Workers' Co-Operatives

TheocWulf wrote:Hmm suprised I never saw this thread a few months ago anyway,

Ladies and Gentelmen I give you the brains and brawn behind the early cooperativist movement and one of my influences,Welsh radical and utopian socialist,Robert Owen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen

What an interesting fellow was Robert Owen. Thanks for sharing him and his ideas, TheocWulf.

The union, United Steel Workers, and the Mondragon Corporation have been in contact to develop worker coops in the United States. I found a pdf of what they jointly drafted as a Union-Coop Model.

Here is the pdf.

Here is another article that is slightly older than the pdf above: this article.

That's fantastic, Red Aegis. Good to know.

I just found this interesting thesis by Christopher C. Wright of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. I have not finished it but think that the membership of this site would enjoy its contents. It was recently featured on the website American Coop. There is a link on that page to the thesis but I will provide another link to it here.

Christopher C. Wright, Abstract of the Thesis wrote:ABSTRACT
WORKER COOPERATIVES AND REVOLUTION: HISTORY AND
POSSIBILITIES IN THE UNITED STATES
December 2010
Christopher C. Wright, B.A., Wesleyan University
M.A., University of Missouri St. Louis
M.A., University of Massachusetts Boston
Directed by Professor James Green


Worker cooperatives have a long and tortured history, but recently they have been advancing globally on a more stable foundation than before. In this essay I provide a theoretical context for the current growth of cooperatives, drawing on Marxist theory to illuminate their potential. I also consider the sociology and economics of worker cooperatives, in addition to expounding and evaluating their history in the United States. A case-study of a cooperative printing press in Jamaica Plain gives a more intimate portrayal of worker co-ops, and hopefully provides lessons for future cooperators. I interpret society as on the cusp of a triumphant advance of cooperativism; the main purpose of this essay is to explain how and why this advance will occur.

After reading more of the article. This article should be taken with a quart of salt.

Red Aegis wrote:After reading more of the article. This article should be taken with a quart of salt.

What did you find unpersuasive about Wright's thesis?

THE MACHINES OF SELF-MANAGEMENT HAVE BEEN SWITCHED ON!

After 3 days of intense mobilization, the factory of Vio.Me. has started production under workers' control earlier today! It is the first experiment in industrial self-management in crisis-striken Greece, and the workers of Vio.Me. are confident this is going to be only the first in a series of such endeavors.

The mobilization kicked off with a big assembly of the workers and solidary organizations and individuals in a central downtown theater on Sunday evening. Here the course of action of the solidarity movement was discussed, and everyone had the chance to take the microphone and to express their opinion on the workers' struggle.

FULL ARTICLE

The question of organizing the methods of management inside organizations has been questioned and contested. Many people that I have talked to have no idea how a workplace can function democratically in a real manner, not through resurrecting the same corporate top-down business model with the one change of choosing your masters. I found a program that can actually provide not only a template, but actually allow democratic functioning without confusion. The Better Means is a new program that can act as a guide for democratic processes within an organization. Here is some more information about it:

Better Means Website wrote:
New Team Structure

No more pyramids, job titles or direct reports.

Everyone is a member, and every member gets an equal binding vote. When people first join they are contributors. Votes are recorded, but are non-binding. This way, teams can get a sense of the crowd’s voice but ultimately the team members drive the direction of the project.

Contributors are nominated to be members, and are voted in by the core team. The core team is a subset of the members who can vote in new members.

Anyone can be nominated to any level in an open enterprise, and everyone is accountable to eachother. The result is a healthy and dynamic hierarchy replaces the rigid proscribed one.


Distributed Leadership. Not Management

Work is arranged in project workstreams. Members and contributors move freely from one project workstream to another. Choosing the work that has been collectively prioritized. Doing only what they are convinced needs doing.

Situational leadership emerges through influence, instead of pre-set management through coersion

No departments, ceos, or managers.

No committees, or predefined roles or areas of responsibility. No one is told what to do.

In the following video they explain how the community can engage with the members of the organization, which is of particular interest to myself:

Red Aegis wrote:The question of organizing the methods of management inside organizations has been questioned and contested. Many people that I have talked to have no idea how a workplace can function democratically in a real manner, not through resurrecting the same corporate top-down business model with the one change of choosing your masters. The Better Means is a new program that can act as a guide for democratic processes within an organization.

This is an excellent development that is sure to assist in the application of workers' self-management, and I commend the Better Means software engineers for designing such an innovative and valuable program.

With that said, I think by reducing traditional methods of self-management to a practice of 'choosing your master,' you unfairly minimize the importance that organizational form has had for countless workers throughout history. One who is held democratically accountable to a constituency can hardly be described as a 'master,' and the managerial expertise required in certain industries ensures that workers' councils will continue to have to delegate authority within such firms for the foreseeable future.

The Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst has started an interesting program for students which enables them to earn an undergraduate certificate in "Applied Economic Research on Cooperative Enterprises":

GRAND OPENING OF WORKER-OWNED FACTORY, AS FORMER REPUBLIC WINDOWS WORKERS LAUNCH NEW ERA WINDOWS COOPERATIVE

The worker-owners of New Era Windows Cooperative, who are members of UE Local 1110 and some of the former employees of Republic Windows and Doors, will hold a grand opening and press conference on Thursday, May 9. The event will take place at 3:15 at the site of the new plant, 2600 West 35th Street in Chicago.

Elected officials, supporters, customers and remodeling contractors will join New Era Window Cooperative worker/owners in celebrating the launch of the new cooperative, a unionized, 100 percent worker-owned and operated business.

