Co-ops - a model for self-exploitation
On platforms to-day perorations shadow forth the old ideal;
but practically cooperatives are run on purely business lines, apart from the
funds devoted to educational and charity purposes. Whilst of itself it is
impotent to evolve into a non-plunder society, we have to settle with ourselves
whether it is not a force working inside modern society that makes for our goal
In the same way that trusts, municipalities and States make
for the unification, the centralisation, of production and distribution, so
also does co-operation. That no one would deny. But it can well be urged that
multiple shop companies are doing exactly the same, and hence are as valuable
from our point of view as co-operative societies. In so far as the latter are
working-class organisations, we must undoubtedly see in them weapons of defence
in the class war, and of aggression in the expropriation of the capitalists,
apart altogether from the training in business methods afforded to so many
workers.
Of greatest value to us, distribution is a field where the
class war is beginning to break out with a virulence equal to that experienced
in the economic and the political fields. Economic necessity drove the weavers
of Rochdale into cooperation, and the same cause led to its expansion.
Conflicts with the interests of private traders arose, and this, inevitably,
produced the boycott and other forms of guerilla warfare. That the traders got
the worst of it was a foregone conclusion, as they represented a more primitive
system of retailing goods. Some twenty-five years ago, optimistic co-operators
anticipated that soon they would monopolise the trade of the working class; but
within the last twenty years there has arisen the multiple system alongside a
tremendous expansion of the huge emporium system, and these separately (and in
the near future, perhaps, conjointly) are beginning to threaten the very
existence of the cooperative movement.
The cooperative movement started with a noble ideal: the
overthrow of the commercial system by the self-employment of the workers. This
has been found impossible, and the co-operators have degenerated into mere
joint stock companies or distributive agencies, with agents in all parts of the
world buying in the cheapest market, which means beating down the wages of the
producer for the benefit of those with capital to spare to invest in these
societies and, like Building Societies, are a very good investment for those
better off, but for the poverty-stricken proletariat this co-operation is not
only useless, but often used for their exploitation. The early pioneers of cooperation
had the ideal of a commonwealth of communities more or less self-sacrificing
and entirely free from the disbursement of surplus value.
Our duty, then, is, while always advocating cooperative
effort to show these people that their movement, so far as it effects the
condition of the people as a whole, has been a failure, and must be so as long
as they attempt to plant it down in the midst of a competitive commercial
system, and that until usury and monopoly of every description is destroyed
there can be no real cooperation that shall benefit the workers, and unless
they are prepared to do their duty and assist in this destruction, they, in the
times coming, will be swept away as part and parcel of the old system of society.
It is be suggested that an enterprise can go from capitalist
to socialist by changing the legal structure of ownership and by determining the
number of shares assigned to each person. A cooperative may do away with
exploitation internally, but it still has to go out onto the market in search
of a slice of the profit pie, and that slice will have been extracted from
other workers. Common ownership over the means of production cannot be limited
to competing cooperative groups where each worker's cooperative fights with the
others. That is not common ownership. The fundamentals upon which the economy
flows and operates must be changed and reshaped in the rise of socialism
following a revolutionary overthrow.
Producers’ cooperatives were voluntary groupings for
self-employment and self-government with respect to their own activities. Some
of these cooperatives developed independently, others in conjunction with the
working class movements. By pooling their resources, workers were able to
establish their own workshops and produce without the intervention of capitalists.
But their opportunities were 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. Soon, the capitalist extension
into all industries destroyed their competitive ability and drove them out of
business.
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 costs of commodity circulation are an unavoidable incidental
operating expenses incurred in capital production, dividing the capitalists
into merchants and entrepreneurs. Since each tries for the profit maximum in
its own sphere of operation, their economic interests are not identical.
Entrepreneurs thus have no reason to object to consumers’ cooperatives.
Currently, they are themselves engaged in dissolving the division of productive
and merchant capital by combining the functions of both in the single
production and marketing corporation.
If workers reformed capitalism initially so that all firms
were based on a cooperative model, exploitation -- inherent to capitalism --
would still exist and eventually destroy the benefits that come out of such a
model of 'market socialism'. Competition
between firms, and the tendency of capital to concentrate, would destroy
smaller firms. Eventually, monopolies would be built up and slowly workers
would lose power as greater companies rise. Cooperatives on a market remain
capitalist.
Cooperative worker-ownership schemes resolve none of the
basic problems facing workers under capitalism. All the basic relations of
capitalist production, exploitation of wage labour, production for sale and
profit, and the like remain in effect. A "worker-owned" company run
collectively and democratically by its workers, would still function within the
overall context of a capitalist economy. Being a co-op does not miraculously
free a business from the anarchy of the marketplace, competition, and the
effects of capitalism's recurrent economic crises. In order to compete
"worker-owned" enterprises have little choice but to intensify
exploitation just as much as their capitalist-owned competitors do. They must
cut wages, close old factories, modernize outmoded equipment and lay off
workers made superfluous by automation although they may do so with a bit more
compassion than conventional companies. To make such schemes
"succeed" in a capitalist context, workers must make more
self-sacrifices and intensify their own exploitation.
