Richard D. Wolff— ‘There’s an Alternative to the Hierarchical, Top-Down Capitalist CorporationJanine Jackson interviews Richard Wolff

But here’s a simple fact which ought to illustrate, in a sense, the question you’ve asked: This is an extremely undemocratic arrangement. What do I mean? Well, the number of people that make all the key decisions in American corporations, and by that I mean deciding what to produce, deciding how, deciding what technology to use, deciding the physical geographic location—will it be produced in Cincinnati or in Shanghai, etc.—and finally, what to do with the profits that the labor of all the people working there have helped to produce? All of those key decisions, that shape the lives of everybody involved in the company, and indeed everybody in the larger community, are made by tiny groups of individuals, the major shareholders, that 1 percent who own three-quarters of the shares, or two-thirds of them, and the boards of directors that they choose. This is a tiny minority sitting at the top of every corporation, looking and acting pretty much like kings and queens once acted when there were monarchies instead of democratic parliamentarian systems.

And we don’t question that, we here in America, with our commitment to democracy. We seem not to be able to ask the obvious question: If we like democracy, as we say we do, if we insist on some sort of accountability of the political leaders who make decisions that impact us, why in the world do we not make the same demand—democratic accountability—of the economic leaders in our society, the people who run these enormous corporations, that are the dominant economic factor in our society? And we don’t.

And the funny thing is that, of course, there is an alternative; just like there was an alternative to monarchy—namely, political democracy—there’s an alternative to the hierarchical, top-down capitalist corporation. And it has a number of names, because it’s very old; the one that’s being used much these days is “worker cooperative,” or “producer cooperative,” and the basic idea is, we would have a different economy if we organized our enterprises in an alternative way....

So what would be a more democratic alternative?

Professor Wolff suggests asking who is most invested in the firm and answers that it is the public the firm serves and the employees that do the work. It's certainly not the owners that do nothing other than let their portfolios grow while they sleep.

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‘There’s an Alternative to the Hierarchical, Top-Down Capitalist Corporation
Janine Jackson interviews Richard Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics (Marxist) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught for 30 years