Theorising the State and Economic Democracy

New Glocal Forms of Financial Participation

“…Whereas pseudo-participation is identified by management initiative, partial participation usually originates from mobilising collective employee interests, with support from sympathetic (social-democratic) political parties. From the specifically financial perspective, a variety of forms might be identified, including nationalisation of social assets and collective wage-earner ownership, of which the best known is the Swedish Meidner Plan, which aimed to secure social ownership of productive enterprises through accumulating pooled employee equity held in trust by trade unions within a broader solidaristic pay policy (Boreham, Hall 2005). Undermined through the coordinated opposition of private sector and conservative interests, the direction of the country's political economy became more market focussed leading to replacement of a social-democratic government by a conservative one, under which the Plan's radical aims were progressively diluted and subsequentially abandoned.…”