By Steve Dubb and Emily Kawano

Nonprofit Quarterly
July 13, 2022 – What does ownership mean, and how can it be structured to design a more democratic economy? It is common to think of ownership as being about possession: it’s yours, or it’s mine—or perhaps, if we are thinking as a group, it’s ours. But it is much more than that. Ownership is a bundle of rights—social, individual, and collective—which means its boundaries and intersections vary from place to place.1

Today, a growing number of people are questioning how those ownership rights are defined and distributed. These days, in the world of work in the United States, there is talk of a Great Resignation;2 but this can also be thought of in other ways—as a great awakening, a great rebellion, a great recalibration.3 Beyond the workplace, communities are designing entirely new ecosystems of institutions—reclaiming ownership of their identities, cultures, land, and businesses.

Discussion of systems change has also rarely been more present. Yet, when people say “systems change,” more often than not they don’t mean systemic change—not really. Perhaps, to be generous, they mean systemic change writ small, focused on taking a multifaceted (sometimes called “collective impact”) approach to addressing a single problem—such as building a better workforce training and development system4— rather than shifting power and changing rights of ownership in society as a whole.

As Cyndi Suarez, NPQ’s president and editor in chief, observed a few years ago, “[S]ystem thinking has become deracinated, devoid of its true power implications.”5 Nowhere is this point more apt than when it comes to thinking of the overall economy. Simply put, when it comes to the economy, all too often systems change is treated as a bridge too far, best not entertained at all. Alternatively, systems change is only framed within the confines of our current dominant system: we are invited to “reimagine capitalism” rather than to dare imagine beyond it.6

With this article, we want to take that challenge on. We do this not out of curiosity or academic fancy but for some highly practical and pragmatic reasons. Our collective well-being—and perhaps even our collective survival—depends on it.

The Nature of the Challenge

It is common to treat the present global economy as a fact of nature, but it is not. Greed, we are also told, is part of the human condition. Maybe it is, but so too is cooperation. As Ariel Knafo, a psychology professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, explained in Scientific American years ago, “Human nature supports both prosocial and selfish traits,” and the “degree to which we act cooperatively or selfishly is unique to each individual and hinges on a variety of genetic and environmental influences.”7 Our current economic system privileges greed and diminishes cooperation; an economic system that prioritized solidarity would do the opposite. We can design our economy to build on the more cooperative, rather than the more self-serving, parts of our human selves—if we choose.

Can a redesign be done? Well, it has been done before. In fact, our present capitalist system, so often treated as permanent, is, historically speaking, quite new. The origins of the capitalist economy can be traced back to at least the beginning of the imperialist process unleashed by the European so-called “discovery” of the Americas. As economist Jeffrey Sachs explains in “Twentieth-century political economy: a brief history of global capitalism,” modern capitalism only “emerged as a [dominant] social system in western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.”8

In short, capitalism became the world’s reigning economic system only two centuries ago, and in many parts of the world its ascendancy is more recent than that. Economic systems have changed before. They can—and almost certainly will—change again.

Capitalism, as an economic system, has unleashed human productive capacity, but it has done so in ways that are highly exploitative and extractive. Capitalism, in short, has done and is doing great harm. It is impossible to discuss capitalism without recognizing its roots in Indigenous genocide and the enslavement of millions of Africans and their forcible relocation—dragged in chains to the “New World.” As Joseph Inikori, a University of Rochester historian, details, “the employment of enslaved Africans in large-scale commodity production in the Americas was central to the rise of the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy.”9

These days, even the benefits of capitalism on its own terms (such as gross domestic product) are showing diminishing returns—one sign of which is a decline in productivity increases.10 Meanwhile, when it comes to economic justice, the costs are disturbingly obvious. In January 2022, Oxfam offered a report that noted, “The 10 richest men in the world own more than the bottom 3.1 billion people.”11 And U.S. data on the racial wealth and wage gaps give few indications—to be polite—of substantive progress. In 2020, David Leonhardt in the New York Times observed that “the wages of Black men trail those of white men by as much as when Harry Truman was president.”12 Meanwhile, the Black-white wealth gap, according to Federal Reserve data, was greater in 2016 than in 1968 (2019 data showed modest improvement).13

Environmental costs are also rapidly rising. The climate crisis, the result of mounting carbon emissions, has already increased global temperatures by an estimated 1.11 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.14 But carbon emissions are by no means the only environmental challenge. As journalist Ashoka Mukpo writes in Mongabay, “The past 50 years have seen a catastrophic decline in the planet’s ecosystems and natural environments. Every day at least 32,300 hectares (80,000 acres) of forest vanish, and the size of wildlife populations has dropped by an average of 60%.”15

A Path Forward: Steps Toward a Solidarity Economy

How can any economy address the vast injustices ours generates today? The word economy is a combination of two Greek words—oikos, meaning household, and nomos, meaning management.16 The global economy, then, requires that we collectively manage our planetary home, including how we generate wealth and allocate resources. This is, of course, an immensely complicated endeavor in a world inhabited by more than 7.9 billion people.17

Still, the good news is that the economy is ultimately a human creation. It therefore can be—and is now, albeit often in very harmful ways—collectively managed. Even better news is that there is widespread creativity and innovation building a new economy right now in the shell of the old. In some cases, people are doing so consciously—in other words, in their work, they are pursuing a vision of replacing the overall economic system with one that would prioritize solidarity. More often, though, these innovators are claiming ownership of their community and their local economies without explicitly seeking to build a solidarity economy. But in this pragmatic, practical, problem-solving work, these economy-building movement leaders are laying crucial building blocks of a different, more humane form of economic and social organization.

But what do we mean by the phrase solidarity economy? As was noted last year in the Nonprofit Quarterly, when moving toward an economy that is rooted in principles of solidarity, there is neither a “ready-made” formula nor a “one-size-fits-all” approach. A solidarity economy is, however, organized around some core values—solidarity, participatory democracy, equity in all dimensions, sustainability, and pluralism.18 In terms of its theoretical base, the solidarity economy builds on the notion of economic democracy—namely, the idea that principles of popular sovereignty should be applied to management of the economy.19

The notion of a solidarity economy is also based on lessons from the failures of twentieth-century state socialism. The core solidarity economy values of pluralism, participatory democracy, and sustainability are a direct response to the lessons learned from state socialism’s overreliance on centralized decision-making, as is the solidarity economy movement’s overall emphasis on the importance of decentralization and federation.

A mistaken assumption of state socialism was its implicit postulate that economic management of our collective home meant management from the top. The work of the late Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, points to the fallacy of this assumption. Her Nobel Prize lecture is titled “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.” Ostrom’s research focused on the organization of what she called “common pool resources.” To pick a prominent example, the free-for-all dumping of carbon into the air could be considered a degradation of the common pool resource of our global atmosphere, resulting in climate change. Among her conclusions: more often than not, effective resource management solutions come from the bottom rather than the top. Ostrom also argued that “a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.”20 This also happens to be a good way to summarize a central goal of the solidarity economy movement.

Putting Solidarity Economy Values Into Practice

So, what practical, pragmatic lessons can be learned from economic justice movements today? Here are a few:

Mutual Aid. The COVID-19 pandemic has lifted mutual aid out of obscurity and made evident to all the practicality of solidarity as an operating principle. An article published last year in Frontiers in Psychology noted the fundamental role that mutual aid played in promoting community health and well-being during the pandemic in the United Kingdom. It called for sustaining such practices even after the pandemic finally subsides, by (among other things) prioritizing community-level interventions, and recognizing their importance in public policy in developing “long-term community responses.”21

Democratic Planning. Participatory democracy is sometimes described as a pie-in-the-sky concept; but participatory budgeting in the United States is, increasingly, shifting from a niche idea to a serious mechanism for the public to take ownership of public resources and plan their use in a democratic way.22

Take the city of Seattle, Washington. In response to calls to defund the police, the city council allocated

$30 million to be distributed through a public planning process. The process was sometimes contentious, but it succeeded in giving BIPOC communities in Seattle an opportunity to self-determine the investments that they needed. As city council member Debora Juarez said, when the council geared up to approve the measure, “We don’t need to tell BIPOC communities what they need. We just need to listen and deliver.”23

Figure 1: Seattle, $30 million Participatory Budgeting
(as adopted by City Council on August 9, 2021)26

Housing: $8.8 million
•  $4.6 million: Subsidized homeownership projects, with target outreach to households of color

•  $1.8 million: Wealth-building education for residents, artists, and business owners of color

•  $1 million: City contracting help for construction businesses owned by women and people of color

•  $875,000: Help for homeowners to keep their properties

•  $250,000: Study on potential lease-to-own program

•  $250,000: Consultant work on housing for union apprentices

Small businesses: $7.5 million

•  $5 million: Grants and subsidized loans to small businesses, including those owned by people of color

•  $2.5 million: Consultant support for small businesses

Education: $7.5 million

•  $4 million: Various student and teacher programs, with focus on youth of color

•  $2 million: Cultural programs aimed at youth of color

•  $1.5 million: Programs for youth involved in the criminal legal system

Health: $6.2 million

•  $1.7 million: Programs helping residents of color with healthcare careers

•  $1.5 million: Innovative healing programs at community health centers

•  $1 million: Efforts to secure healthcare for residents without coverage, with focus on communities of color

•  $750,000: Healthy food programs aimed at communities of color

•  $550,000: Environmental justice grants for community organizations that focus on people of color

•  $500,000: Healthcare mentorships and internships for youth of color

•  $250,000: Farm-to-table programs aimed at youth of color

Political economist Gar Alperovitz has noted that the issue of democratic planning is a central challenge for building a post-capitalist economy.24 There is, quite obviously, a lot more work to do to build governance structures that can allow for effective democratic input into economic planning at the regional and national level. Nonetheless, nascent though they may be, local examples of democratic planning, such as in Seattle, are building a critical knowledge base in this direction.25

Workplace Democracy. Employees typically spend around half of their waking hours at their workplace. All too often, they are excluded from any democratic decision-making beyond what’s for lunch. The transformative potential of fostering workplace democracy is enormous, and data suggest that it pays off in terms of productivity, job quality, job satisfaction, and employee retention. Employee ownership is a hot trend these days, especially given the so-called “silver tsunami”—the impending retirement of the baby boom generation of small business owners.27 There are two major avenues of employee ownership: an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and a worker cooperative. Both have been shown to improve business performance.

ESOPs give workers shares of stock in their workplace, and are by far the more widespread model. While workers in some ESOPs have a controlling interest, the vast majority do not. Worker cooperatives, by contrast, are owned and controlled by the workers, thus hardwiring workplace democracy into the structure. While ESOPs are a step in the right direction, worker co-ops are a better strategy to build democracy in the workplace.

Sustainability. At the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES), executive director Lori Stern sees regenerative agriculture as a means to apply solidarity economy principles to build “a more equitable and resilient system that puts farmers, workers, and eaters in control.” Her organization pursues this vision through a range of strategies, including increasing connections between farmers (including by building domestic supply chains), promoting cooperative ownership structures, and food system policy advocacy. Stern adds that, “The emerging farming solidarity economy is a sum of a range of practices, rooted in solidarity economy principles of pluralism, democracy, equity, mutualism, and sustainability. The connected and circular nature of life on a diverse farm forms the ecosystem that enables all to thrive.”28

Equity and Reparations. There are many inspiring examples of how a genuine solidarity economy, organizing effectively, combines equity and community ownership. One example comes from Humboldt, California, where Cooperation Humboldt—an organization with an explicit solidarity economy mission—has partnered with the local Wiyot nation. This partnership has involved committing to paying an honor tax of 1 percent of Cooperation Humboldt’s annual budget to the Wiyot nation, in acknowledgment that Humboldt is unceded Wiyot ancestral territory. Such reparations are integral to a solidarity economy.29

But Is Systemic Change Possible?

We conclude where we began. We respect those, such as Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, who advocate for the broad application of solidarity principles in our economy but seek to do so within the framework of the existing economic system.30 Benner and Pastor note that “we have reached a point where our fundamental economic structures are driving unprecedented inequality, social divisions, and ecological destruction, amidst a politics of polarization, fragmentation, and alienation,” and ask if we cannot “build a better economy” out of a sense of mutuality.31 That is, indeed, the right question to ask.

Where we differ is in our contention that advocates of a solidarity economy must be brave enough to admit that building an alternative economics that is truly based on cooperation will very likely require systemic change beyond capitalism.32 In particular, we believe the separation of the overwhelming majority of people from meaningful ownership of the economy is a central flaw of capitalism that fosters division, creates concentration of wealth and power, encourages corruption (and cheating—anything to get an edge), and, ultimately, undermines solidarity. This is not to deny the need to fight for reforms; however, it is also to affirm the need for movements to retain the imagination to envision systemic transformation, even while fighting for reforms such as the ones obtained by solidarity economy advocates in Seattle.

Where we agree with Benner and Pastor is in the necessity of rooting social change in social movements. The struggle for a solidarity economy is a practical one, and there is no path forward without social movement. As the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright noted, “If processes of social reproduction were comprehensive, and fully coherent, then there would be little possibility for effective strategies of radical social transformation.”33 But Wright was an optimist, and he added that “even when the spaces are limited, they can allow for transformations that matter.”34

That remains the work. It begins with imagining an economy beyond capitalism. Is this possible? Not only is it possible, it’s a must, if we truly want to work toward an economy that we can all claim as our own.

Notes
1. Steve Dubb, “Ownership as Social Relation: Nonprofit Strategies to Build Community Wealth through Land,” Nonprofit Quarterly, December 11, 2018, org/ownership-as-social-relation-nonprofit-strategies-to-build-community-wealth-through-land.

2. Ophelia Akanjo, “The Great Resignation—A Call for Change in Organizational Culture,” Nonprofit Quarterly, February 16, 2022, org/the-great-resignation-a-call-for-change-in-organizational-culture.

3. Manuel Pastor et , “Solidarity Economics: OUR Movement, OUR Economy” (UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation and USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute, November 4, 2021, virtual), transform.ucsc.edu/event/solidarity-economics/.

4. Bryan Lindsley, “Our Change Systems Solutions—FAQs,” National Fund for Workforce Solutions, Washington, C., accessed April 2, 2022, nationalfund.org/our-solutions/change-systems-for-improved-outcomes/frequently-asked-questions-about-our-change-systems-solution.

5. Cyndi Suarez, “Systems Change Is All about Shifting Power,” Nonprofit Quarterly, October 1, 2019, org/systems-change-is-all-about-shifting-power.

6. See, for example, Our Call to Reimagine Capitalism in America (Redwood City, CA: Omidyar Network, September 2020); and Rebecca Henderson, Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020). See also Rebecca Henderson, website for Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, accessed May 2, 2022, org.

7. Matthew Robison, “Are People Naturally Inclined to Cooperate or Be Selfish?” Scientific American, September 1, 2014, scientificamerican.com/article/are-people-naturally-inclined-to-cooperate-or-be-selfish.

8. Jeffrey Sachs, “Twentieth-century political economy: a brief history of global capitalism,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 15, no. 4 (December 1999): 92.

9. Joseph Inikori, “Atlantic Slavery and the Rise of the Capitalist Global Economy.” Supplement, Current Anthropology 61, no. S22 (October 2020): S166–67.

10. Shawn Sprague, “The S. productivity slowdown: an economy-wide and industry-level analysis,” Monthly Labor Review, April 2021, www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2021/article/the-us-productivity-slowdown-the-economy-wide-and-industry-level-analysis.htm.

11. Nabil Ahmed et , Inequality kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19 (Oxford, UK: Oxfam Great Britain, January 17, 2022), 10.
12. David Leonhardt, “The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950,” New York Times, June 25, 2020, com/2020/06/25/opinion/sunday/race-wage-gap.html.

13. Heather Long and Andrew Van Dam, “The black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968,” Washington Post, June 4, 2020, washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/04/economic-divide-black-households; and Rachel Siegel, “Wealth gaps between Black and White families persisted even at the height of the economic expansion,” Washington Post, September 28, 2020, washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/28/wealth-gap-fed.

14. World Meteorological Organization, “2021 one of the seven warmest years on record, WMO consolidated data shows,” press release 19012022, January 19, 2022, public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/2021-one-of-seven-warmest-years-record-wmo-consolidated-data-shows.

15, Ashoka Mukpo, “As nature declines, so does human quality of life, study finds,” Mongabay, February 9, 2021, mongabay.com/2021/02/as-nature-declines-so-does-human-quality-of-life-study-finds.

