7.Workers' Co-ops: way on or way out

RESPONSE TO TIM HUNT’S CO-OP PIECE IN RED PEPPER (JUNE/JULY 2010)

Are workers’ co-ops a distraction, or do they have the potential to change the world? The answer may be a bit of both, but it’s easy to feel that if Cameron’s for them, there must be something wrong.

Which will be the case if workers’ co-ops settle for the niche they’re being offered: harmless, cheap alternative to democratically accountable public services; kindly front for rampant capitalism, like a charity table (or fair-trade shelf?) at Tesco.

Obviously, co-operatives must not become an alternative to trade union efforts within conventional employment to improve wages and conditions and change the balance of power, either in so-called private enterprise or public service.

And yes, workers’ co-ops too can become self-serving, exploiting their customers, other workers or the community. Unless, squeezed by the market, co-operators become their own slave-drivers

I have spent years in co-operative work – in practice if not in name – and, now, as an unpaid Director of a not-for-profit commonwood, it seems to me more important than ever that we make our mission clear, collectively and as individuals.

Assuming that others are more like me than not, I feel my working life is too important to sell to the highest bidder or entrust to Profiteers. Imbued with commonplace beliefs in personal freedom and social democracy, I find it extraordinary that we routinely drop all claim to these basic rights at the entrance to employers’ premises.

As a democrat with a bias to personal autonomy, I’m not happy with John Lewis or public service models of employment: democracy doesn’t begin with the election of representative authorities, but with the decisions we take for ourselves, as individuals and between us. In our democratic process, we need something like the ‘subsidiarity’ principle invoked in European politics: only where direct democracy, face-to-face decision-making, becomes impossible should we delegate to representatives

The John Lewis and public service employment models reproduce the hierarchy and differentials –systematic inequality of power, status and reward – they inherit from the corporate private sector. Meanwhile - a necessary truism - wage-slavery is not, and never has been, the natural or noble successor to plantation or gulag slavery.

Wage-slavery is a sort of second-worst, deeply damaging to all involved, although for those near the top of the ladder – as for household slaves in the old South – a reductive subordination is sugared by superior conditions on and off the job. Capitalism underpins and exploits the graded (class) inequality on which it depends. And capitalist exploitation begins and ends in the practice and relationships of everyday working life. It is in our work that we shape ourselves, society and world – or have them shaped for us.

If trade unions and workers’ co-operatives are not to be bent out of recognition, both must be concerned with reclaiming the direction and management of working life as well as its rewards. Far from being an alternative to trade union militancy, the co-operative movement is its natural twin, modelling new practices, relationships and goals that will only come into their own when carried into the corporate economy. What we’re after is the once and future common ground on which monstrous Capital is built.

Capital accumulation began with the sweating of subsistence labour by a dominant few. Stripped of any surplus, the majority still laboured to survive. Later, industrialists believed with some reason that if they paid more than a survival wage, their workers would prefer to stay at home. (Enclosure of common land helped cut that option off). Modern employers have adopted a more progressive (?) line. For workers to fulfil their other function as consumers, survival needs are not enough. While owner-employers set the pace, managers, professionals and other workers are strung along in descending order, competing among themselves for possessions and appearances..

As long as we lack the food and fuel, clothes and shelter to live and thrive, MORE is BETTER, goods are GOOD. But we are now reaching a turning point in human history where most people are not working mainly for their own or anyone else’s subsistence. A succession of fabricated wants now fill the gap where hunger used to be. Led by the nose, we carry on working AS IF our lives depended on it, as if what we needed was more of the same. In this addiction, we miss a vital turning point: when survival was the goal, no sacrifice was too much, it was reasonable to accept whatever hardship, cruelty or constraint came our way in the labour to secure it; more material goods meant a better chance of living and thriving. Survival once secured, the emphasis changes. What matters now is no longer quantity of goods produced, possessed or consumed, but the quality of life entailed: the time we spend in employment is part of that life – we work not only FOR but AS a living – and it makes no sense to sacrifice our basic human rights at work.

This might be obvious to us all, if only our time and space were not blocked out on employers’ premises or in the pursuit of the products on offer in the time that’s left to us. Knowing nothing else, we’re hardly conscious of what we miss, of the enormity of the diversion in our way.

It’s not only our personal and social lives that are diminished, but the options for humanity. We may no longer work for our own survival as individuals, but the way we work now threatens our collective survival as a species. Too many people chasing too many goods, and that’s not just an economic platitude: on a finite ball of Earth in space, more and more people cant go on blindly taking more and more.

It is in this social and environmental context that the co-operative movement has a vital role. What matters is not just how we provide for ourselves and manage our lives at work from day to day, but how we re-organise and redirect a global economy before it burns us out.

If we want a life worth living, a just society and sustainable world, then effective, clear-sighted co-operation is the ONLY way ahead. If it’s the way we work that does the damage, it makes no sense to carry on with business as usual. As we apply the logic of our lives at work, Red and Green elements can and must combine, commitments to equality and sustainability go hand in hand. What’s at stake is – to put it conservatively – the future of human life on earth. The subjection of Labour to Capital is, literally, a dead end.

PS
That may not be what the Cameron consort have in mind when they talk of the Big Society, but…they aint seen nothing yet. What if, in our global market, the exploitation of nature and what used to be called man’s exploitation of man turn out to be co-terminous, as cheap labour and other natural resources run out in parallel? In the process, with no stone or sea or sky untouched, the beneficiaries of our exploitive system may find they’ve nowhere to escape to; if ‘terrorism’ too becomes ubiquitous, not confined to this or that old religion, the capitalist vice will close upon itself.

Caught between climate change and class war, exit the exploitive mode? And/or the rich - elite, employers, owners – may begin to recognise our common interest in saving and sharing what’s left of the natural world rather than fighting for scraps in the ruins. No ruling class is quite immune to common humanity. And to reinforce the tenuous bonds of fairness and fellow feeling, there is new evidence that inequality is bad for most of us, richer as well as poorer.*

* The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, and www.theequalitytrust.org.uk