From the recent Bad Faith podcast. Gonna read up on them. Seems like a decent first step towards full communism, with the added benefit of I don't think people have an immune response to the term.
"Democratize the workforce" is pretty close to "seize the means of production". I'll take it, for now.
Co-ops are not only good, they are the logical first step towards socialism. The immediate economic benefits are higher wages, better job security, better working conditions. But far more importantly, the political benefit is that real economic power shifts to the working class.
People saying co-ops are revisionism or whatever are missing the point. Co-ops dont bring about Marxist socialism, but they definitely do a lot of the heavy lifting in generating improving people's lives, giving them real power, and acting as a starting point for socialism.
I don't have much to add that hasn't already been said in this very good thread, but yes. Listen to Richard Wolff. He's basically the only prevelant marxist in academics and in my opinion has some very good stuff. He has a YouTube channel where he posts 10-15 minute videos dunking on libs pretty much every day.
I like Wolfe for his analysis, I’m less into his “solutions”. I have a feeling that a lot of old socialists who have had to live through 40 years of neoliberal “end of history” are the biggest victims of capitalist realism, they have a weird Stockholm syndrome that leads them to revisionism and bourgeois thought.
I mean, what other concrete solutions would you put forward in USA? It's one thing to critique, and another to present an alternative.
Yeah, I'm inclined to be pretty generous towards his solutions simply because he's at least presenting solutions.
But it isn’t a solution unless he tells us how exactly we co-operatise the vast majority of the US economy - are Google, Apple, and the rest just going to let their workers do this? Are co-ops supposed to start fresh and compete with established enterprises? What about public sector work, how do you “democratise” a government job when you work for the bourgeois state?
Limited, partial solutions can be valuable as a proof of concept, as a means of normalizing a once-radical idea, as a way of developing improved ideas through trial, as a way of building worker power for larger solutions, etc. There's a real danger of dismissing anything that's not a silver bullet, and we shouldn't succumb to that.
workers organizing en-masse like they did in the 19th-early 20th century is a more likely to happen (and revolutionary) concrete solution--as pointed out elsewhere, co-ops aren't exactly easy to start and operate at a disadvantage in a lot of sectors of the economy
the total number of brewery workers employed in worker-owned breweries probably wouldn't even be a large enough staff to operate a single budweiser brewery
and this is coming from someone who loves coops. but seeing all the libs in this thread pretending like they're a prescription from Marx and not a thing the ur-lib John Stuart Mill came up with is wiiiiiiild
ok so workers organize and...then what? what concrete goal would they be working towards? state ownership of all capital? just higher wages and nothing more?
Look, diversity of tactics good and I patronize worker-coops wherever possible and dream of one day working for one. I also am working to organize my industry. But acting like worker cooperatives have a basis in theory as a vehicle to socialism is wildly revisionist. I'm begging you to read John Stuart Mill or at least enter 'cooperative enterprise' into your preferred search engine.
Don't take my word for it, but off the top of my head workers organize and...:
On Turtle Island and in most of the anglosphere they organized around 8 hour workdays, 40 hour workweeks, ending child labor, receiving parental leave, etc. A lot of people died at the hands of the state and paramilitaries in order to make those changes to their workplace. The state and bosses bent to these demands in order to otherwise avoid a revolution or attempts at one.
Perhaps most notably, without the worker soviets in 1917 the bolsheviks are never able to seize or keep power.
Like what do you think it means to call for workers of the world to unite and seize the means of production, exactly?
It is one thing to sieze power. It is anothre thing entirely to have a concrete idea of how to organize the economy after taking power. And the very incentive for taking power depends on what exactly the end goal is.
I think basing his solutions on current successful systems already in place in other countries makes his ideas easily acceptable to the masses. The hard part is getting anyone to listen to an hour long podcast/presentation/debate.
If you have other solutions I'd love to hear them.
What would be a solution to avoid this front happening? Was it some sort of but in flaw of having so many coops?
only if you're doing reformism over decades which uhhh doesn't look likely
An actual left wing revolution in the immediate future doesn't look likely either. We're not positioned to seize power if the US State falls, but the right is.
While we build our strength for the future, doing things that improve the material conditions of the working class in the present day is good.
i mean I'm fine with co-ops in the short term and all but starting a co-op kinda requires capital, and in our increasingly monopolized economy you're not gonna have a easy time in most sectors, still should be encouraged tho as just one tactic of many
I’d like to start a side discussion - would commenters rather see mass co-operatisation of the workplace, or mass involvement in MILITANT trade unionism? I would argue that the latter can apply more pressure to the wider capitalist system and the bourgeois state.