16. “The Oikos of God: Economy and Ecology in the Global Household,” Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development, accessed May 3, 2022, com/the-oikos-of-god-economy-and-ecology-in-the-global-household.

17. “Wold Population Dashboard,” United Nations Population Fund, 2022, accessed May 3, 2022, org/data/world-population-dashboard.

18. Emily Kawano, “Imaginal Cells of the Solidarity Economy,” Nonprofit Quarterly 28, 2 (Summer 2021): 48–55, nonprofitquarterly.org/imaginal-cells-of-the-solidarity-economy/.

19, Ted Howard, Steve Dubb, and Sarah McKinley, “Economic Democracy,” in Achieving Sustainability: Visions, Principles, and Practices, Debra Rowe (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2014), 231–39.

20. Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems” (Nobel Prize lecture, Aula Magna, Stockholm University, Stockholm, December 8, 2009), org/uploads/2018/06/ostrom_lecture.pdf.

21. Maria Fernandes-Jesus et , “More Than a COVID-19 Response: Sustaining Mutual Aid Groups During and Beyond the Pandemic,” Frontiers in Psychology 12 (October 20, 2021).

22. See Michael Menser, “From Defunding to Reinvestment: Why We Need to Scale Participatory Budgeting,” Nonprofit Quarterly, June 25, 2020, nonprofitquarterly.org/from-defunding-to-reinvestment-why-we-need-to-scale-participatory-budgeting.

23. Daniel Beekman, “Seattle will invest $30 million in strategies recommended by panel for communities of color,” Seattle Times, last modified August 10, 2021, com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-will-invest-30-million-in-strategies-recommended-by-panel-for-communities-of-color. See also Daniel Beekman, “Seattle Mayor Durkan sends proposal to City Council for $30 million promised to communities of color,” Seattle Times, last modified July 13, 2021, seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-mayor-durkan-sends-proposal-to-city-council-for-30-million-promised-to-communities-of-color/.

24. Gar Alperovitz,” Building a Democratic Economy: Sketch of a Pluralist Commonwealth,” Nonprofit Quarterly 27, 1 (Spring 2020): 50–57, nonprfitquarterly.org/building-a-democratic-economy-sketch-of-a-pluralist-commonwealth/.

25. Steve Dubb, “Seattle Launches $30 million Participatory Budgeting Process,” Nonprofit Quarterly, February 5, 2021, org/seattle-launches-30-million-participatory-budgeting-process/.

26. For these data, see Beekman, “Seattle Mayor Durkan sends proposal to City Council for $30 million promised to communities of color.”

27. Steve Dubb, “Can Employee Ownership Hold Back a Tsunami of Small Business Closures?” Nonprofit Quarterly, November 27, 2017, org/can-employee-ownership-hold-back-tsunami-small-business-closures.

28. Lori Stern, “Rethinking Food with Solidarity in Mind: Lessons from COVID-19,” Nonprofit Quarterly, October 20, 2021, org/rethinking-food-with-solidarity-in-mind-lessons-from-covid-19.

29. Michelle Vassel and David Cobb, “An Indigenous Community Land Trust Rises: Making Land Back a Reality,” Nonprofit Quarterly, October 13, 2021, org/an-indigenous-community-land-trust-rises-making-land-back-a-reality.

30. Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, Solidarity Economics: Why Mutuality and Movements Matter (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021), 2.

31. Ibid.

32, Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei, “System Change: A Basic Primer to the Solidarity Economy,” Nonprofit Quarterly, July 8, 2020, org/system-change-a-basic-primer-to-the-solidarity-economy.

33. Erik Olin Wright, “Elements of a Theory of Transformation,” in Envisioning Real Utopias (London: Verso Books, 2010), 290.

34. Ibid.

Steve Dubb is a senior editor at NPQ, where he directs NPQ’s economic justice program, including NPQ’s Economy Remix column. Steve has worked with cooperatives and nonprofits for over two decades, including twelve years at The Democracy Collaborative and three years as executive director of NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation). In his work, Steve has authored, co-authored and edited numerous reports; participated in and facilitated learning cohorts; designed community building strategies; and helped build the field of community wealth building. Steve is the lead author of Building Wealth: The Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems (Aspen 2005) and coauthor (with Rita Hodges) of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads, published by MSU Press in 2012. In 2016, Steve curated and authored Conversations on Community Wealth Building, a collection of interviews of community builders that Steve had conducted over the previous decade.

Emily Kawano is a cofounder of the US Solidarity Economic Network, codirector of Wellspring Cooperatives in Springfield, Massachusetts, and is a member of NPQ’s economic justice advisory committee.

September 26, 2011 — First posted at Cuba’s Socialist Renewal, posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission — Cooperatives and Socialism: A Cuban Perspective is a new Cuban book, published in Spanish earlier this year. This important and timely compilation is edited by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker (pictured above). Avid readers of Cuba’s Socialist Renewal will recall that I translated and posted a commentary by Camila, titled "Cuba Needs Changes" [also available at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal], back in January. Camila lives in Cuba and has a degree in sustainable development from the University of Berkeley, California. She is a professor at the Centre for Studies on the Cuban Economy at Havana University, and her works have been published both in Cuba and outside the island.

Camila hopes her book may be published in English soon. In the meantime, she has kindly agreed to allow me to translate and publish this extract from her preface to Cooperatives and Socialism with permission from a prospective publisher. I hope that sharing this extract with readers will make you want to read the whole book. If it does become available in English I’ll post the details here. If you read Spanish you can download the 420-page book as a PDF here or here.

At the end of the text you’ll find the footnotes and table of contents, translated from the Spanish — Marce Cameron, editor Cuba’s Socialist Renewal

Preface to Cooperatives and Socialism: A Cuban perspective (extract)

By Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, translated by Marce Cameron

This book arises from the urgent need for us to make a modest contribution to the healthy “birth” of the new Cuban cooperativism and its subsequent spread. Given that cooperatives are foreshadowed as one of the organisational forms of labour in the non-state sector in the Draft Economic and Social Policy Guidelines of the Sixth Cuban Communist Party Congress, the Dr. Martin Luther King Memorial Centre approached me to compile this book. The Centre has made an outstanding contribution to popular education aimed at nurturing and strengthening the emancipatory ethical values, critical thinking, political skills and organisational abilities indispensable for the conscious and effective participation of social subjects. The Centre considers it timely and necessary to support efforts to raise awareness about a type of self-managed economic entity whose principles, basic characteristics and potentialities are unknown in Cuba. There is every indication that such self-managed entities could play a significant role in our new economic model.

For this to happen we must grapple with the question at the heart of this compilation: Is the production cooperative an appropriate form of the organisation of labour for a society committed to building socialism? There is no doubt that this question cannot be answered in a simplistic or absolute fashion. Our aim here is to take only a first step towards answering this question from a Cuban perspective in these times of change and rethinking, guided by the anxieties and hopes that many Cubans have about our future.

When it is proposed that the production cooperative be one – though not the only – form of enterprise in Cuba, three concerns above all are frequently encountered: some consider it too “utopian” and therefore inefficient; others, on the basis of the cooperatives that have existed in Cuba, suspect that they will not have sufficient autonomy[1] or that they will be “too much like state enterprises”; while others still, accustomed to the control over enterprise activities exercised by a state that intervenes directly and excessively in enterprise management, reject cooperativism as too autonomous and therefore a “seed of capitalism”. This book tries to take account of all these concerns, though there is no doubt that more space would be required to address them adequately.

The first concern is addressed to some extent with the data provided in the first part of the book regarding the existence and economic activity of cooperatives worldwide today. This shows that the cooperative is not an unachievable fantasy that disregards the objective and subjective requirements of viable economic activity. Thus, the experiences of cooperatives in the Basque Country, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela that are summarised in the third part of the book demonstrate that cooperatives can be more efficient than capitalist enterprises, even on the basis of the hegemonic capitalist conception of efficiency that ignores externalities, i.e. the impact of any enterprise activity on third parties.

The efficiency of cooperatives is greater still if we take into consideration all of the positive outcomes inherent in their management model, which can be summarised as the full human development[2] of its members and, potentially, of local communities. The democratic abilities and attitudes that cooperative members develop through their participation in its management can be utilised in other social spaces and organisations. Moreover, genuine cooperatives free us from some of the worst of the negative externalities (dismissals, environmental contamination, loss of ethical values) generated by enterprises oriented towards profit maximisation rather than the satisfaction of the needs of their workers.

It’s not possible to take up here the arguments of enterprise administration theorists who hold that cooperatives are inefficient. These criticisms are based, in general, on the fact that democratic decision-making takes time, ignoring the fact that this participation is also the principal source of the advantages of cooperatives over other, non-democratic enterprises. In addition, they condemn cooperatives for not resorting to dismissals, as well as for a supposed tendency to undertake little investment due to the maximisation of member incomes and their aversion to risk. However, such behaviour is not revealed in the practices of the cooperatives analysed in this book, practices which also demonstrate the advantages of democratically managed enterprises in terms of the positive motivation of cooperative members. While the negative incentive of the fear of dismissal is undoubtedly effective in eliciting certain behaviours, not even this is sufficient. The tendency of capitalist enterprises to incorporate methods of democratic management suggests that they understand that participation in decision-making is needed in order to achieve the levels of worker motivation necessary for competitive success in the capitalist market.

We hope that those who, on the basis of the Cuban experience, doubt that it is possible for a cooperative to be truly autonomous and democratic will find this concern adequately addressed in the first part of the compilation. Here, when we explain what a cooperative is, we point to the basic differences between a cooperative and a socialist state enterprise. In a genuine cooperative, the participation of the cooperative members in management does not depend on the enterprise management council deciding to involve them more in decision-making; such participation is a founding principle, concretised in the rights of members established in the internal rules of functioning and exercised through bodies and decision-making procedures that are drawn up and approved by the cooperative members themselves. Although the degree of autonomy of the new Cuban cooperatives will depend, of course, on the content of the anticipated legislation on cooperatives and on the implementation of the regulations it establishes, the Draft Economic and Social Policy Guidelines seem to indicate that they will be granted the powers of self-management that characterise cooperatives everywhere, and without which democratic self-management is impossible. We hope the legislation resolves the deficiencies of the current legal framework for Cuban agricultural cooperatives, which are analysed in the fourth part of this book.

The third concern, that which gives rise to the inclination to reject the cooperative as an option for socialist enterprise organisation because it is considered too autonomous and therefore incompatible with broader social interests, takes up the most space in this book. Beginning with the first essay in the compilation we attempt to demonstrate that genuine cooperatives function according to a logic that is diametrically opposed to that of capitalist enterprises. Instead of profit maximisation for the shareholders, the driving force of cooperatives is the satisfaction of the human development needs of their members, needs which are inevitably bound up with those of local communities and of the nation, and even of humanity as a whole. Throughout the book it is suggested that while it’s true that cooperatives cannot be incorporated into the national economic plan or regional or local development strategies though mechanisms of coercion or imposition, it is possible to harmonise and coordinate the orientation of their activities towards the fulfilment of social needs identified through the planning processes, above all if the latter are democratic and respond to the interests of the surrounding communities or those to which cooperative members belong.

However, to argue for the relevance of cooperatives as part of a socialist project we need to begin by clarifying what we mean when we refer to these socioeconomic entities. In the first part of this book, Jesus Cruz[3] and I try to define the cooperative as simply as possible. Here, it is important to stress that in the international context, cooperatives carry out a great diversity of economic activities, and that a not insignificant part of the global population either belongs to one of these organisations or directly benefits from their activities. This should not be surprising if we consider that the form of the organisation of labour that characterises a cooperative, self-management, has existed since the emergence of humanity. The cooperative has persisted as the most common organisational form chosen by groups of people that seek to resolve common problems through their own efforts.

What differentiates a production cooperative (referred to hereafter as “cooperative” since we emphasise this type[4]) from other forms of enterprise organisation is emphasised, based on an analysis of the cooperative principles[5] that have contributed to the success of these organisations since the emergence of the first modern cooperatives. These early modern cooperatives understood the imperative of achieving an effective enterprise management that would allow them to survive within the more savage and monopolistic capitalism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To the degree to which cooperatives have observed these principles in their daily practice, they have benefited from the intrinsic advantages of this form of enterprise. These advantages ultimately derive from a democratic management model that permits the harmonisation of individual interests with those of the collective (i.e. of the common interests of cooperative members) and even, though in a less axiomatic way, with the social interests of the local communities with which they interact the most.

The observance of these principles is also what allows cooperatives to reduce the inevitable corrupting effects of the capitalist surroundings in which the majority of them have developed. The capitalist environment privileges individual over collective solutions; makes it difficult to achieve equality by generating and reproducing differences in abilities and social status among cooperative members; denies them the time needed for democratic decision-making; punishes genuine acts of solidarity; and promotes the super-exploitation of human beings and nature. While this undoubtedly limits the horizon of human emancipation – the overcoming of the barriers that stand in the way of us fulfilling our human potentialities – an emancipatory dynamic has always been latent in genuine cooperatives. The capitalist environment is not an absolute barrier to cooperatives becoming spaces in which these principles are put into practice, and in which the values that such practices instill may develop. The experiences of successful cooperatives presented in this book demonstrate the economic and ethical-political potential of these organisational principals, above all when cooperatives that embody these principles are able to link up with other self-managed entities, and when they promote the approval of laws and regulations that undermine the prejudices that exist regarding cooperatives in the legal framework and in the practices of capitalist enterprises and state institutions.

As Julio Gambina and Gabriela Roffinelli argue, the cooperative should be seen as one of the many forms of the self-managed social organisation[6] that will allow us to transcend the capitalist logic of maximising narrow individual interests. Because it takes no account of human nature and its social and ecological constraints, such economic “rationality” is in fact irrational and suicidal. For as long as it pervades our daily practice, the logic of capitalism will not only distance us ever more from the socialist or communist ideal of complete social justice; it is also taking us to the brink of an irreversible rupture in the dynamic equilibrium of the biosphere.

The rationality that drives a cooperative, as with all forms of genuine self-management, is the necessity for a group of people to satisfy common needs and interests. It is based on the recognition that they share collective interests that correspond to some degree with their own individual interests, and that it is collective action that allows them to pursue these interests most effectively. This, together with the recognition that all its members are human beings with the equal right to participate in decision-making, results in democratic management in which the cooperative members decide not only who the leaders are and how revenues should be allocated, but also how to organise the process of production: what is produced, how and for whom.

The managerial autonomy of the collective that makes up the cooperative – the ability of this group of people to make decisions independently – is the key reason why the historical experiences of socialist construction have rejected their relevance to the building of socialism and have relegated them to agriculture or marginal economic spaces. Some see in autonomy a disconnection from, or a wanting to have nothing to do with, social interests and the strategic objectives embodied in the socialist economic plan, and ask the following questions: Is it possible to “hitch” an autonomous enterprise to a planned economy? Can a cooperative respond not only to the interests of its members but also to wider social interests? When one thinks in terms of absolute autonomy and authoritarian (i.e. undemocratic) planning, if the interests of collectives (groups) are considered a priori to be indifferent to social interests, then the answer is obviously negative. The authors of this book are motivated by the certainty that the answer is affirmative. We argue the case here, though we are unable to respond to all of the questions about how this can be achieved in practice.

Here, we must point out that we make no claim to have solved this practical problem which dates back to the times in which socialist theories were first elaborated. It is perhaps more of a conceptual problem than a practical one, since there are examples of collective and even private enterprises that satisfy social needs more effectively, and that have established decentralised horizontal relations that are more socially responsible, than some socialist state enterprises. Our focus here is on the form of organisation of labour within a productive unit and not in the economic system as a whole. The analysis of how a socialist-oriented society should guide the management of enterprises, or of the form in which the fruits of cooperative labour should be distributed in society, are thus topics that we do not attempt to grapple with in this initial approach to the problem. However, we do put forward some ideas in relation to these themes throughout the book.

\The “fruits” of cooperative labour that interest us most here are the human beings themselves that are “produced” as a consequence of the particular form in which the productive process is organised in the enterprise: the social subjects that work together as members of a cooperative and who are motivated to give the best of themselves to the success of their enterprise and, potentially, to local communities.

