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.

David Harvey: ‘The Left Has to Rethink Its Theoretical and Tactical Apparatus.’

FROM ROAR MAGAZINE. David Harvey, one of the leading Marxist thinkers of our times, sits down with the activist collective AK Malabocas to discuss the transformations in the mode of capital accumulation, the centrality of the urban terrain in contemporary class struggles, and the implications of all this for anti-capitalist organizing.

AK Malabocas: In the last forty years, the mode of capital accumulation has changed globally. What do these changes mean for the struggle against capitalism?

David Harvey: From a macro-perspective, any mode of production tends to generate a very distinctive kind of opposition, which is a curious mirrored image of itself. If you look back to the 1960s or 1970s, when capital was organized in big corporatist, hierarchical forms, you had oppositional structures that were corporatist, unionist kinds of political apparatuses. In other words, a Fordist system generated a Fordist kind of opposition.

With the breakdown of this form of industrial organization, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, you ended up with a much more decentralized configuration of capital: more fluid over space and time than previously thought. At the same time we saw the emergence of an opposition that is about networking and decentralization and that doesn’t like hierarchy and the previous Fordist forms of opposition.

So, in a funny sort of way, the leftists reorganize themselves in the same way capital accumulation is reorganized. If we understand that the left is a mirror image of what we are criticizing, then maybe what we should do is to break the mirror and get out of this symbiotic relationship with what we are criticizing.

In the Fordist era, the factory was the main site of resistance. Where can we find it now that capital has moved away from the factory floor towards the urban terrain?

First of all, the factory-form has not disappeared—you still find factories in Bangladesh or in China. What is interesting is how the mode of production in the core cities changed. For example, the logistics sector has undergone a huge expansion: UPS, DHL and all of these delivery workers are producing enormous values nowadays.

In the last decades, a huge shift has occurred in the service sector as well: the biggest employers of labor in the 1970s in the US were General Motors, Ford and US Steel. The biggest employers of labor today are McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Walmart. Back then, the factory was the center of the working class, but today we find the working class mainly in the service sector. And why would we say that producing cars is more important than producing hamburgers?

Unfortunately the left is not comfortable with the idea of organizing fast-food workers. Its picture of the classical working class doesn’t fit with value production of the service workers, the delivery workers, the restaurant workers, the supermarket workers.

The proletariat did not disappear, but there is a new proletariat which has very different characteristics from the traditional one the left used to identify as the vanguard of the working class. In this sense, the McDonalds workers became the steel workers of the twenty-first century

If this is what the new proletariat is about, where are the places to organize resistance now?

It’s very difficult to organize in the workplaces. For example, delivery drivers are moving all over the place. So this population could maybe be better organized outside the working place, meaning in their neighborhood structures.

There is already an interesting phrase in Gramsci’s work from 1919 saying that organizing in the workplace and having workplace councils is all well, but we should have neighborhood councils, too. And the neighborhood councils, he said, have a better understanding of what the conditions of the whole working class are compared to the sectoral understanding of workplace organizing.

Workplace organizers used to know very well what a steelworker was, but they didn’t understand what the proletariat was about as a whole. The neighborhood organization would then include for example the street cleaners, the house workers, the delivery drivers. Gramsci never really took this up and said: ‘come on, the Communist Party should organize neighborhood assemblies!’

Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions in the European context where Communist Parties did in fact organize neighborhood councils—because they couldn’t organize in the workplace, like in Spain for example. In the 1960s this was a very powerful form of organizing. Therefore—as I have argued for a very long time—we should look at the organization of neighborhoods as a form of class organization. Gramsci only mentioned it once in his writings and he never pursued it further.

In Britain in the 1980s, there were forms of organizing labor in city-wide platforms on the basis of trades councils, which were doing what Gramsci suggested. But within the union movement these trades councils were always regarded as inferior forms of organizing labor. They were never treated as being foundational to how the union movement should operate.

In fact, it turned out that the trades councils were often much more radical than the conventional trade unions and that was because they were rooted in the conditions of the whole working class, not only the often privileged sectors of the working-class. So, to the extent that they had a much broader definition of the working class, the trades councils tended to have much more radical politics. But this was never valorized by the trade union movement in general—it was always regarded as a space where the radicals could play.

The advantages of this form of organizing are obvious: it overcomes the split between sectoral organizing, it includes all kinds of “deterritorialized” labor, and it is very suitable to new forms of community and assembly-based organization, as Murray Bookchin was advocating, for example.

In the recent waves of protest—in Spain and Greece, for instance, or in the Occupy movement—you can find this idea of “localizing resistance.” It seems that these movements tend to organize around issues of everyday life, rather than the big ideological questions that the traditional left used to focus on.

Why would you say that organizing around everyday life is not one of the big questions? I think it is one of the big questions. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and everyday life in cities is what people are exposed to and have their difficulties in. These difficulties reside as much in the sphere of the realization of value as in the sphere of the production of value.

This is one of my very important theoretical arguments: everybody reads Volume I of Capital and nobody reads Volume II. Volume I is about the production of value, Volume II is about the realization of value. Focusing on Volume II, you clearly see that the conditions of realization are just as important as the conditions of production.

Marx often talks about the necessity of seeing capital as the contradictory unity between production and realization. Where value is produced and where it is realized are two different things. For example, a lot of value is produced in China and is actually realized by Apple or by Walmart in the United States. And, of course, the realization of value is about the realization of value by means of expensive working-class consumption.

Capital might concede higher wages at the point of production, but then it recuperates it at the point of realization by the fact that working people have to pay much higher rents and housing costs, telephone costs, credit card costs and so on. So class struggles over realization—over affordable housing, for example—are just as significant for the working class as struggles of wages and work conditions. What is the point of having a higher wage if it is immediately taken back in terms of higher housing costs?

In their relationship to the working class, capitalists long ago learned that they can make a lot of money out of taking back what they have given away. And, to the degree that—particularly in the 1960s and 1970s—workers became increasingly empowered in the sphere of consumption, capital starts to concentrate much more on pulling back value through consumption.

So the struggles in the sphere of realization, which where not that strong in Marx’s times, and the fact that nobody reads the damn book (Volume II), is a problem for the conventional left. When you say to me: ‘what is the macro-problem here?’—well, this is a macro-problem! The conception of capital and the relation between production and realization. If you don’t see the contradictory unity between both then you will not get the whole picture. Class struggle is written all over it and I can’t understand why a lot of Marxists can’t get their head around how important this is.

Harvey_FistMoneyThe problem is how we understand Marx in 2015. In Marx’s times, the extent of urbanization was relatively convenient and the consumerism of the working class was almost non-existent, so all Marx had to talk about was that the working class manages to survive on a meager wage and that they are very sophisticated in doing that. Capital left them to their own devices to do what they like.

But nowadays we are in a world where consumerism is responsible for about 30 percent of the dynamic of the global economy—in the US it’s even 70 percent. So why are we sitting here and saying consumerism is kind of irrelevant, sticking to Volume I and talking about production and not about consumerism?

What urbanization does is to force us into certain kinds of consumerism, for example: you have to have an automobile. So your lifestyle is dictated in lots of ways by the form urbanization takes. And again, in Marx’s days this wasn’t significant, but in our days this is crucial. We have to get around with forms of organizing that actually recognize this change in the dynamic of class struggle.

Given this shift, the left would definitely have to adjust its tactics and forms of organizing, as well as its conception of what to organize for.

The groups that stamped the recent movements with their character, coming from the anarchist and autonomist traditions, are much more embedded in the politics of everyday life, much more than the traditional Marxists.

I am very sympathetic to the anarchists, they have a much better line on this, precisely in dealing with the politics of consumption and their critique of what consumerism is about. Part of their objective is to change and reorganize everyday life around new and different principles. So I think this is a crucial point to which a lot of political action has to be directed these days. But I disagree with you in saying that this is no “big question.”

So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be very crucial for building social movements around everyday life and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising approach?

I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book, says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state as a possible partner to radical transformation.

There is a tendency to regard the state as being the enemy, the 100 percent enemy. And there are plenty of examples of repressive states out of public control where this is the case. No question: the capitalist state has to be fought, but without dominating state power and without taking it on you quickly get into the story of what happened for example in 1936 and 1937 in Barcelona and then all over Spain. By refusing to take the state at a moment where they had the power to do it, the revolutionaries in Spain allowed the state to fall back into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinist wing of the Communist movement—and the state got reorganized and smashed the resistance.

That might be true for the Spanish state in the 1930s, but if we look at the contemporary neoliberal state and the retreat of the welfare state, what is left of the state to be conquered, to be seized?

To begin with, the left is not very good at answering the question of how we build massive infrastructures. How will the left build the Brooklyn bridge, for example? Any society relies on big infrastructures, infrastructures for a whole city—like the water supply, electricity and so on. I think that there is a big reluctance among the left to recognize that therefore we need some different forms of organization.

There are wings of the state apparatus, even of the neoliberal state apparatus, which are therefore terribly important—the center of disease control, for example. How do we respond to global epidemics such as Ebola and the like? You can’t do it in the anarchist way of DIY-organization. There are many instances where you need some state-like forms of infrastructure. We can’t confront the problem of global warming through decentralized forms of confrontations and activities alone.

One example that is often mentioned, despite its many problems, is the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbon in refrigerators to limit the depletion of the ozone layer. It was successfully enforced in the 1990s but it needed some kind of organization that is very different to the one coming out of assembly-based politics.

From an anarchist perspective, I would say that it is possible to replace even supra-national institutions like the WHO with confederal organizations which are built from the bottom up and which eventually arrive at worldwide decision-making.

Maybe to a certain degree, but we have to be aware that there will always be some kind of hierarchies and we will always face problems like accountability or the right of recourse. There will be complicated relationships between, for example, people dealing with the problem of global warming from the standpoint of the world as a whole and from the standpoint of a group that is on the ground, let’s say in Hanover or somewhere, and that wonders: ‘why should we listen to what they are saying?’

So you believe this would require some form of authority?

No, there will be authority structures anyway—there will always be. I have never been in an anarchist meeting where there was no secret authority structure. There is always this fantasy of everything being horizontal, but I sit there and watch and think: ‘oh god, there is a whole hierarchical structure in here—but it’s covert.’

Coming back to the recent protests around the Mediterranean: many movements have focused on local struggles. What is the next step to take towards social transformation?

At some point we have to create organizations which are able to assemble and enforce social change on a broader scale. For example, will Podemos in Spain be able to do that? In a chaotic situation like the economic crisis of the last years, it is important for the left to act. If the left doesn’t make it, then the right-wing is the next option. I think—and I hate to say this—but I think the left has to be more pragmatic in relation to the dynamics going on right now.

More pragmatic in what sense?

Well, why did I support SYRIZA even though it is not a revolutionary party? Because it opened a space in which something different could happen and therefore it was a progressive move for me.

It is a bit like Marx saying: the first step to freedom is the limitation of the length of the working day. Very narrow demands open up space for much more revolutionary outcomes, and even when there isn’t any possibility for any revolutionary outcomes, we have to look for compromise solutions which nevertheless roll back the neoliberal austerity nonsense and open the space where new forms of organizing can take place.

For example, it would be interesting if Podemos looked towards organizing forms of democratic confederalism—because in some ways Podemos originated with lots of assembly-type meetings taking place all over Spain, so they are very experienced with the assembly structure.

The question is how they connect the assembly-form to some permanent forms of organization concerning their upcoming position as a strong party in Parliament. This also goes back to the question of consolidating power: you have to find ways to do so, because without it the bourgeoisie and corporate capitalism are going to find ways to reassert it and take the power back.

