Pretty Capitalism
Many left activists propose a radical movement to establish
an economy organised on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries,
peoples’ banks, consumer and producer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor
unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers
associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable
institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, kibbutzim-style communes.
Such a cooperative project is viewed as useful for providing
much needed services for working class communities. Cooperatives are also seen
to be a means to self-manage some asset gained through struggle. Consider the
Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. This is a million member organization that
has seized thousands of acres of land and resettled 250,000 families on the
land. Their methods of land expropriation through collective action are
certainly the sort of thing any syndicalist could applaud. Once they have
control of the land, they set up a residents’ assembly and build a cooperative
organisation to run the land and the community, and they provide various
services such as schools and radio stations.
This scenario is very similar to the early utopian
movements, believing that socialism can develop separately inside a capitalist
society. Cooperatives are a very tiny part of the existing economy. They are so
for a variety of reasons, including especially lack of capital, discrimination
against them by banks, etc. But simply building cooperatives and other
alternative institutions will never enable the mass of workers to confront and
defeat the power of the corporations and the state. Very little is going to
happen until the working class has political power.
Modern society cannot exist only on the basis of autarkic
communes, because they cannot feed 7 billion people. The latter require
metallurgical plants, power plants, modern medicine, universities, etc. That’s
why a big society will be a giant circle of kibbutzim. Like the individual
kibbutz members, they will share a common property of all major projects
(created by the collective work of many individual communities), the overall
distribution of the results of work of these enterprises, the common planning
of the economy and life. The central councils of delegates of the kibbutzim
will manage major objects, and the solutions about certain fundamental
transformations in a large society will be taken at referendums.
For Marx and Engels, capitalist society could only be
abolished as an entity, not factory by factory, town by town or farm by farm.
Its abolition therefore required the active participation of the majority of
the population. Although Marx and Engels never challenged the demonstrative
value of these communist experiments – which confirmed that a society without
bosses, without commodity production and without money was possible – they
contended that they were doomed to failure to being reabsorbed by the dominant
prevailing capitalist system society as long as they remained isolated.
Marx's critique of political economy in a cooperative the
associated laborers remain their own capitalist, and “self-exploit”. Cooperatives
represent a paradoxical relationship between labour and capital, in which
labour formally dominates capital, but has to meet the demands of capital by
voluntarily perpetuating its own subjugation. Cooperative members are not
simply petty bourgeoisie, but what you might call "self-exploiting
workers" While cooperatives may grant the workers inside them greater
freedoms and rights, so long as they operate within a capitalistic system they
will continue indulging in the same cycle of competition. They may be more
desirable at the moment given they represent an alternative inside the current
economic structure, but they still work as a capitalistic-oriented company. In
practice, especially over time, there would be a re-imposition of capitalist
relations to the extent that it is, at best, a kind of radical reformist
iteration of the capitalist mode of production.
Even if it was possible to maintain a 'pure'
worker-cooperative on a purely ideological basis there is no socialism here -
commodities are produced for profit to meet the demands of the value system,
instead of planning production for meeting human needs. It doesn't matter who
is in charge of a capitalistic business, the point is that it is capitalistic. Cooperatives transfer the ownership of an
enterprise from an individual capitalist to a collective ownership by workers.
This only recreates capitalism in a different form. It has little to do with
socialism, which is the free association of producers in a planned economy.
Cooperatives have existed as long as capitalism existed. It
doesn't reform capitalism towards a more cooperative driven type of capitalism,
instead, these worker co-ops tend to go bust after being out-competed with a
more efficient traditional business.
Competing against capitalist corporations on their own terms
is a bit of a David and Goliath situation in which the weaker will go against
the wall or more likely be swallowed up wholesale by the stronger. On the other
hand, to effectively compete you have to ruthless in subordinating the
interests of wage labour to those of capital - in fact become more and like the
very conventional capitalist enterprises you are supposed to have moved away
from. This is precisely what has been happening in the case of the large
Mondragon cooperative in Northern Spain with its recent decision to lay off a
whole lot of workers etc.
