WHY WORKER COOPERATIVES? THE HISTORICAL UNDERPINNINGS AND DEFENSE OF WORKER COOPERATIVES

Worker cooperatives have captured the mindset and the imagination of countless committed thinkers who have had the working class at the heart of their beings. The grounded basis of their belief systems is that working men and women can labor productively and provide for their families and communities without overlords, captains of industry, magistrates or members of the managerial or ownership classes.

Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci among many other theorists and political economists – some influentially writing earlier than these notables, others contributing afterwards, all coming from varying ideological principles and orientations – understood the need to confront and supersede the exploitative wage system under existing capitalist relations. It is the wage system that, after all, is at the bottom of how capital continues to achieve profits while immiserating the bulk of the working class. We need to examine the hierarchical relationship between the capitalist and the worker by reenergizing our notion of what is done with capital and by whom. Whether Marxists, neo-Marxists, utopian socialists, reformed socialists, left-liberals, they all recognized the intrinsic value and important interjection of cooperatives as a counterweight to capital–worker societal relationships. Cooperatives offered a major departure from hierarchy at work and working-class exploitation.

Marx, in Capital, vol. I, was the most notable, though not the earliest, theorist to note that workers lacked a sense of community and their aggregate social labor is manifested only at the point of exchange when commodities are purchased (Marx 1967a: 73–75). In reality the total collective labor of separate production units represents a dual narrative: workers producing as a group of individuals and workers as part of a society's achieved surplus value produced and exchanged. The product doesn't have much meaning for the worker until it is successfully accepted in the market. Any worker acknowledgement with each other only found confirmation in the sale of the product. Finally, the whole process ends for the worker at that point. Nor, of course, does the worker control what is being produced in the first place. The worker's product is bought by other workers and they, in turn, buy another product with their earnings produced by another worker producing elsewhere. It is this exchange of commodities that Marx envisioned as the lifeblood of capitalism (ibid.: ch. 3). And this exchange is critical for, as Marx noted, 'Circulation sweats money from every pore' (ibid.: 113).

Marx's keen insight was that this was a historical phase of economic development and need not be eternal. Nature has not produced forever one small group of owners and a much larger group of people possessing nothing but their labor power (ibid.: 169). Whatever Marx's critique of worker cooperatives as not spelling the end of capitalism, his many comments about the lack of worker control over what, how and for whom something is produced under capitalism make it clear that he would see cooperatives as enhancing workers' lives while presaging a supersession of this mode of production. In the Grundrisse, he clearly sees that capital needs labor, but also that labor needs capital to be productive. It is fully a question of who rules and manages the productive process and for what ends (Marx 1973: 293–310).

It is not by accident that Marx devoted a whole chapter to 'Cooperation' in Capital, vol. I. He knew the power of capital and that of labor itself increased multifold in the process of workers working together and producing what an individual worker could not. In fact it this togetherness among workers that greatly enhances their creative and productive powers manyfold (Marx 1967a: ch.13). Marx said it best when he, speaking of cooperative labor, wrote, '... it excites emulation between individuals and raises their animal spirits ... This power is due to cooperation itself. When the laborer cooperates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species' (ibid: 329). Of course, it is the capitalist and his managers who takes advantage of worker cooperation. But it need not be because, unquestionably, the capitalist is dispensable in this scenario. Marx wrote in Capital, vol. 3,

Cooperative factories furnish proof that the capitalist has become no less redundant as a functionary ... Inasmuch as the capitalist's work does not originate in the purely capitalist process of production, and hence does not cease on its own when capital ceases; inasmuch as it does not confine itself solely to the function of exploiting the labor of others; inasmuch as it therefore originates from the social form of the labor-process, from combination and cooperation of many in pursuance of common result, it is just as independent of capital as that form itself as soon as it has burst its capitalistic shell ... In a cooperative factory the antagonistic nature of the labor of supervision disappears, because the manager is paid by the laborers instead of representing capital counterposed to them. (Marx 1967c: 387)

Marx later adds,

The antithesis between capital and labor is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated laborers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labor. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage. (Ibid.: 440)

Nor is it either natural or God-given that the owner/manager be the organizer of men working and producing cooperatively, nor that it be the fixed form of organized production or relationship among workers. Marx wrote in Grundrisse, 'The transformation of labor (as living, purposive activity) into capital is in itself, the result of the exchange between capital and labor, in so far as it gives the capitalist the title of ownership to the product of labor (and command over the same)' (Marx 1973: 308).

In 1859, Karl Marx, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, wrote of new modes of production developing within old forms: 'At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or with the...