What do you think about the dilemma of solidarity networks filling the void after the retreat of the welfare state and indirectly becoming a partner of neoliberalism in this way?

There are two ways of organizing. One is a vast growth of the NGO sector, but a lot of that is externally funded, not grassroots, and doesn’t tackle the question of the big donors who set the agenda—which won’t be a radical agenda. Here we touch upon the privatization of the welfare state.

This seems to me to be very different politically from grassroots organizations where people are on their own, saying: ‘OK, the state doesn’t take care of anything, so we are going to have to take care of it by ourselves.’ That seems to me to be leading to forms of grassroots organization with a very different political status.

But how to avoid filling that gap by helping, for example, unemployed people not to get squeezed out by neoliberal state?

Well there has to be an anti-capitalist agenda, so that when the group works with people everybody knows that it is not only about helping them to cope but that there is an organized intent to politically change the system in its entirety. This means having a very clear political project, which is problematic with decentralized, non-homogenous types of movements where somebody works one way, others work differently and there is no collective or common project.

This connects to the very first question you raised: there is no coordination of what the political objectives are. And the danger is that you just help people cope and there will be no politics coming out of it. For example, Occupy Sandy helped people get back to their houses and they did terrific work, but in the end they did what the Red Cross and federal emergency services should have done.

The end of history seems to have passed already. Looking at the actual conditions and concrete examples of anti-capitalist struggle, do you think “winning” is still an option?

Definitely, and moreover, you have occupied factories in Greece, solidarity economies across production chains being forged, radical democratic institutions in Spain and many beautiful things happening in many other places. There is a healthy growth of recognition that we need to be much broader concerning politics among all these initiatives.

The Marxist left tends to be a little bit dismissive of some of this stuff and I think they are wrong. But at the same time I don’t think that any of this is big enough on its own to actually deal with the fundamental structures of power that need to be challenged. Here we talk about nothing less than a state. So the left will have to rethink its theoretical and tactical apparatus.

David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). His most recent book is Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Profile, 2014).

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.

By Marta Harnecker, translated by Federico Fuentes

[Paper presented at the International Scientific Academic Meeting on Methodology and Experiences in Socio-environmental Participatory processes, Cuenca University, November 13-15, 2014.*]

December 19, 2014 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — These words are aimed at those who want to build a humanist and solidarity-based society. A society based on the complete participation of all people. A society focused on a model of sustainable development that satisfies people’s genuine needs in a just manner, and not the artificial wants created by capitalism in its irrational drive to obtain more profits. A society that does all this while ensuring that humanity’s future in not put at risk. A society where the organized people are the ones who decide what and how to produce. A society we have referred to as Twenty-First Century Socialism, Good Living or Life in Plenitude.

The question is how can we achieve this complete participation? How can we guarantee as much as possible that all citizens, and not just activists or leftists, take an interest in participation? How can we achieve the participation of middle class sectors alongside popular sectors? How can we ensure that solidarian interests prevail over selfish ones? How can we attend to the concerns of the poorest and most forgotten and repay the social debt inherited by previous governments?

I am convinced that it is through what we have called “decentralized participatory planning” that we can achieve these objectives. We have reached this conclusion not on the basis of reading books and academic debates, but through the study of practical experiences of participatory budgets and participatory planning, primarily in Brazil, Venezuela and the Indian state of Kerala.

We were very attracted to the experience of participatory budgeting undertaken by the regional Workers’ Party government in Porto Alegre, Brazil, because we saw it as a new, transparent, rather than corrupt, way of governing, that delegated power to the people.

In Venezuela, we got a strong sense of how the popular subject was strengthened through the initiative taken by Chávez to promote the creation of communal councils and his decision to grant them resources for small projects. This was not done in a populist manner, with the state coming in to satisfy the community’s demand; rather it occurred after a process of participatory planning where the citizens of the community implemented what he called “the communal cycle”, which involved the following actions: diagnosis, elaboration of a plan and budget, execution of the project, and control over how it was carried out.[1]

Lastly, our work was been greatly enhanced by what we learnt from one of the first experiences in the world of “decentralized participatory planning” that occurred in the Indian state of Kerala. There, a communist government decided to carry out an important process of decentralization, not only of monetary resources, but also material and human resources, to aid with the implementation of local development plans that were based on the active participation of local residents. The end result of this has been a more egalitarian economic development when compared to the rest of India, and a growth in resident’s self-esteem and self-confidence. This type of decentralization allowed for greater local government autonomy when it came to planning their development, which facilitated the progress of a much more effective participatory planning.

I. A decentralised participatory planning proposal

The type of planning we advocate is the antithesis of the centralized planning implemented under the Soviet Union. In the old USSR, it was thought that to coordinate all efforts towards building a new society, a central authority was required to decide objectives and means. It was a process in which decisions were always made from above, on many occasions without taking into consideration that down below was where people best knew the problems and possible solutions.

Similarly, often processes that claim to be participatory limit themselves to being processes of simple consultation. Rather than promoting a process of decision-making by citizens, local politicians limit themselves to consulting citizens. The people in the local area are called upon to participate in working groups where they are asked to point out their main priorities for public works and services for their respective communities. A technical team collects these and it is the technicians and not the people who decided upon which projects to implement. We don’t deny that a willingness to listen to people represents a step forward, but it is very limited.

We advocate a more integral process in which it is the people who genuinely discuss and decide upon their priorities, elaborate, where possible, their own projects and carry them out if they are in the condition to do so without having to depend on superior levels. We seek to fully involve citizens in the planning process, which is why we refer to it as participatory planning.

To achieve complete citizen’s participation we must take the plans of small localities as our starting point, where conditions are more favorable for peoples’ participation, and apply the principle that everything that can be done at a lower level should be decentralized to this level, and only keeping as competencies of higher up levels those tasks that cannot be carried out at a lower level. This principle is referred to as subsidiarity.

Of course, we are not talking about an anarchic decentralization. The ideal situation would involve the existence of a strategic national plan that could integrate community, territorial/communal and municipal/canton plans with plans developed by other levels of government.

Moreover, we are thinking about a decentralized that is infused with a spirit of solidarity, that favors those localities and social sectors most in need. One of the important roles of the state and local governments is to redistribute resources in order to protect the weakest and help them develop.

The type of planning, while recognizing the need for a central national plan, allows local institutions to play a fundamental role. They do so not only by contributing to the elaboration of the central plan, but also by having the autonomy to plan within their own territory and carry out an important part of the plan.

In order to emphasis the issue of decentralization as a crucial aspect of planning we are proposing, we have called this process decentralized participatory planning.

You might be asking why are we talking about participatory planning and not the more commonly used concept of participatory budget.

We cannot ignore the contribution made by participatory budgeting, a process whereby people participate in the elaboration of annual investment plans, that is, in making decisions regarding where resources assigned to municipal public works and services are invested. This process has been implemented in various regions across the world and has helped increase the level of resident participation in public policy making, as well as helping improve the performance of municipal governments and, above all, made municipal governance more transparent, thereby benefiting the most helpless sectors.[2]

It has becomes an excellent means for monitoring the actions of administrations and an effective weapon in the fight against corruption and the diversion of funds as people not only prioritize certain public works and services but also organized themselves to ensure they are carried out, monitor to make sure that allocated resources are used for their specific objective and not for others, and that quality works or services are carried out.

It is also an ideal means for speeding up the administrative machinery, making it more efficient and decreasing bureaucracy given so many eyes are monitoring the process and pressuring to make sure public works are completed in time.

This process has also achieved a decrease in tax evasion because when people see the efficiency and transparency with which resources that come from their taxes are used, they begin to feel more willing to comply with taxation regulations.

However, the participatory budgeting process also has its limitations.

For example, the fact that participatory budgeting is restricted to the framework of an annual investment plan limits the scope and horizon of the government’s actions and, in many cases, public works and services prioritised by the population do not fit within any plan, which can lead to chaotic development.

Moreover, given that the objective of participatory budgeting is to determine what public works or services should be prioritized given the resources available each year, the discussion tends to focus solely on these issues rather than on longer term goals that can allow us to move towards the kind of society we want to build.

On the other hand, participatory planning is not limited to discussing public investment in public works and services that the population deems necessary, it goes further. It propose actions that affect society as a whole: the development of cooperative industries that offer employment to underemployed or marginalised sectors; finding self-sustainable solutions based on the natural and human resources available within the territory; the elimination of intermediaries in the distribution of food produce; mechanisms for the redistribution of natural resource rents, etc. In sum, we aim to use participatory planning to lay the basis for a new, more just and humane society.

II Necessary conditions for participatory planning

The following conditions must exist in order to carry out a genuine process of participatory planning.

1) Creation of suitable territorial meeting spaces

The first step that a municipal council must take if its wants to implement a process of participatory planning is to create territorial meeting spaces within which this process can be carried out.

This is one of the most serious problems that those in local government who advocate an increasingly participatory and protagonistic democracy face.

In many cases, there are territorial subdivisions, such as parroquias (parishes), that date back to colonial times and no longer response to any rational criteria. There are municipalities that have a large population, enormous barrios (slums) that are much bigger than many other municipalities, while there are other much smaller ones. These distortions have negative repercussions on a just, equitable and efficient territorial distribution of resources and make it more difficult for the population to participate. That is why there is necessary to move towards a new political-administrative division of the national territory.

In rural municipalities, these sub-divisions tend to be more suited to peoples’ participation.

Based on the experiences we have studied, it seems that the ideal scenario for carrying out a process of participatory planning involves municipal territorial sub-divisions that are or can be transformed into spaces of self-government that can assume competencies previously handled by superior bodies. At the same time, the territory should have the conditions to generate its own resources, allowing it to operate in the most autonomous manner possible, without this meaning that it no longer articulates its actions with those other levels of government.

Before turning to the issue of spaces for self-government, I would like to reflect on what is the ideal space for citizens’ participation.

In Venezuela, after much debate and studying successful experiences in community organization such as the urban land committees (CTU), which involved 200 families organizing to fight for titles to the land their homes were built on, and health committees, which united 150 families with the objective of supporting doctors working the poorest areas, it was decided that the idea space was the community.

What did they understand community to mean? A community is a group of families that live in a specific geographic space, that know each other and can easily relate to each other; that can meet up without needing to rely on transport; and that, of course, share a common history, the same cultural traditions, use the same public services and share similar economic, social and urban planning problems.

The number of people that make up a community can vary greatly from one reality to another. In a densely-populated urban area, where barrios and urbanizations exist with tens of thousands of residents, it was decided that the number oscillated between 150 and 400 families. On the other hand, in rural areas a community is seen to made up of between 50 to 100 families and even less in remote rural areas where residents formed small villages.

Now, each community is different to the next. Some have an important tradition of organization and struggle, and therefore house various community organizations. Others only have one or two organizations, and other perhaps have none. Among the organizations we can find in a community are: health committees, cultural groups, sports clubs, neighborhood associations, environmental groups, grandparents clubs, cooperatives, micro-businesses, and others. Each of these organizations tends to do their own thing.

President Chavez’s idea was to create an organization that would be able to cohere all of these organizational efforts into one body that in turn could acts as a community government. He called this organization “communal council”.

And what is the best instrument for cohering the different demands and organizational efforts of a community? Chavez had the brilliance to see that the best instrument for this was the elaboration of a single work plan dedicated to resolving the community’s most deeply felt problems.[3]

Designing this single plan is therefore one of the key tasks of the communal council. To do this, it is necessary to start with a participatory diagnosis that allows residents themselves to detect the biggest problems that exist in their community. When it comes to prioritising problems, I believe that a method should be used that ends up prioritizing those problems that the community can resolve with its own human and material resources.

