Three issues around the commons and cooperatives

“In the last decade, the commons has become a prevalent theme in discussions about collective but decentralized control over resources. This paper is a preliminary exploration of the potential linkages between commons and cooperatives through a discussion of the worker cooperative as one example of a labour commons. We view the worker coop as a response at once antagonistic and accommodative to capitalism. This perspective is amplified through a consideration of five aspects of an ideal-type worker cooperativism: associated labour, workplace democracy, surplus distribution, cooperation among cooperatives, and, controversially, links between worker cooperatives and socialist states. We conclude by suggesting that the radical potential of worker cooperatives might be extended, theoretically and practically, by elaborating connections with other commons struggles in a process we term the circulation of the common.”

* Article: Commons and Cooperatives. Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, Vol 4, No 1 (2010). Special issue on The New Cooperativism.

In the special issue of Affinities on The New Cooperativism, the article by Nick Dyer-Whiteford and Greig de Peuter stands out by its strategic clarity.

In this installment, we refract three important issue about the interrelationship of coops and the commons:

1. Commoners and workers

Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford:

“In the last decade, talk of “commons,” “commoning,” and even “commonwealth,” has become, well, common, on the left in discussions of collective but decentralized control over resources ranging from farmlands to fresh water, ocean fisheries, clean air, software code, and genetic information. Starting point for critical accounts of the commons is typically the historical destruction of the collective land of pre-capitalist agricultural communities; in Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries these were enclosed by mercantile landlords eager to sell agricultural goods in an expanding world market. Such enclosures were a crucial part of the process of primitive accumulation, creating early capitalism’s dispossessed proletariat from displaced rural populations. These commoners did not go quietly: enclosure faced “hydra-headed” opposition, but these struggles were lost and largely forgotten.

Interest in commons was revived by neoliberalism. Confronting the late-twentieth century onrush of global capital, activists and theorists found in the image of the commons a perspective from which to criticize privatization, deregulation, and expropriation in numerous domains: land wars caused by the continuing enclosure of farmlands and displacement of rural populations by agribusiness, energy mega-projects and urban developers in Asia, Latin America, and Africa; ecological struggles over issues from pesticide poisoning to clear-cutting to species-extinctions and climate change; digital activism such as the free and open-source software movements and ‘creative commons’ challenges to intellectual property law; and resistances to corporate ownership of the genome of plants, animals, and humans. Commons has become a concept connecting multifarious struggles against capital’s old but ongoing primitive accumulation and its new horizons of futuristic, high-tech accumulation.

Beyond resistance to enclosures, commons politics involve renewed attention on the forms of association through which communities can govern shared resources. The once powerful idea of “the tragedy of the commons”–which claimed that, without the protection of private property rights, natural resources will be degraded by neglect–has been not just challenged but reversed by theorists proposing a “cornucopia of the commons” or “inverse commons” in which collectives produce more robust, inventive results than commercial entities. The vocabulary of commons has, moreover, provided anti-corporate and anti-capitalist movements a way of talking about collective ownership without invoking a bad history–without conjuring up “communism,” conventionally narrowly understood as a command economy plus a repressive state. Commons discourse resumes older discussions about “public goods,” but breaks new ground, both in the range of ecological, biogenetic, and cultural domains it addresses, and in its interest in the possibilities for the organization of resources from below, rather than according to the models of command economies or bureaucratic welfare states.

Commons politics, and the discourse around it, has its limitations. The term commons has come to cover a proliferation of proposals, some highly radical, but also some reformist, and others even potentially reactionary. As George Caffentzis points out, neoliberal capital, confronting the debacle of free-market policies, is turning to “Plan B”: limited versions of commons–be it carbon trading models, community development schemes, biotechnology research, and open-source practices–are introduced as subordinate aspects of a capitalist economy. Here voluntary cooperation does not so much subvert capital as subsidize it. Just as the original commons were an element within, rather than an alternative to, a brutally coercive feudal order, so, too, in isolation, today’s commons experiments may just supplement, not challenge, capitalist exploitation. In addition, and germane to the focus of this article, while discourse about commons is popular among environmental, digital, and biotechnological activists, it is often disconnected from labour politics. Talk of commons less frequently intersects with the lexicon of unions, solidarity, and strikes. It thus risks being disassociated from issues of work and wealth, class and poverty–where what is at stake is, still, capital’s denial of commonality via the private control of the means of production. It is as an antidote to this rift that this article discusses the worker cooperative as one form of labour commons.

Worker cooperatives are a historically deep element in counter-capitalist movements from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and are a resurgent component in the contemporary search for economic assemblages alternative to planet-wide capitalism. This paper suggests “the new cooperativism,” to use the term framing this journal issue, be situated in the context of a wide set of struggles over various forms of commons. Linking together commons and cooperatives is, we believe, valuable on several counts. The history of the worker cooperative movement provides a practical demonstration of the art of collective association key to all commoning practices. It also offers an example of decentralized control of common resources that potentially connects the traditions of labour struggle to the modes of activism honed by both ecological and networked radicals. At the same time, the scope and diversity of commons activism indicates the broader currents for social change with which cooperativism must be interwoven if it is to become part of “the coming economies” beyond capital.

Cooperatives can be seen as a response, at once antagonistic and accommodative, to capitalism. This point is amplified in what follows through a brief consideration of five aspects of ideal-type worker cooperative practice: associated labour, workplace democracy, surplus redistribution, cooperation among cooperatives, and, controversially, links between cooperatives and socialist states. Elements of these constitute the worker coop as a labour commons. We suggest in our conclusion, however, that the extension and actualization of the radical potential of worker cooperatives requires interconnection with other commons struggles–a process we term the circulation of the common. Our essay’s perspective is Marxist, but one informed by other traditions of anti-capitalism present in both commons and cooperative struggles.”

