruyn 1-7) To struggle for economic democracy is not to presume that social market strategies would work on a large scale if they were imposed next year on a political culture unprepared for them. The social vision f economic democracy can only take shape over the course f several decades, as hard-won social gains and the cultivation f cooperative habits and knowledge build the groundwork for a better society. Such a project does not call for large-scale investments in any particular economic model; it does not rest upon illusions about human nature; it does not envision a transformed humanity.

Niebuhr's epigrammatic justification f democracy will suffice for economic democracy: The human capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but the human inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. Niebuhr did not deny that the human capacity for fairness is often moved by genuine feelings f compassion and solidarity, but to him it was evident that all such feelings are mixed in human nature with more selfish motives. The crucial point was that democracy is necessary precisely because virtually everyone is selfish.

Because human beings are so easily corrupted by the attainment f power, Niebuhr argued, democracy is necessary as a restraint on greed and the human proclivity to dominate others. By the time he wrote the book that elaborated this argument, Niebuhr was no longer inclined to press the argument as a case for economic democracy. The Children f Light and the Children f Darkness was written in 1944, several years after Niebuhr gave up on Marxism and only a few years before he formally rejected Christian socialism.

During these few years, when he tentatively held out for a socialism stripped f its Marxist illusions, he did not explore the possibilities f a politics that democratized and decentralized economic power. For Niebuhr, socialism meant economic nationalization, state economic planning, and production for use. To him, there were only three serious possibilities: free market capitalism, state socialism, and New Deal liberalism. Throughout the 1930s, while America's welfare state was being constructed, Niebuhr ridiculed and denounced it with unqualified contempt.

A decade later, having renounced his Marxism, he made his peace with Roosevelt's liberal reformism and