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Socialists we should not be supporting capitalism regardless on how nice a face it has put on but rather we should be calling for it's abolition. Co-ops are pefectly compatible with capitalism and operate under the law of value just like any other business or institution which extracts surplus value and produces for exchange. worker co-operatives, as nice as they sound are at the end of the day captialist enterprises, and as socialists it is vital that we recognize this fact, because if we don't go after the heart of capitalist production then all we end up with is a capitalism-without-capitalists (e.g worker co-operatives or nationalized production).
The following is an article from the 1960s that has been edited but which demonstrates that even those with sympathies for co-ops and workers self-management better understood the ramifications of the demand.
“The goal of socialists is the abolition of the wage system, which implies the end of capitalism. Capitalism not only produced a socialist movement but also various attempts on the part of workers to ease their conditions by non-political means. Apart from trade unionism, a cooperative movement came into being as a way of escape from wage-labour and as a vain opposition to the ruling principle of general competition.
Producer cooperatives are voluntary groupings for self-employment and self-management with respect to their own activities. By pooling their resources, workers are able to establish their own workshops and produce without the intervention of capitalists. But their opportunities are from the very beginning circumscribed by the general conditions of capitalist society and its developmental tendencies, which granted them a mere marginal existence. Capitalist development implies the competitive concentration and centralisation of capital. The larger capital destroys the smaller. The cooperative workshops were restricted to special small-scale industries requiring little capital.
“The workers forming a cooperative the field of production,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg, “are faced with contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They are obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur – a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production cooperatives, which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.”
Operating in a competitive market economy, workers have to exploit themselves as if they were exploited by capitalists. While this may be more palatable, it does change the fact of their subordination to economic processes beyond their control. Profit production and capital accumulation control behaviour and perpetuate the misery and insecurity bound up with it.
Consumers’ cooperatives proved to be more successful and some of them absorbed producers’ cooperatives as sources of supply. But consumers’ cooperatives can hardly be considered as attempts at working class control, even where they were the creation of working class aspirations. At best, they may secure a measure of control in the disposal of wages, for labourers can be robbed twice – at the point of production and at the market place.
The cooperative movement is easily integrated into the capitalist system and, in fact, was to a large extent an element of capitalist development. Even in bourgeois economic theory it was considered an instrument of social conservatism by fostering the savings propensities of the lower layers of society, by increasing economic activities through credit unions, by improving agriculture through cooperative production and marketing organisations, and by shifting working class attention from the sphere of production to that of consumption. As a capitalistically-oriented institution the cooperative movement flourished, finally to become one form of capitalist enterprise among others, bent on the exploitation of the workers in its employ, and facing the latter as their opponents in strikes for higher wages and better working conditions. The general support of consumers’ cooperatives by the official labour movement – in sharp distinction to an earlier scepticism and even outright rejection – was merely an additional sign of the increasing ‘capitalisation’ of the reformist labour movement. Consumers’ cooperatives incorporated members of all classes and were seeking access to all markets. They were not opposed to centralisation on a national and even international scale. The market of producers’ cooperatives, however, was as limited as their production and they could not combine into larger units without losing the self-control which was the rationale for their existence.
Syndicalists envisioned a society in which each industry is managed by its own workers. All the syndicates together would form national federations which would not have the characteristics of government but would merely serve statistical and administrative functions for the realisation of a truly collectivist production and distribution system. Syndicalism was predominant in France, Italy and Spain but was represented in all capitalist nations in some modification as in their international off-spring, I.W. W. in the USA and the Guild Socialists in Great Britain, seen, at the same time, as “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” To speak of workers’ control within the framework of capitalist production can mean only control of their own organisations, for capitalism implies that the workers are deprived of all effective social control. Capitalist production and workers’ control are incompatible.
Workers’ control of production is seen as such a ‘non-reformist reform’ precisely because it cannot be established in capitalism. But if this is so, then the fight for workers’ control is equivalent to the overthrow of the capitalist system. Workers’ control of production presupposes a social revolution cannot gradually be achieved through working class actions within capitalist system. Where it has been introduced as a measure of reform, it turned out to be an additional means of controlling the workers via their own organisations e.g. Yugoslavia, Algeria and the legal work councils in Germany are mere appendices of trade union and operated within their restricted activities. While workers councils cannot affect the decisions of government, the government do set the conditions within which the councils operate. Reforms presuppose a reformable capitalism. The working class will even cease being conscious of its class position and identify its aspirations with those of the ruling classes.
While there cannot be socialism without workers’ control, neither can there be real workers’ control without socialism. To assert that gradual increase of workers’ control in capitalism is an actual possibility merely plays into the hands of the ruling classes to hide their absolute class-rule by false social reforms dressed in terms such as co-management, participation or determination. State-capitalism still find the working class in the position of wage workers without effective control over their production and its distribution. Their social position does not differ from that of workers in the mixed or unmixed capitalist economy. Everywhere, the struggle for working class emancipation has still to begin and will not end short of the socialisation of production and the abolition of classes through the elimination of wage labour.
When capitalism is forced by its own development to recreate the conditions which lead to the formation of class consciousness, it will also bring back the revolutionary demand for workers’ control as a demand for socialism. It is true that all previous attempts in this direction have failed, and that new ones may fail again. Still, it is only through the experiences of self-determination, in whatever limited ways at first, that the working class will be enabled to develop toward its own emancipation.”
Abridged and adapted from Paul Mattick, Workers Control 1967
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