What differentiates a cooperative member from an employee of either a capitalist or socialist state enterprise? In light of the experiences of cooperatives analysed in this compilation, the member of a genuine producer cooperative, or other form of self-managed entity, is the true owner of their enterprise and thus feels like it. He or she, together with the collective they belong to, participate in a conscious and active way in strategic and managerial decision-making, as well as in their implementation and in verifying that decisions are carried out. What characterises a cooperative is not legal ownership of the means of production (premises, land, machinery) by the collective or group of people that comprise it, but the fact that decisions regarding the use of means of production are made by the cooperative as a whole, either directly or by representatives that they elect, in such a way and with such powers as decided by the collective. Albeit limited to the cooperative enterprise and its activity, this is a concrete form of self-management, of the exercise of popular sovereignty.

Given this, for Gambina and Roffinelli the relevance of various forms of worker self-management, in particular cooperatives, to the building of socialism depends on the degree to which they serve as an “an apprenticeship in administration outside the control of capital”. Thus the value of the cooperative lies in the nature of its daily practice, in the social relations of production that are established among its members: relations between associated producers rather than between wage-workers and capitalists. Cooperative members are not obliged to renounce, in exchange for wages or salaries, their capacity to think, be creative and make decisions. They exercise these capacities via democratic mechanisms in conditions of equal rights and duties. There are no bosses and subordinates in a cooperative but an organisational structure and a technical division of labour that have been collectively drawn up and approved.

Thus cooperatives can be valuable weapons in the struggle to build socialism. They are not the only such weapons, they are insufficient by themselves and are not devoid of risks and challenges, but they are nevertheless tools – perfectible and adaptable – for socialist construction. They are tools that we should not allow to be abandoned due to either state-centric dogma or the misconception that only what is privately owned and managed, and operates according to capitalist logic, works. As Gambina and Roffinelli argue, “… there is a dialectical relationship between socialism and cooperativism that is either promoted or discouraged in specific socio-historical conditions.” The extent to which cooperatives contribute to the building of socialism depends on the context in which they arise and develop, and on the relationship they establish with this context. 

Footnotes 

[1] By “autonomy” we mean the ability to make decisions independently. As we shall see, no social organisation anywhere in the world is completely autonomous since its options are always conditioned in one way or another by its social context.

[2] The term full or integral “human development” is used to make clear our rejection of the progressivist and economistic mythology that reduces development to achieving an abundance of material goods, without taking into account that development also has intrinsic ethical and spiritual dimensions, in which people can achieve professional fulfilment and the realisation of their potentialities as social beings.

[3] A brief biography of each of the contributors to this compilation is included at the end of the book.

[4] Cooperatives can be classified as either production cooperatives, in which cooperative members unite in order to collectively produce goods or provide services; or consumer cooperatives, in which the members acquire goods or services collectively.

[5] Essentially, as is clarified in the first contribution to this compilation, a cooperative must be: (1) open to members joining and leaving and flexible with regard to its internal organisation; (2) run democratically; (3) based on the labour of its members; (4) managerially autonomous; (5) prioritise the education and training of its members and the general public; (6) establish mechanisms for cooperation with other cooperatives; and (7) committed to the community.

[6] Other forms of enterprise self-management are the various forms of co-management (in which the work collective participates in the management of the enterprise together with the legal owners of the means of production, or owns shares in the company); professional partnerships (professional associations in which members provide services on an individual basis, but pool a part of their incomes to acquire services and goods collectively; they are usually limited liability companies); associations, etc. There are also forms of self-management outside the economic enterprise sphere, such as self-management in regions, communities and local governments.

* * *

Cooperatives and Socialism: A Cuban Perspective

Compiled and edited by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker

Editorial Caminos, La Habana, 2011, 420 pp.

ISBN: 978-959-303-033-5

Table of contents

Preface, Camila Piñeiro Harnecker

Part 1: What is a cooperative?

1. An introduction to cooperatives, Jesús Cruz Reyes and Camila Piñeiro Harnecker
2. The construction of alternatives beyond capital, Julio C. Gambina y Gabriela Roffinelli
Part 2: Cooperatives and the socialist theoreticians
3. Cooperativism and self-management in the perspectives of Marx, Engels and Lenin, Humberto Miranda Lorenzo

4. Socialist cooperativism and human liberation: Lenin’s legacy, Iñaki Gil de San Vicente

5. Che Guevara: cooperatives and the political economy of the socialist transition, Helen Yaffe

6. The basis for self-managed socialism: the contribution of István Mészáros, Henrique T. Novaes

Part 3: Cooperatives in other countries
7. Mondragón: the dilemmas of a mature cooperativism, Larraitz Altuna Gabilondo, Aitzol Loyola Idiakez and Eneritz Pagalday Tricio

8. Forty years of self-managed community housing in Uruguay: the “FUCVAM model”, Benjamin Nahoum

9. Solidarity economy in Brazil: the current state of cooperatives for the historical emancipation of the workers, Luiz Inácio Gaiger and Eliene Dos Anjos
10. Worker self-management in Argentina: problems and potentialities of self-managed labour in the aftermath of the crisis of neoliberalism, Andrés Ruggeri
11. From cooperatives to community-managed social property enterprises in the Venezuelan process, Dario Azzellini
Part 4: Cooperatives and building socialism in Cuba
12. Cuban agricultural cooperatives from 1959 to the present, Armando Nova González
13. The Basic Unit of Cooperative Production (UBPC): redesigning state property with cooperative management, Emilio Rodríguez Membrado and Alcides López Labrada
14. Key features of the legal framework for Cuban cooperatives, Avelino Fernández Peiso
15. Challenges for cooperativism as a development alternative in the face of the global crisis and its role in the Cuban economic model, Claudio Alberto Rivera Rodríguez, Odalys Labrador Machín and Juan Luis Alfonso Alemán

Bus/Taxi Coop in Cuba

Cuba is poised to be the first country in the world to have cooperatives make up a major portion of its economy. It is a laboratory for a new society.

By Cliff DuRand

Cuba is engaged in a fundamental reshaping of its society. Calling it a renovation of socialism or a renewal of socialism, the country is re-forming the economic system away from the state socialist model adopted in the 1970s toward something quite new. This is not the first time Cuba has undertaken significant changes, but this promises to be deeper than previous efforts, moving away from that statist model. Fidel confessed in 2005 that “among the many errors that we committed, the most serious error was believing that someone knew how to build socialism.” That someone, of course, was the Soviet Union. So, Cuba is still trying to figure out for itself how to build socialism.

To understand the current renovation it is important to distinguish between ownership and possession of property. The productive resources of society are to remain under state ownership in the name of all the people. Reforms do not change the ownership system. Reforms are changing the management system, bringing managerial control closer to those who actually possess property. So while the state will continue to own, greater autonomy will be given to those who possess that property. In effect, Cuba is embracing the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be made at the lowest level feasible and higher levels should give support to the local. This means more enterprise autonomy in state enterprises and it means cooperatives outside of the state.

It is expected that in the next couple years the non-state sector is expected to provide 35% of the employment. Along with foreign and joint ventures, the non-state sector as a whole will contribute an estimated 45% of the gross domestic product (PIB). Hopefully coops will become a dominant part of that non-state sector.

Cooperatives

Already 83% of agricultural land is in coops. Much of that has been in the UBPCs (Basic Units of Cooperative Production) formed in the 1990s out of the former state farms. But these were not true cooperatives since they still came under the control of state entities. Now they are being given the autonomy to become true coops.

Even more significantly, new urban coops are being established in services and industry. 222 experimental urban coops are to be opened in 2013. As of 1^st of July, 124 have been formed in agricultural markets, construction, and transportation. A big expansion in this number is expected in 2014.

In December 2012 the National Assembly passed an urban coop law that establishes the legal basis for these new coops. Here are some of its main provisions:

• A coop must have at least 3 members, but can have as many as 60 or more. One vote per socio. As self-governing enterprises, coops are to set up their own internal democratic decision making structures.

• –Coops are independent of the state. They are to respond to the market. This is to overcome the limits that hampered some agricultural coops in the past.
• –Coops can do business with state and private enterprises. They will set their own prices in most cases, except where there are prices established by the state.
• –Some coops will be conversions of state enterprises, e.g. restaurants. They can have 10 year renewable leases for use of the premises, paying no rent in the first year if improvements are made.
• –Others will be start-up coops.
• –There will be second degree coops which are associations of other coops.
• –Capitalization will come from bank loans, a new Finance Ministry fund for coops and member contributions. Member contributions are treated as loans (not equity) and do not give additional votes. Loans are to be repaid from profits.
• –Coops are to pay taxes on profits and social security for socios.
• –Distribution of profits is to be decided by socios after setting aside a reserve fund.
• –Coops may hire wage labor on a temporary basis (up to 90 days). After 90 days a temporary worker must be offered membership or let go. Total temporary worker time cannot exceed 10% of the total work days for the year. This gives coops flexibility to hire extra workers seasonally or in response to increased market demands, but prevents significant collective exploitation of wage labor.

This is a big step forward for Cuba. Since 1968 the state has sought to run everything from restaurants to barber shops and taxis. Some were done well, many were not. One problem was worker motivation. Decisions were made higher up and as state employees, workers enjoyed job security even with poor performance. However, their pay was low. Now as socios in cooperatives they will have incentives to make the business a success. The coop is on its own to either prosper or go under. Each member’s income and security depends on the collective. And each has the same voting right in the General Assembly where coop policy is to be made. Coops combine material and moral incentives, linking individual interest with a collective interest. Each socio prospers only if all prosper.

Remittances: Much of the start-up capital from members is likely to come from remittances sent by relatives living abroad. This is a good way to harness for the social good some of the $2.455 billion of remittance money (2012 figures) that comes into Cuba. Although 62.4% of the population receive remittances, the bulk of this money is likely to come to whiter Cubans. As a result Black Cubans will end up being underrepresented in this sector of the economy. In the long run, this presents social dangers.

Recommendation: Preferential bank lending policies can avoid this problem. Cuba does not need to adopt race based affirmative action policies to correct this imbalance. Banks can give preference in their lending policies to those coops that lack funding from remittances. To each according to his need.

State plan. If coops are truly autonomous, how can this sector of the economy be articulated with planning? Guideline #1 says the socialist planning system is to remain “the principle means to direct the national economy.” How can market and plan work together? In addition to responding to the market, coops are also charged (by charter?) with a “social object.” In addition, local entities can also request that they assist in specific social projects. Their participation is voluntary. This applies to individual coops.

But beyond this, the investment function can be used to direct the development of this sector. Bank lending priorities can be based on state development plans. The model for economic democracy developed by US philosopher David Schweickart shows how this can operate. In After Capitalism (1) Schweickart envisions a society made up of democratically managed cooperatives exchanging goods and services in a free market. But the allocation of investment capital is made by government bodies at national, regional and local levels based on social criteria democratically decided upon. Something like this would seem to fit well the new economy developing in Cuba today.

Coops are recognized as a socialist form of organization in the Guidelines or lineamientos. In part, this is because they foster a social consciousness. By bringing people together in their daily worklife in democratically self managed organizations, coops nurture the democratic personality and the human being is more fully developed. This point has been strongly advocated by Cuban economist Camila Piñeiro Harnecker. She argues that coops “promote the advancement of democratic values, attitudes and habits (equality, responsibility, solidarity, tolerance for different opinions, communication, consensus building).” (2) Coops are little schools of democracy in which the new socialist person can thrive, more so than was possible under state socialism. (3) Thus coops spontaneously generate at the base of society momentum toward that society of associated producers that is the aim of socialism. Coops are the kind of institution that can make socialism irreversible by embedding its practices in daily life.

Private Businesses

The other component of the non-state sector is made up of private businesses. These small and medium sized private businesses are called self employment or cuentapropistas. While limited areas of self employment were opened up in the 1990s (e.g. paladares), this was expanded to 178 occupations in 2011. In part, this was designed to quickly absorb the large number of redundant state employees that were to be dismissed. It also allowed underground activities that had flourished since the Special Period to come out into the open and operate legally where they could be licensed, regulated and taxed.

The acceptance of small private businesses signifies that the leadership recognizes that a petty bourgeoisie is compatible with socialism. As it is often said, the state cannot do everything. Contrary to a common claim in the US media, this is not the beginning of capitalism. The Guidelines say that accumulation of wealth is to be avoided. This means the petty bourgeoisie will not be allowed to grow into a big bourgeoisie, a capitalist class.

Unlike coops which nurture a social consciousness, private businesses foster individualism. Self interest becomes the primary concern of private businesses. For that reason the petty bourgeoisie is a decidedly non-socialist class. While its existence is allowed, its growth should not be encouraged where coops can do the job instead.

Unlike the paladares which could employ only family members, these private businesses can hire others as well. While this is also called self employment, in reality it is wage labor. While the private exploitation of wage labor is widely understood to be incompatible with socialism (as well as in violation of the Cuban constitution), it is accepted as necessary to quickly absorb surplus workers.

In recent years, small private businesses have been the fastest growing element in the Cuban economy. If they were to come to make up a sizable portion of the non-state sector, they could easily acquire significant political influence, moving Cuba away from socialism. This is because class power is fundamentally rooted in the significance a class has in the economy as a whole and thus the dependence other classes and groups have on its success.

For that reason, the continued development of socialism requires that coops rather than private businesses come to make up the bulk of the non-state sector. That is likely to be the case for several reasons.

• –Coops are favored by the state in terms of tax policy and loan policies.
• –In direct competition between coops and private businesses coops often are in more advantageous positions. E.g. state restaurants that convert to coop restaurants generally have better locations than private restaurants.
• –Labor efficiency and productivity is high in coops due to the greater incentives for socios.

Recommendation. In the long run it would be desirable to convert many private businesses into coops so all who are employed there can enjoy the benefits equally (no exploitation) and participate in decision making (democracy). This could be done by restrictions on the size of private businesses, tax incentives for conversion, and political organizing of their wage labor force.

Role of CTC (Central de Trabajadores de Cuba)

In view of the new and growing diversity among Cuba’s workers, the role of its labor movement needs to be rethought. Under state socialism the CTC represented the interest of the working class as a whole in the councils of government. Unlike unions in a capitalist society which represent workers in an industry or particular workplaces in an adversarial relationship with capital, in state socialism the state and the working class are considered to be united in their interests. It is for this reason that the CTC has been given a central position in the political structure. Its role is not to represent workers in negotiations with their employers, but to be their voice in making public policy in a socialist society.

Previously only 9% of employment was in the non-state sector. Now it is 22% and is expected to grow to 35%. This raises new questions for the labor movement. Reportedly, 80% of cuentapropistas have joined unions. How can the CTC represent the interests of those cuentapropistas who are private business owners? The petty bourgeoisie has interests different from the working class (even though they do work in their businesses). How can CTC at the same time represent the interests of the cuentapropistas who are in fact the wage laborers they employ (and exploit)?

And how can the CTC represent the interests of cooperative socios given the fact that they are at once both owners and workers? While the CTC could advance socialism by advocating for the cooperative sector as a whole over against the private business sector, it might be more suitable to have a separate federation of cooperatives to carry out this role. It might also take on an entrepreneurial role for cooperatives, doing market research, organizing workers for new start-up coops, providing training in self-management, and even monitoring coops to ensure compliance with their own self-governance processes.

21^st Century Socialism

The project called 21^st Century Socialism has been associated primarily with the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. It is an attempt to reinvent socialism after the collapse of the state socialism that characterized the 20^th century. In Venezuela this has involved using state power to promote cooperatives and communal councils at the base of society as seeds of a future socialism. Social transformation is constructed both from above and from below. (4) In Venezuela this is taking place in what is still overwhelmingly a capitalist society. In Cuba we see a very similar process in the context of a state socialist society. Here the state is also promoting cooperatives, relaxing administrative control over enterprises and decentralizing governmental power to the local level. Both see the empowerment of associations at the base of society and the active participation of working people in directing their affairs as key to building the new socialism. In the Venezuelan case this is seen as eventually replacing the existing bourgeois state with a new communal state, the beginnings of which are being constructed by associations of communal councils.

In the case of Cuba, resistance to this dispersal of power away from the state is reportedly coming from the state bureaucracy itself. Some see this as motivated by the self interest of an entrenched bureaucratic class that will block Cuba’s reforms. Others see the resistance as due to bureaucratic habits that are slow to change. In that case it can be overcome by a change of mentality. (5) There is also bureaucratic resistance in Venezuela. That is why power and resources are being sent directly to communal councils, effectively by-passing traditional channels. Something like that same strategy is being used in Cuba as some taxes are being collected at the local level rather than nationally to be distributed downward. This then shifts the capacity to initiate action to the local level, a far cry from the vertical structure of state socialism.