Coops are better than unions. Militant unions are better than coops. Militant coops would be better than militant unions. We need a militant cooperatism. If you're not using your cooperative voting rights to choose to give the whole office time off to bolster a union picket line, are you even part of a mass labor movement?
Also coops should be giving each other huge preferential discounts. If you're going to try to seize power through market means, the very least you could do is cheat.
also they went over a lot of this in the Wolff-Chapo interview
Unrelated but I love this interview, it was one of the first episodes I listened to - Wolfe responds to “taxation is theft” by saying profit is theft and I just love that.
Gotta find a way to redistribute wealth from the workers who control tech syndicates versus those who work in restaurants
This. Worker coops are very good, but ultimately insufficient at a societal level.
I might be a huge lib, but can someone explain the difference between an enterprise where the workers are the owners and share the profits (co-op) and one where the workers own the means of production?
Well, if you believe Lenin, this is pure “economism” - focusing purely on the battle between workers and employers. The fight between workers and employers is just part of the struggle for socialism. He considered this kind of narrow minded approach opportunism.
If you’re a “socialist” and not talking about the abolition of wage labour and proletarian control of the state as WELL as the workplace, you’re playing against the bourgeoisie on their own turf, by their own rules. Let’s say a bunch of private prison workers somehow “democratised their workplace” - it’s done nothing to change the prison industrial complex, except slightly rearranging who gets which slice of the pie.
Not to say that co-ops are bad, they’re a marginal improvement on the alternative, but I find it mildly concerning that someone who is clearly as intelligent as Wolfe seems to think this is the be all and end all of socialist agitation. I don’t know if it’s some kind of tactical consideration he’s made to “start small”, but if he has I suggest he read What Is To Be Done? because Lenin was calling that shit out 120 years ago.
Wolfe has mentioned that he doesnt see co-ops as the end goal, but a starting point for socialism. I would agree with him.
Still not seeing a difference between a group of workers owning their own business and the socialist "workers owning the means of production" as described by Marx.
I get what you're describing is a move towards a centralized and controlled economy- but in a market-based society, why would workers choose to pay themselves less than they produce in value if they are the owners and decision makers at their company.
This is a step for socialism, towards full on communism. In my opinion.
“The workers owning the means of production” doesn’t mean “these specific workers at this one business owning this specific business”. If one auto plant becomes a co-op, they don’t control the mine, or the smelting plant, or the place where the electronics are made, or the transport chain that gets the materials to the plant, or the distribution network that disperses the finished product. They’re still just one tiny “worker owned” cog in a bourgeois machine. It’s essentially the same as big capitalist enterprises integrating petit-bourgeois small tradesmen into their operations, which is a thing that happens already.
Not to mention I have a feeling that co-ops would eventually be squeezed out of the market, like any other petit-bourgeois element, they will eventually be proletarianised.
Ok, so what if the smelter were worker owned, and the mine, and the electronics manufacturer, and the transport company? That is better, right? Even if they are operating in a market based economy?
Are the different co-ops all “co-operating” with each other, or are they in competition? Are the smelters trying to squeeze as much profit as they can from the auto workers? Are the transporters trying to squeeze the rest of the supply chain? Because if they are, congrats, you just invented capitalism with more steps.
But it isn’t though if the whole supply chain is coops? Squeezing will result in much more effective socially needed labor contraction/wage equalization. As one labor place becomes too highly compensated, it would spawn a second shop in market paradigm.
I think industries were this is not true is only extremely high tech sector (precision instruments/silicon manufacturing/space), where labor education takes decade plus. The issue wouldn’t be competition up and down chain, it would be exclusively top of the chain in imaginary market-economy coops.
I mean, yes, they are trying to lower the price of goods. And yes, this is a market-based system, so the balance of income for the co-op, distributed among its workers to pay suitable amounts, with affordability of the products will happen. But without the bourgeois ownership, without the leeches stealing surplus value, there is likely room for price changes while still providing the workers with their value.
Isnt this desirable? Workers would see increases in income, and products would potentially decrease in price. Or go up.
Anyway, I see what you're saying, but I think it is significantly different without the leeching class stealing value across the entire supply chain.
And no, its not capitalism with more steps - worker power is a real thing in this situation, and where is the capitalist class?
Ehhh, critical support of co-ops.
On a micro-level, there isn't much difference between a co-op & a labor syndicate. Lots of different ways to (quasi)democratically structure a workplace.