Capitalism is a mode of production defined by the private
ownership of the means of production - note that private ownership is not necessarily
individual ownership. Most corporations are owned jointly by their
stockholders, after all. What defines private ownership is not the number of
owners, but the relation whereby one section of society - an individual, the
stockholders, or workers in a cooperative - has exclusive control over a
particular portion of the means of production. This results in wage labor,
market distribution etc. etc. Therefore, cooperatives are not an alternative to
capitalism - they are capitalist entities.
Let us say you and several friends start a coffee-shop
cooperative but then capitalist coffee-shop chain opens up in the same street.
Your coffee-shop coop will have to compete with it in terms of prices if it is
to attract customers. But this commercial rival only pays minimum wage, with no
sick pay, paid holidays or any other benefits etc. Being a large chain, they
can use their purchasing power to drive down suppliers' prices to get cheaper
coffee beans. So they sell their products much cheaper than your cooperative. Facing going out of business, you and your
fellow co-op members must become your own capitalist boss, and cut your own
wages, reduce your conditions and lay-off some coop members. Or you go bust. In
a capitalist economy, we cannot extract ourselves from the market. We cannot
self-manage capitalism in our own interests as it is automatically weighted
against workers. The only way we can really live without exploitation and
bosses is by abolishing capitalism.
Having argued against any raised expectations for
cooperative and despite the fact that self-management is not the alternative to
capitalism, it could, nevertheless, be said that they may help us to find a way
to abolish capitalism, since the struggle for the collective management of the
producers can make us see the concordance of our interests as exploited
workers, it can help us to break out of the isolation and the individualism of
“every man for himself” and, which is even more important, the experience of
self-management of our own space of exploitation can permit us to become aware
of that fact that this is no solution for exploitation in and of itself. It is
not necessary to individually experience these processes in order to become
conscious of this counterrevolutionary trap, but certainly at a collective
level some people will opt for the formula of self-management as long as they
do not realize that the satisfaction of the needs of all of society will not be
achieved by changing the forms of those who manage it but by way of a profound
transformation of the totality of social relations. Co-ops facing competition do
have one option which is to go more into the life-style niche market: make the
co-op part of their brand and market themselves to people for whom that would be
a selling point, a campaign based on "Give us your custom because although
we are still alienated and self-exploiting but it's lit better than working in
Walmart stacking shelves.” If your aspiration is to find a comfortable niche
within capitalism to live out your days, then various coops are indeed going to
be a benefit. But if you are determined
to engage in social revolution then pursuing coops will be a dead-end. The
capitalist system is composed of owner who sell for profit. The fact that an
owner is a group of individuals rather than a single person makes no essential
difference. This has long been recognised for joint-stock companies. It must
now also be recognised for cooperatives. A co-op which collectively owns all the
means of production is merely a collective capitalist firm as long as it
remains—as all such states are, in fact, presently compelled to remain—a
participant in the market of the capitalist world-economy. No doubt such a
"firm" may have different models of management and differences in the
division of profit, but this does not change its essential role operating in
the world-market.
Every cooperative must work exactly like a capitalist stock
company. The only difference is that the cooperative company will always be at
a disadvantage, when compared to the capitalist business enterprise, even when
the former has as much capital as the latter. The cooperative undertaking,
because it is cooperative, cannot press any surplus value out of its members,
and therefore its capital will not grow. On the other hand, it has to spend its
main strength fighting strong capitalist concerns, while it is just that fight
of competition that fixes the prices of the products. Competition has to
disappear were a general lowering of the cost of production and a general
uplifting of the standard of life is possible. But one co-op cannot accomplish
that. And one thousand coops could not accomplish it. In order to accomplish
that we must necessarily have control over the entire population. Under such
conditions it is clear that all cooperative schemes have only the effect of
leading people astray from the road to our goal. They only have the effect of
getting the minds of the people confused as to our aims. They hinder the
progress of our idea. Cooperative schemers have a habit of hiding and denying
the class struggle, for they by necessity live in the spirit of capitalism. Co-ops
simply "prettify" capitalism, and would simply reproduce all the
faults of capitalist society, from the anarchy of the market to periodic
crises.
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