Four Season Produce transporter, Jeff Martin looks on as broccoli is inspected by a Glut worker-owner of this cooperative store, that serves the Mount Rainier, Maryland community, on Tuesday, March 3, 2015. (Photo: US Department of Agriculture / Flickr)
Yes, the Democrats, as Robert Reich recently wrote, need to transform from a corporate-powered party to a people-powered party. But what do people-powered institutions, which a people-powered party must fight for, actually look like?
The Democrats, for decades, have supported the social institutions of neoliberalism. They have upheld an economy owned by giant, highly centralized corporations, largely free from antitrust enforcement. And they have supported a government of technocratic managers who see their only legitimate roles as handing the public sector over to the private, corporate sector and tinkering with the rules of the corporate markets to try to create fairness around the edges of the corporate economy. All the while, the corporate economy drives further and further concentration of economic and political wealth and power.
Transforming the Democrats toward people power means abandoning these institutions of neoliberalism — a government that aids and abets corporate economic and political power — in favor of people-powered institutions.
People power means democracy. And democracy must be embedded within all of our society’s institutions, rather than only taking the form of a supposedly representative government that tries to regulate our society’s other non-democratic institutions. We need a new vision for democracy that extends to the economy and provides rights for all of us to participate in making the decisions that drive the…