This methodology was proposed by the World Health Organization and was successfully put into practice in various Cuban communities in the period following the collapse of the old socialist bloc, when the economic situation in the country was critical and the Cuban state did not have sufficient resources – as it always had until then – to attend to peoples’ demands.

Setting realistic goals that can be achieved in the short-term and with the active participation of as many community members as possible allows one to more quickly realize a project, meaning residents see quick results and with this the self-esteem of the community increases and people become more motivated to participate with greater enthusiasm in future tasks. What tends to occur when a diagnosis is not carried out with these criteria is that, rather than stimulating participation, the community remains with its arms folded waiting of a higher up body to resolve problems.

When the cost or complexity of the solution is too much for the community, the communal council should come up with a list of problems, ranking them from most to least pressing, and elaborate project ideas to resolve them. These should be presented during the process of participatory planning to other government bodies.

Another function of the communal council is to promote community supervision over all projects carried out in the community by state, community or private entities.

Residents should be elected to the communal council by citizens’ assemblies within the community.

Those that are elected are called spokespeople because they are the voice of the community. When residents lose confidence in them, they should be recalled, as they can no longer be said to be the voice of the community. Venezuelan activists refuse to use the term “representative” because of the negative connotations this term has acquired in the bourgeois representative system. Candidates only talk to the community at election time, promising “all the gold in the world”, but are never seen once they are elected.

I think it is important to point out that in Venezuela, they discussed whether this communitarian body should simply be the sum of the leaderships of the different organizations that exist within a community or whether it was better to hold a citizen’s assembly and let the assembly elect its spokespeople. The second option was agreed upon because reality dictated that the leaderships of many of the existing community organizations had become removed from the grassroots that had elected them. Elections via assemblies allowed them to correct his situation. If these leaders have popular support, then they will surely be elected.

Each member of the communal council elected by the community fulfils a different function, but it is the residents who, in an assembly, get to analyse, discuss, decide and elect. The citizen’s assembly is the highest decision-making body in the community. Its decisions are binding on the communal council. This is where peoples’ sovereignty and power reside.

That is why it is so important to ensure that the public invitation is issued as broadly as possible, and that effort is made to guarantee that those who turn up genuinely represent the interests of all residents. We have to avoid situations were the only people invited are friends, acquaintances or those who share the same political outlook, thereby leaving out those who have different opinions or who don’t follow the same local leaders. The best way to avoid this is by ensuring that quorum requires the presence of people from every corner of the community. No important decision should be taken if some of these spaces are not represented in the assembly. What spaces are we referring to? The street, the stairwell, the laneway, the apartment block, the building, the block….

These spaces tend to be made up of small groups of families that, due to the fact they live close together, maintain a deeper relationship and bond. A community could therefore be made up of various neighborhood areas. Some places have decided the best way to elect spokespeople is to first get families to elect a spokesperson and then bring them together so that they can elect one of them to act as spokesperson for the area on the communal council.

The idea of a delegate (spokesperson) per neighborhood area is very important to ensuring the proper functioning of the assembly. It is a manner by which to ensure that assemblies are representative of the entire area that the council covers and the different political opinions that exist within it.

Furthermore, it should be clear that the formation of a communal council cannot happen overnight. The community has to pass through a process of maturation. That is why an external promotional team has been proposed to promote the formation of an internal promotional team that is elected in an assembly by the community.

The main task of this internal promotional team would be to create the conditions for residents to elect their own communal council with complete understanding of what is occurring. This team has to elaborate a database of the community based on information obtained by visiting families door-to-door. Entrusting them with these tasks means that the potential future members of the communal council will have been involved in grassroots work, have intimate knowledge of the problems in the community, and have shown in practice their consistency and dedication to work. Depending on how they carry out this task, all or some of the members of the promotional team may be elected as communal council spokespeople

I want to insist a lot in the need to avoid any political, or other type of manipulation during the process of forming communal councils.

It is not about creating communal councils that only involve government supporters; these communitarian institutions should be open to all citizens, regardless of their political stripes.

President Chavez initially thought that the community was the ideal space for participation, and that therefore the communal council could be the first level of government. However, he later realized that in order to transfer competencies that belonged to the municipal council, it was necessary to organize on a larger territorial scale, one that he called commune. Therefore, the ideal space for peoples’ participation does not necessarily seem to also be the ideal space for self-government, if we understand self-government to mean “system of territorial units of administration that have autonomy to administer themselves”.

Now, having the capacity to administrate oneself does not mean ignoring the necessary interrelationship that must exist between the various government levels and bodies.

Further, not every form of self-government implies participation. There could be territorial units whose governments have administrative autonomy but are run undemocratically.

When we use the term self-government, we are referring to peoples’ self-government, that is, where the people govern themselves. In this sense, there is no self-government without full citizen’s participation, which means that we are talking about a process that can always be improved.

I believe this issue can be clarified by looking at the example of Kerala.[4]

This densely populated state in India is one of the few states in the country that has put into practice article 40 of the 1950 constitution. This article establishes the need to organize “Grama Panchayats” (village or rural town governments), giving them as much power as is necessary to allow them to function as units of self-government. At the same time, it is one of the few states that put into practice the idea of incorporating peoples’ participation in the process of drafting up development plans.

In 1992, amendments 73 and 74 were introduced into the Indian constitution, giving the Panchayats constitutional status and laying the basis of a process of decentralization at a national level. These amendments proposed the decentralization of administration via the creation of three levels of local self-government: the lowest level of self-government is the Grama Pachayats, that is, the village or town government (the equivalent of our territories, or rural parishes in Ecuador, or communes in Venezuela); this is followed by the Block Panchayats, which for us would be the equivalent of municipalities or cantons; and lastly, the District Panchayats or provincial governments.

In 1994, the government of Kerala passed the Panchayat Raj Law, thereby providing a solid legal basis for the system of local government and unifying the transference of institutions and personnel to local self-governments according to the principle of subsidiarity.

This meant that the Grama Panchayats began to assume many of the functions that were previously carried out at a higher level.

In 1996, the Communist Party of India – Marxist led a coalition of progressive forces to electoral victory, winning a majority in the state parliament. That year they launched the “Peoples’ Campaign” for decentralized planning.

This campaign signified a fundamental change in the role that the different levels of local and regional governments would play from then on.

The starting point for the Peoples’ Campaign was an afternoon long citizens’ assembly held in the community, where people could express these most deeply felt needs. In order to stimulate peoples’ participation in these assemblies, the State Planning Commission decided to hand over 35-40 per cent of the money dedicated to its development plan to local governments. Of this money, the Grama Panchayat (that is, the local village government, which represents the lowest level of the decentralization structure) received around 70 per cent; the following level, the Block Panchayat (rural municipality) received 15 per cent; and the District Panchayat received the other 15%. As you can see, there was evidently a clear desire to decentralize the majority of resources to those local governments closest to the people.

This meant that the people who participated felt that they were the ones making decisions regarding investments in their community, rather than being restricted to simply approving decisions made from on high.

The following stages of the campaign involved additional assemblies, the election of delegates to various specialized meetings, the recruitment of volunteer technical personnel from among retirees, the prioritization of projects by elected rural or urban councils, and community control and evaluation of the process. The administrative apparatuses of higher up levels of government were equipped in order to be able to insert local projects into regional plans. A massive educational campaign was launched and there was an exchange of experiences among activists across all levels. It was a very ambitions initiative that demanded the mobilization of energies and resources of the whole society.

The essential components of the decentralized participatory planning process in Kerala were the following:
a) Each level of local government must be autonomous from the functional, financial and administrative point of view. Central government supervision should be limited to setting out general guidelines.
b) Everything that have be done at a lower level should be carried out at that level and not at a higher up level. Only residual and complementary functions should be carried out at higher levels.
c) The different levels of decentralization need to understand exactly which functions they have to carry out, in order to avoid overlap and crossover with other levels of government.
d) Functions should be complemented via horizontal and vertical processes of integration.
e) The norms and criteria for selecting who to benefit and which activities to prioritize should be the same for all programs.
f) It is necessary to foment the maximum level of participation possible at all levels and in all phases of the process.
g) There must be permanent community control over elected representatives and over the entire participatory planning process.
h) People have to have the right to be inform about every detail of the process.

After much reflection and investigation, it was decided that the most appropriate geographical and demographical unit for self-government that was most closely tied to the people would be the rural village or town called “Grama”, which is why the rural government is called Grama Panchayat (government of the town or village). Alongside the three levels of self-government in more rural zones, there exist urban municipalities and municipal corporations in the big cities.

Once the lowest level of self-government was defined, it did not take along for those overseeing the process of participatory planning to realize that convening an assembly of all residents in a town, in such a densely populated territory as Kerala, implied having to hold assemblies of more than 1000 people, something that did not facilitate peoples’ participation. That is why they decided to hold popular assemblies (grama sabhas) not at the level of the village but instead at the level of the electoral wards they were divided into.

The meetings in the wards included plenaries involving all participants and working groups that were working on different issues, with the aim of ensuring that people could more efficiently participate. Yet, even then these spaces turned out to be too large. That is why for some task they set up neighborhood groups (40-50 families) that began to carry out many of the functions of the grama sabha, such as discussing the local plan, revising the plan’s implementation and selecting which people or entities should receive resources.

It is very likely that in the majority of municipalities in Latin America, the first step that will need to be taken by a municipal government in order to advance the process of participatory planning will be establishing territorial sub-divisions whereby the territories (communes, areas, parishes or villages, depending on the name each country uses) will become the first level of self-government.

2) Decentralizing competencies

Where no national policy exists in terms of transferring competencies from municipalities to territorial sub-divisions, another step that municipal governments should take, and that is even more complex than the first one, is the decentralization of competencies to the territorial sub-divisions, applying the principle of subsidiarity, which we referred to above. For example, it is necessary to transfer competencies over resource administration, tax collection, civil registry, administration of state companies, urban planning, surveillance and security, asphalting roads, attention to homes with elderly people and popular feeding halls that might exist within its territory, along with the general maintenance of infrastructure related to healthcare, education, culture and sports.

It is not possible to set rigid criteria for this decentralization. Each reality needs to be taken into consideration. For example, while the centralized management of services such as sanitation and street cleaning might seem reasonable in a city due to economies of scale and the possibilities available for mechanization, it is obvious that in the case of a relative isolated rural area with small communities, decentralized management would not only be possible but would in fact ensure better results.

3) Decentralizing resources to the territories

The other fundamental premise of participatory planning is the decentralization of resources to the territories, including material resources (finances, equipment) and human resources (personnel).

a) Financial resources

Where existing regulations did not foresee the possibility of decentralization, the municipal or communal government could take initiatives in this direction.

In the experience developed in Torres municipality, in the state of Lara, Venezuela, the municipal government transferred the resources it had for public works to the 17 parishes so that they could decide upon and carry out the works they wanted to prioritise. [5] The fundamental criteria used to transfer monies were: size of territory (much of which was rural), number of inhabitants, population density and an index of inter-territorial compensation that Venezuela uses when handing over budgets in order to lessen inequalities between territories.

b) Equipment and personnel

It is also necessary to transfer personnel, that is, relocate functionaries by taking them out of the central apparatus and deploying them in the community. There is also a need to provide offices and equipment.

4) Training participants

Nevertheless, it is not enough to simply transfer human resources and hope that citizens will participate to the maximum extent possible. It is also crucial to train up technical personnel, elected representatives and the population itself, providing them with instruments that can help them to partake effectively in the process of decentralized participatory planning.

One of the strongest points of the participatory planning process in Kerala was precisely the big emphasis they placed on training up different participants: residents, technicians, representatives, volunteers. One piece of information demonstrates the emphasis they have places on training cadres: in the first year alone, they provided one-day workshops to 100,000 activists in a state with a population of 38 million people.