Democratically self governing cooperatives are an essential feature of 21^st century socialism. They empower the associated producers in their daily work, giving them some control over their lives. At the same time these little schools of democracy are the soil in which the new socialist person will thrive, more so than was possible under state socialism. And with that it becomes possible to envision the state eventually withering away as society comes more and more under the direction of a truly civil society, or what Marx called the associated producers.

Conclusion

Cuba is poised to be the first country in the world to have cooperatives make up a major portion of its economy. It is a laboratory for a new society. Those who are implementing the Guidelines are aware that they are redesigning society and approach the challenge in an experimental way. The new urban coops are being set up as experiments. As difficulties emerge lessons are to be learned so as to improve the process as it goes along.

One difficulty is already evident. That is the need for education in cooperativism. (6) Previous experience in the UBPC agricultural coops showed that workers were not practiced in democratic decision making. Nor did the coops have the autonomy necessary for them to feel they were really in control. The UBPCs were actually under the control of state enterprises, such as the sugar centrals. Now for the first time they are being given real autonomy.

Likewise, the workers in urban state enterprises now being cooperativized have deeply established habits of compliance with higher authority. Under state socialism decisions came from higher up. It was a structure that bred passivity. That is part of the “change in mentality” so often talked about these days that needs to take place.

Many years ago Cuban philosopher Olga Fernandez pointed out to me that under the model of socialism Cuba had adopted, rather than the state withering away, it was civil society that was withering away. Today’s renovation of socialism is an effort to rejuvenate civil society, to construct a socialist civil society. Cooperatives may be a key link in that rejuvenation that can sustain Cuba on its way to a society run by the associated producers. If it can succeed, it will be of world historical importance.

Notes

1. David Schweickart, After Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2^nd edition 2011), pp. 47-58.

2. Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, “Las cooperatives en el Nuevo modelo economico cubano” http://rebelion.org/mostrar.php?tipo=5&id=Camila%20Pi%F1eiro%20Harnecker&inicio=0, also Cooperativas y socialismo: Una mirada desde Cuba (La Habana: Editorial Caminos, 2011).

3. Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of Real Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2012).

4. Dario Azzellini, “The Communal State: Communal Councils, Communes, and Workplace Democracy” NACLA Report on the Americas (Summer 2013), pp. 25-30.

5. Olga Fernandez “Socialist Transition in Cuba: Economic Adjustments and Socio-political Challenges” Latin American Perspectives (forthcoming).

6. This has been emphasized by Beatriz Diaz of FLACSO in “Cooperatives in the Enhancement of the Cuban Economic Model: The Challenge of Cooperative Education” Latin American Perspectives (forthcoming). Camila Piñeiro Harnecker has proposed establishment of a special department to train coop members for their new role. Op. cit.

[Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal urges its readers to consider taking out a subscription to Monthly Review, where this article first appeared.]

By Michael Lebowitz

March 2014 — Monthly Review — It is now one year since the unfortunate death of Hugo Chávez on March 5, 2013. Shortly after, the editors of Monthly Review quoted a letter from István Mészáros to John Bellamy Foster which described Chávez as “one of the greatest historical figures of our time” and “a deeply insightful revolutionary intellect” (“Notes from the Editors” in the May 2013 Monthly Review). Whether Chávez will be remembered over time this way, however, depends significantly on whether we build upon the foundations he began.

As important as his vision and his deep understanding of the necessary path (so clearly demonstrated by his focus upon communal councils as the basis of a new socialist state—“the most vital revolutionary achievement in these years,” as the editors indicated) was Chávez’s ability to communicate both vision and theory in a clear and simple way to the masses. As demonstrated by Chávez’s articulation of the concept of “the elementary triangle of socialism,” that is what revolutionaries must learn to do.

Following Marta Harnecker’s long interview with Chávez (later published as Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution by Monthly Review Press), he asked her to come to Venezuela in 2003 to serve as his advisor and explained that he wanted someone around him who would not hesitate to criticize him. And that’s how we ended up in Venezuela. At the beginning of 2004, I became an adviser to the Minister of the Social Economy and, during that year, Marta and I became convinced that it would be important to create a center which could bring together foreign advisors who supported the Bolivarian Revolution. Accordingly, she proposed to Chávez that an institute be established for this purpose; he agreed, and, after we assembled people and found a home for the Institute (ultimately in the Ministry of Higher Education), the Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM) was formed in early 2006.

Since it was clear that Chávez would be re-elected in December and would be thinking seriously about directions for the new mandate, those of us involved in CIM decided to prepare a series of papers proposing initiatives which we felt could advance the process of building socialism in Venezuela. Although several of us engaged in these discussions, ultimately only three of the CIM directors (Marta Harnecker, Haiman El Troudi, and I) completed papers for transmission to Chávez in early December. In what follows, I include an excerpt from one paper I prepared plus a second paper subsequently developed in response to Chávez’s reaction to the first.1

Building new productive relations now

Everyone understands that it is impossible to achieve the vision of socialism for the twenty-first century in one giant leap forward. It is not simply a matter of changing property ownership. This is the easiest part of building the new world. Far more difficult is changing productive relations, social relations in general, and attitudes and ideas.

To transform existing relations into the new productive relations, we need first of all to understand the nature of the existing relations. Only then can you identify the mechanisms by which the new relations can be introduced. At this time, there is a great variety of experiments and approaches to changing productive relations which are being pursued. There is no attempt to set out specific proposals here but only to provide the framework in which such changes should be explored in order to move toward socialist productive relations.

The first step is to understand the direction of change. The precise pace of transformation will depend upon the existing conditions, the conjuncture, and the correlation of forces (national and international).

A. Existing productive relations

It is essential not to confuse property relations with productive relations. For example, a state-owned firm could be (a) worker-managed and functioning in a market with the goal of maximizing income per worker (as in the self-managed enterprises in the former Yugoslavia), (b) a profit-maximizing state capitalist firm, or (c) what we call for our purpose here a “statist” firm—a productive unit directed by the state to achieve specific targets in terms, e.g., of output or revenue. Similarly, a cooperative may be focused upon maximizing the income of its members or solving local needs. And, in all these cases, there is always the possibility of managers and managerial elites directing the enterprises in their own personal interests because of the difficulties in, for example, the state or stockholders monitoring and sanctioning their activity (as occurred in the old PDVSA).2

1. Capitalist productive relations

We understand capitalist productive relations as those in which workers enter into a relationship with capitalists in which they surrender their ability to work (and their claim upon what they produce) to capitalists. What workers get from this transaction is a wage that provides for their maintenance; what capitalists get is the right to direct their employees in such a way as to profit from their ability to work, the right to own everything that workers produce, and the right to determine what is produced and how it is produced. These relations may take different forms—e.g., workers may have more or less control over the production process and they may receive a portion of their wage in the form of profit-sharing (which means that they share in the risks of the capitalist); however, characteristic of capitalist productive relations is (a) that everything is subordinated to the generation of profits and the accumulation of capital, and (b) the capitalist is working constantly to increase those profits however possible.

Thus, the system drives toward the greatest possible exploitation of workers and the greatest possible use of resources for which the capitalist does not have to pay (e.g., clean air and water); workers and society may succeed in winning some battles from time to time, but the logic of capital is always to attempt to undermine and reverse those victories sooner or later. And that is because the logic of capital is opposed to the logic of human development and human needs.

2. Cooperative productive relations

Cooperative relations exist where workers are associated in particular enterprises in their mutual interest as producers. Both in the case where workers are the owners of the means of production or where the means of production are owned by the state and entrusted to the collective of workers, the inherent logic of the cooperative as a separate unit is the same: maximize the income per member of the cooperative. Accordingly, characteristic of a cooperative is that it looks upon members of other cooperatives (and members of society as a whole) as either competitors or as potential sources of income as customers. The logic of the cooperative is the self-interest of the group; in this respect, taxation of the cooperative by the state, by reducing the net income of its members, appears as a burden contrary to the interests of the group.

Thus, the logic of the cooperative as such is not a focus upon human development and solidarity within society as a whole. The cooperative retains the self-orientation of the capitalist firm and may function atomistically in the market in the same way as capitalist firms. Nevertheless the differences between cooperatives and capitalist firms are immense. In the cooperative, workers do not surrender their ability to work or their right to determine how they will produce or their claim over what they produce. Rather, they combine or pool their capacities in their common interest and, instead of keeping their tacit knowledge to themselves and finding ways to minimize their work, the logic of the cooperative leads them to share their knowledge and their ability because they are the beneficiaries.

Precisely because of this collective interest and this conscious combination of activity, cooperatives build solidarity within the specific group and teach a lesson about the benefits of cooperation. At the same time, however, this orientation toward the interests of the specific group (and toward “group property”) is consistent with the exploitation of other workers (non-cooperative members) as wage-laborers and with actions in the interest of the group which are contrary to the interests of society. Nevertheless, the two-sided nature of relations within cooperatives suggests the potential of building new productive relations upon them.

3. Statist productive relations

Characteristic of statist relations is that enterprises are given specific directives by the state and are expected to fulfill these. Insofar as the goal of the state is to meet a specific output or revenue target or to maximize revenue for the state budget, the resources of the statist unit will be directed toward meeting this goal.3 Further, the counterpart of the directive or command given to the statist enterprise will be the directive or command transmitted within that enterprise; hierarchy is characteristic of the statist enterprise: orders are transmitted downward. Thus, democracy and worker decision-making are not characteristic; rather than the disruptions in state goal achievement that may result from the differing goals of workers, the preferred role of an organization of workers from the statist perspective is to mobilize human resources to meet the selected goal—i.e., to serve as a transmission belt for state directives. In this respect, from the perspective of workers the statist firm may be no different than the capitalist firm.

Similarly, insofar as meeting the chosen output or revenue targets is paramount, efficient use of resources (including the environment) may tend to be sacrificed in the interests of reaching those targets. Despite state goals which are formulated in the interests of society as a whole, the fact that specific directives are given to individual productive enterprises means that their efforts to achieve them may stimulate behavior which is in the interests of the particular enterprise rather than in that of the whole. Such a pattern is particularly likely where the income or career path of enterprise managers depends upon their success in meeting these assigned targets. In fact, the private interests of those managers may yield many anti-social effects with the result that the statist firms do not act in the interest of society as a whole. Where statist enterprise managers are not committed to the goals of the state and where their behavior is not easily monitored, the performance of those enterprises will appear incoherent because they reflect the presence of a different set of relations. The existence of managers with their own goals and the difficulty of monitoring them from above was characteristic of the enterprise in the former USSR.4

The logic of the statist enterprise, accordingly, is two-sided. While it potentially can be directed in the interests of society as a whole and is essentially oriented toward production of use-values rather than profits, in the absence of specific directives which stress the interests of workers and society as a whole, and the transparency which is a precondition for monitoring and empowering of workers and communities, the statist enterprise can be captured by particular interests.

B. Transforming existing productive relations

The steps that must be taken to make a transition from existing relations to the new productive relations and the pace at which the changes can be made depends upon the starting point.

1. Transforming statist enterprises

Without question, the easiest transition can be made in the statist firm—it is already at the threshold of new productive relations. Unlike the explicit private interests in capitalist and cooperative productive relations, the statist firm already is in form the property of society as a whole and has as its explicit directive to act in the interests of society as a whole.

The path to transform the logic of statist enterprises, then, is to change the directives which they are given by the state. If the new productive relations which are to be built emphasize as a goal the full development of human potential and the creation of new socialist human beings, the nature of these institutions and the instructions given by the state must include the conditions necessary for the realization of this goal. With the development of workers councils and the growing orientation of their activity toward meeting the needs of communities (as expressed by those communities themselves) and with the transparency which allows waste, corruption, and bureaucratic self-interest to be challenged, statist enterprises increasingly can be characterized by socialist productive relations. This is not an easy process, of course, because the habits, traditions and common sense of both capitalist and statist firms is that decisions should be made at the top and transmitted downward; for this reason, success in this process depends upon the selection of managers who share the vision.

To the extent that the statist enterprise moves in the direction of new socialist relations emphasizing the full development of human capacity, it no longer can be evaluated by the measures of traditional capitalist accounting. State directives such as, for example, transformation of the workday to include education in the workplace, transitional phases in the development of worker participation, and improvement of environmental conditions are directives to invest in human development. Thus, rather than view the specific enterprises which follow such social policies as “uneconomic” or money-losing, those policies are social investments whose cost must be born by society as a whole.

2. Transforming cooperatives

The transformation of cooperatives concerns not only those where the means of production are owned by a group of workers but also the case of state-owned enterprises which are self-managed and enterprises which are a combination of state and group ownership. Despite the difference in property ownership, common to all is that the prevailing logic is to maximize income per worker within the group.

Besides this group self-interest, however, this institution contains the essential ideas of cooperation and democracy—which are at the core of the new relations which must be built. The transition here, then, must take the form of encouraging the cooperative to move beyond its narrow self-orientation and to develop organic links to society.

A first step would be to develop links between groups of workers, i.e., members of differing cooperatives. With the establishment of a Council of Cooperatives in each community, it would be possible to explore the way in which these groups of workers could cooperate in activities rather than compete and, in general, to investigate ways in which cooperatives can integrate their activities directly without being separated by market transactions. Further, links could be established between the Councils of Cooperatives in each community and communal councils. With the support of the communal banks, the needs of local communities could be communicated to the organized cooperatives as a way of moving toward production for communal needs and purposes.

The process of transforming the productive relations of cooperatives, thus, is one of guiding them step-by-step beyond their own narrow interests into a focus upon the needs of communities. In other words, cooperatives are at another threshold of socialism for the twenty-first century. Both the statist enterprise and the cooperative have in common that they are not capitalist enterprises; rather, they are part of the social economy, which can “walk on two legs” on a path toward socialist productive relations.

However, there is nothing automatic about this process. The logic of capital can dominate both, and can turn both statist firms and cooperatives into complements and supports for capitalism. Being on the threshold of socialist productive relations does not mean you will ever cross that threshold.

3. Transforming capitalist enterprises

Capitalism is not at that threshold, and it will never be. The essence of capitalism is the exploitation of workers and the orientation toward profit at the expense of every human being and every human need. We can never use the logic of capital to build new social relations. Rather, it is necessary to go beyond capital and to subordinate its logic to the logic of the new society.

Part of the process of subordinating capitalism to a new social logic is by introducing the transparency necessary to monitor the activity of capitalist enterprises. With a new law on transparency, making the financial records (including records of transactions with other entities) of all business enterprises of a minimum size (e.g., over twenty-five workers) available to inspection by workers and tax officials, the information available for a democratic, participatory, and protagonistic society would be increased. Those enterprises unwilling to provide this information would be understood to be acting against the public interest and, thus, would be operated in a transparent way instead by the state or groups of workers.

A rupture of property rights in this way—i.e., nationalization by the state or a take-over by collectives of workers—is one of three ways to subordinate existing capitalist enterprises within a country. Certainly, this does remove these capitalist enterprises and the capitalist interests behind them as threats to a new socialist society. As noted earlier, however, changing property rights is not the same as developing new productive relations. At best, this only takes us to the threshold (in the form of statist firms and cooperatives) of those new relations. In fact, a private capitalist firm may simply be replaced by a state capitalist firm which exploits workers and destroys the environment—all in the interests of maximization of profits. Thus, while existing capitalist enterprises may be subordinated in this way, we have seen that more is needed to introduce new productive relations.

A second way to subordinate existing capitalist firms is by extracting and transferring the surpluses generated in those firms. Through taxes or prices (e.g., forms of “unequal exchange”), surpluses generated within these firms may be siphoned off to other sectors (e.g., new firms being created) or to the support of social programs—rather than realized as profits. A similar assault on the profitability of these enterprises could be through competition with state-owned firms or subsidized cooperatives. Certainly, such inroads upon the profits of capitalist firms will reduce their viability, and their subsequent absorption by the state or workers would likely follow in the public interest in order to maintain jobs and production.

Whereas the above cases involve an external assault on existing capitalist firms, a third approach to their subordination involves the invasion of an alien logic, the logic of new productive relations within those enterprises. The premise here is not that capitalism can be reformed or that it can change but, rather, that its orientation toward profit-maximization will be constrained by the existence of new requirements. For example, the existence of strict environmental standards compels the capitalist enterprise which wants to remain in operation to accept these as a cost of doing business and to continue, within this new constraint, to attempt to maximize profits. In the same way, government directives which require enterprises to transform the workday to include educational training, introduce specific forms of worker decision-making (such as workers councils), and devote a specific portion of resources to meet local community demands will impose costs upon these firms which would be still consistent with the logic of capital—the drive to maximize profits.