On a macro-level, co-ops still function as defacto capitalist entities, They're still working within a framework of commodity production and market trading. While usually less exploitive than a similar capitalist enterprises, making the workers their own exploiters still leads to contradictions eventually.
The missing piece of this theory though is “how does a co-op grow to the level of being compete with multinational capitalist enterprise”? I find your comment interesting and hadn’t thought of it through that lens, I particularly like the idea that co-operatives almost demystify capitalist relations of production by revealing “the market” itself to be the cause of contradiction, not “bosses” as such.
But so many comments here are skipping to a stage of play where co-ops control the majority of the economy. I don’t know how that happens unless, I dunno, Apple and Google employees somehow seize their workplace and transform it into a co-op.
Does Wolfe have any particular plan of how to co-operatise the entire capitalist economy?
It doesn't make sense to me that workers would exploit themselves -when there is noone at the top taking their surplus value. They would take it.
It’s not themselves they would be exploiting sure. Well, let’s say they make tantal capacitors, a) would they care about supply chain? B) if they do, what would happen if they’ve tried to ethically source it? C) do they benefit from patent system and trade deals?
if the whole world collapsed into coops that would be fine, as it will quickly equalize value/labor relationship, sans military/trade deals, would be nice. So largely positive, but critical support
Well this is the point, any principled worker operated business would be immediately pushed out of the market by bigger enterprises with lower costs who are A) exploiting their workers directly and B) exploiting workers further down the production chain either directly or indirectly
Nah exploiting their workers is precisely the opposite effect, as coop can provide higher salaries, if everything else is the same, the owner doesn’t take their chunk away. The source exploitation is much bigger issue, I agree.
Edit: also capitalist sugar sponsor can make competing business operate at significant loss to outlive them, now that I’m thinking about uber:(
Well, that’s largely the issue with military, no? Which is why there is an inherent danger to socdem policies without anti-imperialism largely. They could just vote for the guy(*or gal) who will fund some paramilitary in some country to bash some skulls.
In capitalist framework the solution via tnc is even more obvious, it is exactly what neolibs harp on about, except they ignore imperialism: investing in countries where labor is cheap causes them to not become so cheap, and profit rates of investment to gradually equalize across the world, and then drop to 0, ushering something akin to worldwide crisis of capitalism. Two issues here are: power imbalance by means of guns (which neolibs are oh so happy to ignore), which can freeze this process completely as we see in global south, and two: we don’t have time, because climate change :(. The mechanics of the process, be it gradual spread of coops (I don’t think it would be unsuccessful tbh) or sudden worldwide rebellion are kinda two steps ahead of the central issues, as I see them (but may be I’m too third worldism pilled). But still, preliminary work on coops is great, so.
In a vacuum, sure, but you're skipping to the end-game of a capital market. Unless a co-op has a monopoly, the nature of the capitalist system they're in will still end up influencing their decisions, sometimes in downright anti-social ways.
If there are two competing co-ops, one whose workers are willing to vote themselves a paycut in order to out-price the competition will win. Faced with a recession, the one that decides to democratically slow production and/or fire their comrades will win(maybe they'll draw straws?). Co-ops still must respond to market forces or die. Faced with a lawsuit, or environmental regulation, or whatever really, the logic of co-ops is scarcely different from capitalist firms.
Exactly - what happens if your co-op is big enough to start become a monopoly, etc.? It’s still operating in the same sphere as any other capitalist enterprise. Plus, can the workers really be said to “own the means of production” when it is so tenuous - for example the bourgeois state could just make a law banning co-ops under some pretence or other.
Tbh large company=monopoly is a common misunderstanding. Gigantic companies like Walmart or GE still compete with other gigantic companies with the same intensity as small businesses do. It's why the law of value is still valid today, despite like 1000 companies controlling 80% of all capital.
I agree that taking state power is essential, like no way the ruling class is gonna let you have your peaceful co-op society even if it's 100% legal within their own framework.
Yes though there are two criticisms I can come up with off the top of my head:
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They are good overall, but have the problem that even with 100% worker coops, this would not necessarily eliminate the profit motive from work and therefore society. This is difficult to reconcile as a communist, and so it should (if it is even possible to get there from here) likely be viewed as a transitional period to full communism.
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Some may believe that, if people become economically more comfortable, they may lose the taste for full communism. I suppose some may logically view it is an impediment to revolution for this reason (I am guessing here).
Overall I would love to work at an effective coop and I am a huge Wolff fan also.
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Workers' co-ops are one big step closer to workers' councils, or to communes, or both.