5) Generating a database

Another fundamental premise for decentralized participatory planning is the need to generate an up-to-date database that can allow planning to occur on the basis of a complete knowledge of the local reality. A fundamental element in this is mapping the presence of social actors. There is generally a lot of data at the central level, but this data is not organized and available in such a way that it can be used for participatory planning at the local level. It is therefore important to have access to this data in order to complement it with data obtained in the local area itself, with the participation of experts and local residents.

Conclusion

The more the participatory planning process is able to count upon a biggest number of organized communities in the municipality, the more fully developed it will be. Citizen’s participation is greater when the diagnosis and prioritization of problems occurs in much smaller assemblies.

As well as elaborating their own communitarian development plan, these communities should: issue statements regarding proposals for territorial divisions elaborated by the municipal council, the decentralization of competencies, the distribution of resources to territories, and the areas of development they consider should be prioritized; raise demands on higher up levels of government, and their prioritization; be present via their representatives (spokespeople, delegates, councilors) in the remain levels of the participatory planning process; and be informed and consulted on plans elaborated on the basis of these processes.

The participation of communities organized into communal councils is the most specific and enriching contribution of the Venezuelan experience to the process of participatory budgeting carried out in municipalities governed on Workers’ Party mayors in Brazil and the experience of decentralized participatory planning in Kerala.

Finally, I am convinced that such a planning process can ensure that society as a whole, and not only an elite, manages the wealth of society and begins to put it at the service of society. That is why I believe that decentralised participatory planning is an essential feature of the new democratic society we want to build.

As this process should have no political coloration, with all citizens invited to participate in the elaboration of the development plan, contribute their criteria and collaborate in the diverse tasks involved in this process, it can help facilitate a broad space for an ideal encounter of people from across the political spectrum, those that have never been members of a party, and those that reject parties and politicians due to their bad practices.

This form of planning is the ideal instrument for achieving complete citizens’ participation in the management of public affairs, and at the same time, the people involved in the planning process feel dignified, increases their self-esteem and, what’s most important, no longer feel like beggars demanding solutions from the state. On the contrary, they feel like they are creators of their own destiny and society.

In this activity, as in all human activity, there is a double product: the first product which is objective and material for all to see, in this case the plan, which has been elaborated in a participatory manner; and a second subjective, spiritual product, which is much less tangible and can only be seen by an attentive eye: the transformation of people through their practice, their human development.

The whole process is an educational process in which those that participate learn to inquire about the causes of things, to respect the opinion of others, to understand that the problems they face are not exclusive to their street or neighborhood but are related to the overall situation of the economy, the national social situation, and even the international situation. They learn that everyone’s problems and every community’s problems should be examined within the context of the reality of other people and other communities that may face a much more difficult and urgent situation. Through this, new relations of solidarity and complementarity are created that place the emphasis on the collective rather than the individual.

All this means that those who participate in this process broaden out their knowledge in political, cultural, social, economic and environmental terms, and thereby become politicized in the broader sense of the term. This allows them to develop an independent mind that can no longer be manipulated by a media that remains overwhelmingly in the hand of the opposition.

Although an ideal scenario would involve the central state deciding to decentralize an important part of the nation’s resources designated to development, there is no doubt that a majority of countries are a long way from finding themselves in such a situation. Nevertheless, we believe that this should not stop local authorities who want to kick start decentralized participatory planning processes in their local area from doing so, thereby contributing to training up residents, through practical experience, to become protagonists of the new society we want to build, one in which peoples’ participation is a central feature.

Our greatest hope is that we might be able to interest and enthuse some mayors into implementing our proposal as a pilot project that can be enrich through practice.

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Notes

* This speech is a synthesis of ideas that are more fully developed in a book I am currently working on, with the help of José Bartolomé and Noel López.

[1]. De los consejos comunales a las comunas. Construyendo el socialismo del siglo XXI (2009) Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/97085.pdf

[2]. See Marta Harnecker, Delegando poder en la gente: presupuesto participativo en Porto Alegre, Brasil, Monte Ávila, Venezuela, 2004. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/95167.pdf

[3]. This method was successfully applied in the rural Cuban community of Guadalupe, in the province of Ciego de Ávila, and is outlined in the book Marta Harnecker, Buscando el camino (método de trabajo comunitario) Cuba, MEPLA, 2000. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/95168.pdf . A documentary on this experience can also be viewed online at: http://videosmepla.wordpress.com/documentales-de-participacion-popular/ciclo-video-debate/5-buscando-el-camino/

[4]. See Richard Franke, Marta Harnecker, Andrés Sanz Mulas & Carmen Pineda Nebot, Estado Kerala, India, Una experiencia de planificación participativa descentralizada, Centro Internacional Miranda. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/97086.pdf ). I would also recommend reading  T.M. Thomas Isaac & Richard W. Franke, Democracia local y desarrollo (campaña popular de planificación descentralizada de Kerala) Diálogos L’Ullal Editions, Xativa, España, junio 2004, and Rosa Pinto y Tomás Villasante, Democracia participativa en Kerala: Planificación descentralizada desde la base, El Viejo Topo, España, 2011.

[5]. For information see Marta Harnecker, Transfiriendo poder a la gente. Municipio Torres, Estado Lara, Venezuela, CIM-Monte Ávila, Venezuela, 2008. Online at: http://www.rebelion.org/docs/97082.pdf.

Part of the CCDS team at the conference: Kathy Sykes, Janet Tucker, Harry Targ, Paul Krehbiel

By Paul Krehbiel
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

"The capitalist class is in a serious crisis without solution," said David Schweikart at the Moving Beyond Capitalism conference held in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico from July 30-August 5, 2014.  "But there is a solution," he said, "economic democracy, democratic socialism." Over 200 people from 15 countries discussed how to make this happen, organized by the Center for Global Justice.

Chronic high unemployment, depression of wages and benefits, cuts in social services, and growing inequality and repression, and social and political resistance are endemic to nearly all capitalist countries, said Schweikart, a Philosophy professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and author of After Capitalism. 

Schweikart’s model of democratic socialism calls for a regulated competitive market economy, socialized means of production and democratic workplaces (he advocates worker-run cooperatives as an example), non-profit public banks to finance projects, full employment, and a guarantee that human needs will be meet for everyone. 

Cliff DuRand, a conference organizer, said people are creating alternatives to capitalism today all over the world.  "If we’ve built these alternative institutions, the next time the capitalist system collapses…we will be able to survive without it."

Gustavo Esteva, a former Mexican government official, founder of the University of the Land in Oxaca, and an advisor to the Zapatistas in Chiapas in southern Mexico, gave a good account of how the indigenous people of this region are creating a new democratic and socialist-oriented society that they control, within the borders of a capitalist Mexico.  The Zapatistas launched an armed uprising in the mid-1990′s to stop NAFTA and the Mexican government from allowing multi-national corporations to come into Chiapas to extract minerals to enrich the corporations and destroy their lives and their local economy. 

Ana Maldonado of the Venezuelan Ministry of Communal Economy could not attend, so University of Utah Professor Al Campbell filled in for her.  Campbell has worked in Venezuelan with the Community Councils, a new form of grassroots democracy and socialism.  Created in 2006 by the late socialist president Hugo Chavez, there are 20,000 Community Councils today, each holding meetings in neighborhoods where all residents can attend, discuss, and vote on decisions for their community. 

Private, for-profit banks came under sharp attack for causing the 2008 Great Recession, and for ripping off billions of dollars from people world-wide, primarily through charging high interest rates.  Ellen Brown, founder of the Public Banking Institute based in California, declared, "Without interest payments, there would be no national debt," which now stands at over $15 trillion.  Politicians use the debt as an excuse to cut funds for education, health care and other social programs.  An example of local bank rip-offs is a bank loan for the purchase of a house, where the homeowner pays the bank 2-3 times or more than the cost of the house due to interest payments. 

Brown said the solution is to set up not-for-profit public or state banks — like the Bank of North Dakota.  She describes how to do it in her book Democratizing Money: The Public Bank Solution.  Since the 2008 economic crash, 20 other states including California have introduced bills to study or establish publicly-owned state banks.

"The US controls third world countries," Brown explained, "by putting them in debt and then forcing repayment with high interest rates," which they can’t afford to pay.  Brown said the book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins, explains how devastating this is. 

Coops in Cuba

Camila Pineiro Harnecker, a leader of the cooperative movement in socialist Cuba, explained that her country is giving much more attention to the development of worker-run cooperatives as a way to help workers create jobs for themselves, and learn how to become masters of their work and work lives. The state socialist sector dominates the economy, but coops now comprise 12% of the workforce and are expected to increase in number.

There were many examples of people struggling against capitalist-caused injustices, to survive, and also to weaken capitalism by creating socialist-oriented building blocks within capitalist society.

Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese of the Occupy Wall Street movement in Washington D. C. facilitated discussions about how the Occupy movement redirected talk of cuts in social services to stopping the top 1% from enriching themselves at the expense of the 99%.

Enrique Lazcano, a member of the Authentic Workers Front (FAT) in Mexico, talked about building cross-border solidarity with the United Electrical workers (UE) in the US, and how this strengthened both unions to win improvements.  Juan Jose Rojas Herrera of Mexico spoke about the Solidarity Economy, where work is done with as little capitalist exploitation as possible and for the common good. One day of the conference was devoted to visiting a near-by cooperative market and learning how it is run.  David Schwartzman, a professor of Biology at Howard University in Washington, D. C., spoke about the need to combat the capitalist-fueled crisis of climate change by changing the system to socialism. 

Song Mengrong, of an educator in China, spoke about new policies recently enacted by the Chinese government to focus on the needs of the people, calling it "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics." Francisco Javier Ramirez of Mexico spoke about the Morena party, a new people’s party, pledged to reverse the neoliberal policies of the Mexican government which have served the corporate elite at the expense of the people.  Harry Targ, Political Science professor at Purdue University in Indiana, spoke about "fusion politics" – uniting many social movements to oppose capitalism and imperialism, and highlighted the struggles of the Arab Spring and "Moral Mondays" in North Carolina to stop the attacks on civil rights and democracy in that state. 

Kathy Sykes of Mississippi talked about the campaign to organize a union at Nissan and a socialist-oriented Cooperative Economy project initiated by the late mayor of Jackson, Chokwe Lumumba.  Janet Tucker, former president of the statewide organization Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the national organizer for the US-based Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, spoke about building grassroots labor-community coalitions in Kentucky.  This reporter spoke first-hand about how member-driven union Stewards Councils were built in large public hospitals in Los Angeles County, California, and how these councils empowered workers on the job.  One theme that came up in many presentations was that organizing was a full-time job, and if ignored, gains could be reduced or lost.

Cynthia Kaufman, a Philosophy professor at De Anza College in California, director of an organization encouraging civic engagement, and author of Getting Past Capitalism, captured a key element of the conference: "We get past capitalism by building on the healthy non-capitalist aspects of our world, while we also do pitched battle with the capitalist aspects that we have a fair chance of winning against."

The conference ended with a discussion to help set priorities.  One was to fight neoliberalism and especially trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership, and the second was to build the environmental movement to fight climate change.  -end-

Schafik Handal, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro and Evo Morales, in Havana in 2004

By Roger Burbach

Telesur, July 1, 2014

Something remarkable has taken place in Latin America in the new millennium. For the first time since the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, radical left governments have come to power in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, raising the banner of socialism. The decline of the US empire, the eruption of anti-neoliberal social movements, and the growing integration of the region on its own terms have created a space for the rejuvenation of socialism after the dramatic setbacks of the last century. Cuba is part of this transformative process as its leadership moves to update the country’s economy while the Cuban people experience new freedoms.

