Corporatist economics creates giant, global business organizations and concentrates property ownership into the hands of oligarchs. Corporatist economics creates massive obstacles to property accumulation for ordinary individuals.
"True dat, G, but how does that relate to local or personal sufficiency? Such topics seem to be more macro-economic in nature, rather than local or personal. What gives?"
Well, I have little hope of democratic-socialism ever being imposed from the top down. Nor should it. Democratic-socialism should be built from the bottom up. We need to work democratic-socialist principles into the social fabric of our local communities and spread the good news from there.
Very, very few progressives know anything about democratic-socialist principles; we've been immersed in corporatist culture all our lives. We know what we're against, but we struggle to imagine the alternative and how to implement it. This series presents the alternative; you can find it in the Resilience Group's essay queue. Part 4 starts below.

Might as well listen to Jack Johnson.

My understanding of democratic socialism comes from a famous book that came out when a young Bernie Sanders was forming his economic philosophy: Small Is Beautiful (1973), by the post-WWII British economist E.F. Schumacher. It is subtitled "Economics As If People Mattered." It is not a textbook, there's no technical language, or math (or any Marx), but a book of popular economics aimed at the general readership. I have read it a number of times and have made a summary, mostly in Schumacher's words - there's lots of excerpts. I cut out the 70's rock...

Schumacher began part 4 with an essay on "automation," the word of his day, before discussing organizations and his observations are even more relevant today in the techno-fantasy we inhabit.

Fifteen - A Machine to Foretell the Future?
Schumacher voices his doubts, back in 1973 already, of the usefulness of computers to economics, given our inherent human confusion about assumptions. He concludes as follows:

If I hold a rather negative opinion about the usefulness of 'automation' in matters of economic forecasting and the like, I do not underestimate the value of electronic computers and similar apparatus for other tasks, like solving mathematical problems or programming production runs.
These latter tasks belong to the exact sciences or their applications. Their subject matter is non-human, or perhaps I should say, sub-human. Their very exactitude is a sign of the absence of human freedom, the absence of choice, responsibility and dignity.
As soon as human freedom enters, we are in an entirely different world where there is great danger in any proliferation of mechanical devices. The tendencies which attempt to obliterate the distinction should be resisted with the utmost determination.

Schumacher is also doubtful about the path that the social sciences had chosen in the 20th c.
He notes the damage to human dignity has resulted from the misguided attempt of the social sciences to adopt and imitate the methods of the natural sciences.
(One day I'll tell you how I laughed my way through four years of undergraduate psychology :=) I graduated, with distinction, and a strong sense of how the social sciences had lost their way. Objective reality, my left foot.)
Economics, and even more so applied economics, is not an exact science, says Schumacher: It is in fact, or ought to be, something much greater: a branch of wisdom.

In his urgent attempt to obtain reliable knowledge about his essentially indeterminate future, the modern man of action may surround himself by ever-growing armies of forecasters, by ever-growing mountains of factual data to be digested by ever more wonderful mechanical contrivances: I fear that the result is little more than a huge game of make-believe and an ever more marvellous vindication of Parkinson's Law. (Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.)

Here's a nugget for all of us, but in particular our society's decision-makers:

The best decisions will still be based on the judgments of mature non-electronic brains possessed by men who have looked steadily and calmly at the situation and seen it whole. 'Stop, look, and listen' is a better motto than 'Look it up in the forecasts'.

Sixteen - Towards a Theory of Large-Scale Organisation
Schumacher notes that, while most economists praise large-scale organizations, most sociologists and psychologists warn of its inherent dangers. I marvel at his prescience: too big to fail is too big to exist.

Schumacher says that there are dangers in giantism to the individual through dehumanizing, as well as to efficiency and productivity through what he calls Parkinsonian bureaucracies (Parkinson's Law states, as we saw above, that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.)
Yet the large-scale organization is here to stay, so we had better think about how to run them.
The fundamental task, says Schumacher, is to achieve smallness within large organization.

A large organisation has to strive continuously for the orderliness of order and the disorderliness of creative freedom, And the specific danger inherent in large scale organisation is that its natural bias and tendency favour order, at the expense of creative freedom.

Schumacher's theory of organizations is composed of 5 principles.

The first principle is that of Subsidiary Function.

A famous formulation is this principle reads as follows: 'It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organisations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social and never destroy and absorb them.'

The second principle is that of Vindication.

To vindicate means: to defend against reproach or accusation: to prove to be true and valid; to justify; to uphold; so this principle describes very well one of the most important duties of the central authority towards the lower formations. Good government is always government by exception.
Except for exceptional cases, the subsidiary unit must be defended against reproach and upheld. This means that the exception must be sufficiently clearly defined, so that the quasi-firm is able to know without doubt whether or not it is performing satisfactorily.