This is worker capitalism. Yet, it does demonstrate that
production in no way depends on a capitalist class. But, if the concept of
worker ownership is to truly benefit workers, it must be effected on a
society-wide basis not in niche corners of the business world. To do that, a
socialist revolution is needed to abolish the entire system based on private
ownership and control of the means of production by a parasitic capitalist
class. The potential of worker ownership can be fully realized only by
replacing an economic system based on exploitation, competition, the market and
the profit motive with one based on social co-operation for the common good.
What workers must gain is not nominal ownership of individual plants, but real
control of the entire economy.
Capitalism also affects co-ops in other ways. In Argentina,
for example, some capitalist-dominated companies simply refused to do business
with worker-owned cooperatives. Obviously, if almost all other businesses were
coops, then the conventional companies wouldn't be able to survive. However,
capitalist companies dominate and have the support of the state. Capitalists
control the government so policies would be enacted to try as much as possible
to prevent workers from asserting an increased degree of independence as long
as the plutocrats hold the reins of power and fear the spread of increasing
workers’ consciousness.
But surely the cooperative movement is essentially socialist?
The former Tory prime minister, David Cameron stole the clothes of Robert Owen
by using the title Pioneer Schools - after the Rochdale Pioneers - for his
first proposals for a new “co-operative” approach to education and “free” charter
schools. He explained that "The
co-operative principle captures precisely the vision of social progress that we
on the centre-right believe in - the idea of social responsibility, that we're
all in this together, that there is such a thing as society, it's just not the
same thing as the state," he said, adding that the conservative
cooperative movement campaign for "public ownership of public services and
public facilities" does not mean he believes in state ownership of those
services. He was following in the foot-steps of such radical agencies as the
American Peace Corp and USAID who promoted that miners in Bolivia form
cooperatives who are currently now in dispute with the Leftist government of
Evo Morales.
In the Soviet Union the state used to own most industry and
agriculture, the ‘people’ were legally the owners, but it was the bureaucracy
which had exclusive control of the means of production and therefore it was they
who in PRACTICE owned the means of production. Equally, a workers cooperative
whilst instituting common ownership amongst its members is a form of private
ownership as against the rest of society. Cooperatives are not the means to
socialism but the end. Only in socialism can we really achieve cooperative
equality. So long as the relationship between workers cooperatives is governed
by the market or indeed by any means of equal EXCHANGE, then so long will
people as a whole fail to exert conscious social control over society as a
whole. So long as production remains primarily geared towards exchange on the
market rather than towards directly satisfying peoples self-expressed needs
them ‘common ownership of the means of production and distribution’ will not
have been achieved. You can’t exchange that which is held in common or the
products of that held in common.
Right now, and as long as the capitalist system exists, we
all have to live within it. Capitalist relations affect and dominate every
aspect of life. The world-wide social order of production for profit can’t be
changed by opting out of it. We cannot escape the system.
For example, if you form a cooperative to manufacture shoes,
you still have to buy the materials and sell the shoes in an international
market. Buyers want the shoes as cheaply as possible. How can you compete
successfully against companies that produce similar shoes using exploited
labour without driving down the cost of your shoes by exploiting yourself?
There cannot be socialism in one country, much less in a single cooperative or
network of cooperatives. Even if the members of a m cooperative or network of
cooperatives are nominally their own bosses, it follows from the continued
existence of the capitalist relations that “the process of production has
mastery over [human beings], instead of the opposite…” as Marx pointed out,
Thus as long as “…The co-operative factories run by workers themselves [exist
within capitalism]…they naturally reproduce in all cases, in their present
organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce
them…the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here…only in the
form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e., they
use the means of production to valorize their own labour.” What was crucial to Marx wasn’t which human
beings were nominally in control, but whether the process of production had
mastery over human beings, or the opposite. We cannot endorse a system of
worker-run cooperatives where “the workers in association are their own
capitalist.” That is, in order to compete effectively, they pay themselves the
minimum and extract from themselves the maximum output. Even within
capitalist-owned firms, the cooperative labour process is a harbinger of
socialism. And capitalism’s creation of a socialized labour force is the
creation of a new social power that can bring it down. But as long as
capitalism exists, cooperative labour is neither self-directed activity nor the
partial emergence of the new society within the old one. Labour can become
freely associated only by breaking with the enslaving laws of capitalist
production. There is no in-between. The system must be uprooted and replaced
with a wholly different way of working, not just distributing. And we need a
system in which it’s possible to produce for human needs, not for the sake of
accumulating more capital. The ideal of worker-owned and -operated production
neglects the fact that, as Marx observed, the conditions for industrial
production are not essentially the workers’ own labour, but rather more socially
general: production has become the actual property of society.
The ideal of worker-owned and -operated production neglects
the fact that, as Marx observed, the conditions for industrial production are
not essentially the workers’ own labour, but rather more socially general:
production has become the actual property of society.