In what follows, the theoretical debates and the praxis of socialism in the twenty-first-century socialism will be explored. The intent is not to provide a singular theory of the new socialism, but to put forth some of the interpretations of the contemporary struggles that are taking place in Latin America.

Theories of Twenty-First-Century Socialism

Drawing on the wide-ranging discussions of twenty-first-century socialism taking place in the hemisphere, political theorist Marta Harnecker, who served as an informal adviser to Hugo Chavez, outlines five key components of what constitutes socialism. First, socialism is “the development of human beings,” meaning that “the pursuit of profit” needs to be replaced by “a logic of humanism and solidarity, aimed at satisfying human needs.” Secondly, socialism “respects nature and opposes consumerism – our goal should not be to live ‘better’ but to live ‘well,”’ as the Andean indigenous cultures declare. Thirdly, borrowing from the radical economics professor Michael Lebowitz, Harnecker says, socialism establishes a new “dialectic of production/distribution/consumption, based on: a) social ownership of the means of production, and b) social production organized by the workers in order to c) satisfy communal needs.” Fourthly, “socialism is guided by a new concept of efficiency that both respects nature and seeks human development.” Fifthly, there is a need for the “rational use of the available natural and human resources, thanks to a decentralized participatory planning process” that is the opposite of Soviet hyper-centralized bureaucratic planning.(1)

To construct a socialist utopia along these lines will be a long endeavor, taking decades and generations. Today different explorations, or counter-hegemonic processes, are at work throughout the hemisphere. As Arturo Escobar – a Colombian-American anthropologist known for his contribution to post-development theory– writes in ‘Latin America at a Crossroads’:

“Some argue that these processes might lead to a re-invention of socialism; for others, what is at stake is the dismantling of the neo-liberal policies of the past three decades – the end of the ‘the long neo-liberal night,’ as the period is known in progressive circles in the region – or the formation of a South American (and anti-American) bloc. Others point at the potential for un nuevo comienzo (a new beginning) which might bring about a reinvention of democracy and development or, more radically still, the end of the predominance of liberal society of the past 200 years founded on private property and representative democracy. Socialismo del siglo XXI, pluri-nationality, interculturality, direct and substantive democracy, revolución ciudadana, endogenous development centered on the buen vivir of the people, territorial and cultural autonomy, and decolonial projects towards post-liberal societies are some of the concepts that seek to name the ongoing transformations.” (2)

Orlando Núñez, a leading Marxist theorist from Nicaragua, amplifies our understanding of the long transition to socialism with a more orthodox approach. Rejecting 21^st century socialism as a concept to describe what is occurring in Latin America today, he asserts that the region is in a very preliminary phase of “transitioning to socialism in which we should not pretend we are constructing socialism.” Rather we are confronting neoliberalism and each country in Latin America is “facing different conditions.” He adds, “new flags are appearing in the social struggle against the dominant system that cannot be resolved by the logic of capitalism.” It is “a post-neoliberal or post-capitalist struggle” against woman’s inequality and patriarchy, racial and ethnic discrimination, and the degradation of the environment. More fundamentally it is against “savage capitalism,” and “neo-colonialism,” both internally and externally. (3)

The Brazilian political scientist Emir Sader, in The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left, argues that the setback for socialism in the 20^th century was so severe that it is still recuperating to this day. Socialism can be part of the agenda, but the priority must be on forming governments and political coalitions to dismantle neoliberalism, even if that means accepting the broader capitalist system for the time being.(4) This in part explains why the construction of socialism in the coming years and decades will be a diverse process – differing widely from country to country. There is no single definition or model–we are indeed witnessing, two, three, many transitions to socialism..

Part 2: Rise of the Social Movements and New Theories of Social Struggle

The origins of twenty-first century socialism are found in the wave of social movements led by peasants and indigenous organizations that swept the rural areas of Latin America as state socialism was collapsing. By the mid-1990s they had assumed the lead in challenging the neoliberal order, particularly in Ecuador, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil. These new organizations were generally more democratic and participatory than the class-based organizations that traditional Marxist political parties had set up in rural areas in previous decades. In general, they came to fill the gap left by a working class that was fragmented, disoriented, and dispersed due to the assault of neo-liberalism. With a broad range of interests and demands, including indigenous and environmental rights, these new social movements transcended the modernist meta-narratives of both capitalism and traditional socialism.

At the dawn of the new millennium, social struggles and popular rebellions irrupted primarily in the cities that often overlapped with existing rural-based struggles. The uprising in Buenos Aires and other major Argentine cities in late-December 2001, and the popular rebellions in Quito, Ecuador in January, 2000 and then in April, 2005, dramatically altered these countries histories. The urban organizations that participated in these rebellions and mobilizations varied greatly, some with a distinct class basis and others having a multi-class composition.

Post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri broke with classic Marxism in their theoretical approach to the new social movements. In The Multitude they declare: “Some of the basic traditional models of political activism, class struggle, and revolutionary organization have today become outdated and useless." They add, "The global recomposition of social classes, the hegemony of immaterial labor, and the forms of decision-making based on network structures all radically change the conditions of any revolutionary process …" (5)

For Hardt and Negri, the Zapatista movement in Mexico–with its national and international networking, democratic decision-making process, its horizontal forms of organization, and its insistence on changing the world from the bottom up—is part of what they call the multitude. Whereas older Marxist theories lumped all the groups involved in global rebellion into one category called "the masses," the concept of "the multitude" recognized the diversity of the groups involved. It also differs from the classical Marxist belief that the industrial working class has to be the vanguard of any revolutionary movement.

While Goan Therborn does not break as sharply with classical Marxism, in his article "Class in the Twenty-First Century" in New Left Review, does see a new social and geographic dynamic emerging that breaks with the twentieth century: “The red banner has passed from Europe to Latin America, the only region of the world where socialism is currently on the agenda, with governments in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia speaking of ‘21st-century socialism’.” Unlike the century past when the industrial working class drove socialist politics, the new socialism “will find its base among workers and the popular classes in all their diversity—the plebeians, rather than the proletariat.” He adds: “The ‘socialism’ of Morales, Correa and Chávez is a new political phenomenon, which stresses its independence from 20th-century Eurasian models of left-wing politics and is itself quite heterogeneous.” (6)

Orlando Núñez takes a somewhat different tack in characterizing the current social and economic struggles by using Karl Marx’s concept of “freely organized associate producers.” The term originally meant that the workers in a socialist society would run the factories and work places as associate producers, setting the direction for the state and the economy as a whole. Today Núñez argues that there is a “via asociativa hacia el socialismo,” a path to socialism that is constructed by producers from below. (7)

Núñez points out that in most third world countries formal employment in large scale capitalist enterprises is being replaced and/or augmented by an ever increasing number of self-employed workers many of whom are part of what he calls “the popular economy.” It includes street vendors, micro-entrepreneurs, artisans, sellers in open air markets, fishermen, loggers, small farmers, bus and taxi cab owners, truckers and many more. This is the new proletariat that is being exploited in the realm of commerce and circulation. Most of its participants earn subsistence incomes as they sell their services and commodities in a market dominated and manipulated by big capital and transnational corporations.

Many in the popular economy become freely organized associate producers as they affiliate in credit and producer cooperatives, merchant and peasant associations, and transportation collectives. They pressure the government for resources and become conscious of their exploited role in society, demanding a more socialized state that provides universal education, health services, access to credit, etc. Núñez as well as radical theorists like Marcos Arruda of Brazil believe that a social solidarity economy is being constructed in Latin America in which networks of collaboration and equal exchange proliferate among the workers and independent producers at the base of the economy. (8)

Part 3: Contesting the State via Democratic Insurgencies

A groundbreaking perspective on how social forces and the popular movements maneuver and engage in a struggle for control of the state comes from Katu Arkonada and Alejandra Santillana in their 2011 article from Le Monde Diplomatique, "Ecuador and Bolivia: The State, the Government and the Popular Camp in Transition."

They assert that the state should be viewed as "an historic aspiration of the popular organizations and the indigenous peoples, and as a space open to political dispute." (9) In recent years the popular movements have sought to alter the state, to make it responsive to their interests and needs.

With the ascent of democratically elected new left governments, the contest over who will control the state is becoming even more intense. Arkonada and Santillana argue that "the construction of hegemony comes out of civil society," meaning that the "popular camp" in this period of transition is presenting its projects and interests, hoping to capture ever more space within the state. The popular forces will become hegemonic, they believe, as the state becomes an instrument of "collective interests," and "a universalizing political project."

A central question facing the popular forces is what type of democracy should be constructed. At present the political systems where the new left has come to power can be described as liberal in the classical sense. Broadly speaking, this liberal paradigm emerged with the philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. It consolidated in the eighteenth century with the American, French, and industrial revolutions, based on the concepts of private property, representative democracy, individual rights, and the market as the organizing principle of the economy and social life. (10) With the rise of capital, the dominant economic interests have manipulated the state, resulting in controlled democracies where citizens are allowed to vote every few years for candidates that generally do not question the capitalist order or respond to the interests of the people. Today in Latin America there is growing disillusionment with this liberal form of government and representative democracy.

The popular forces are envisioning a democracy that is more substantive, integral, and participatory, starting at the local level. Like never before, communal self-rule is being embraced in Latin America. We see it taking hold in Bolivia’s indigenous communities and Mexico’s Zapatistas in the state of Chiapas. In 2006 the citizens of Oaxaca occupied the state capital and formed the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca that kept federal forces at bay for several months in a manner reminiscent of the Paris Commune of 1871. Over the past decade and a half, hundreds of Brazilian municipalities have launched participatory budgeting to engage local communities in the allocation of city funds. Venezuelan communities have founded over 40,000 neighborhood-organized communal councils. (11)

A central characteristic of the three countries in South America that have raised the banner of socialism is that they are deeply committed to democratic procedures. During the fourteen years of Hugo Chávez, starting with his first presidential election, there were sixteen national elections or referendums. Under Evo Morales there have been seven in seven years and during Rafael Correa’s six years in office eight elections and referendums have occurred.(12)

The commitment to democratic procedures means that twenty-first-century socialism in Latin America is tied to the electoral cycle. A likelihood exists that in Venezuela, Bolivia or Ecuador, the incumbent presidents or their designated successors will eventually be voted out of office. This will mark a new unpredictable phase in the struggle for socialism. Will the new non-socialist leaders seek to overturn the deep reforms of their more radical predecessors? Or will they have to accept many of the changes, particularly the social and economic reforms that have benefited the popular classes? Will new openly socialist candidates win back the presidential office in future elections? Given that Rafael Correa won a resounding reelection in 2013 and that Evo Morales will probably be victorious in 2014, the most immediate challenge is in Venezuela where President Nicolas Maduro is facing a renewed right wing offensive as the oligarchy moves to destroy the economy, using tactics and strategies reminiscent of those employed by the Chilean bourgeoisie and the CIA  against the popular unity government of Salvador Allende (1970-73).

Part 4: Renovating Cuban Socialism

is important to discuss the trajectory of socialism in Cuba and its relationship to 21^st century socialism. Aurelio Alonso, sub-director of the magazine Casa de las Américas, in Havana, draws a distinction between socialism in the 21^st century vs. socialism of the 21^st century (socialismo en el siglo 21 vs. socialismo del siglo 21).

