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Democracy at Work

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the institutionalization of democratic codetermination, — location: 186 ^ref-52172

wage workers are not free (other than formally, legalistically) because to live even minimally, they must work for others. They must sell their labor power to those who own the means of production in order to survive. — location: 291 ^ref-26189

Like any social system long exempted from criticism and debate, the capitalist system deteriorated behind its protective wall of celebration. — location: 342 ^ref-45367

the growth of wealth in some parts of the world goes hand in hand with the growth of poverty in others. — location: 373 ^ref-42153

when the Great Depression hit in 1929, the average US family had debts roughly equal to 30 percent of its annual income. In 2007, according to the Federal Reserve, the comparable number was well over 100 percent. — location: 625 ^ref-21364

this focus on the state as the rogue, disruptive part of the entire system has long attracted those who, for various reasons, cannot bear to question, criticize, or even debate changing the capitalist system as a whole. — location: 687 ^ref-37549

Capitalist societies can continue to monitor, identify, regulate, and prosecute economic misdeeds, but doing so never will prevent cycles and crises. It never has. Overcoming the systemic roots and nature of capitalist crises requires a change in the economic system. — location: 705 ^ref-9109

capitalists rarely oppose government intervention per se—even though they like to say so to stave off unwanted kinds of government intervention. What they want—and what they embrace en masse—is other kinds of government intervention. They want the government to facilitate their profitable activities, clean up the periodic economic messes they make, keep them firmly in charge of finance and credit, and make the general public, rather than the financial industry, pay the huge costs of all that. — location: 955 ^ref-42266

The term capitalism applies to all three possible situations because the internal organization of productive enterprises is the same in each of them: production is organized such that hired workers produce surpluses appropriated and distributed by people other than themselves, employers who are either private or state capitalists. — location: 1068 ^ref-44557

some capitalists come to internalize the system’s rules and imperatives. They define themselves and mold their personalities in conformity with the behaviors imposed on them as capitalists. — location: 1218 ^ref-31861

From the standpoint of surplus analysis, what defines an economic system—for example, capitalism—is not primarily how productive resources are owned nor how resources and products are distributed. Rather, the key definitional dimension is the organization of production. — location: 1353 ^ref-22223

even if such reforms are achieved (as they were by the mass struggles of the CIO, socialists, and communists in the 1930s), they will remain insecure and reversible so long as nothing is done about the workers’ subordination to capitalists. — location: 1491 ^ref-35378

Slaves had finally to become their own masters to move society beyond the inhumanity, inequality, and indignity of slavery. Wage and salary earners have likewise to become their own directors, to move society beyond the inhumanity, inequality, and indignity of capitalism in all its myriad forms. — location: 1494 ^ref-35652

The key capitalist roles—directing production and appropriating and distributing the surplus—are played by the directors of capitalist enterprises, not by their owners. — location: 1559 ^ref-11938