Private Authoritarianism

Social/Books

PRIVATE GOVERNMENT
How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It)
Elizabeth Anderson

Private Authoritarianism
By Wade Lee Hudson

Americans are sensitive to government curtailing individual freedom. They’re less concerned about employer violations — such as businesses that unjustifiably control workers’ behavior on the job or monitor them off-duty. Widely embraced “free market” ideology proclaims that workers are free. Nevertheless, one in four workers consider their workplace a “dictatorship.” 

In her pathbreaking 1999 article, “What Is the Point of Equality?” (see “Elizabeth Anderson: Democratic Equality), Elizabeth Anderson insightfully examined social equality, authority, esteem and social standing. She follows up on these issues in her powerful 2017 book, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It).

Prior to industrialization and the rise of factories, egalitarians supported free trade and the rights of private property as a way to undermine monopolies that were established by the state or by guilds. British Levellers (a pioneering egalitarian movement in the mid-seventeenth century), the American and French Revolutions, and pre-Marxist radicals believed these new policies would dissolve economic hierarchies based on domination and submission. From Thomas Paine to Abraham Lincoln, American egalitarians envisioned all (white) men becoming a farmer, artisan, merchant, or some other self-employed businessman. Western expansion reinforced hope for this vision (which neglected the value of womens’ unpaid domestic labor and the nation’s dependence on the enslavement of Africans). 

Anyone who failed to become self-employed was blamed for their condition. As Lincoln said, “If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, or folly, or singular misfortune.” Anderson comments:

Lincoln's disparaging judgment of wage laborers is akin to blaming those left standing in a game of musical chairs, while denying that the structure of the game has anything to do with the outcome. Thus, what began as an egalitarian ideal ended as another basis for esteem hierarchy: to raise the businessman on a higher plane than the wage worker….  {But) the Industrial Revolution shattered the egalitarian ideal of universal self-government in the realm of production.

Anderson says, “Preindustrial labor radicals...call it wage slavery. Liberals call it free labor.” 

Along with regimented factories, in the nineteenth century self-identified “liberals” promoted the rise of all kinds of “total institutions” — including the prison, the asylum, the hospital, and the orphanage. Jeremy Bentham’s infamous Panopticon was a model for these institutions that were based on order, routine, and submission.

Anderson writes:

Imagine a government that assigns almost everyone a superior whom they must obey…. The most highly-ranked individual takes no orders but issues many…. The government mostly secures compliance with carrots. Because it controls all the income in the society it pays more to people who follow orders particularly well and promotes them to higher rank.  Because it controls communication, it also has a propaganda apparatus that often persuades many to support the regime. This need not amount to brainwashing. In many cases, people willingly support the regime and comply with its orders because they identify with and profit from it. Others support the regime because, although they are subordinate to some superior, they get to exercise dominion over inferiors….

Would people subject to such a government be free? I expect that most people in the United States would think not. Yet most work under just such a government: it is the  modern workplace, as it exists for most establishments in the United States….

Private Government argues that the state is merely one form of government, which Anderson defines as any institution that has “the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in one or more domains of life.” 

Abigail Adams, the wife of the Founding Father John Adams, adopted a similar perspective. In March 1776, she wrote her husband, “I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.” In his response, her husband acknowledged “the bonds of government every where,” as with children, apprentices, students, Indians, and negroes, but he concludes, “Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.” 

Unfortunately, the egalitarian hope for the “free” market society persisted after the Industrial Revolution, when “personal independence of workers from arbitrary authority” was clearly impossible. “Thus, a political agenda that once promised equalizing as well as liberating outcomes turned into one that reinforced private, arbitrary, unaccountable government over the base majority.”

Anderson recognizes that her dramatic use of the word “government” is somewhat unconventional. However, this use is common, as in “allow reason to govern customs” and factors “that govern humandecisions.” And a principal definition is “to control, direct, or strongly influence the actions and conduct of.” So she states, “I do not claim that private governments at work are as powerful as states…. Yet private governments impose a far more minute, exacting, and sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any domain outside of prisons and the military.”

The book includes four extensive comments about the book followed by a response by Anderson. In her “Learning from the Levellers?” comment, Ann Hughes highlights a key aspect of Anderson’s work when she writes, “It is really exciting to see egalitarianism as about more than economic issues — to see it as a commitment to a broad enhancing of human capacities, enabling a fulfilling independence from the domination of others.” 

On this point, in his comment, referring to Anderson’s 1999 paper, Niko Kolodny writes, “What fundamentally mattered, she argued, were social relations of equality among people. If equalizing stuff mattered it was because of how inequalities of stuff might affect such social relations.” And, he could have added, equalizing stuff can reinforce social inequality with paternalism and dependency. 

Kolodny argues that Anderson is concerned with unjustified powers, not justified powers. “The difference...is that our idealized state’s laws are democratic, whereas McDonald’s laws are oligarchic.” The primary issue is not any imposition of an “alien will” on the individual. Rather, the problem is about “equality, your symmetrical standing with others.” 

Anderson largely agrees with Kolodny’s analysis. As she puts it, private government at work

embeds inequalities in authority, standing, and esteem in the organizations upon which people depend for their livelihood. Those consigned to the status of wage worker for life have no real way out: while they can quit any given employer, often at great cost and risk, they cannot opt out of the wage labor system that structurally degrades and demeans them.

In response to Kolodny’s wondering why Anderson doesn’t fully embrace workplace democracy, Anderson comments:

The fundamental reason is pragmatism: there are enough disanalogies between state and workplace governments that our experiences with democratic states do not give us enough information about what arrangements are likely to make sense for the workplace…. It is possible that different types of workplace will best operate under different constitutions. We need to experiment to learn the costs and benefits of different forms of workplace governance. 

My reading of Private Government leads me to believe that Anderson uses the term “government” inconsistently. She acknowledges the need for government “in many domains…. In the workplace, too, organizations with some kind of internal hierarchy have proven indispensable.” But she insists, “My focus is private government — arbitrary, unaccountable authority.” This language contradicts her acceptance of justified government. So it seems it is more precise to target private authoritarianism, not private government. Her problem is with unjustified government, not government itself. 

Nevertheless, Anderson’s passionate, eloquent, important affirmation of democratic equality deserves close, widespread attention.