Almost a year to the day after their window factory closed by its last owner, Serious Energy, a group of former Republic Windows and Doors workers are launching their own window business without bosses. They successfully raised capital to buy the factory's manufacturing equipment themselves and run it democratically.

The members of Local 1110 successfully occupied the Republic plant for six days in December 2008, when the owner gave them only three days notice that the plant was about to close, and denied them earned vacation pay and other benefits. They won the money they were owned, and also won the reopening of the plant under a new owner. When the second owner announced in February 2012 that the plant would close again, workers again occupied the plant. This sit-down was resolved in 11 hours. Workers won the company's commitment to stay open another 90 days and give them the opportunity to keep the plant open. The local also negotiated a severance package for all of its members.

The new plant will manufacture high-quality, energy efficient windows at affordable prices.

SOURCE

Richard Wolff and Gar Alperovitz gave an informative lecture on the theory and practice of workers' self-management at this year's Left Forum:

This post might be deserving of its own thread. In any case, I have researched cooperatives as of late in order to examine their role in the class struggle and implications within Marxist theory. Marx himself harbored an ambivalent attitude toward the cooperative enterprises of his day. He certainly extolled the cooperative movement on several occasions, as evidenced by the following excerpt from his 1864 Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen's Association:

"But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially of the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold ‘hands’. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart."

Discerning his opinion regarding their suitability as revolutionary vehicles or successors to capitalist production is a much more ambiguous task. In the same address, he goes on to say:

"At the same time the experience of the period from 1848 to 1864 has proved beyond doubt that, however excellent in principle and however useful in practice, cooperative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries… To save the industrious masses, cooperative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means…To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy, and France, there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political organization of the workingmen’s party."

The above indicates that Marx did not believe it to be possible, nor even desirable, to promote the expansion of cooperatives in some impotent effort to outgrow the system. As long as capitalism prevailed, he maintained that the political organization of the proletariat toward a revolutionary direction and its subsequent seizure of power would be necessary to develop communism. In other fragments of his work, Marx hints that cooperatives might nonetheless occupy a revolutionary place. For example, in Capital, Vol. III, he writes:

"Capitalist production has itself brought it about that the work of supervision is readily available quite independent of the ownership of capital. It has therefore become superfluous for this work of supervision to be performed by the capitalist. A musical conductor need in no way be the owner of the instruments in his orchestra, nor does it form part of his function as a conductor that he should have any part in paying the ‘wages’ of the other musicians. Cooperative factories provide the proof that the capitalist has become just as superfluous as a functionary in production as he himself, from his superior vantage-point, finds the large landlord."

Later in the work, he describes the evolution of capitalism with cooperatives and joint-stock companies in mind:

"The co-operative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labor is abolished there, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalists, i.e., they use the means of production to valorize their labor. These factories show how, at a certain stage of development of the material forces of production, and of the social forms of production corresponding to them, a new mode of production develops and is formed naturally out of the old’ [ ... ] ‘Capitalist joint-stock companies as much as cooperative factories should be viewed as transition forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, simply that in one case the opposition is abolished in a negative way, and in the other in a positive way."

Some socialists who applaud the opportunity for self-management offered by cooperatives have referred to passages such as the above in order to prove that markets were consistent with Marxism's vision of post-capitalist society (see the major works of Jaroslav Vanek, Branko Horvat, David Schweickart, James Lawler, Theodore Burczak, Radoslav Selucky, and other prominent market socialists, including a number of the Analytical Marxists). In the same excerpt, however, Marx describes cooperatives as transforming "the associated laborers into their own capitalists" (though Vanek has argued that his LMF model is absolved of this charge). Notice also that he asserts that cooperatives "naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them."

By contrast, Marxists like Bertell Ollman and David McNally, along with the traditional scientific socialist consensus, categorically deny the compatibility of markets with Marx's conception of lower phase communism. It is worthwhile to explore the views of Engels and Lenin on the question of cooperative labor as well, but as they either comport with Marx's or are merely extensions thereof, I shall omit doing so here.

In Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx criticized Ferdinand Lassalle for his utopian vision of using the bourgeois state to aid the proliferation of cooperative ventures (it is interesting how renewed attraction to cooperatives on the Left, perhaps best represented by Gar Alperovitz, Richard Wolff, and the "new economy movement", has produced similar ideas), concluding:

"That the workers desire to establish the conditions for cooperative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of cooperative societies with state aid. But as far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois."

Clearly, attempting to outcompete capitalism via cooperation is an exercise in futility. Worker cooperatives will never gain preponderance in a capitalist economy on their own. However, I do believe that they can play a role in future working class movements. As syndicalists, we already recognize the strategic importance of militant industrial unions and direct action, but it might prove fruitful to encourage the formation of radical cooperatives to assist the revolutionary ambitions of the working class. We live in the era of global capitalism, in which the dominant "actors"—to avail myself of bourgeois economic jargon—are transnational corporations, literally operating beyond the borders and interests of nation states. In some ways, capitalism has expanded beyond the scope outlined in Lenin's Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which primarily concerned itself with the imperial aspirations of capitalist powers. Today, transnational capital has no loyalty to any individual country; capital mobility is ruinous to communities around the world. Cooperatives, if operating under the auspices of a revolutionary political program, can empower workers, help curb capital fight, provide financial security and support to members, political representatives, and their organizations, and in so doing, assist the proletarian vanguard. In this respect, cooperatives can serve to promote a strategy not unlike Antonio Gramsci's war of position.

Commentaires et les critiques.