Pirate Constitutions and Workplace Democracy
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Pirate Constitutions and Workplace Democracy
Gary Chartier
I. Introduction
The constitutions adopted by eighteenth-century pirates created radically demo-
cratic work environments. Peter Leeson has argued that the democratic character of
these work environments was a function of the criminal character of the enterprise in
which pirates were engaged, that it was entirely understandable that contemporary
merchant vessels were managed by captains by autocratic powers, and that no con-
clusions about the desirability of workplace democracy in general follow from the
structure of these constitutions.1 I argue that Leeson is mistaken: he treats existing
structure of ownership and control in the Golden Age of piracy and in the present
as givens when they are better seen as products of violence and privilege.2
My goal here is to contextualize the facts to which Leeson alludes in his discus-
sion of pirates' governance structures and of contemporary workplaces and to
highlight the possibilities of a recognizably political approach to fostering work-
place justice that does not depend on positive legislative or regulatory enforcement
of moral norms related to the organization of work life. In Part II, I offer an over-
view of Leeson's discussion of pirate democracy and of the authoritarian merchant
ship culture to which it was an alternative, noting his conclusion that pirates were
able to implement democratic constitutions because of their vessels' ownership
structure and his view that pirates' governance models are not generally emulable
in today's workplaces. In Part III, I suggest that pirates needed to steal vessels in
order to organize democratically only because of the process of primitive accumu-
lation that shaped the economic circumstances of those likely to become sailors
during the Golden Age of piracy and that, absent prior injustices on a large scale,
sailors might well have been able to achieve democratic workplaces peacefully. I
suggest in Part IV that the same injustices, and others of more recent vintage, lie
behind the persistence of undemocratic structures in today's workplaces, and that
remedying these injustices is the best way for people acting as citizens to foster the
creation of democratic workplaces. I recap briefly in Part V
1 Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (2009) [hereinafter
Leeson, Hook].
2 Thanks to Kevin Carson for underscoring the need to make this point explicitly here.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jaret18&div=28&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Pirate Constitutions and Workplace Democracy
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