(MENAFN- Asia Times)
Fans of capitalism like to say it is Democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and never was.
Indeed, it is much more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites. To see why, you have only to look at capitalism as a production system where employees enter into a relationship with employers, where a few people are the boss, and most people simply work doing what they are told to do. That relationship is not democratic; it is autocratic.
When you cross the threshold into a workplace (e.g., a factory, an office, or a store), you leave whatever democracy might exist outside. You enter a workplace from which democracy is excluded. Are the majority-the employees-making the decisions that affect their lives? The answer is an unambiguous no.
Whoever runs the enterprise in a capitalist system (owner[s] or a board of directors) makes all the key decisions: what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production takes place, and what to do with enterprise profits.
The employees are excluded from making those decisions but must live with the consequences, which affect them deeply. The employees must either accept the effects of their employers' decisions or quit their jobs to work somewhere else (most likely organized in the same undemocratic way).
The employer is an autocrat within a capitalist enterprise, like a king in a monarchy. Over the past few centuries, monarchies were largely“overthrown” and replaced by representative, electoral“democracies.” But kings remained. They merely changed their location and their titles. They moved from political positions in government to economic positions inside capitalist enterprises.
Instead of kings, they are called bosses or owners or CEOs. There they sit, atop the capitalist enterprise, exercising many king-like powers, unaccountable to those over whom they reign.
Democracy has been kept out of capitalist enterprise for centuries. Many other institutions in societies where capitalist enterprises prevail – government agencies, universities and colleges, religions, and charities – are equally autocratic. Their internal relationships often copy or mirror the employer/employee relationship inside capitalist enterprises. Those institutions try thereby to“function in a businesslike manner.”
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