This difference in wording reflects the fact that the socialism being constructed in the rest of Latin America is unique to the new millennium whereas in Cuba it has a much longer trajectory. Alonso told me that “the ‘punta de partida’ (point of departure) is different for Cuba and the rest Latin America,” both in terms of time and politics: “The Cuban process today is an attempt to advance the socialism that triumphed in the 20^th century while in Latin America at large the left is in a protracted struggle with the oligarchy to construct a new socialism of the 21^st century.” (13) Socialism has very different protagonists and antagonists in each region. For Cuba the opposition is not the oligarchy, but the bureaucracy and elements within the Communist party that want to hold onto the old 20th century order with a centralized economy and an authoritarian state.

Cuba is also different from the Latin American continent in that its historic trajectory is related to the other surviving socialisms of the 20^th century, particularly China and Vietnam. All three countries in their earlier stages adopted the Soviet model in one form or another with the centralization of their economies and state ownership of the means of production. The market played only a marginal role as the state set prices and issued five year plans to determine production goals.

The two Asian countries moved much earlier than Cuba to market economies; China beginning in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping with its “modernization” policies, and Vietnam in 1986 with its “renovation” program that it adopted in the face of widespread food shortages and famine. Both were largely rural societies at the time, and many of the early reforms were directed at the countryside and quickly succeeded in increasing agricultural production. Although only a quarter of the Cuban population is rural, the early economic reforms are aimed at unleashing agriculture by granting 10 hectare parcels in usufruct to small scale producers who sell a portion of their produce in the free market. And like China, the Cuban government is encouraging food processing and rural light manufacturing via municipal enterprises and cooperatives that also operate in the open market. Measures opening up the sales of houses and motor vehicles, along with the creation of 171 self employment categories, are designed to place many of the smaller enterprises and economic activities–ranging from taxis and barber shops to restaurants and produce venders– in the hands of independent owners, merchants and producers who set their own market prices. (14)

China, Vietnam, and now Cuba share the belief that the market should not be identified exclusively with capitalism. The market functioned in feudal societies and it can help distribute resources in an efficient manner in a socialist economy. But free reign cannot be given to individuals to dominate and manipulate the market. The market place itself needs to be regulated.

The Cuban leadership does not express an official view point on the large scale accumulation of private capital and the emergence of a new bourgeoisie in China. However, Cuban academics and some party officials assert that their reform process will be different from both the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, because they are “Asiatic societies,” whereas Cuba is firmly rooted in the “Western tradition.” There are critical differences in culture and history, perspectives on leadership, and the role of the peasantry and the workers. Differences in geography and the size of the populations also weigh heavily in determining what types of economic and political institutions evolve under market socialism in each country.(15)

There are different schools of thought in Cuba on how to move the economy forward. Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, in an essay titled “Visions of the Socialism That Guide Present-Day Changes in Cuba,” describes three different visions: (a) a statist position, largely reflecting the old guard, (b) a market socialist perspective, advanced by many economists, and (c) an autogestionario, or self-management, stance that calls for democratic and sustainable development primarily through the promotion of cooperatives.(16)

The statists recognize that Cuba faces serious economic problems but argue that they can be corrected through a more efficient state, not through a dismantling of the state. They call for more discipline and greater efficiency among state industries and enterprises. A loosening of state control, they contend, would result in greater disorganization and even allow capitalist tendencies to emerge. This position points to the disaster that occurred in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s after an attempt to end central control over state enterprises.

The statist position is most deeply entrenched among midlevel bureaucrats and the party cadre, who fear a loss of status and income with the end of direct control over Cuba’s economy. Some heads of the Cuban military enterprises—which include food and clothing factories, as well as hotels, farms, and telecommunication stores—also manifest this tendency, although surprisingly many officers, including Raúl Castro, are in favor of decentralization and a greater use of market mechanisms.

Those committed to a socialist market economy contend that only the market can unleash Cuba’s productive forces. To increase productivity and efficiency, the state needs to grant more autonomy to enterprises and allow competitive forces to drive the market. In the short term, privatization is necessary, even if this means an increase in inequality, the exploitation of wage workers, and environmental degradation. As the country develops, the state can step in to level the differences and distribute the new surpluses to support social programs.

The economists who argue for market socialism tend to be located in what is referred to as academia—the research institutes and centers, many of which are affiliated with the University of Havana. Academia looks to the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, particularly their appeal to foreign investment, although they believe that Cuba should do a better job of controlling corruption. This position also finds support among state technocrats and some managers who want to see their enterprises expand and become more profitable as they are privatized. There is also significant support for the market economy among self-employed and working people who feel that they can enjoy the material prosperity of China or the Western world only through more individual initiative and private enterprise via the market.

The autogestionario position, which Piñeiro advocates, has a fundamentally different view from the economists over how to break with the old statist model. Instead of relying on competition and the market to advance productivity, the democratic socialist values of participation, association, and solidarity should be at the heart of the workplace and the new economy. Control should not come from the top down but from the bottom up, as workers engage in self-management to further their social and economic concerns. As Piñeiro writes, “The autogestionarios emphasize the necessity of promoting a socialist conscience, solidarity, and a revolutionary commitment to the historically marginalized.” These principles can be practiced in cooperatives and municipal enterprises, leading to increased consciousness and productivity in the workplace.

Piñeiro admits that support for the autogetionario position is less consolidated, coming from intellectuals, professionals, and those involved in the international debates over 21st-century socialism. One of the problems is that the old statist model used the terms participation, autonomy, and workers’ control to characterize the relations in the factories, enterprises, and cooperatives that operated poorly in Cuba, and this language has now fallen into disfavor. Today those who try to revive these terms are often seen as making a utopian attempt to resuscitate failed policies.

Ultimately, Piñeiro is optimistic, seeing “a new path for the nation.” It will be a hybrid composed of “a state socialism better organized, a market,” and “a truly democratic sector.”

While the debate within the government and the Cuban Communist Party over the direction of the economy is comprehensive, the leadership has made it clear that Cuba will remain a one party state. Here Cuba differs from the emerging socialist societies in the rest of Latin America that are committed to holding multiparty national elections. However, important changes are taking place within the political and state apparatus. With the demise of Fidel Castro and the limits of Raúl, who is now in his 80s, a new generation is coming to the fore that will act more collectively.  Raul has announced he will be stepping down in 2018 and Miguel Diaz-Canal who is in his early fifties–with broad experience in the Communist party and the state, particularly at the provincial level–is Raul’s apparent successor as the new vice-president. Legislation is being advanced in the National Assembly that limits all upper level government positions to two five-year terms. The National Assembly itself is also becoming more important as a center of debate and discussion over policies, while the election of delegates is more competitive than in the past.

Part 5: Economic Challenge: Extractivism and Socialism in Latin America

The Achilles heel of the counter-hegemonic and anti-systemic processes in South America is the difficulty of  breaking with the old economic model.

The new left governments are heavily dependent on extractivist exports: petroleum in Venezuela, natural gas and minerals in Bolivia, petroleum and agricultural commodities in Ecuador.

The Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi argues that dependence on extractive exports means that countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are mired in a second phase of neoliberalism and have not escaped from dependent capitalist development. (17) But this criticism is too harsh and absolute.

The economies of Latin America have always been driven by extractive exports. To expect this to change in a decade or so is unrealistic, especially in a global system dominated by transnational capital. What we are witnessing in the short term is the determination of these countries to capture a much larger portion of the rents that come from exports and to use this revenue to expand social programs and to encourage endogenous development. Zibechi is tapping into the debate within the left over how to exploit these natural resources, with many indigenous and ecological organizations insisting that the earth should not be ravaged and that the environment needs to be respected.

In the sphere of international trade, the socialist oriented countries are promoting innovative policies. Venezuela and Cuba founded ALBA in 2004, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas, which encourages "fair trade" not free trade, and promotes integration through complementarity and solidarity. Bolivia joined in 2006 and later Nicaragua, Ecuador, and five Caribbean countries.

The exchange of Cuban medical personnel for Venezuelan oil is just one early example of the type of agreement reached under ALBA. Cuba and Venezuela have also collaborated under ALBA to provide literacy training to the peoples of other ALBA member countries, such as Bolivia. The key concept is to trade and exchange resources in those areas where each country has complementary strengths and to do so on the basis of fairness, rather than market-determined prices. (18)

Along with these state-level economic initiatives, a transformative and radical dialogue is taking place at the grassroots that may not be explicitly socialist but it is anti-systemic. Civil society and local movements are questioning the process of development itself because it harms the environment and is intricately linked to capitalism. Social movements and many of the new left governments have increasingly clashed with their governments over developmental projects. In Bolivia the dispute over a road that would link previously unconnected parts of the country, but which would bisect the TIPNIS Indigenous Territory and National Park, raised fundamental questions about issues of development, indigenous autonomy, and the rights of Mother Earth.

In Ecuador the social movements even after President Rafael Correa’s resounding reelection in February, 2013 continue their criticism of his policies of exploiting the country’s petroleum and mineral resources at the expense of local communities. CONAIE, the major indigenous organization in Ecuador, is openly challenging Correa’s developmentalist approach in mining, water rights, and the exploitation of oil reserves in one of the most biodiverse areas in the world.

Bolivian vice-president Alvaro García Linera puts a positive spin on these developments, asserting that these conflicts are inherent in a transformative process. The popular forces will have different factions that try to push their particular interests and visions of where they want the society to go. The vice-president calls these ‘creative tensions’ and even argues that they are essential for social and political progress to take place. (19)

Venezuela made significant advances during the eight years after Hugo Chavez’ call for 21st century socialism at the World Social Forum in Brazil in early 2005. Later in that year he urged citizens to form communal councils. The Law of Communal Councils defined these councils as "instances for participation, articulation,and integration between the diverse community-based organizations, social groups and citizens, that allow the organized people to directly exercise the management of public policies and projects." To date over 40,000 communal councils have been formed. Cooperatives are also a major form of constructing socialism from below. Many factories are now administered by workers councils, particularly in the steel, aluminum and bauxite industries. Food distribution centers are also controlled by the workers. (20) The road to socialism, however is fraught with difficulties, as shortages and inflation have gripped the economy, undermining the stability of the government of Nicolas Maduro. Even Chavez acknowledged in his final days that Venezuela had by no means achieved a socialist utopia.

Part 6: Transitional Turbulence and the New Socialisms

This is a period of turbulence and transitions. It is not an age of armed revolution as was the century past.

Socialism in twenty-first-century Latin America is part of a complex process of change sweeping the region.

Cuba is striving to update its economy while on the South American continent the socialist banner is unfurling at very distinct paces. In Venezuela the quest for socialism is most advanced politically and economically while in Ecuador, although Rafael Correa proclaims he is undertaking a “citizens revolution” and is a twenty-first century socialist, his government has taken virtually no steps in the direction of a socialist economy. Bolivia occupies a middle ground in which innovative discussions are taking place within and between the government and social movements that relate socialism to the indigenous concept of buen vivir.

Socialism is making an appearance in other countries through a variety of social actors. In Chile the 2011 student rebellion ignited Chilean social movements, which are now rethinking the country’s socialist legacy. They have been instrumental in compelling the second presidency of Michelle Bachelet to call for a series of progressive reforms, including a new constitution, that break with the neo-liberal agenda of her first term. In Brazil the MST, Movement of Landless Rural Workers, the largest social organization in the hemisphere, continues to espouse socialism in its platform and in the daily practices of its land reform settlements. It does not look to a paternalistic state, as demonstrated by its frequent criticism of the policies of President Lula da Silva when he held office 2003 to 2011. The MST seeks to maximize the participation of its own members in the running of their own cooperatives and communities.

