By: Kavarna Hayek
Coordinator of the Left party (Levica), Luka Mesec, who will be the Vice-President of Golob’s government and also the Minister for Solidarity-Based Future, will also be taking care of “economic democracy.” What does this mean?
Economic democracy is supposed to be a system in which people share ownership and decision-making over power and resources in their communities or environments. They say that such an economy is more efficient because in it, communities and organisations (including companies) are not focused on profit or their own interests but instead highlight solidarity, cooperation, democracy and sustainability.
If this vocabulary sounds somewhat familiar to you and you think you’ve heard it before, you are not wrong. Economic democracy (which is usually quickly proven to be unsuccessful and is definitely unsuccessful in the long run) is mostly talked about by those who are financially latched on to the state budget and who insult people who think that street activists should set up their own companies and try this “economic democracy” there, by calling them neoliberals. Well, these people have their own (great) role model, idol and, of course, sponsor. This is none other than George Soros with his Open Society, which is very clear in its commitment to the need for civil society to take “democratic control of our economy.”
A group of experts to be feared
To this end, the Institute for Economic Democracy IED was established in 2018 (and Soros has his own EDI – Economic Democracy Initiative). It is probably needless to say that the Institute for Economic Democracy is filled with Marxist philosophers, professors from the Faculty of Social Sciences, and supporters of the Left party. And that this group of “experts” in the field of employee ownership and participatory culture should be feared. However, now they have their own minister, the law on the workers’ property cooperative has already been written, and there will apparently be no obstacles for Golob’s government to be among the first to adopt it. We can only imagine what will follow – among other things, probably a forced division of ownership among employees. Economic democracy is, therefore, just another term for democratic socialism or just socialism in general. Under this guise, socialism is also coming to the centre of political life in traditionally capitalist countries: in an economic democracy, where the market is partially regulated, there are companies run by their workers (employees). Ownership and control over the means of production, which until now belonged to private entities as individuals, is gradually becoming the property of communities (cooperatives). The same thing will happen with housing. There will be no more private ownership of housing, as housing will be owned and managed by the community. The apocalypse of what the American biologist Garrett Hardin describes as the “tragedy of the common” is coming.
But let’s make something clear. There is nothing wrong with economic democracy or democratic socialism in the economy if people participate in this experiment voluntarily and are not forced (with legislature) to support such forms of economic integration. As individuals, they are free to choose their friends, and they are also free to choose who they hang out with, who they will hang out with, who they will go into business with, and in what form their business will take place. Anyone who wants to do it can establish a participatory cooperative or company; there is nothing anti-freedom, anti-capitalist or anti-market in that. Lots of different forms of running a business exist, so people just have to be left with a choice. The problem is that Golob’s government and its minister Mesec are trying to enforce such a system by law and impose it on the people. This, in turn, means economic and social engineering is happening, which is contrary to the free will of the people. The realisation of this is possible only under the threat of force and deprivation of liberty of those who will not follow the new order.
Socialists like Luka Mesec and his comrades do not understand that it was capitalism with the free market that democratised individual societies and countries. In the free market, each of us gets to vote every day – we vote for those who satisfy our needs and desires and punish those who do not offer us what we need. It is a real win-win combination. However, economic democracy is just a euphemism for socialist self-government that has been proven time and time again to not work.
