Plebeian Democracy in the Workplace: The Case of Platform Cooperativism

Platform cooperativism in the gig economy promises to deliver democratic technology to workers particularly struggling against algorithmic domination from traditional platform companies. Once gig workers can allegedly own and run their own platforms, workplace democracy can guarantee fair labour conditions. However, cooperatives themselves sometimes fail to uphold their democratic promises. Particularly Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy is often mentioned to highlight the democratic failures of worker-owned enterprises. When democratic organisations grow, the need for managerial coordination purportedly produces a new class of leaders that, in its turn, dominates ordinary workers. Cooperatives thereby do not emancipate workers but merely subject them to a new managerial elite. I argue that this interpretation of the iron law of oligarchy misunderstands the central thrust of Robert Michels’ own writings and provides a one-sided presentation of real-life cooperative governance. Michels, in fact, supported a variant of plebeian democracy, as more recently theorized by Camila Vergara, where oligarchic tendencies are acknowledged but potentially counterbalanced by institutions that empower the ‘plebs’ or common people. Worker-owned cooperatives offer a good illustration of this dynamic, since they are riven with paradoxical governance tensions that cannot be resolved but only managed through staged democratic conflict.