Greig de Peuter and Nick Dyer-Witheford asks whether the thrivability of the new cooperative movement requires a role for the state:

“The legacy of worker coops in socialist states is controversial. Not least because political autonomy and voluntary membership are among the longstanding principles of cooperativism, while socialist models have subordinated these values to state authority. It seems undeniable, however, that the creation, maintenance, and proliferation of worker coops today depend on the existence of state support of some kind. At minimum, there must be a legal framework recognizing the cooperative as a legitimate form of enterprise. Beyond this, governments may have varying levels of policy commitment to support the development of cooperatives. In this regard, the contemporary experiment in state-supported cooperativism that attracts most attention is the “cooperative revolution” in Venezuela.

Since the election of Hugo Chávez, cooperatives have become a prominent part of Venezuela’s national economic policy. In 1999 the Venezuelan constitution was revised to enshrine the state’s responsibility for the promotion and protection of coops; in 2001 a Special Law on Cooperative Associations was passed; and in 2003 the then newly created Ministry of Popular Economy broadened the range of government support for coop development by, for example, funding buy-outs and providing self-management training. When Chávez took office, fewer than 1,000 coops were registered (representing about 20,000 members). By 2006, more than 100,000 coops were registered (representing over one million members)–a third in commerce, restaurants, and hotels; another third in transport, storage, and communications; and the rest divided between agriculture, hunting and fishing, and manufacturing. While most of these coops are small, an important subset is comprised of large industrial cooperatives, which can be the result of a national expropriation policy that targets bankrupted firms and converts them into coops.

The relationship between the Venezuelan state and individual cooperatives is guided by the concept of “co-management.” Described as “an alternative to capitalism,” Lebowitz contrasts co-management to the system of Yugoslav self-management. In the latter, Lebowitz writes, “[t]he focus of workers within each firm was on their own self-interest.… What was missing was a sense of solidarity with society as a whole, a sense of responsibility to and responsibility for society.” Although the Yugoslav enterprises were state-owned, and viewed as social property, they functioned in the market and were driven by the interest of the workers in the confines of an individual enterprise.

Co-management, by contrast, implies both solidarity with communities external to the enterprise and state involvement in coop operations. Coops designated “social production enterprises” are obliged to set aside a portion of their surplus for local social uses; such policies regulating the distribution of surpluses attempt to embed coops in their local community. Co-management also seeks to achieve other policy objectives of the Venezuelan government, from combating unemployment to fostering local economic-development alternatives to dependency on foreign corporations. Above all perhaps, co-management refers to a state ownership stake, especially in firms operating in strategic industries; in expropriated plants in such industries, the ownership arrangements are such that the state owns 51%, workers 49%. Expropriated plants may be run by elected representatives of workers “alongside government appointees.”

Lebowitz contrasts the “triangle” of capitalism (private property, exploitation of labour, and production for profit) to Chávez’s “elementary triangle of socialism”: units of social property, social production organized by workers, and production for the needs of communities:

Co-management implies a particular kind of partnership–a partnership between the workers of an enterprise and society. Thus, it stresses that enterprises do not belong to the workers alone–they are meant to be operated in the interest of the whole society. In other words, co-management is not intended only to remove the self-interested capitalist, leaving in place self-interested workers; rather, it is also meant to change the purpose of productive activity. It means the effort to find ways both to allow for the development of the full potential of workers and also for every member of society, all working people, to be the beneficiaries of co-management.

The limits, contradictions, and obstacles to co-management in Venezuela are many. Venezuelan co-management is nonetheless perhaps the major experiment in popular economic participation so far in the twenty-first century.”