But, why would capitalist enterprises accept such imposed costs when they can go to other locations in the world where those particular costs are not present? They would do so if this were a condition to having access to scarce local resources, to credit from state banks, and to the market that state enterprises and the state offer. In other words, the state can use its leverage (where it wishes) to change the ground rules under which capitalist enterprises which are not footloose can do business with it.

Does this change them from being capitalist firms? Does it mean that they no longer exploit workers? Obviously not. Why, then, would a state which wishes to transform productive relations accept the continued existence of these capitalist firms? It would do so only if the limited economic and technical resources at its disposal make it rational for it to work for a period with capitalist firms constrained in this way.

The process of introducing these conditions (“socialist conditionality”), though, is the insertion of new, alien productive relations within the capitalist firm. The combination of state directives which enforce the development of workers councils (with increasing responsibilities) and a growing orientation toward meeting community needs makes the capitalist enterprise contested terrain. And, the struggle within these firms will continue: just as capitalist firms in this case will be constantly attempting to lessen and reduce the burden of “socialist conditionality,” the state—in cooperation with workers and communities—will be working to introduce into these enterprises further elements characteristic of the invading socialist society. In short, we are describing here a process of class struggle in which the goal of socialism for the twenty-first century is the complete replacement of the logic of capital by the logic of a new socialist society.

From Mészáros to concrete proposals for transforming Venezuela

In the following week, Marta Harnecker received a call from Chávez in relation to our papers. He said, “Could Michael look at the paragraph from István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital where Mészáros described capitalism as an organic system of production, distribution and consumption, a system in which everything is connected? If everything is connected, how is it possible to change anything? So, ask Michael to indicate concrete proposals for change in this context.”

Frankly, I was blown away by the question, and my immediate reaction when she passed this message to me was—“What paragraph???” Happily, I had Mészáros’s book with me in Caracas, and so I searched for the paragraph in question. It was not easy, though, to isolate a single section because that is what the whole book is about—the necessity to go beyond all sides of capital if socialism is to be built. Ultimately, I concluded that the paragraph Chávez had in mind was in section 20.3.5 where Mészáros talks about “the inescapable dialectical relationship” between production, distribution, circulation, and consumption, stressing that “the capital relation is made up of many circuits, all intertwined and mutually reinforcing one another.” Here, then, was why Mészáros concluded that “it is inconceivable to achieve the socialist objectives without going beyond capital, i.e. without radically restructuring the totality of existing reproductive relations.”5 And, here was the problem that concerned Chávez and which now concerned me—what concrete measures were possible in this context? That led to the second of these papers for Chávez in December 2006.

Rereading István Mészáros’s Beyond Capital, I am very impressed by the way he goes to the heart of the new society that must be built. It is true that he draws very heavily upon Marx’s discussion in the Grundrisse (and I have often stressed this point); however, what is so remarkable is how sharply he hones Marx’s point. Especially significant is the way he stresses a “twofold tyrannical determination” in capital (to which the market socialist reformers in the USSR were oblivious)—(a) “the authoritarianism of the particular workshops,” and (b) “the tyranny of the totalizing market.”6

Precisely because this double tyranny is so clear for him, Mészáros is unequivocal in identifying as characteristic of the new socialist society that (a) control of production be “fully vested in the producing individuals themselves,” and (b) that “the social character of labour is asserted directly,” not after the fact. In other words, productive activity in this socialism is social not because we produce for each other through a market but because we consciously produce for others. And, it is social not because we are directed to produce those things but because we ourselves as people within society choose to produce for those who need what we can provide.

Here is the core of this new socialism as Mészáros saw it—“the primacy of needs.”7 Our needs as members of society—both as producers and as consumers—are central. This is a society centred on a conscious exchange of activity for communal needs and communal purposes. It is a society of new, rich human beings who develop in the course of producing with others and for others; these are people for whom the desire to possess and the associated need for money (the real need that capitalism produces, Marx noted) wither away. We are describing a new world in which we have our individual needs, needs for our own “all-round development,” but where we are not driven by material incentives to act. It is a world in which our activity is its own reward (and is, indeed, “life’s prime want”) because we affirm ourselves as conscious social beings through that activity, a world in which we produce use-values for others and produce ourselves as part of the human family.

But, obviously, those people do not drop from the sky. They are formed by every aspect of their lives. Not only their activity as producers but also in the spheres of distribution and consumption. In this complex dialectic of production-distribution-consumption, Mészáros stresses, no one part can stand alone—it is necessary radically to restructure the whole of these relations because capitalism is a “structure of society, in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another” (Marx). So, how can you make any real changes if you have to change all relations—and you cannot change them all simultaneously?

In the same way that capitalism developed. Capitalism developed through a process, a process of “subordinating all elements of society to itself” and by creating for itself the organs which it lacked. The new socialist society similarly must develop through a process of subordinating all the elements of capitalism and the logic of capital and by a process of inserting its own logic centred in human beings in its place. It proceeds by assembling the elements of a new dialectic of production-distribution-consumption.

Elements of the new socialism

What are those elements? At the core of this new combination are three characteristics: (a) social ownership of the means of production which is a basis for (b) social production organized by workers in order to (c) satisfy communal needs and communal purposes. Let us consider each in its turn and their combination.

Social ownership of the means of production is critical because it is the only way to ensure that our communal, social productivity is directed to the free development of all rather than used to satisfy the private goals of capitalists, groups of individuals, or state bureaucrats. Social ownership, however, is not the same as state ownership. State property is consistent with state capitalist enterprises, hierarchical statist firms, or firms in which particular groups of workers (rather than society as a whole) capture the major benefits of this state property. Social ownership implies a profound democracy—one in which people function as subjects, both as producers and as members of society.

Production organized by workers builds new relations among producers—relations of cooperation and solidarity; it furthermore allows workers to end “the crippling of body and mind” and the loss of “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (Marx) that comes from the separation of head and hand characteristic of capitalist production. As long as workers are prevented from developing their capacities by combining thinking and doing in the workplace, they remain alienated and fragmented human beings whose enjoyment consists in possessing and consuming things. Further, as long as this production is carried out for their private gain rather than that of society, they look upon others (and, indeed, each other) as means to their own ends and thus remain alienated, fragmented, and crippled. Social production, thus, is a condition for the full development of the producers.

Satisfaction of communal needs and purposes has as its necessary condition a means of identifying and communicating those needs and purposes. Thus, it requires the development of the democratic institutions at every level which can express the needs of society. Production reflects communal needs only with information and decisions which flow from the bottom up. However, in the absence of the transformation of society, the needs transmitted upward are the needs of people formed within capitalism—people who are “in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society” (Marx). Within the new socialist society, the “primacy of needs” is based not upon the individual right to consume things without limit but, rather, upon “the worker’s own need for development”—the needs of people in a society where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. In a society like this where our productive activity for others is rewarding in itself and where there is all-round development of individuals, society can place upon its banner: to each according to one’s need for development.

As consideration of these three specific elements suggests, realization of each element depends upon the existence of the other two—precisely Mészáros’s point about the inseparability of this distribution-production-consumption complex. Without production for social needs, no real social property; without social property, no worker decision-making oriented toward society’s needs; without worker decision-making, no transformation of people and their needs. The presence of the defects inherited from the old society in any one element poisons the others. We return to the essential question: how is a transition possible when everything depends upon everything else?

Building revolutionary subjects

In order to identify the measures necessary to build this new socialist society, it is absolutely critical to understand Marx’s concept of “revolutionary practice”—the simultaneous changing of circumstances and human activity or self-change. To change a structure in which all relations coexist simultaneously and support one another, you have to do more than try to change a few elements in that structure; you must stress at all times the hub of all these relations—human beings as subjects and products of their own activity.

Every activity in which people engage forms them. Thus, there are two products of every activity—the changing of circumstance or things (e.g., in the production process) and the human product. This second side of production is easily forgotten when talking about structural changes; however, it was not forgotten in the emphasis of the Bolivarian Constitution upon practice and protagonism—in particular, the stress upon participation as “the necessary way of achieving the involvement to ensure their complete development, both individual and collective.”

What is the significance of recognizing this process of producing people explicitly? First, it helps us to understand why changes must occur in all spheres—every moment that people act within old relations is a process of reproducing old ideas and attitudes. Working under hierarchical relations, functioning without the ability to make decisions in the workplace and society, focusing upon self-interest rather than upon solidarity within society—these activities produce people on a daily basis; it is the reproduction of the conservatism of everyday life.

Recognizing this second side also directs us to focus upon the introduction of concrete measures which explicitly take into account the effect of those measures upon human development. Thus, for every step two questions must be asked: (1) how does this change circumstances, and (2) how does this help to produce revolutionary subjects and increase their capacities? There are often several ways to make changes, but the particular battles which will build this new socialism more certainly will be those which not only win new ground, but also produce an army capable of fighting new, successful battles.

Choosing concrete steps

When we focus upon human beings and their development, it is easy to see how the elements within the new dialectic of production-distribution-consumption are connected. The process is one of synergy—the effects of changes in the sphere of production will be felt in the spheres of distribution and consumption; thus, this whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Let us consider each of the elements in turn.

Producing for communal needs and communal purposes

The Bolivarian Revolution has taken a giant leap into the twenty-first century with the creation of the Communal Councils, an essential cell of socialism for the twenty-first century. The communal councils provide a means by which people can identify communal needs democratically and learn that they can do something about these by themselves as a community. In this respect, these new community organizations are a school of socialism—one in which there is simultaneously a changing of circumstance and the development of people, “both individual and collective.”

They are also a base upon which to build. As the councils begin to function successfully, they can take further steps in identifying the needs of the community—what are those needs (both individual and collective) and what are the local resources that can satisfy those needs? For example, the councils can conduct a census of the local cooperatives and other enterprises that could produce for local needs. Further, they could bring together workers and the community to discuss ways to produce for communal needs and purposes.

The communal councils in this respect are a paradigm for this process. Not only are they a vehicle for changing both circumstances and the protagonists themselves but they also move step by step to a deepening of the process. Inevitably, all councils will not develop at the same pace, so uniformity cannot be imposed; however, this unevenness provides an opportunity for more advanced communities to share their experiences (a process which helps to build solidarity among communities). Further, the transmission of their needs upward for participatory budgeting at higher levels is an essential part of the process of developing planning from below for communal needs and purposes.

Of course, not all decisions to satisfy social needs belong at the level of the neighborhood and community. The decisions to reject neoliberalism, to pursue endogenous development, to seek food sovereignty, to create new education and health programmes, to create a new transportation infrastructure, to build new socialist relations—these are decisions which must be made at the national level. So, where is the place for revolutionary practice, the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change, in such cases?

There is no automatic place for the protagonism of the people in such state decisions. Perhaps some day a new state which is based upon the communal councils will emerge, and perhaps at some point computers will permit instant referenda on a host of national issues. On such matters at this point, however, the participation from below that allows people to develop their capacities will only occur as the result of a political commitment, one which makes real the Constitution’s understanding that the sovereign people must become not only the object but also the subject of power.

In short, national-level decisions can all be made at the top, which is characteristic of both dictatorships and representative democracies, or there can be a dedicated search for mechanisms which incorporate people below so they not only can affect the nature of the decisions, but also recognize the decisions as theirs. The “parliament of the streets” is an obvious example of a mechanism which can incorporate people into the discussions of laws, improve the quality of information available for good decisions, and create an identification with these decisions. However, finding ways to institutionalize this process so that people view it as their right to participate (and punish National Assembly deputies who do not honor this right) is important both in empowering people and attacking bureaucracy and elitism.

National decisions on such matters as the sectors of the economy that should be expanded and the social investments that need to be made are most critical at a time when the rapid and dramatic transformation of the structure of the economy from an oil economy is desired. And, these decisions have the profoundest effect upon which needs of society can be satisfied in the present and future. The significance of such decisions is precisely why it is important that they be pursued transparently, that the information that people need to be able to understand the logic behind these proposals be circulated in a simple and clear way and that the proposed plans and directions be discussed in advance in assemblies of workers and communities.

Just as in the case of discussions in communal councils and the development of links between the community needs and local producers, the dissemination and discussion of information about nationwide needs and purposes will be important in mobilizing support and initiatives from below in communities and workplaces to meet the needs of society. Sometimes, too, it will prevent serious errors when national initiatives do not take into account local and regional impacts (especially their environmental effects). Thus, not only do these democratic processes disseminate information downward. They also are an essential means of transmitting information upward.

For goals identified at both the community and national levels, the greater the spread of information and discussions through which people take ownership of the decisions, the more likely that productive activity will occur to ensure the successful achievement of those goals (rather than out of self-interest); in this way, producing for communal needs and purposes emerges as common sense.

Social production organized by workers

The preconditions for successful worker organization of production are dissemination of the information necessary to carry out the activity and the ability to use this information efficiently. Thus, transparency (“open books”) and worker education (through a transformation of the traditional workday to include education) should be introduced in state, private capitalist, and cooperative enterprises.

While some aspects of enterprise activity (such as production statistics and information about purchasing decisions) can be monitored by workers relatively easily, examination of financial data and evaluation of management proposals require the development of more skills. Thus, for an interim period, workers should have access to worker auditors and advisors who can serve on their behalf. These specialists could be part of the group of educators assigned to the enterprise or could be provided to the enterprise by the Ministry of Work or by a trade union or trade union federation.

The steps in which workers assume direction of the organization of production should be set out clearly in advance in each enterprise; these steps and the pace pursued will vary in accordance with the history, culture, and experience in each case. While individual cases will vary, one of the first areas where workers can demonstrate the benefits of worker decision-making is through the reorganization of production. With their knowledge of existing waste and inefficiency, workers should be able to improve productivity and reduce costs of production.

To encourage the efficient production of use-values and to deepen the development of social production, the gains from these worker initiatives should not accrue to the enterprise (especially in the case of private capitalist firms!). Rather, in principle, these benefits should be divided up among enterprise workers and the local community following discussions in worker assemblies and the direct coordination of worker representatives with local communal councils. The links between workers and community built upon this basis are then an important part of the creation of these new relations.

In general, the process by which worker decision-making advances in the enterprise should start from the bottom up. Beginning from worker veto over supervisors (on the logic that supervisors unacceptable to workers are inconsistent with any worker management), the degree of worker decision-making would grow on a step-by-step basis. Starting from a phase in which workers identify the profile of acceptable managers and begin discussions of production and investment proposals of managers, the development of knowledge and worker capacities through this process would proceed toward the goal in which workers (including the managers who represent them and society as a whole) organize social production for communal needs and purposes.8

Under ideal circumstances, the steps in this process will be determined through negotiation and agreement between workers and management of enterprises and will be filed with the Ministry of Work as a social contract. Where timely agreement is not possible, enterprise workers can bring the matter to the Ministry of Work for its action (and for referral to the National Assembly in the case of privately owned enterprises).

It should be pointed out that two characteristics often identified with co-management—worker election of top directors and worker ownership shares—play no role in the above discussion. Both measures contain within them the potential for old ideas and familiar patterns to penetrate into the new relations of worker management and to make them simply new forms of the old relations.

As in the case of representative democracy in the political sphere, worker election of enterprise directors has often served to create a separation between those directors and the people they presumably represent. The club of directors develops its own logic, which is one distinct from the interest of workers. In particular, within the contested terrain of capitalist firms, co-management in this form means cooptation—a means of incorporating workers into the project of capitalists. In contrast, the process described here in which workers organize production is one of protagonistic democracy in which workers’ power proceeds from the bottom up and does so for the purpose of serving communal needs.

Similarly, the idea that workers’ interests in enterprises (state-owned or private capitalist) should be secured by giving workers shares of ownership—whether those shares are individually held or owned by a cooperative—is a case where co-management can be deformed into self-oriented private ownership. Instead of workers functioning as socially conscious producers, expressing themselves as cooperating producers and members of society, they are transformed into owners whose principal interest is their own income (which means the economic success of their particular company). This is not the way to build social production—i.e., the exchange of activity based upon communal needs and purposes.

Social ownership of the means of production

Social ownership of the means of production is often presented as a matter of ideology. However, in a society oriented toward “ensuring overall human development” and “developing the creative potential of every human being,” social ownership of the means of production is common sense.