While the wording is not explicitly socialist, the constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador call for people to live in harmony with “Pachamama,” Mother Earth, and for buen vivir, or good living – a holistic cosmovision of the world where people strive for harmony. It is more than a hollow dream; it influences contemporary policies in opposition to capitalist development. For example, food sovereignty as it is conceived of in the Andean countries is adapted to buen vivir. It breaks with the traditional concept of development, asserting that food production should not be driven simply by the marketplace, especially the international market. Food sovereignty means that people have access to nutritious and sanitary foods that are produced at the community level by local producers in accordance with local needs and cultures, be they Andean or non-Andean. As Francisco Hidalgo Flor, an Ecuadorean sociologist, asserts in his October 2011 article ‘Land: food sovereignty and Buen Vivir,’ ‘the state has the responsibility to stimulate production … to provide support to small and medium scale producers,’ ensuring that they have adequate technical assistance and credit. (21) Land should be controlled or owned by those who work it. The promotion of cooperatives and a solidarity economy are part of the effort to construct a participatory society, be it in Brazil with the MST or in Bolivia with the indigenous communities.

Latin America is a cauldron of political and social ferment. There are no discernible laws of history driving this upheaval, but socialism is a central component of the brew that is being stirred up by the social movements and the popular forces. Rather than a lineal historic clash between capitalism and socialism that classic Marxism envisioned, we are now witnessing a plethora of struggles and confrontations that veer across the pages of history–between classic liberalism and post-liberal politics; extractivism and post-development; transnational agribusiness and food sovereignty; patriarchy and feminism; exclusionary educational systems and free democratic centers of learning; nation-states dominated by the descendants of the colonizers and the new plural-national states.

Francois Houtart, a leading organizer of the World Social Forum and the executive secretary of the World Forum of Alternatives, argues that it is not important whether we call this new project buen vivir, socialism of the twenty-first century or something else. What is important is that it is a “post-capitalist paradigm” that projects a new utopia. “We need it because capitalism destroys every utopia, it considers itself the end of history. If there is no utopia there are no alternatives.” (22)

A multiplicity of groups and movements are now imagining new utopias. ‘One world with room for many worlds,’ proclaim the Zapatistas. In the short term, twenty-first-century socialism could flounder or experience setbacks in any one of the countries in the Americas where the socialist banner has been planted – Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, or less likely, Cuba. But it will not disappear. Socialism runs deep in the historic waters of the hemisphere, and the quest for a renovated socialism in Latin America offers hope to a world torn asunder by wars and economic crises.

Endnotes:

1.Marta Harnecker, ‘Cinco reflexiones sobre el socialism del siglo XXI,’ Rebelión, 26 March 2012, www.rebelion.org/docs/147047.pdf.

2.Arturo Escobar, ‘Latin America at a crossroads,’ Cultural Studies, 24(1) (2010): 2.

3.Orlando Núñez Soto, ‘La via asociativa y autogestionaria al socialismo,’ Revista Correo, No. 24, Noviembre-Diciembre, 2012 Managua, Nicaragua, p. 11

4.Emir Sader, The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left (Verso, 2011), p. 104-5.

5.Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 68–9.

6.Göran Therborn, Class in the 21st Century, New Left Review No. 78, Nov.-Dec. 2012, p. 20.

7.Núñez, pp. 16-18.8.For an insight into  Marco Arruda’s extensive work on the solidarity economy, see: http://programaeconomiasolidaria.blogspot.com/2010/06/economista-marcos-arruda-lanca-amanha.html

8. Also http://www.tni.org/users/marcos-arruda

9. Katu  Arkonada and Alejandra Santillana,‘Ecuador and Bolivia: The State, the Government and the Popular Camp in Transition.’ Rebelión, 13 September 2009, www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=135502.

10.Escobar  p. 9.

11. Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes, Latin Americas Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty First Century Socialism, London, Zed Books, 2013, pp, 7-8.

12. Ibid., See Appendix: Nationwide Elections in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, pp. 159-60.

13. Aurelio Alonso, Interview, April, 2012.

14.For a more extensive discussion of the transformations and debates occurring in Cuba, see Roger Burbach, A Cuban Spring, NACLA Report on the Americas, (January-March), 2013.

15 Julio Díaz Vázquez, “Un balance critico sobre la economía cubana: Notas sobre dirección y gestión,” Temas, (April-June 2011): 128. Also interview with Juan Valdes Paz, April, 2012.

16.Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, “Visiones sobre el socialismo que guían los cambios actuales en Cuba,” Temas, no. 70 (April–June, 2012): 46–55.

17.Raúl Zibechi, ‘Ecuador: A new model of domination,’ Latin America Bureau, trans. Alex Cachinero-Gorman, 5 August 2011.

18. ‘¿Que es el ALBA-TCP?’, Portal ALBA-TCP, 3 December 2009, www.alianzabolivariana.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=2080.

19.Álvaro Garcia Linera, Las Tensiones Creativas de la Revolución: la quinta fase del Proceso de Cambio (Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2010).

20.Roger Burbach, “”Chavez Renewed Latin America and Revived Socialism, The Progressive Magazine, March 6, 2013. www.progressive.org/chavez-renewed-latin-america

21. Hidalgo Flor, ‘Tierra: soberanía alimentaría y buen vivir,’ La Línea de Fuego, 14 October 2011, lalineadefuego.info/2011/10/14/tierra-soberania-alimentaria-y-buenvivir-por-francisco-hidalgo/.

22.François Houtart, “El Desafio Fundamental Para Bolivia, Venezuela y Ecuador es Definir La Transicion Bajo Un Nuevo Paradigma Poscapitalista: Entrevista por Katu Arkonada, Publicado por lalineadefuego  November 8, 2013, http://lalineadefuego.info/2013/11/08/el-desafio-fundamental-para-bolivia-venezuela-y-ecuador-es-definir-la-transicion-bajo-un-nuevo-paradigma-poscapitalista-entrevista-a-francois-houtart

About the author:

Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) based in Berkeley, California. He has written extensively on Latin America and US foreign policy for over four decades. His first book, Agribusiness in the Americas (1980), co-authored with Patricia Flynn, is regarded as a classic in the research of transnational agribusiness corporations and their exploitative role in Latin America. His most notable book is Fire in the Americas (1987), co-authored with Orlando Núñez, which is an informal manifesto of the Nicaraguan revolution during the 1980s. With the collapse of twentieth-century socialism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe he began to study the emergent system of globalization and to write about the new Latin American social movements and the renewed quest for socialism, His most recent book is: Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Socialism, co-authored with Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes. See the web site: www.futuresocialism.org

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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[2] http://rabble.ca/category/bios/ajamu-nangwaya
[3] http://rabble.ca/
[4] http://rabble.ca/contact/editor/[letter to editor for rabble.ca-node-103266]
[5] http://rabble.ca/supportrabble
[6] http://rabble.ca/contact/corrections/[correction for article rabble.ca-node-103266]
[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/
[20] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/labour
[21] http://rabble.ca/taxonomy/term/2811
[22] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/us-politics
[23] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/urban-planning
[24] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/economic-development
[25] http://rabble.ca/category/tags-issues/municipal-government
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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.

Applied learning: degrees at Mondragon are almost exclusively vocational, and research focuses on technology transfer

Source: Getty

By David Matthews

SolidarityEconomy.net via Times Higher Education / UK

We report from Spain on the University of Mondragon, which is fighting to preserve its teaching mission, industry-focused research and mutual governance model

Mondragon is jointly owned by its academic and administrative staff. No one may earn more than three times the salary of the lowest-paid worker

It is hard to think of a time when academics in the UK have been more dissatisfied with where the academy is going. Their list of gripes is long: from the rise of the student “consumer” to overpaid vice-chancellors, a distant management class, increasing marketisation, a seemingly ever-growing brood of administrators and, perhaps least tangibly, a sense that academia is turning into a competitive rather than comradely affair.

Last year, senior scholars founded the Council for the Defence of British Universities, which set out to fight many of these developments, along with what they believe to be increasing control of universities by government and business. But so far no practical alternatives have emerged. Meanwhile, experiments such as Lincoln’s Social Science Centre, a cooperative organisation offering higher education for free, have taken place only on a very small, relatively informal scale.

At a time when many academics feel remote from their university’s managers and strategic plans, the cooperative model, in which all staff have a stake, has obvious appeal. So, can the University of Mondragon, an established higher education cooperative in the lush green mountains of the Basque Country in northern Spain, offer any answers for academies elsewhere? Founded in 1997 from a collection of co-ops dating back to 1943, the institution now has 9,000 students. The staff have joint ownership and the institution’s culture and its model of governance are radically different from those of modern UK universities.

Times Higher Education went to see how and why they do things differently at Mondragon, and to consider whether some of its practices might appeal to UK scholars looking for a new model for the academy.

Even before arriving in Spain, there is one obvious difference about Mondragon – it does not have a press office to restrict access to the top brass or vet comments by its employees. Instead, THE’s trip was arranged directly through teaching and administrative staff. And on arrival, transport was provided by the vice-chancellor, Jon Altuna, who drove from campus to campus – with the occasional stop-off for tapas and wine.

Mondragon is jointly owned by its academic and administrative staff. To become a fully fledged member, employees have to work there for at least two years, and then pay €12,000 (£10,300), which buys a slice of the university’s capital that can be withdrawn upon retirement.

However, it is unlikely that anyone employed by the university expects to earn enough to build a personal art collection or buy membership to an exclusive private members’ club: no one at Mondragon may earn more than three times the salary of the lowest-paid worker.

This is a far cry from the UK, where in 2008 the ratio between the highest- and the lowest-paid workers in higher education was, on average, 15.35:1, according to the 2011 review of fair pay in the public sector led by Will Hutton – a bigger gap than found in any other part of the public sector.

There is one exception at Mondragon, though: the rector, the closest thing the university has to a chief executive, is permitted to take home five times the lowest wage – although even this relative largesse was agreed only after “huge argument”, Altuna notes.

Excluding cleaners and catering staff, who are subcontracted, the lowest-paid staff, such as administrative and maintenance workers, earn €27,421 a year. The highest-paid managers earn just over three times this amount, while the current rector earns about €157,000. “We are not in this project for [personal] profit-making,” Altuna says with a smile.

Although the university’s student population is relatively small, at about 4,000 (it offers 21 undergraduate, 12 master’s and three PhD programmes), another 5,000 people a year undertake professional training at Mondragon. “We want to be one of the main agents in making companies competitive,” Altuna says.

He is referring to the fact that the university is in effect the training and research-and-development arm of a wider network of interlocking cooperatives, known collectively as the Mondragon Corporation.

Discard any quaint images you might have of basket-weaving communes eking out a trade in the Basque hills. The corporation employs more than 80,000 people and had a revenue of €14 billion in 2012. It is the largest cooperative in the world and has 94 production plants outside Spain. Its factories manufacture white goods, industrial components and road bikes, while its construction wing built Bilbao’s swooping silver Guggenheim Museum.

The university has a highly democratic governance structure. Its supreme body is the general assembly, a 30-strong committee of representatives composed of one-third staff, one-third students and one-third outside interested parties, often other co-ops in Mondragon Corporation. It meets annually to decide on the priorities for the coming year and has significant powers: it can, for example, sack members of the senior management team. (It last used this power in 2007 when one manager was dismissed, according to Altuna.)

It is impossible to recreate our model outside Mondragon, but it is possible to spread some of the culture and ideas of our version of higher education

Meanwhile, administrators make up just one in four workers, compared with 52 per cent in the UK higher education sector, according to 2011-12 figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency.

Mondragon is also highly decentralised. “We say that the chancellor [also known as the rector] has less power than the deans,” says the current holder of the top post, Iosu Zabala Iturralde. (Zabala appears to be the only member of staff who wears a tie – but he does not go as far as wearing a suit jacket.)

