Chapter 2 recovers a distinct interpretation of ‘modern socialism’ that focused on diffusing power to producers, consumers, and communities. Over the 1970s and 1980s, several left-wing thinkers and politicians championed redistributing economic and social power through industrial democracy or consumer and community empowerment. These explorations were fuelled by critiques of the post-war state, trade union assertiveness, corporatist experiments, municipal socialism, and market socialism. In the 1980s, they were championed as ‘modern socialism’, mainly as a response to Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policies like popular share ownership and the ‘right to buy’ a council house. Drawing on maverick academics and Eurocommunist journalists, ambitious Labour MPs argued that a ‘modern socialism’ needed to diffuse power through schemes like employee share ownerships. They embraced socioeconomic democracy as ‘modernisation’. However, while some decentralist ideas remained influential, the popularity of diffusing economic power peaked in the late 1980s. This helped scotch subsequent attempts to make the ‘stakeholding economy’ a foundation of New Labour’s ‘modernisation’.

Chapter 3 focuses on the challenges and opportunities of transnational worker representation and their consequences for the development of more democratic governance institutions. We examine these from two key theoretical perspectives. Starting from the notion of associational democracy, we differentiate between two logics of democratic representation: representation as claim versus representation as structure. The first approach is associated with a discursive or communicative model of transnational democracy as put forward by political theorists. Rather than thinking of representation in terms of representative structures, representation becomes the dynamic and ongoing process of making “representative claims” that reflect certain discourses, categories, concepts, judgments, dispositions, and capabilities. In contrast, structural ideas of representation are grounded in industrial democracy. Here, constituents of an organic political unit defined by voluntary membership, such as a trade union, authorise their representatives to deliberate, negotiate or bargain on behalf of members. We develop their theoretical grounding in structuralist and post-structuralist thinking, and question to what extend these approaches may be reconciled with each other to advance prospects for transnational worker representation.

Globalisation has placed democratic institutions under severe pressure as economic actors seek to take advantage of the disjuncture between national political governance and transnational economic activity. This chapter provides an introduction and overview as to the key themes to be addressed in the book. In particular, we highlight the debate between different approaches to democratic representation and associational democracy which is the theoretical framing for the remainder of the book: representation as claim versus representation as structure.

Both worker bargaining power and political democracy have been gripped by a mutually reinforcing crisis that has worsened for decades, harming working people (especially communities of color) and undermining our social fabric. This chapter argues that this crisis had become existential by 2020 as the pandemic, policing, privatization, financialization, growing monopoly, and rising unemployment exacerbated inequality, sparked social unrest, and threatened democracy.  It contends that our response must link the defense of political democracy to the fight for bargaining power for workers in the twenty-first century economy through innovative movement campaigns and new alliances that tie together the degradation of the environment, the upending of democratic oversight, and the more general degradation of the political economy to the exploitation of the workforce by rent-seeking corporate power.

This chapter first scans the historical context of the “labor question” in the United States and the radically diverse interpretations and experimentation with “industrial democracy,” widely seen as the answer.Second, it outlines how industrial democracy ultimately came to have meaning through collective bargaining, with the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and how optimism about the law’s promise and achievements turned into disenchantment. Third, the essay sketches the glimmerings of industrial democracy’s revival, with the labor question’s reemergence.Creative experimentation is underway, older notions are being reimagined, collective action is on the rise, and the threat posed by worker’s diminished bargaining power is a matter of public debate.