The point of social ownership is to ensure that the accumulated products of the social brain and the social hand are subordinated to the full development of human beings rather than used for private purposes. If the private ownership of the means of production does not support the creation of food sovereignty, endogenous development, and investment that generates good jobs, then the interest of society is advanced by introducing social ownership in its place.

Similarly, if private owners are not prepared to be transparent, to introduce education into the workplace, to accept growing worker decision-making, and to direct their activity increasingly to satisfying communal needs and communal purposes, then they thereby declare that they rank the privileges and prerogatives of private ownership over ensuring overall human development. Where they refuse to support public policies oriented toward creating a society based upon the logic of the human being, they demonstrate that there is no alternative for such a society than social ownership of the means of production.

Thus, it is not the socialist project which excludes them—they exclude themselves by demonstrating that they are incompatible with the full development of human potential.

One month later, on his regular Sunday “teach-in” (Aló Presidente #264 on January 28, 2007), Chávez drew upon the concepts developed in this second paper and introduced (to my excitement as I watched!) what he called the “elementary triangle of socialism”: social property, social production, and satisfaction of social needs (by setting out three points on his desk and explaining each side).9 This was one of many examples of his unique ability to take complex theoretical concepts (most evident in his regular references to Mészáros’s Beyond Capital) and to communicate these to the masses of viewers without a theoretical background.10 With simple commonsense language, Chávez succeeded in grasping the minds of masses, and that was an essential aspect in the combination which was building a path to socialism in his (truncated) lifetime. If we can learn to do that, then Chávez no se va.

Notes

1. ↩An additional paper I prepared, “Year of Total Education” (stressing education within worker-managed enterprises, education through practice, and an educational television station) was expanded upon by Haiman El Troudi (subsequently Minister of Planning and currently Minister of Transport) to add political and ethical education, and this was an inspiration for the program “Moral y Luces” announced in 2007 by Chávez.
2. ↩In the period before Chávez, managers of the state-owned oil company (PDVSA) succeeded in performing the magical feat of ensuring that revenues of the firm disappeared from Venezuela (and thus as state revenues) and appeared instead on the books of subsidiaries such as off-shore refiners.
3. ↩In Venezuela, PDVSA was the obvious example of such a “statist” firm. Its revenue was critical for supporting, among other things, state programs such as the social missions.
4. ↩I subsequently explored the incoherence and dysfunction characteristic of “real socialism” in The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
5. ↩István Mészáros, Beyond Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), 823.
6. ↩Ibid, 974–75, 837.
7. ↩Ibid, 835.
8. ↩The idea of “profiles” and of the step-by-step emergence of full worker management was developed in the course of meetings in 2005 between the managers of CADAFE (the major state electrical firm at the time) and FETRAELEC (the electrical workers federation) where Marta Harnecker and I played the role of marriage counselors after a breakdown in the process of “co-management” within the firm. Both sides agreed to this proposal but after management consulted with the Ministry of Oil and Energy, all such discussions of worker management were ended (presumably because they were contrary to the policy of the ministry, whose minister was, and remains, also the president of PDVSA).
9. ↩A few days earlier, I had incorporated much of the above discussion of socialism as an organic system into a talk (subsequently published as “New Wings for Socialism,” Monthly Review 58, no. 11 [April 2007]: 34–41) at the launch of the Venezuelan edition of my Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006). But there was no mention of a socialist triangle there because that graphic image had yet to be invented by Chávez. Subsequently, though, I drew explicitly upon his concept of the socialist triangle as a way to represent socialism as an organic system—beginning with two books published in Venezuela in 2008 (El Camino al Desarrollo Humano: Capitalismo o Socialismo? and La logica del capital versus la logica del desarrollo humano) and in the essay “The Path to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?” (Monthly Review 60, no. 9 [February 2009]: 41–63). This was followed by The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review, 2010), where the socialist triangle served as the organizing theme.
10. ↩Some examples of his discussion of the socialist triangle were incorporated in the video, “Worker’s Control: Theory and Experiences,” which was based on a conference on October 26–27, 2007, organized by the Program on Human Development and Practice of Centro Internacional Miranda; available at http://socialistproject.ca.

Chokwe Lumumba, Mayor of Jackson, MS

By Ajamu Nangwaya
SolidarityEconomy.net via Rabble.Ca

Ajamu Nangwaya participated in the recent Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy 2013, speaking about the potential for worker self-management in the City of Jackson, Mississippi, following the historic election Chokwe Lumumba as mayor. This article, Part 1 of 2, is based on Ajamu Nangwaya’s presentation to the conference, and is part of our ongoing focus on labour and workers’ issues [8] this week on rabble.ca.

Sept 3, 2013 – “We have to make sure that economically we’re free, and part of that is the whole idea of economic democracy. We have to deal with more cooperative thinking and more involvement of people in the control of businesses, as opposed to just the big money changers, or the big CEOs and the big multinational corporations, the big capitalist corporations which generally control here in Mississippi.” [1] – Chokwe Lumumba

"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children." – Amilcar Cabral [2]

I am happy to be a participant at the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy 2013 and to be in the presence of worker cooperators, advocates of labour or worker self-management [9] and comrades who are here to learn about and/or share your thoughts on the idea of workplace democracy and workers exercising control over capital.

Worker self-management or the practice of workers controlling, managing and exercising stewardship over the productive resources in the workplace has been with us since the 19th century. Workers’ control of the workplace developed as a reaction to the exacting and exploitative working condition of labour brought on by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Many workers saw the emancipation of labour emerging from their power over the way that work was organized and the fruit of their labour got distributed.

I believe we are living in a period that has the potential for profound economic, social and political transformation from below. It might not seem that way when we look at the way that capitalism, racism and the patriarchy have combined to make their domination appear inevitable and unchallenged. But as long as we have vision and are willing to put in the work, we shall not perish. We shall win!

On June 4, 2013, the people of the City of Jackson, Mississippi, elected Chokwe Lumumba, a human rights lawyer and an advocate of the right to self-determination of Afrikans in the United States, as their mayor. That is a very significant political development. But that is not the most momentous thing about the election of Chokwe Lumumba. The most noteworthy element of Lumumba’s ascension to the mayoral position is his commitment to economic democracy, "more cooperative thinking" and facilitating economic and social justice with and for the people of Jackson.

The challenge posed to us by this historical moment is the role that each of you will play in ensuring a robust programme of worker cooperative formation and cooperative economics in Jackson. We ought to work with the Jackson People’s Assembly, the Malcolm Grassroots Movement and other progressive forces to transform the city of Jackson into America’s own Mondragon [10]. It could have one possible exception. Jackson could become an evangelical force that is committed to spreading labour self-management and the social economy across the South and the rest of this society.

The promotion of the social economy and labour self-management could engage and attract Frantz Fanon’s "wretched of the earth" [11] onto the stage of history as central actors in the drama of their own emancipation. By promoting the social economy/labour self-management and participatory democracy by civil society forces and structures (the assemblies), Chokwe and the social movement organizations in Jackson are privileging or heeding Cabral’s above-cited assertion that the people are not merely fighting for ideas. They need to see meaningful change in their material condition. The development of a people controlled and participatory democratic economic infrastructure in Jackson would give concrete form to their material aspirations.

Amilcar Cabral was a revolutionary [12] from Guinea-Bissau in West Afrika whose approach to organizing and politically mobilizing the people could provide insights and direction to our movement-building work. In order to build social movements with the capacity to carry out the task of social emancipation, we need to organize around the material needs of the people. The very projects and programmes that we organize with the people should be informed by transformative values; a prefiguring of what will be obtained in the emancipated societies of tomorrow.

As an anarchist, I am not a person who is hopeful or excited by initiatives coming out of the state or elected political actors. More often than not, we are likely to experience betrayal, collaboration with the forces of domination by erstwhile progressives or a progressive political formation forgetting that its role should be to build or expand the capacity of the people to challenge the structures of exploitation and domination. I am of the opinion that an opportunity exists in Jackson to use the resources of the municipal state to build the capacity of civil society to promote labour self-management.

Based on the thrust of The Jackson Plan [13], which calls for the maintenance of autonomous, deliberative and collective decision-making people’s assemblies and the commitment to organizing a self-managed social economy [3], which would challenge the hegemony or domination of the capitalist sector, I see an opening for something transformative to emerge in Jackson. As revolutionaries, we are always seeking out opportunities to advance the struggle for social emancipation. We initiate actions, but we also react to events within the social environment. To not explore the movement-building potentiality of what is going on this southern city would be a major political error and a demonstration of the poverty of imagination and vision.

Primary imperatives or assumptions

There are four critical imperatives or assumptions that should guide the movement toward labour self-management and the social economy in Jackson. They are as follow:

1. Build the capacity of civil society

We should put the necessary resources into building the requisite knowledge, skills and attitude needed by the people to exercise control over their lives and institutions. In the struggle for the new society, we require independent, counterhegemonic organizational spaces from which to struggle against the dominant economic, social and political structures.

In any labour self-management and social economy project in Jackson, we must develop autonomous, civil-society-based supportive organizations and structures that will be able to survive the departure of the Lumumba administration. If the social economy initiatives are going to operate independently of the state, they will need the means to do so. Therefore, the current municipal executive leadership in Jackson should turn over resources to the social movements that will empower and resource them in their quest to create economic development organizations, programmes and projects.

2. Part of the class struggle, racial justice movement and feminist movement

When we talk or think about social and economic change in the City of Jackson, it is not being done in a contextless structural context. We are compelled to address the systems of capitalism, white supremacy/racism and patriarchy and their impact on the lives of the working-class, racialized majority. It is critically important to frame the labour self-management and the solidarity economy project as one that is centred upon seeking a fundamental change to power relations defined by gender race and class.

The worker cooperative movement ought to see itself as a part of the broader class struggle movement that seeks to give control to the labouring classes over how their labour is used and the surplus or profit from collective work is shared. The solidarity economy and labour self-management will have to seriously tackle oppression coming out of the major systems of domination and allow our organizing work to be shaped by the resulting analysis.

3. Develop an alternative political decision-making process — an assembly system of governance

The system of assemblies that is proposed in The Jackson Plan is the right approach to creating alternative participatory democratic structures. It is through these political instruments that the people will set the communities’ priorities and wage a struggle of contestation with the powers-that-be in the liberal capitalist political system.

As we strive to build the embryonic collectivistic economic structures of the future just society, we need the political equivalent. The latter should be of a scale that allows for direct democratic participation of the people. The federative principle can be used to link the community-based assemblies into a unified body, whose role would be a coordinating one. Power must reside at the base where the people are located.

4. Displacing economic predators who are currently located in racialized, working-class communities

In working-class Afrikan communities across the United States, there are economic predators that exploit and dominate the local business scene. These petty capitalists must be seen for what they are; business operators who do not normally employ the people in the local community and they live and spend the wealth generated elsewhere. We do not need to search for business ideas or opportunities because the existing capitalists and their businesses should become targets for replacement with worker cooperatives and other solidarity economy enterprises. If these existing owners would like to become worker-cooperators, they are free to join the labour self-managed enterprises.

The City of Jackson could contribute to worker cooperative development in a number of areas. It could make a material contribution in the areas of technical assistance provision, financing, procurement and contract set-aside for worker cooperatives, education and promoter of labour or worker self-management and the social economy.

Evangelical promoter of worker self-management and the social economy

The City of Jackson’s Office of Economic Development [14] is the chief organ that facilitates business development. Its mandate is "to maximize the city’s potential as a thriving center for businesses, jobs, robust neighborhoods and economic opportunity for everyone in the Capital City…. supports business and the development community within city government and between city agencies. It also partners with other organizations to further economic development."

This terms of reference should be expanded and specifically state that it "promotes worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives and other social economy enterprises as instruments to create economic security, jobs, livable wages, economic development and economic democracy."

Furthermore, the Office of Economic Development should be empowered to vigorously, strategically and relentlessly create the enabling condition for the development of worker cooperatives and other social enterprises in Jackson. A part of its worker or labour self-management agenda should include transforming the city of Jackson into a catalyst for this approach to workplace democracy, workers’ control of the means of production and the producers of wealth being the ones who determine how the economic surplus or profit shall be distributed.

This new role for the Office of Economic Development will be startling for some and is likely to generate opposition. But Mayor Lumumba ought to borrow a play from the playbook of conservative governments; move lightning fast in implementing his administration’s policies in the first two years and keep the opposition dizzy, disoriented and playing catch up.

Lumumba has a mandate to include labour self-management by way of worker cooperatives. The economic development plank in the mayor’s election platform stated that he is committed to "build[ing] co-ops and green industry" and ensuring "that Jacksonians are well-represented with jobs and business ownership." [4] Labour self-management, cooperatives of all types and social enterprises are the tools needed to give form to his electoral commitment. Colorlines’ writer Jamilah King also interprets Lumumba’s platform in a similar fashion:

    In his campaign literature and in news media interviews, Mayor Lumumba stressed that his economic program will incorporate principles of the "solidarity economy." Solidarity [15] economy is a[n] umbrella term used to describe a wide variety of alternative economic activities, including worker-owned co-operatives, co-operative banks, peer lending, community land trusts, participatory budgeting and fair trade. [5]

Larry Hales correctly asserts, "Lumumba’s political history did not scare away voters, nor did the bold and progressive Jackson Plan, which is reminiscent of the Republic of New Afrika’s program of the 1960s, calling for the establishment of an independent Black-led government in six former confederate states." [6] The City of Jackson should move ahead and start implementing the solidarity economy mandate. Mayor Lumumba should immediately hire a team of solidarity economy and labour self-management personnel, whose principal role would be to bring about the condition for the economic democracy take-off.

They would be embedded in the Office of Economic Development and at least one of the positions should be a senior leadership/management one. The latter is needed to communicate Lumumba’s seriousness about the social economy thrust of his administration and to give the necessary clout to the economic democracy team to get the work done. Lumumba, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the Jackson People’s Assembly will have to get out into the community and in all available spaces to educate the people about labour self-management and the solidarity economy.

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an organizer with the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity and the Network for the Elimination of Police Violence.

Notes

[1] Chokwe Lumumba, “Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor-elect Chokwe Lumumba on economic democracy,” interview by Anne Garrison, San Francisco Bayview [16], June 20, 2013.

[2] Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 86.

[3] Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly, “The Jackson Plan: A Struggle for Self-determination, Participatory Democracy and Economic Justice,” Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, July 7, 2012, http://mxgm.org/the-jackson-plan-a-struggle-for-self-determination-participatory-democracy-and-economic-justice/ [13]

[13][4] Electlumumbamayor.com [17]

[17][5] Jamilah King, J. “Mayor Chokwe Lumumba wants to build a ‘solidarity economy’ in Jackson, Miss.,” Colorlines [18], July 2, 2013.

[6] Larry Hales, “The political, historical significance of Chokwe Lumumba’s mayoral win in Jackson, Miss.,” Workers World [19], June 25, 2013.

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[7] http://rabble.ca/sites/rabble/files/node-images/chokwe-lumumba-wins-democratic-primary-run-off-052113.jpg
[8] http://rabble.ca/issues/labour
[9] http://libcom.org/library/worker-self-management-in-historical-perspective
[10] http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/3/25/video_understanding_the_mondragon_worker_cooperative_corporation_in_spains_basque_country
[11] https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/index.htm
[12] https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/index.htm
[13] http://mxgm.org/the-jackson-plan-a-struggle-for-self-determination-participatory-democracy-and-economic-justice/
[14] http://www.jacksonms.gov/business/economy
[15] http://searchtopics.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/topic/Solidarity
[16] http://sfbayview.com/2013/jackson-mississippi-mayor-elect-chokwe-lumumba-on-economic-democracy/
[17] http://www.electlumumbamayor.com/
[18] http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/07/mayor_chokwe_lumumba_wants_to_build_a_solidarity_economy_in_jackson_miss.html
[19] http://www.workers.org/2013/06/25/the-political-historical-significance-of-chokwe-lumumba-mayoral-win-in-jackson-miss/
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The importance of education and conscientization: Part II on labour self-management

By Ajamu Nangwaya

Sept 5, 2013 – The people have been long exposed to the capitalist approach to economic development and it is quite fair to assert that the ideas of capitalism are dominant on the question of economic efficacy. The people might have critique of capitalism but it is generally seen as the only game in town, especially with the demise of the former Soviet Union and with it bureaucratic, authoritarian state socialism. In this context Marley’s exhortation to the people to "Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds" is very instructive.