The university has four faculties: business studies; engineering; humanities and education; and, since 2011, “gastronomic” science, the theory and practice of cookery. The first three began life as separate colleges, and merged into a university in 1997. Each faculty is its own cooperative, which makes Mondragon a kind of “cooperative of co-ops”, and each department has substantial autonomy. They do not even share the same academic calendars.

Each faculty also has “total freedom to leave the project”, Altuna says. There was a lot of debate in the early days of the university about the wisdom of the faculties joining forces, he explains, but only by combining several subjects could Mondragon become a university and award its own degrees. Now they have lost their distinct identities, making it very difficult for them to break away, he thinks.

What also makes the university unusual is that its three founding faculties are spread across five towns in the Alto Deba region, the heart of the Basque Country. Most are “remote” locations, Altuna admits, estimating that none has a population of more than 10,000. Only in recent years has Mondragon set up bases in the cities of San Sebastian and Bilbao.

Mondragon places a strong emphasis on transparent governance. For example, any worker in the Faculty of Engineering can check on the expenses of any of their colleagues – with enough detail provided to make it possible to work out which restaurants they have been to and when, Altuna explains.

Its students and staff say the institution has a very different ethos from those of traditional universities. As Raquel Pangua, a fourth-year undergraduate training to be a teacher, puts it: “We are like a family. We all work together – the university gives a lot of importance to group work. In public universities, they mostly work in an individual way, and maybe tutors don’t have that close a relationship with their students. We have a really close relationship with teachers.”

So Mondragon has equality, autonomy, openness, transparency and no ties. Are there any catches? Plenty, as it turns out.

Mondragon is a private university, and thus it receives minimal public funds. Just over a 10th of its income comes from the Basque government’s structural funding, although the institution’s suite of new buildings – including the architecturally bold €17 million Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastian, designed to look like a stack of crooked plates from the outside – are largely funded by the Basque and Spanish administrations.

There is little room for the humanities: degrees are almost exclusively vocational. Mondragon offers bachelor’s degrees in mechanical, computer, biomedical and energy engineering, business administration and management, primary education and gastronomy and culinary arts. The master’s courses are largely in similar areas, although there is an MA in social economy and cooperativism.

Almost a third of Mondragon’s income comes from technology and knowledge transfer fees. It develops new products for the corporation’s engineering firms, consults for local businesses and advises schools in the region.

As a point of comparison, UK universities earned just 7.3 per cent of their income from research contracts with UK-based industry, charities and public bodies in 2011-12, according to Hesa.

Mondragon’s heavy dependence on technology transfer income means that “there is no ground for research that has no return”, Altuna says.

Still, there is no sense that academics at Mondragon begrudge the lack of opportunities to conduct blue-sky research; if anything, they seem proud that their work is being put to good use. But Altuna freely admits that some researchers “cannot understand it”. “They have quit and gone to a public university,” he says.

An educational idyll: on the lush campuses in the Basque mountains, students say they encounter a different ethos. One says: ‘We are like a family. We all work together’

Because employees’ salaries are dependent on their faculties not running at a loss, academics have to bear money in mind far more than they might like.

“At public universities, the lecturers – and sometimes the directors of the departments – don’t talk a lot about money,” says Vicente Atxa Uribe, director of the Faculty of Engineering. “They talk more about academic things.”

They think “the world will provide” their salaries, claims Zabala, but that is not the way at Mondragon. Lecturers must constantly drive student recruitment, and rack their brains for new, income-generating technology transfer projects, he says.

Mondragon’s heavy reliance on contract research also leaves it exposed to the chill winds of Spain’s bleak economy, and ironically, the business faculty has been squeezed more than most.

Juanjo Martin, who is responsible for Mondragon’s international relations, admits that the business faculty is “not doing really well” financially. Businesses have cut back on commissioning his faculty’s consultancy work while continuing to buy research from the engineering department because their projects are “more tangible than ours”, Martin suggests.

The faculty will make a loss this year, and workers have had their salaries cut – to 80 per cent of their normal pay – partly because, says Martin, “it’s impossible to fire people” from the co-op. “This year we are really suffering from the [economic] crisis in the Basque Country.”

Under the university’s regulations, a faculty can have up to 30 per cent of its losses offset if other faculties are making a profit. Although wages are now as low as they are allowed to go in the business faculty, Martin is still positive.

“Of course we are unhappy [with the pay cut] but it’s not as if we were in a public company. The project is ours. You are relaxed because you won’t lose your job,” he explains.

Although parts of the university may be struggling financially, other Mondragon Corporation cooperatives are in worse positions. The trouble is, when your comrades get into difficulties, it is only brotherly to bail them out. All co-ops recently elected to give 1 per cent of their income to support the beleaguered Fagor Electrodomésticos, a white goods manufacturer affected by the slump in Spanish demand. About 1,000 of its workers will be shifted to other, more successful co-ops, Altuna says.

Still, Altuna is keen to stress that the university is not totally economically bound to the wider corporation: 40 per cent of its technology transfer income is generated from deals with companies that are not cooperatives.

“Some people imagine we’re like the Mormons but in fact we’re open to the whole society,” Martin adds. He points out that two-thirds of students in the business school go on to work outside the cooperative movement.

Another disadvantage of being a private institution is that Mondragon’s students must pay fees up front, and staff admit that most have to scrape the money together with the help of their families.

At just under €5,500 a year for a bachelor’s course, fees are relatively low for a private university in Spain, and make up just over a third of Mondragon’s income. But Spanish public university fees, although they are increasing, are presently much lower, at about €1,000 a year. Mondragon does, however, offer grants to students from poorer families, and students can work part-time during their studies at Alecop – a co-op that manufactures educational training and simulation equipment – to help fund their studies.

Mondragon does feel subtly different from many UK institutions – staff are open about its problems, there is no relentlessly upbeat corporate message, and relations between workers feel less hierarchical and more relaxed than on many UK campuses. But some veteran staff express concern that the university’s cooperative spirit is waning.

Founding father: the founder of the Mondragon Cooperative movement, the priest José María Arizmendiarrieta

“I think some of the values have been lost along the way,” Martin observes. “Going to any meeting here, and any meeting in a public limited company, there is no difference. This is happening in all the co-ops in Mondragon.”

The cooperative spirit has become perfunctory, he believes. “It’s like going to church, where you can go just on Sundays and listen to the priest and you are a Christian,” he says.

Fred Freundlich, a US academic who has been working at Mondragon since the 1980s and lectures in business studies, says he has observed a decline in camaraderie. Fewer workers now eat their lunch together or go out for a glass of wine after work, he says.

One of the benefits of Mondragon’s ethos, he observes, is its highly collaborative research style. He contrasts this with the US where, he says, “the culture is that faculty members may end up collaborating but each one is there to do their individual research”. But these days, even at Mondragon, researchers can be more reluctant to invite others to join their projects, focusing instead on trying to clock up as many of the hours they are required to work as possible, he says.

Freundlich thinks this is symptomatic of wider social change. In a bid to revive some of the older values, he is bringing in co-op “veterans” to explain to younger staff how they used to work together.

Other social pressures are chipping away at the sustainability of the project. The Basque Country, like much of southern Europe, has a rapidly ageing population. “Not only in the Basque Country, but Spain generally, there are too many universities, and there’s not enough domestic demand to keep them running,” Freundlich observes.

Mondragon is looking to expand its activities overseas, principally into South and Central America, both to spread its ideas and to create new markets for the companies in the corporation. “The only way that our project can survive is to create activities in countries that are developing,” Altuna says.

The university is helping a network of about 40,000 non-profit businesses in Colombia turn a private university into a higher education institution that will serve them with training and research. Mondragon is providing governance experts, lecturers and researchers. It has also acquired 80 per cent of a private university in Mexico.

The plan is to eventually turn these two institutions into co-ops, but for the moment, the idea is too radical to implement in those countries, Altuna says. Indeed, many subsidiaries of cooperative businesses outside Spain are not co-ops, he says. The idea is an alien one in China, for example.

But in South Korea, people are going “crazy” for cooperatives, Martin says, and the university receives regular delegations from countries where there is curiosity about the project.

“It is impossible to recreate our model outside Mondragon,” Altuna says. “But it is possible to spread some of the culture and ideas of our version of higher education.”

Whether a cooperative university could flourish away from the special circumstances found in the close-knit Basque Country is unclear. But it may offer hope to those unhappy with the academy’s present direction in the UK and elsewhere.

In 2011, three academics – Rebecca Boden of the University of Roehampton, Davydd Greenwood of Cornell University and Susan Wright of Aarhus University – visited the university and wrote that Mondragon was a “highly successful” alternative to what they called “neoliberalised university formations”.

“It is possible to create and manage successful universities that do not involve the exploitation of faculty as passive employees and the treatment of students as mere clients in a fee-for-service educational scheme,” they conclude in “Report on a field visit to Mondragón University: a cooperative experience/experiment”, published in the journal Learning and Teaching.

Mondragon rejects the idea of private profit-making, and yet academics are perpetually concerned with bringing in income. Earnings are relatively equal, but fluctuate with financial performance. Governance is highly democratic, but allows for an unprecedented degree of influence from businesses and students. It may be an alternative to the state-funded public university – but is it worth it?

Could it happen here? Prospects for a cooperative university in the UK

A number of vice-chancellors have had private talks about adopting some elements of the cooperative model at their institutions, according to Mervyn Wilson, chief executive and principal of the Manchester-based Co-operative College, which specialises in studying and researching the movement.

The problem with universities in their current form is that they “treat professionals as employees”, he argues. This means that running difficulties and big decisions are seen as “management’s problem”, not “our problem”.

Give staff a slice of ownership and control and they are more likely to take responsibility, Wilson believes.

He says he has met a “handful” of university leaders who are concerned about ways they can “differentiate” their institutions in the UK and globally.

“The ones I’ve spoken to see a very distinctive community-focused role,” Wilson says. They are not willing to go down the “sharp-elbowed” corporate route favoured by others, he adds.

The introduction of higher undergraduate fees in England and more open competition for students means that the “ground is opening up…over the next three to five years lots of institutions will be looking at appropriate governance reforms in the marketised sector”, he believes.

There are already a number of cooperative higher education projects under way in the UK, in Brighton, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cardiff. In Lincoln, the not-for-profit, cooperative, zero-fee Social Science Centre took its first cohort of nine students last October. But for now, these projects are extremely small and do not have degree-awarding powers.

Dan Cook, school manager and director of education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol, is currently in the early stages of a master’s thesis on cooperative universities. He thinks there is at least the possibility of something much bigger emerging.

If a larger cooperative institution were established, although it would face significant hurdles, “these are essentially the same ones any other private university…has successfully faced”, Cook says.

The government is encouraging new entrants to the sector and in the past year, it has approved the creation of three new private universities, Regent’s University and the for-profit University of Law and BPP University.

But “the more likely possibility is for an existing university to convert to mutual status”, Cook believes. There would be various ways in which a university could legally convert, he says, but of the challenges that such a change would present, “none is insurmountable”.

In 2011, the Cabinet Office announced £10 million in funding to help public sector organisations spin off into mutuals, which it defines as “organisations in which employee control plays a significant role in their operation”, and this could include cooperatives.

“The bigger question than the legal one is that of culture – are universities ready to mutualise?” asks Cook. “That’s a much bigger ‘if’, but it is a question I’m hoping to make some progress on”.

However, many of the principles on which cooperatives are based are not necessarily that radical in higher education. Cook points out that the University of Cambridge “is already configured as a sort of workers’ co-op” because every academic is part of the governing body, Regent House.

But, he adds: “I don’t think anyone has told them yet.”

Print headline:

Article originally published as: Share option (29 August 2013)

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