Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Economic Prosperity and Economic Democracy: The Worker Co-Op Solution

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Economic Prosperity and Economic Democracy: The Worker Co-Op Solution

Click here to access article by Richard Wolff from Truthout.

Workers' self-directed enterprises (WSDEs) are a response to capitalism's failure to deliver economic prosperity and socialism's failure to deliver economic democracy.

This is the political project which Wolff supports in this article. First, he expresses what he believes is the resistance by ordinary US citizens to socialist alternatives, which, in my opinion, are due to a massive misunderstanding of traditional and misidentified "socialist" governments and parties. This, of course, is no accident. Ideological institutions in the West have always been flooded with intense propaganda to confuse and obscure any such understanding. (Even the Nazi party, the corporate sponsored party of fascism in Germany, was called "National Socialist German Workers' Party"!)

Following this, he then launches into what he believes are the virtues and possibilities of "workers' self-directed enterprises". Many people have favored worker cooperatives as a progressive movement, and people might easily mistakenly believe that he is arguing for the same thing. (Setting up worker cooperatives has been argued elsewhere as very problematic.) His different argument did not become clear to me until a careful reading of the final paragraph.

Transforming capitalist enterprises into WSDEs in this context would radically change workplaces, residential communities, and hence, the daily life of virtually everyone. It could realize the systemic change that traditional socialisms pointed toward but never achieved: a viable and attractive alternative preferable to capitalism. It offers leftists a means to overcome their frustrations and a focus around which to regroup, existing, as well as building, new left movements and organizations.

The key difference between his proposal and most who favor worker cooperatives is that he argues for transforming existing capitalist enterprises into worker controlled enterprises (and obviously publicly owned, but this wasn't explicitly stated) while others merely argue for setting up worker cooperatives within the capitalist system which are forced to compete with capitalist firms that exploit both workers and the environment. The difference between the two positions is startlingly dramatic!