The preceding verses from Marley implicitly call on us to engage in critical education about oppression and emancipation. As worker self-management practitioners and/or advocates our educational programmes would also provide the necessary knowledge, skills and attitude to operate worker cooperatives, other social enterprises and the enabling labour self-management structures. Therefore, the educational initiatives would be directed at facilitating worker self-management and the social economy and political/ideological consciousness-raising.

In carrying out this educational programme, the method of teaching and learning should mimic the democratic economic development method that we are pursuing. We are not seeking to reinscribe authoritarian, leadership-from-above ways of teaching and learning. I believe ancestor Ella Baker, advocate of participatory democracy and an organizer within the Afrikan Liberation Movement in the United States, was onto something when she declared, "Give people light and they will find a way." [1]

We are not seeking mastery over the people. The goal is to engender in the laboring classes an appreciation and consciousness of the transformative possibilities and to move toward their realization.

Paolo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed reminds us, "Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people — they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress." [2]

One of the admirable features of labour self-management is its commitment to placing the power of economic self-determination in the hands of the worker-cooperators. Education has long been an instrument for igniting the passion for emancipation within the radical or revolutionary sections of the labour self-management movement. Mayor Lumumba is very much aware of the educational task ahead in developing the social economy:

    And this will bring about more public education and political education to the population of the city, make our population more prepared to be motivated and organized in order to participate in the changes which must occur in the city of Jackson in order to move it forward. We say the people must decide. ‘Educate, motivate, organize.’ [3]

Mayor Lumumba and his civil society allies can carry out the following educational initiatives to advance worker cooperatives and the social economy:

- Hire worker cooperative educators and developers among the staff of the Office of Economic Development.

- Execute professional development education of all city personnel with economic and business development responsibilities.

- Educate institutional actors such as hospitals, educational institutions and the city’s bureaucracy on the economic virtue of purchasing from worker cooperatives and other social enterprises that are located in Jackson.

- Organize labour self-management and social economy workshops for all relevant elected municipal officials and their staff.

- Develop a public education campaign to educate the people about worker cooperatives, labour self-management and the social economy.

- Enlist the support of the United States Worker Cooperative Federation, regional worker cooperative federations and cooperative educators in designing a worker cooperative/labour self-management education training manual and programme.

- Develop a three-year social economy and worker self-management education pilot project in an elementary, junior high and high school.

- Infuse materials on the social economy and labour self-management in all business and economics courses in the elementary and secondary school curricula.

- Engage in dialogue with the colleges and universities in the city of Jackson to add courses and programmes on the social economy and labour self-management.

- Work with colleges and universities and the state on workforce adjustment or retraining programmes that prepare workers for cooperative and labour self-management entrepreneurship

Technical assistance

Jackson’s Business Development Division provides prospective business operations with advice on preparing their business plans, site selection and access to financial resources. Its role and that of other entities within the city’s bureaucracy should be enhanced to provide business formation and development technical assistance to prospective worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses. The City of Jackson’s technical assistance provision role could include the following:

- Work with civil society groups and the postsecondary institutions in the region to create a civil society-based technical assistance provider organization that would facilitate the formation and development worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses.

- Sell a city-owned building at the nominal price of $1 to a community-based labour self-management and social economy technical assistance provider.

- Aid the technical assistance provider to create a labour self-management and social economy incubator to increase the survival rate of these firms.

- Provide assistance and advice on the identification of business creation opportunities and the development of feasibility studies and business plans.

- Provide training and development opportunities to social enterprises that would allow them to bid for city contracts

Financing labour self-management

One of the most serious challenges faced by small businesses is their limited access to investment and working capital. We have to find creative ways to build organizations that are able to mobilize capital for labour self-management and other social economy projects. The City of Jackson currently provides grants and incentives to businesses so as to attract investment dollars. It can expand the criteria to include worker cooperatives, other cooperatives and social enterprises. Some of the financial instruments that could be explored are:

- Encourage worker cooperatives and other cooperatives to apply for its matching business grants Small Business Development Grant Program and the Storefront Improvement Grant, which provides up to $15,000 to recipients.

- Create a Social Economy Development Grant Program that provides up to $30,000 to worker cooperatives and other social economy firms that employ at least seven employees, invest at least $100,000 (20 per cent of which can be sweat equity) and employ at least 75 per cent of the workers from within Community Development Block Grant eligible area.

- Create a Social Economy Feasibility and Business Plan Grant that provides a 1:1 matched funding grant of up to $10,000.

- Create a credit union that is committed to facilitating cooperative entrepreneurship and community economic development.

- Collaborate with credit unions to expand their capacity to serve as agents for cooperative economic development.

- Work with civil society organizations to create a cooperative and social enterprise loan fund. The revolving loan fund Cooperative Fund of New England [10] could be used as a model for the provision of start-up and working capital to social economy entities.

- Capitalize the cooperative and social economy loan fund with a $300,000 grant over four years that would be matched at a 2:1 ratio from foundations, trade unions and other social movement organizations and/or other levels of government.

- Procure funding for a labour self-management and social economy incubator that is operated by a civil-society-based organization.

- Seek funds to support the matched savings instrument called the Individual Development Accounts [11]. Prospective worker-cooperators would use their accumulated savings to capitalize their labour self-managed enterprises. This programme would develop the business plan through its accompanying educational component.

Procurement and equal opportunity programme function

- Create procurement opportunities for worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses, including those with a few worker-cooperators or employees and a small annual turnover.

- Establish business or contracting set-asides that are exclusively directed at worker cooperatives and other social economy businesses.

- Include worker cooperatives in equal opportunity or affirmative action business programmes established by the city.

- Develop sub-contracting opportunities for cooperative businesses on the city’s infrastructure development projects.

- Develop the creative capacity to ensure that labour self-managed and social economy firms are able to participate in business opportunities with the City of Jackson.

Conclusion

We have to build the road as we travel. All of our organizing work should be directed at developing the capacity of the oppressed to act independently of the structures of domination. The Lumumba administration, the Jackson People’s Assembly and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement have an opportunity to use the resources of the municipal state to advance labour self-management and the solidarity economy.

The worker cooperative movement and progressive entities across the United States should support the civil society forces in Jackson in their effort to build the supportive organizations and structures to engender labour self-management and the solidarity economy. The labour self-management and social economy work being advanced in Jackson ought to be geared toward the purpose of social emancipation and to place the people in the driver’s seat in creating history.

I would like to close with a statement by the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta [12] who captures the spirit in which we ought to wage struggle and create a participatory-democratic culture within the movement for emancipation:

    We who do not seek power, only want the consciences of [the masses]; only those who wish to dominate prefer sheep, the better to lead them. We prefer intelligent workers, even if they are our opponents, to anarchists who are such only in order to follow us like sheep. We want freedom for everybody; we want the masses to make the revolution for the masses. The person who thinks with [her] own brain is to be preferred to the one who blindly approves everything…. Better an error consciously committed and in good faith, than a good action performed in a servile manner. [4]

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an academic worker and an organizer with the Network for Pan-Afrikan Solidarity in Canada. He was a participant at the founding conference of the United States Federation of Worker Cooperative and was elected to its first board of directors.

Notes

[1] Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker & The Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 105.

[2] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed – 30th Anniversary Edition. (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 178. Retrieved from http://libcom.org/files/FreirePedagogyoftheOppressed.pdf [13]

[3] Monica Moorehead, “People’s Assembly’s platform brings mayoral victory for Chokwe Lumumba,” Workers World, June 11, 2013, http://www.workers.org/2013/06/11/peoples-assembly-platform-brings-mayoral-victory-for-chokwe-lumumba/ [14]

[4] Cited in Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. (Oakland: AK Press, 2009), 184.

Vietnamese Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong (right) with his Cuban counterpart Raul Castro.

PART 1, THE VIETNAM CASE

By Harry Targ

Diary of a Heartland Radical

Introduction

The weight of history bears down on humankind such that, paraphrasing Marx, people make history but not precisely as to their own choosing. The rise of capitalism out of feudalism in Northern Europe spread over the centuries to Africa, Asia, and Latin America ripping asunder traditional patterns of economic, social, and cultural relations. A new political economy dynamic, now called “neoliberal globalization,” spread across the face of the earth extracting natural resources, enslaving and exploiting human labor power, and expanding production and distribution such that by the twentieth century the whole world was touched. The impact of capitalist globalization included enormous scientific and technological advances, significant increases in the capacity to sustain life, coupled with the capacity to exploit, destroy, kill, uproot traditional cultures and communities, and defile the human landscape.

Capitalism created a global empire. It also created global resistance. The drive to construct empires and to build economic, political, and cultural hegemony stimulated revolution, non-violent resistance, and desperate efforts to create new forms of social and economic being. During the period since World War 11, socialist regimes and radical nationalist movements have challenged the hegemony of U.S., European and Japanese capitalism. The twentieth century socialist project disintegrated for a variety of reasons but its loss spurred new and diverse forms of resistance that complicated the rule of “victorious” empires. The economic, political, and military crises of the early 21^st century, coupled with renewed resistance raised the specter of new “21^st century socialist” visions. These visions became concrete programs, again paraphrasing Marx, that were not precisely of peoples’ choosing but necessary transitional steps to socialism nonetheless.

Vietnamese History

Southeast Asia, a diverse space geographically, culturally, politically, and economically, has experienced many kinds of imperial rule and resistance. Vietnamese national identity emerged about 100 BC as a result of Chinese expansion and resistance to it among indigenous kingdoms. But China established its hegemony over Vietnam from 200-900 AD. After that time Vietnam consolidated its independence.

During the 1850s Vietnam came under the domination of the French. Occupied by France, Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) became a classic colony. The Japanese military conquered Indochina during World War II. The Japanese had collaborated with the old French colonial administrators and land owners to control the Vietnamese people. After the Japanese were defeated, the Vietnamese people rose up to challenge the French effort to reestablish their old colony.

From 1946 to 1954, revolutionary forces led by Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh fought and won a victory against the French. At the Geneva Conference, 1954, the war was settled. The United States, however, in violation of the main agreements reached, established a puppet regime in South Vietnam that became the basis for continuing war on the Vietnamese people. The Vietnam War, with the U.S. replacing the French, continued until 1975, when the Saigon military collapsed. Finally, after short and brutal battles with hostile forces in neighboring Cambodia and a short war initiated by China in 1979, violence ended. Now the Vietnamese had to rebuild their country and begin constructing the socialist society they had struggled for since the end of World War II.

Post-war reconstruction was initiated after “the U.S. military and their allies dropped four times the tonnage of bombs used in World War II in Vietnam, which is equivalent to 725 nuclear bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 3 million Vietnamese were killed and 4 million were wounded. At the same time, the U.S. military used up to 80 million liters of chemicals to ‘clear’ the land.” (Tran Dac Loi). Agent Orange sprayed liberally over the entirety of Vietnam from 1961 and 1971 affected millions of Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers and poisoned the land. Unexploded ordinance and descendants of Vietnamese exposed to Agent Orange/Dioxin remain part of the Vietnamese experience today. The devastation of land and people was reinforced by a U.S. initiated economic blockade of Vietnam that lasted from 1975 until 1994.

From a Socialist Command Economy to Doi Moi (a socialist-oriented market economy)

Tran Dac Loi, Vice-President of the Vietnam Peace and Development Foundation, wrote about post-war economic policies in Vietnam in an essay in Vietnam: From National Liberation to Socialism (Changemaker, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, forthcoming). Loi explained that after the war against the United States ended the newly united Vietnamese nation adopted a centrally-planned socialist economy.

Although small shops based on family labor were allowed the bulk of the economy was state-run as “…all essential production materials and consumer goods were circulated through the state distribution system.” The evolving command economy reduced inequalities but labor productivity was low, inflation-rates grew, and the Vietnamese experienced chronic food shortages. Over 60 percent of the Vietnamese people by the early 1980s lived below the country’s self-defined poverty rate.

Loi asserts that state ownership, management, and distribution became inappropriate for the post-war Vietnamese economy. Adequate “economic, material and technical conditions, as well as cultural development” did not exist to achieve a fully developed socialist society. Entrepreneurial skills and corporate and individual competition, characteristic of economic development in market economies, it was realized, were necessary to stimulate economic growth. Vietnamese leaders recognized that economic development was “a long-term process, not a one-day business and cannot be realized only by political will. In fact, we did not yet have socialism; we were at the beginning of the process of building it. And there is a need for sustainable policies and steps relevant to the existing context and objective conditions.”

Thus at the 6^th Party Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1986) a new set of policies were adopted called Doi Moi. They called the new policy “a market economy with a socialist orientation.” Doi Moi included the following:

-a regulated market economy.

-a market that should be coordinated with planning to maximize the rational distribution of resources and economic development.

-a rationally encouraged use of “external resources” such as foreign investment.

-construction of a multi-level pattern of ownership including a state sector controlling energy, natural resources, heavy industry, communications, railways and public transportation, aviation, banking and insurance and the distribution of lands for agricultural use on a household and cooperative basis.

-the expansion of foreign trade, particularly the export of rice.

-the provision of primary education for all Vietnamese.

-free health insurance for the poor.

Many observers, including the Vietnamese themselves, point to serious economic, political, and cultural problems that have emerged since Doi Moi. However, basic economic changes have resulted from the programs embraced in the 1980s. Per capita GDP has risen by a factor of ten since 1986. Vietnam no longer ranks as one of the UN’s most underdeveloped countries. Industrial growth has doubled. Having overcome the post-war shortage of food, Vietnam is now the second largest rice exporter in the world. Vietnam, since Doi Moi, has increased access to education and health care, significantly increased life expectancy, reduced rates of poverty from over 60 percent to 11 percent, and, according to the United Nations, has increased its Human Development Index score (HDI) from .498 in 1991 to .733 in 2007.

With the weakening of state socialism as a world force and the shift virtually everywhere to neoliberal economic policies by the 1980s, the Vietnamese came to the realization that transitioning to 21^st century socialism would require the construction of a more complicated economic model that continued to support a renovated state sector, allowed a regulated marketplace, and encouraged local socialist forms, such as workers cooperatives.

Sources

This discussion of Vietnam draws heavily on materials from Vietnam: From National Liberation to Socialism, Changemaker, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, forthcoming, 2013. Essays referred to include Tran Dac Loi, “Vietnam: 65 Years of the Struggle for National Independence and Socialism;” Merle Ratner and Ngo Thanh Nhan, “Vietnam Update 2013: Opportunities and Challenges,” and Duncan McFarland, “Origins of Doi Moi in Vietnam and the Relationship to Lenin’s New Economic Policy.” Also the essay by Paul Krehbiel, “A Nation at Work,” and his suggestions for revision of this paper were very helpful.

(Prepared for a presentation at The Labor and Working-Class Studies Project, Working Class Studies Association, Madison College, Madison Wisconsin, June 12-15, 2013. “Transitional Steps to Socialism: Part 2, The Cuban Case” will discuss reforms in Cuba and their similarities and differences with Vietnam.)

PART TWO: THE CUBAN CASE

Spanish colonialism came to the Western Hemisphere in the fifteenth century. Indigenous people were killed or enslaved. Africans were brought to the occupied land to produce sugar, tobacco, coffee, dyes, and other commodities that would find their way to Europe and processing for sale in the new global market place. The era of primitive accumulation, as Marx called it, marked the “happy dawn” of a new era.

Cuba became part of this new imperial system. Indigenous people were destroyed. Sugar plantations were established. And Cuba became an administrative center of Spanish colonialism in the “new world.” Some of Havana’s landmark buildings were constructed in the fifteenth century to house Spanish administrators.

Resistance and the passion for national autonomy were embedded in Cuban culture. Slave revolts and revolutionary campaigns occurred throughout the nineteenth century. The so-called “Spanish American War” constituted the culmination of Cuba’s anti-colonial struggle and the imposition of United States neo-colonialism on the island.

From 1898 until 1959, U.S. investors controlled the plantations, businesses, tourist enterprises, and public utilities while American tourists enjoyed Cuban beaches and culture. When the Fidelistas marched joyfully into Havana in early January, 1959 after Fulgencio Batista’s armies were defeated, a new era of hostile Cuban/U.S. relations was born. From 1959 to the present, the Cuban regime has experienced non-recognition, an economic blockade, a nuclear crisis, sabotage, efforts to cut off Cuban relations with neighboring governments as well as those in Europe, and sustained campaigns to undermine and overthrow the Cuban revolution. Despite enormous pain and suffering and extensive internal debates about the direction the revolution should take, the Cuban revolution survives until this day.