The third principle is that of Identification.
Schumacher insists that subsidiary units should have, not only a statement of profit and loss, but also a balance sheet.

A unit's success should lead to greater freedom and financial scope for the unit, while failure - in the form of losses - should lead to restriction and disability. One wants to reinforce success and discriminate against failure. The balance sheet describes the economic substance as augmented or diminished by current results.
This enables all concerned to follow the effect of operations on substance. Profits and losses are carried forward and not wiped out. Therefore, every quasi-firm should have its separate balance sheet, in which profits can appear as loans to the centre and losses as loans from the centre. This is a matter of great psychological importance.

The fourth principle is that of Motivation.

The health of a large organisation depends to an extraordinary extent on its ability to do justice to the Principle of Motivation. Any organisational structure that is conceived without regard to this fundamental truth is unlikely to succeed.

The fifth principle is that of the Middle Axiom.

It is very difficult for senior management to establish a happy balance between the opposite needs of every organization, namely order and freedom. It requires creative thinking and persistence.
This is real life, full of antinomies and bigger than logic. Without order, planning, predictability, central control, accountancy, instructions to the underlines, obedience, discipline - without these, nothing fruitful can happen, because everything disintegrates.
And yet - without the magnanimity of disorder, the happy abandon, the entrepreneurship venturing into the unknown and incalculable, without the risk and the gamble, the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.

Seventeen - Socialism
Schumacher was no dogmatic; he was ever the practical centrist, as can be seen from the following:

As mentioned before, the whole crux of economic life - and indeed of life in general - is that it constantly requires the living reconciliation of opposites which, in strict logic, are irreconcilable.
In macro-economics (the management of whole societies) it is necessary always to have both planning and freedom - not by way of a weak and lifeless compromise, but by a free recognition of the legitimacy of and need for both.
Equally in micro- economics (the management of individual enterprises): on the one hand it is essential that there should be full managerial responsibility and authority; yet it is equally essential that there should be a democratic and free participation of the workers in management decisions,
Again, it is not a question of mitigating the opposition of these two needs by some halfhearted compromise that satisfies neither of them, but to recognize them both. The exclusive concentration on one of the opposites - say, on planning, produces Stalinism; while the exclusive concentration on the other produces chaos.
The normal answer to either is a swing of the pendulum to the other extreme. Yet the normal answer is not the only possible answer. A generous and magnanimous intellectual effort - the opposite of nagging, malevolent criticism - can enable a society, at least for a period, to find a middle way that reconciles the opposites without degrading them both.

Schumacher advocates a middle way between the extremes of totalitarian communism and oligarchic capitalism (which is just as totalitarian). Democracy in politics and economics and culture lies along the middle way.

Eighteen - Ownership
First, let us see how Schumacher views private ownership. He was in favour of more flexible, mixed forms of ownership, depending on the size of a business:

a. In small-scale enterprise, private ownership is natural, fruitful, and just.

So far, everyone is singing from the same hymn book. Kumbaya.

b. In medium-scale enterprise, the best form of ownership is collective, as in a workers' cooperative.

In medium-sized businesses, says Schumacher, the idea of 'property' becomes strained, unfruitful, and unjust. If there is only one owner or a small group of owners, there can be, and should be, a voluntary surrender of privilege to the wider group of actual workers - i.o.w. Schumacher favours a workers' co-operative as the best form of ownership in medium-sized enterprises.
Schumacher knows that medium-sized enterprises owned by a large number of anonymous shareholders would hardly be willing to extend ownership to their workers. Government would have to pass legislation to force ownership conversion. (Heh, heh, heh, I know! I know! Screaming and running and bedwetting and secession and insurrection...Wait until you see the next :=)

c. In large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labour of others.

At this level, says Schumacher, private ownership is not only unjust, but also an irrational element that distorts all relationships within the business.
Insert your favourite corporate horror story here. I say Monsanto. What's yours? As we have seen in our age, large-scale private ownership is responsible for the destruction of vast swathes of the environment and our society.
Schumacher insists, however, that the common good have a front seat in the deliberations of any and all large-scale private organizations.
It's absence - having been driven out by 150 years of corporate lawyers before and on the Supreme Court - is what has driven our economy into the ditch.
How does a society ensure then a front seat for the common good in the deliberations of the powerful?
This he addresses in the next and last chapter.

Nineteen - New Patterns of Ownership
Schumacher opens this chapter with the underlying rationale for his views on ownership.
Much of our societal misfortune stems from private ownership ignoring this reality. Schumacher says that:

The principle is that the role of public expenditure must be accounted for in private profit.