2. Surplus distribution

“One of the traits linking the worker coop to commons traditions concerns the distribution of economic surplus. For George Holyoake, a nineteenth-century historian of the British cooperative movement, the overriding cooperative principle is that of the “distribution of profits to all those who had a hand in generating them, including both consumers and employees.”[46] Commitment to distributive justice is embedded in the cooperative principle of “member economic participation.”[47] Put in Holyoake’s class-conscious terminology, cooperativism is rooted in a belief that “[i]t is more reasonable and better for society and progress that men (sic) should own capital than that capital should own men (sic). Capital is the servant, men (sic) are the masters.”[48] The worker coop is an institution of the labour commons where worker-owners view surplus as a product of their shared efforts, and, as such, ought to be distributed equitably and democratically among those who created it.

Remuneration practices in coops vary widely. MCC, for example, uses the term anticipos, rather than “wages,” to refer to the monies paid out at regular intervals to individual worker-owners as an advance on anticipated earnings. Other coops speak of a “draw” account to which dividends are deposited regularly. In terms of setting compensation levels, some coops might take their cue from private businesses operating in the same sector, others might adopt a strict wage-equity policy as with some worker coops in Argentina, and others still, especially those occupying a competitive industry and employing managers, might impose a ceiling on the differential between the highest and lowest paid occupational levels as with Mondragón.

Some studies have suggested that productivity in coops matches and sometimes exceeds that of conventional firms.[49] If, after wages and operational expenses are covered, the coop has a surplus, this leaves the question of its distribution. This surplus is likely to be modest on account of the cooperative principle of “limited returns on capital.” How surplus is distributed in a cooperative in practice varies of course. But, generally, and in keeping with the cooperative commitment to workplace democracy, worker-owners decide on it through collective mechanisms, and it will typically be set in a coop’s by-laws. Theoretically, however, worker-owners may have the option to vote for an increased individual bonus, or dividend, as a means of consuming the surplus. The attractiveness of this option to individual cooperators would lead some critics to fear that there is a tendency toward self-exploitation as coops come to internalize capitalist behaviour. Marxist critics of coops might argue worker-owners have a strong self-interested incentive to increase their individual return, rather than to invest surplus in fixed capital or reserve savings to make the enterprise more sustainable in the long run; this is one reason some statist socialists who see merit in coops with regard to control of the labour process might advocate publicly-owned worker-managed firms over full worker-ownership.”

3. Cooperation among cooperatives

“This brings us to an issue central to our thesis about the need for cooperatives to connect to other commons initiatives–that of coops’ relation to the wider economic order. From the perspective of cultivating economic autonomy, the development of links within the cooperative sector itself is of great significance. The sixth principle in the Statement of Cooperative Identity is “cooperation among cooperatives”–an ethos of mutual aid that encourages individual coops to support one another and contribute to the development of a parallel economy through practices of inter-cooperation.[51] In this way, coops would reduce their dependence on, and seek to gain autonomy from, conventional capitalist enterprises; this is the movement-building aspect of cooperativism.

In addition to the formation of coop associations (e.g. International Cooperative Alliance), one possible manifestation of cooperation among cooperatives is inter-cooperative sourcing–the sourcing of products and services from other coops. For instance, a consumer coop might have a purchasing policy in place requiring employees always try sourcing a product from a coop supplier before buying from a conventional firm. Similarly, a worker coop might seek to concentrate on supplying other worker coops or consumer coops. These are examples of a “cooperative economy,” in which an objective is “the creation of a social structure capable of supplanting … profit-making industry.”

Pragmatically, however, inter-cooperative sourcing can be a challenge, as it can be time-intensive simply to find a coop seller; one can imagine, however, a role for cooperatives associations to respond to this dilemma by creating a coop-centered version of the Social Purchasing Portals currently used by a small but growing number of city governments to connect purchasers and sellers who are mutually commitment to “social economy” values.

Another example of inter-coop cooperation is the development of means of financing for coops. Under-capitalization is a chronic problem in the coop sector; this explains the disproportionate number of worker-coops in lines of business that are often more labour intensive rather than capital intensive. Credit unions are hence of strategic importance in the development of a cooperative sub-system. To see these dynamics at work we can turn again to MCC. An ethos of inter-cooperation has been integral to Mondragón since its early days. The success of MCC is often attributed to Caja Laboral, which was positioned at a nodal point within a wider multifunctional coop to aggregate coop surplus and to redistribute it to meet the needs of, and expand, the network of coops.[54] One of the premises behind Caja Laboral is that retaining local jobs depends upon maintaining local control over savings. Caja Laboral retains the surplus, and offers loans, at affordable interest rates, to new coops, and also manages a fund that aids coops in periods of financial need. In addition to these forms of direct financial support, Caja Laboral also offers MCC coops “extensive research assistance on technologies, products, and markets, (and) in-depth training in cooperative principles of management.”[55] The new coops that are supported with the collective’s surplus potentially provide services or manufacture goods that serve the needs of other coops in the network, and therefore reduce MCC’s reliance on external capitalist suppliers.

There are also examples of coops and associations based in the North establishing education programs where groups of people visit the South and aid communities in setting up coops, as an approach to cooperative international development.

Practices of cooperation among coops suggest the possibility that within the overall global system of capital a non-capitalist sub-system might grow its counter-power, reduce reliance on the primary system, and potentially render it redundant. In inter-coop cooperation we see at least a nascent possibility of how the social product of the labour commons can contribute to the expansion of a new system which seeks to continually enlarge its autonomy.”

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.