How viable do you think it is for first world communist movements to build or incentivise local socialist coop micro systems, with the goal of improving living standards and disseminating socialist practices?
Local coops could offer discounts or maybe even free products to workers from other associated coops. Maybe the participating coops could have a common fund, used for emergencies and or building other coops to provide more alternative services for local comunities and keep the network growing. The coop association would become a mini worker's state.
I think it's really important for a variety of reasons. It directly connects with people. It's a means of enabling people to live differently under the current system, while building capacity for alternative economic arrangements during a revolution. I imagine socialism as a mix of central planning and co-ops, with industries scaled to their social function, not that different from the Soviet Union really but more productive and culturally open to the world and so on.
Coops are not a solution though. The fact is you're operating under the constraints of capitalism so if you need to take out a loan to invest in growing the coops, you're relying on the financial system, and welp the banks are going to tell you how to run the coop at that point (cracking up the financial system could open up a space for opportunities here though). Even under socialism, in theory the workers will have self-managed coops, but in practice things get a lot more complicated, like say if you're trying to ward off an invasion! In capitalism, if you become really successful, capital will try to destroy you using all kinds of measures. I don't know though, most socialists out there have thought about this problem a lot more than me.
Justin Young
how can they do that if they have no money or land?
Jackson Morgan
Kinda off track, but about non-coop employee ownership firms: there's an incredible little article by the right-wing "Foundation for Economic Education" in 1990 warning about the dangers of employee-owned firms. "Ironically, many leaders of American conservatism have spoken up for employee ownership. Unaware of the dangers, they see it as a way to 'involve employees in capitalism' and also to 'privatize' governmentally owned enterprises both inside and outside the United States. The purpose of this article is to sound an alarm. Employee ownership poses a serious and expanding threat to a free market."
Coops are not that common in the United States, but an employee-owned (not managed) grocery chain (owned via stock plans) expanded into my area recently: WinCo. I will only now shop there, and I like it a lot but this is Burgerland standards we're talking about. I will tell you: this is an improvement. The food is cheap, employees are friendly and carry themselves with more dignity than, say, Walmart – which is an awful and demoralizing place, and where my cousin works (he hates it and wants to throw his bosses off the rooftop).
Anyways, I've talked to employees at WinCo and will ask them about their job. Everyone I've talked to said they like it, and one guy – a white dude in his thirties – told me he was able to provide health coverage for his family including two children and basically paid nothing. The company also seems to encourage long-term employment with the employee stock plan. Another employee, a middle-aged black woman, told me she received better benefits than at the law firm where she used to work.
Obviously not socialist: these are capitalist firms and not worker managed. The debate around this is whether these companies makes revolution harder, like they violate Marx's immiseration thesis. But honestly, seeing the kind of shit my cousin and his mother (my aunt, now retired) had to put up with at Walmart here in the American South makes me wish WinCo all the best.
the problem you outline is faced by any kind of socialist experiment, it must exist within global capitalism before socialism can supercede it.
Isaac Ortiz
also the whole "not pure socialism" thing is ultraleft nonsense. There has never been real socialism, not even close by purist definitions. The goal is to empower the proletariat to be able to own and manage their won resources until they have the power and resource base to implement a planned economy. You simply cannot do this until the natural resources and man made infrastructure under your control can produce all the goods necessary to a modern society, therefore there must be stages
Easton Hill
Don't you lot usually denounce this as lifestylism?
Kayden Richardson
no, there seems to have been a severe lack of ultras on this board (which is a good thing) ever since BO's R*java rule.
Robert Kelly
Well not entirely sure what ultras are but if they're the sad cunts that denounce everything as lifestyle then good, i guess.
Back to OP i definetly think this is one of the most important things we can do, physical infrastructure. Physical space is simply necessary for any real movement but the problem is the state will always make this as hard as they possibly can for us. Squats are a good bet if you live in a country that has squatters rights, etc.
Jacob Howard
I completely agree. For me a big problem with the left is it's financial poverty. Germany has a few organizations that will help groups buy land or businesses to run as co-operatives. I personally think it'd make all the difference if some leftists could make serious money and put it behind these kind of orgs that will open the way to build real infrastructure.
A kind of ambition of mine (but alas i am poor) is to build the infrastrucutre for radical digital space outside of google, fedbook, twitter, amazon and the other big 'cloud' networks, etc. This would look like community owned hosting for leftists and radicals with platforms for blogging, email, patron-esque digital begging and easy support page setup for campaigns and our arrested and imprisoned, etc. etc. Alas, i am poor.