(You didn't build that! :=)
Schumacher notes the enormous amounts of public funds being spent on infrastructure: however, the benefits go largely to private enterprise free of charge.
Think, for example, of how much taxpayer money has subsidized the Walmarts of the world.
First, in infrastructure costs, and then in subsidization of operations through tax breaks, health care and food stamps for underpaid workers, etc. Now think of how much they return in taxes!

All the educational, medical, and research institutions in any society, whether rich or poor, bestow incalculable benefits upon private enterprise - benefits for which private enterprise does not pay directly as a matter of course, but only indirectly by way of taxes, which. as already mentioned, are resisted, resented, campaigned against, and often skilfully avoided.
It is highly illogical and leads to endless complications and mystifications, that payment for benefits obtained by private enterprise from the 'infrastructure' cannot be exacted by the public authorities by a direct participation in profits but only after the private appropriation of profits has taken place. Private enterprise claims that its profits are being earned by its own efforts, and that a substantial part of them is then taxed away by public authorities. This is not a correct reflection of the truth - generally speaking.
The truth is that a large part of the costs of private enterprise has been borne by the public authorities - because they pay for the infrastructure and that the profits of private enterprise therefore greatly over- state its achievement. There is no practical way of reflecting the true situation, unless the contribution of public expenditure to the profits of private enterprise is recognised in the structure of ownership of the means of production.

As we had seen in the previous chapter, Schumacher proposes that:

• a) Private ownership be retained for small businesses; and,
• b) Medium-sized organizations should be worker-owned in the legal form of a cooperative.
• c) For large-scale businesses, Schumacher proposes two forms of ownership.

The first is the workers' cooperative.
He discusses a large British company that re-organized itself as a workers' co-operative, to show how this type of ownership changes the underlying assumptions governing the enterprise towards the common good. The Mondragon group of companies in Spain have shown clearly over many decades that the legal form of workers' cooperative easily accommodates even the biggest size of organization.
More info at http://www.mondragon-corporation.com/...

The second is direct public ownership
Thereafter he makes a detailed case for direct public ownership in large private companies, in order to account for the role of public goods and the common good in private profit.
This type of ownership would replace income tax for these type of companies.
Schumacher goes on to argue in favour of some forms of nationalization. Now, he was quite aware that in his times, western countries tried nationalization as was done along the lines of the totalitarian communist states. Those were terrible examples to follow! Totalitarian examples of anything are non-starters.
So never fear, totalitarian nationalization is emphatically not on the agenda of democratic socialism.
Part public ownership is the only way to ensure that democracy has input into large-scale organizations' behaviour.
Folks could argue about percentages of public ownership, but the principle must be enacted in law. The Koch brothers would be compelled to accept part public ownership.
I once saw a photo of an airship decked out in environmental themes hovering over a Koch retreat in swing down below. Pardon my french, but that's f*cking useless.
The public must have a front seat at the table inside in the Koch companies' deliberations:

• At all times.
• Legally binding.
• Backed by the force of law.
• No private taxation without representation.

This is the bottom line for democratic socialists. It is not negotiable. This is what is at stake in 2016.

Epilogue
Schumacher concludes with this summary.

The 'logic of production' is neither the logic of life nor that of society. It is a small and subservient part of both, The destructive forces unleashed by it cannot be brought under control, unless the 'logic of production' itself is brought under control - so that destructive forces cease to be unleashed. It is of little use trying to suppress terrorism if the production of deadly devices continues to be deemed a legitimate employment of man's creative powers.
Nor can the fight against pollution be successful if the patterns of production and consumption continue to be of a scale, a complexity, and a degree of violence which, as is becoming more and more apparent, do not fit into the laws of the universe, to which man is just as much subject as the rest of creation.
Equally, the chance of mitigating the rate of resource depletion or of bringing harmony into the relationships between those in possession of wealth and power and those without is non-existent as long as there is no idea anywhere of enough being good and more-than- enough being of evil.

I welcome your comments - questions, ideas, reflections, and so on.
Peace be with us, if we learn the principles of democratic-socialism and build them into our local communities,
gerrit

Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered
In 1973, British economist E.F. Schumacher published Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered, a book that offered a vision of an economy driven by a desire for harmony, not greed; a local economy based on community and ecological values, not global financial derivatives. In the 1970s, “Small is Beautiful” helped launch a back-to-the-land movement that is the ancestor to the Local Food Revolution of today and the global Transition Network.

Here's where the series is situated in the book. Small Is Beautiful is comprised of four parts:
1. The Modern World
http://caucus99percent.com/content/local-resilience-democratic-socialism...
2. Resources
http://caucus99percent.com/content/local-resilience-democratic-socialism...
3. The Third World (now called the emerging world)
http://caucus99percent.com/content/resilience-democratic-socialism-appro...
4. Organization & Ownership (the best for last :=)

Don't buy books new. You can find the text online.
Please don't search with gargle: try www.duckduckgo.com instead.