Socialist Paths: Material vs. Moral Incentives, the Socialist Command Economy, Rectification, the Special Period, to 313 Guidelines

The United States project from 1959 on was to stifle, dismantle, and destroy the Cuban Revolution. The Cuban revolutionaries had two main projects in mind: national self-determination and achievement of the basic social and economic rights referred to in Fidel Castro’s “History Will Absolve Me” speech. In this speech Castro proclaimed that the Cuban people wanted to secure basic social and economic justice within a framework of national independence.

Over the next sixty years, Cuban society has been an experimental laboratory for testing and evaluating the effectiveness of economic and political policies designed to achieve the goals of the revolution. During the 1960s, leaders of the revolution debated whether the Cuban people were ready to embrace fully an economic system of moral incentives modeled after altruism and self-sacrifice or whether, given the neo-colonial capitalist system out of which the revolution occurred, a period of continuing material incentives was needed to encourage production for revolutionary change. The system of moral incentives was put to the ultimate test during the campaign of the late 1960s to produce 10 million tons of sugar. It failed.

After the disastrous sugar campaign, Cuba joined the Eastern European common market (COMECON) and shifted more in the direction of Soviet bloc command economies. Despite economic growth over the 15 years of command economy experience, the Cubans, in 1986 committed themselves to a campaign of “rectification” or reintroducing incentives and exhortations to rebuild revolutionary enthusiasm which they believed had been stifled by the Soviet state socialist model. From the point of view of the Cuban leadership, bureaucratization and centralization of control had reduced ties between the revolution and the popular classes.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and COMECON, the Cuban regime, because of deep economic crisis, shifted away from socialist command economy policies and revolutionary enthusiasm to policies, referred to as the special period, designed to save the revolution from collapse. The Cuban economy was opened to foreign investment, tourism was reinstituted as a core foreign exchange earner, some shift to small scale markets was allowed to resume, and state farms were shifted to cooperatives. The result was, despite the predictions of U.S. “experts” on Cuba, some economic recovery and growth from the depths of depression in the mid-1990s until 2006.

For a variety of reasons, including the retirement of Fidel Castro, rising generations of post-revolutionary youth, reduced growth in tourism due to global recession, and severe natural disasters, the Cuban economy’s growth rates were modest after its remarkable recovery from the special period. Economic inequality and inadequate absorption of a highly skilled work force added to a growing malaise. Leaders of the Cuban Communist Party, economists, and social movement activists began to argue that substantial changes needed to be made to better satisfy the twenty-first century needs and wants of the Cuban people and to sustain economic growth in a world still dominated by global capitalism. The state-dominated economy led to excessive bureaucratization, corruption, too many state employees, and insufficient innovation and competition.

Raul Castro, who replaced his brother in 2006, initiated a public discussion of Cuba’s economic future. Literally 2.3 million proposals for policy changes were introduced in various assemblies over a three year period. These were concretized and publicized as 291 “Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution.” In April, 2011 after extensive debate a new document with 313 guidelines was presented and adopted by the 6^th Party Congress of the Cuban Communist Party.

These guidelines have become the basis of a model of 21^st century socialism that incorporates a strong but rationalized state sector, expanding markets, and the encouragement of workers to form various cooperatives in urban as well as rural areas. Also the guidelines allowed the expansion of private enterprises in small business, service, production, and agricultural sectors. Almost two million state workers overtime would be shifted to the non-state sector of the economy, private enterprises and cooperatives.

While the guidelines have begun to be translated into policy, Camila Pineiro Harnecker suggests debates continue between those Cubans who believe that the regime should continue to maximize the role of the state, those who argue that markets should become primary, and those who see economic democracy and workers’ cooperatives as central to Cuba’s future development of twenty-first century socialism. Interestingly, all three positions are represented in the guidelines; a better organized state sector, broadening of markets, and a growing sector based on workers’ control of production and distribution.

Among the central features of the guidelines are the following:

-socialist planning will continue more efficiently and will open spaces for other forms of management, production, and distribution of goods and services in the economy. A significant shift in employment from the state sector to the marketplace and cooperatives will proceed over a modest time period.

-along with state enterprises, the guidelines allow capitalist enterprises including foreign investment, the leasing of state-owned farmland, the leasing of state owned premises, self-employment, and the encouragement of urban and rural workers’ cooperatives.

-Expansion of categories of self-employment.

-Economic entities of all kinds will be required to maintain themselves financially, without subsidies for losses.

-Wages and incomes in state, private, and cooperative sectors will be determined by real earnings.

-Self-sustaining cooperatives will be encouraged that will decide on the income of workers and the distribution of profits after taxes.

The guidelines, while incomplete and still being developed, represent an effort to move beyond the dilemmas of a poor, but developing country historically committed to improving the quality of life of its people as to education, health care, culture, and economic security.

Vietnam, Cuba, and 21^st Century Socialism: A Work in Progress

Vietnam and Cuba share many experiences in common. They both are historic products of years of colonial and/or neo-colonial domination and patterns of national resistance. Twentieth century nationhood was formed during the period of emerging global industrial and finance capitalism. Both Vietnam and Cuba resisted imperialism and won revolutionary wars against it only to be forced to survive in an era of harsh neoliberal globalization and political/military subversion. Concretely both experienced economic blockades from the United States at their most vulnerable time of economic reconstruction. And both as allies of the Soviet Union were forced to embark on the path of transitioning to socialism at a time when the socialist bloc was collapsing.

The generation of revolutionaries who fought the U.S. marines in the countryside and creatively withstood horrific bombing in Vietnam and fought against U.S. puppet armies in the mountains of Cuba, brought to victory a hardened vision of constructing a radically new society based on state socialism. With the collapse of state socialism as a world force and the shift virtually everywhere to neoliberal economic policies, Vietnamese and Cubans came to the realization that transitioning to 21^st century socialism would require the construction of a more complicated economic model that continued to support a renovated state sector, allowed a regulated marketplace, and encouraged local socialist forms, such as workers cooperatives.

Presently advocacy of workers’ cooperatives seems stronger in Cuba than Vietnam. As the Cuban guidelines suggest, workers cooperatives are advocated to continue the socialist vision by more effectively institutionalizing worker participation in decisions that affect their lives. Decisions about management, distribution of profits, commitments to the communities in which they work all would be determined largely by those in the cooperative units. Given the broad array of grassroots mobilizations that dot the map from the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America, some creative combination of workers’ states and workers’ cooperatives might constitute the centerpiece of a 21^st century socialism.

Sources

The discussion of Cuba draws upon Cliff DuRand, “Renovation of Cuban Socialism,” March, 2013, (and insightful editorial comments on a draft of this paper from that author) and Camila Pineiro Harnecker, “Visions of Socialism Guiding the Current Changes in Cuba,” translated by Emily Myers, Center for Global Justice, both available from Cuba@globaljusticecenter.org ; Roger Burbach, “A Cuba Spring?” NACLA Reports, Spring, 2013; Raul Castro, “Report to the 6^th Communist Party Congress,” ; Olga Fernandez Rios, “The Socialist Transition in Cuba: Economic Adjustments and Socio-Political Challenges, Institute of Philosophy, University of Havana, translated by Emily Myers, Center for Global Justice, 2012; Pedro Campos, “New Cooperative Policy Big for Socialism,” Havana Times, April 9, 2012, http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=66858

Part 2 of a presentation prepared for The Labor and Working-Class Studies Project, Working Class Studies Association, Madison College, Madison Wisconsin, June 12-15, 2013. To access Part 1 see www.heartlandradical.blogspot.com

By Circles Robinson

Havana Times, Feb 26, 2013

Vicente Morin Aguado interviews non-Marxist US socialist Grady Ross Daugherty

HAVANA TIMES — Over several weeks of difficult back and forth emails (it’s hard to imagine the slow speed and high cost of Internet in Cuban hotels), I attempted to clarify the thinking of Grady Ross Daugherty ^[2], the leader and founder of the “modern cooperative socialist movement” in the United States and who is a regular reader of HT.

HT: What place do you see for cooperatives in the current reform process taking place within Cuba’s socialist experiment?

Grady Ross Daugherty: Thanks for characterizing Cuba’s half-century post-capitalist period as an “experiment.” An experiment is a way of testing a reasonable hypothesis. If we look at the Cuban model as an experiment, as a modifiable work in progress, its performance can be altered to achieve greater prosperity and progress.

In our discussion, we need to keep in mind that most types of cooperatives require a certain basis of legal private ownership, assuming we want them to be functional. For example, agricultural cooperatives require the ownership of cultivated land and the families homes — not usufruct rights — if we hope them to be effective and make Cuba self-sufficient in production.

HT: Regarding the issue of ownership, I began to understand your non-Marxist position prior to our exchange. It may seem like a digression, but it’s good to point out something as controversial as your self-declared non-Marxist yet socialist position.

GRD:  Since its origins in the nineteenth century, the socialist movement was mutual and cooperative. This was something notable in France and England, where workers and farmers were eager to own land and the instruments of production as their property. They didn’t want ownership in the hands of private capitalists or government officials.

I think that if Cuba’s political leaders can clear their minds about the theory of state monopoly and its consequent personality cult, typical of the founders of Marxism during the nineteenth century, Cuba will be a socialist country in the long term.

Marx and Engels instilled prejudice against private property, pointing to it as a cause of society’s ills and as something antithetical to their aim of “scientific” socialism. Nevertheless, for cooperatives to be real they require ownership, which supposedly would be “capitalist” – as opposed to state-run or scientific forms like “socialist” ones.

Despite this, harsh reality has led Cuban politicians to take a fresh look at cooperatives. They’re beginning to look at socialism as an ongoing experiment.

HT: Of course Marx criticized Proudhon, the father of French cooperative and mutualist socialism, considering him petty bourgeois for all his vacillation and wavering, which is typical of his social class.

GRD:  Correct, Marx criticized Proudhon as being petty bourgeois, but Proudhon was a manual worker with calloused hands, while Marx was nothing like that.

The essential fact is that all workers — women, men, blacks and whites — have an intrinsic desire to control their workplace and direct their own productive lives. Marx and Engels couldn’t accept that idea. Marx was a bookworm, from a privileged bourgeois family. Engels was an office clerk in the textile business of his father, who offered prospects of eventually leaving the younger Engels a hefty inheritance.

If workers directly own the means of production under socialism, they won’t need capitalists, nor will they need bourgeois communist “friends” whose desire is to arrogantly stay on top and always be the stars of the show.

^[3]

Gateway to the Mondragon cooperative complex.

GRD: Cooperative enterprises are often thought of as small and basic, but look at the example of the Mondragon cooperative experiment in northern Spain. There, the worker-owned factories are very large, automated and competitive – similar to other factories in advanced capitalist countries.

A derivative of Mondragon is the workers grocery chain Eroski, which constitutes the largest company of its kind in the country. So, as we can see, cooperatives come in all shapes and sizes.

HT: Is a cooperative political republic actually the third option between capitalism and socialism, or is it a limited an oscillating concept of the petty bourgeoisie?

GRD: That’s an excellent question. It would be more accurate to say it’s a third way between capitalism, on the one hand, and Marxism as a socialist state monopoly on the other – which is so familiar to Cubans.

From a distance, it seems that Marxists couldn’t shake their philosophy as a religion, a holy truth, therefore they couldn’t get their arms around the idea of workers possessing their workplaces directly under socialist state power.

HT: In the failed experiment in the USSR, cooperatives under perestroika ended up being a bridge to capitalist enterprises when the communists lost political power.

GRD: A reasonable theory would be to understand that — if workers must possess productive property directly and cooperatively in a socialist country led by a vanguard party that does the macroeconomic planning and coordination (be it a restaurant, hotel, factory, bus company, etc.) — these companies would then be socialist.

HT: Have you ever been to Cuba? What are the bases of your suggestions?

GRD: I haven’t been to Cuba yet, mainly because I’m a retired worker without much money to travel. But what I recommend for Cuba is largely the same as for my country. From this angle, my observations may be better than those of others who’ve been fortunate enough to visit the land of the valiant Marti.

If workers directly own the means of production under socialism, they won’t need capitalists, nor will they need bourgeois communist “friends” whose desire is to arrogantly stay on top and always be the stars of the show.

HT: They say that sometimes those sitting outside a game of dominoes can see the plays better than those playing. What do you see?

GRD: The traditional management system in Cuba is the necessary byproduct of 100 percent government ownership. In other words, what’s needed is a new system of ownership. Many Cubans, including the highest political leadership, don’t understand that associated labor, just like a company, is a “private” form of the socialist enterprise. What’s more, without this form of private cooperatives in Cuba it would be a repetition of the Yugoslav experience and therefore doomed to failure.

HT: Along the path we’re pursuing, based on the idea of cooperativism, how do you see the future of my country, either with or without socialism?

GRD: No one can predict the future, of course, but I think that if Cuba’s political leaders can clear their minds about the theory of state monopoly and its consequent personality cult, typical of the founders of Marxism during the nineteenth century, Cuba will be a socialist country in the long term. On the other hand, if the same mentality retains its paralyzing grip, then we can consider the socialist state as being endangered, with brutal imperialism waiting in the wings to reassert itself.
—–

To contact Vincent Morin Aguado, write: morfamily@correodecuba.cu ^[4]

2 Comments To "Cooperatives Could Save Cuban Socialism"

#1 Comment By Moses Patterson On February 26, 2013 @ 8:40 am

Thank you for what seems to be a thoughtful analysis. Where does technological innovation fit in your “modern cooperative socialist movement”? How would entertainment companies that produce $100 million blockbuster movies find funding? Who decides how much to spend on scientific research for breast cancer or childhood diabetes? The point of my questions is without a free market and without the possibility of huge rewards associated with huge investment risks, how do the great advances or simple joys in society come about?

#2 Comment By Griffin On February 26, 2013 @ 10:24 am

An interesting discussion. Grady mentioned how Marx & Engels were not workers, but were in fact from the bourgeois class. The same could be said of the sons of a prosperous Cuban plantation owner, who were sent to the best schools on the island and one of whom became a lawyer. The intellectuals of the bourgeois class are always fascinated with perfect schemes and utopian ideologies, with no firm basis in economic and social reality.

Grady, when you say the co-operatives must be owned by the workers, how exactly does that work? Does an individual own a share in a co-op? Can she sell her share to somebody else, or to a fellow co-op member? If so, how is the price of such a share set? What powers does the co-op have to set working conditions and to deal with members who refuse to work? Can an uncooperative fellow be expelled from the co-op?

It has become well understood that one of the chief causes of the failure of the Marxist/Castro system followed by Cuba is the inefficiency of the centrally planned economy. It is simply impossible for a government ministry to collect enough data, to have enough time and resources to fully analyze & understand the data, and to formulate policies and plans to adequately organize the complex interrelationships of production, distribution & consumption of resources in a national economy. It is not possible to know everything in order to plan everything.

So how does the co-operative model deal with this problem? What degree of autonomy does the co-operative have to make their own economic decisions? What about the channels of resources, supplies, advertisement and product distribution? If the co-operatives must exist under a socialist political monopoly, what freedom do they have to make their own economic decisions? The Mondragon Co-operative has been successful, but it exists within an overall pluralist free-market capitalist economy, the EU. Would the co-operative be as successful without the interactions with private corporations, businesses, customers and professionals and as an economic community?

So what about private enterprise? Would privately owned and operated businesses be allowed in your co-operative socialist republic? Suppose I didn’t want to join a co-op and accept the decisions of a committee on how to run my life & work? Can I open my own privately owned business and hire workers? Or could I accept a job offer from Moses to go work in his private firm as a salaried employee? If not, who has the authority and power to say no? Do I not have the right to decide for myself how I am going to use my mind, my capital and my labour?

Finally I ask, how is this movement you say you founded, the modern co-operative socialist movement, not another scheme to prefect society, a utopian ideology? And when you describe yourself as the “founder” of a “movement”, roughly how many people are in your movement, how do they join and what is your relationship to the members of this movement? When I googled your name I came up with a few pages of self-promotion and your two books at Amazon. The books rank as #1,170,428th and #6,349,213 place as sellers. Not very popular titles, really. But there is no trace of a “modern socialist co-operative movement” of which somebody named Grady Ross Daugherty is a founder. So what gives? Does your movement actually exist outside the covers of your two books?

Article printed from Cuba’s Havana Times.org: http://www.havanatimes.org