Chase Turner
I think you need to combine all these things, where you can collectivise work such as through co-ops, or even mutualise it if you are working on smaller level. Profits from co-ops can be used to directly communinise i.e. give away for free some things on a small scale such as food or education.
Some things such as old buildings or disused or disputed land can be directly expropriated and used for communal space, even housing.
At the same time you can push in electoral politics but you need the non electoral power base at the same time
Dylan Wood
Ugh. failing.
in reply to
Luke Thompson
The 'Freiräume network' is one example i was thinking of in regards to these groups who will buy land. projektwerkstatt.de/index.php?domain_id=22 (DE. seems be fairly readable with machine translation)
Brandon Turner
That's where unions can help protect the co-ops. Capital always tries to destroy co-op competition, so to stop this the union can act as a counter measure to destroy the capitalist competition in turn. If Walmart moves in to out-compete your co-op grocer, unionize the Walmart workers to monkey wrench it out of business. Then, seize the abandoned Walmart for your co-op grocery chain.
Carter Edwards
Not at all viable in practice, since cooperative labor can't compete with slave labor in foreign countries. In practice it just leads to hipsters selling overpriced food to each other.
Henry Wood
reality proves you wrong. there are worker co-ops that exist and function well even today.
Ian Peterson
Community effort. Press the local government into cooperating. It's easier than you think.
Easton Allen
Alternative infrastructure is peak utopianism. I had a similar debate with an anarchist friend who insists that squatting and "black" production (which is very limited in scope and scale, there's more to provide people a decent living than being able to repair bycicles or grow weed outside of the capitalist circuit) is a practical way to dismantle capitalism. I'm actually involved in squatting and very much in favor of it but I don't delude myself into believing we can squat away capitalism, no matter how many nice community gardens and anarchist book shops we have. To use a metaphor, it's trying to build a new society in the space between the walls of a house. Sure, there is some space there outside the capitalist circuit and a few people live in it or otherwise occupy a significant time in it but the only real use for it is as a staging ground to break through the wall and occupy the whole damn house.
Elijah Carter
As a dear friend once said to me; 'You can't feed the planet on skipped food!'
Oliver Reyes
i think this is the best way of putting it, honestly. worker owned co-ops, trade unions, and dual structures are not the solution to capitalism's problems but they provide the staging ground to organize a solution.
trade union activity / fighting for reforms - this gives working people "breathing space" and helps reduce the utter lack of options that many have under capitalism.
worker co-ops - serve as an example that the hierarchical structure of most economic organization is unnecessary.
political & social orgs - give working class people a way of engaging in some kind of political process and bypassing the ordinary structures that are dominated by the very socio-economic forces they are meant to control/mediate.
Isaiah Price
I don't think this thread is talking about these hip initiatives like starting an anarchist bookshop in an abandoned building. We need to build a genuine cooperative movement. A worker-ran non-hierarchical sector covering serious shit, with lots of community involvement, as well as the infrastructure to connect these initiatives into a larger whole. The problem with "breaking through the wall" is that you need to make sure the building can keep functioning, and you know capitalists are going to cut off your water and electricity. Thus we better first colonize the walls and wire the place up ourselves. We need an institutional framework to take over from capitalism. We need our own Soviets.
Lucas Lopez
Yeah as said i'm not thinking squats or book shops here. Neither is it suposed to be socialism inside capitalism. It's more like a socialist effort to improve community life and provide a "preview" of socialist organization.
When people think of squats most people don't want to live in one, nor do they want to work in some hipster niche workplace. The goal here is to be the most appealing as possible like , It's not about wether WinCo is socialism or not it's just that it's better than wallmart, and it's somewhat closer to socialism than what most people have.
We should not let the views pushed on working class ppl by the hostile capitalist media dictate the terms on what we accept and reject.
Hunter Lewis
but in terms of co-ops that is a very real tool, a network of co-ops can fund things beyond just bicycle repair, food banks for example are very real necessity in the UK, if these were red food banks that presents a huge opportunity to engage communities, also things like mental health services which are sorely lacking, co-operative housing is something else which a pool of co-ops could fund
building co-operative farms and housing was part of the black panthers program they just never managed to realise it before they collapsed, imagine their free breakfast program had a network of worker owned co-ops behind it.
you do though have to work with what you've got, which is why the above stuff is important because you can show people the tangible benefits which they can experience themselves without having to beat them with ideology, although again, a co-operative network could fund media and education also
Brayden Ross
I am bumping this thread because it has some great discussion.
