artificiality of many national borders, need be no less legitimate than any
nation-state. Despite this, ‘imperialism’ in modern political language is nearly
always used pejoratively, suggesting an illegitimate desire to extend one’s power
or authority for reasons of self aggrandizement, as, for example, when Richard
Nixon was dubbed an ‘imperial’ president for seeking to take over powers that
belonged to the US Congress.
Industrial Democracy
Industrial democracy, or industrial participation, embraces a wide range of
alternatives and is espoused in a surprisingly wide range of ideological posi-
tions. Essentially, all variants aim to break down the line-of-command hier-
archy which characterizes modern industry, and in particular to remove the
class/power distinction between work-force and management. The motiva-
tion for such plans can be the elimination of workalienation, a desire to link
the interests of the work-force more clearly with those of the industry or
company, the increase of overall human freedom, or more far-reaching
intentions to restructure either just the economy or the whole polity on
egalitarian and democratic lines. Just as the motives vary considerably in
ambition, so do the techniques suggested. At the lowest level of ambition,
industrial democracy may mean nothing more than profit-sharing schemes, or
an encouragement and facilitation to workers owning shares. It may imply,
instead, trade-union representation on boards of directors, as is the case in
Germany, and as was planned for the United Kingdom by the Bullock Report
(1976). Some firms are entirely owned by the work-force, and have manage-
ment decisions made by meetings of the worker-owners, though these are rare
and have seldom proved successful in capitalist societies; however, a hierarch-
ical management structure generally proves essential in an enterprise of any
size.
The full-blooded theory of industrial democracy, however, is an entire rival
theory both tocapitalismand tocommunism’ssystem of state ownership.
Developed by such thinkers as, in Britain, G. D. Cole (1889–1959), it imagines
the replacement of ordinary representative democracy with direct
democracy, not only in the community but in the individual factories and
firms. In these workplaces the workers would be entirely independent and
would make all decisions of production, pricing and sales, as well as salaries,
themselves. The firms would only loosely be grouped in representative bodies,
and there would be no more state control of the economy than of any other
aspect of life. The problems of co-ordination raised by such theories are legion,
and the approach really belongs within the theory ofanarchism.
With the radical transformations of the structure of employment in the Post-
industrial Western economies, especially the growth of part time work and
Industrial Democracy