On
the American progressive website, Truthout, there is featured an
article on cooperatives.
Once
more people are being counseled that such schemes are a solution
to their misery.
In
the past decade, the number of worker-owned cooperatives in the
United States has almost doubled
from
roughly 350 companies to nearly 600. We are informed that the
immediate motivation for their creation is that coops equitably share
the benefits in the good times and the burdens in the hard times.
It's not the
job of the Socialist Party to tell fellow-workers the way to live. We
are not in the business of telling people how they should live their
lives under capitalism. It might indeed be more pleasant to work in a
cooperative. Co-operatives
are usually portrayed by their proponents as more satisfying working
arrangement than those found in the hierarchical structures of
conventional enterprises. Who needs a martinet boss hectoring us every moment of our working time? People will instinctively and
understandably seek ways to bandage over social wounds to improve
their quality of life. People are genuinely suffering and seeking a
solution. People are becoming increasingly atomised, alienated, and
anxious. With the financialisation of capital and globalisation, power
is concentrating in the hands of a few. The situation that we are in
is getting worse politically, socially, and economically yet the
opposition to capitalism is so divided we can't get organised to
oppose the powers that be.
Cooperatives
can provide some immediate relief from the various symptoms of
capitalism. They are also real-life examples that it is possible to
organise production and distribution without greedy private
capitalists at the helm. In doing so they help dispel the myth that
working class people can’t organise or run society and go some way
to showing that the capitalist class is unnecessary and parasitic.
They make a vision of an alternative society seem more practical and
possible.
Having
said that, we must take issue with the article's other claim, that we
should aim towards “entire ecosystems of cooperatives that
transform the way the economy works.” Per usual Mondragon is cited
as something to be aspired towards. This is where we part company
with the author.
Co-ops
can’t “out-compete” capitalism. Corporations will always have
larger capital to invest in research, technology, machinery and their
willingness to cut costs through lower wages, less environmentally
sounds practices, outsourcing, etc, will give them an advantage.
Second, is that cooperatives are subject to market pressures to
compete just the same as capitalist enterprises and this lends itself
to pressures to create the same practices of corporations. For
instances, in the Mondragon cooperatives there have been strikes in
the past, outsourcing and low wages in production sites opened
developing countries, as well as a trend towards unelected management
that is more like a typical capitalist corporation. It is
self-managed capitalism, because it offers no solution for changing
the underlying logic of capitalism, which is production for maximum
profit. There would be restrictions on the lengths to which a
self-directed enterprise would go as opposed to a traditional
capitalist company, but those restrictions would likely not hold up
when they threaten the survival of the enterprise.
Co-ops
do not eliminate owners. What happens is that ownership changed
hands. And whereas previously a company might have had a few
influential shareholders, it now has a few hundred (or thousand) But
private property has not been abolished. Socialists aim to abolish
the social structures that allow for the division between the rich
and the poor - private ownership, money, markets etc. Socialists
advocate the socialisation of the means of production, not the
dilution of ownership of the same. "Capitalist" isn't a
needlessly obtuse term of abuse for people we don't like, it denotes
people who own capital, the means of production under capitalism. The
owners of a co-operative are collective capitalists. The problem is
that what exploits us isn't the bosses, but capital. As long as the
purpose of productive units is to produce value, workers will be
enslaved to the production of value, regardless if there are an
enterprise’s owners. Coops aren’t an alternative way to socialism
because they still produce value. Both capital and value are social
relationships. By making them the owners, workers do not abolish the
relation of ownership, nor do they abolish the anarchy of the market
etc. etc.
Cooperatives
that exist under a market economy inevitably replicate the problems
of capitalism although it makes life better for some, but it doesn’t
end the system of exploitation. They reproduce capital and
prioritises sectional interests of pockets of workers of the class
interests over the working class as a whole. The market is to remain,
but not, apparently, its laws. It should be obvious that if any
enterprise produces to sell, and pays its bills out of its revenue,
it will be subject to the same basic market laws as any other
enterprise. Of course, at the moment these laws are observed and
interpreted by management, which then makes the decisions and'
imposes them on the other workers in the interests of the
shareholders. It should have occurred to the advocates of
cooperatives that these same laws might have the same force whoever
does the managing and even if the shareholders, so to speak, are the
workers. "Capitalism without capitalists"
could never in fact come about. They argue for some sort of “self-managed capitalism” that could
only exist on paper.
Should the working-class reach a
level of understanding where they could pressurise the owning class
out of existence, they would long since have passed the stage where
they would have already abolished the wages system and established socialism.
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