This post started off as a response to a post at Joe Clement’s blog. It got long enough that I figure it should be it’s own post; it got long enough that it seemed rude to put it as a comment. Joe’s post is about a video by Richard Wolff. I haven’t watched the video yet. I haven’t had time yet in a spot where I could watch an online video. From what I’ve read at Joe’s, Wolff is arguing for workers to start their own businesses, for worker cooperatives. Joe said this isn’t a socialist view but rather a syndicalist one.
I quibbled with Joe, I hope not pedantically, saying that I don’t think co-ops are a syndicalist project but rather a mutualist or cooperativist one (I forget the terms). I’m not sure I’m using ’syndicalist’ the right way, but I associate the term with a view that emphasize conflict between waged workers employers at the immediate point of production. That’s my basic view. e may not share my view on the importance of that kind of activity, but either way I think it’s quite different from workers starting their own business. Put simply, I don’t get what makes a worker run business all that different from any other small business. I guess they don’t hire other workers, maybe, in which case they’re not exploiting others’ labor power (thougy many worker run co-ops do hire other workers). Still, I don’t think that’s an avenue out of capitalism. I favor the syndicalist take and I don’t much fancy the mutualist/cooperativist one. Joe replied saying, I think, that to him Wolff’s emphasis is on workers’ control of production whether of a union or co-op perspective and neither is a socialist perspective.
I respectfully disagree with Joe on one thing, again a quibble and again I hope I’m not being pedantic, about this being a socialist view or not. By at least one definition, this is a socialist view. I think my view is basically the classic view held by a number of people in the Industrial Workers of the World in the organization’s heyday, many of whom were themselves socialists - members of the US socialist party, prior the SP’s expulsions around 1912 or 1913. I tried to argue here that the IWW had something like a vision of revolutionary transition. (I recognize that the implied definition of socialism I’m appealing to here is not the only definition. For instance, arguably, actually existing socialists might hold or have held views which aren’t quite socialist ideas. I’m not going to get into this or argue for this definition, just noting that it’s there and one according to which what I’m saying could be a considered a socialist view. Arguably, so could the cooperativist/mutualist view, based on the same sort of appeal to history. That doesn’t make it right, which I recognize is the more important question and one I’ve not really addressed here.)
That said, Joe’s post gets to a problem in my thought, a transformation problem of sorts. My basic view is that the main goal for anticapitalists (whatever term we want to use - socialist, communist, anarchist, whatever) should be to build up the forces of revolution. In my view, this will best come about through building mass working class organizations. I don’t think our goal should be the redistribution of wealth under capitalism. The goal I think a key piece of this *is* about redistribution, but redistribution is not the end but rather a means. The way redistribution is achieved has to be a means to the end of building for the revolution. But, there’s this transformation problem. That is, how exactly does the activity I’m talking about help build for the revolution? I accept that there’s a gap in my thinking here (having rejected the seizure of state power by electoral or any other means). My grasp of the theory of transition isn’t sufficient. The FdCA might be one source to look to for getting clearer on this.
*
On a somewhat related note, below is a draft of a post I was working on the other day.
A movement?
I got into a mild argument with some comrades recently about slogans and vague goals. The argument was about movement building. I don’t find “movement” very useful. I think those things which people call movements are well and good, but I don’t find it helpful to say our goal is movement building. I think there are too many intermediate steps to this and I think those steps are the main things we need right now. I think the emphasis right now should be on building organizations. My friend Chuck puts it this way: movements are the fluff around organizations. I think this is overstated but the point is basically right. Build organization. That’s the route to movements. There certainly are spontaneous movements, but their character as spontaneous rules them out as a goal. Furthermore, Sergio Bologna’s point should be remembered, that spontaneity is microscopic organization - spontaneity really means rapid organization which happens under the analytical radar. More simply, many actually existing movements we can point have/had organizations as a key determinant: the labor movement, the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the trotskyist movement, the anarchist movement… you name it.
Another way to put this is that a key component of movements are relationships between groups, both official and collective ones as well as individual relationships across groups. Individuals outside of organizations can and often do participate in organizations, but organizations play a crucial anchoring role. I suppose there could be movements without organizations, in the sense of formal bodies, but I want to say that such movements would have informal groupings playing the same role - acting as de facto organizations.
Like I said, I think a key component of movements are relationships between groups. I think there are two or three very basic functions that make sense tied to this. One is to build new groups. Another is to build up existing groups. Both of those likely include networking within a group. A third is to network across existing groups, on a member to member basis.
[Not included here is a crucial distinction, that I characterize as that between mass and political, whether organizations or movements. There are mass organizations and mass movements, and political organizations and political movements. The borders of the terms may be fuzzy but I think the distinction is important. Not going to get into this now though.]
I don’t think your remarks were pedantic. In fact, you’re probably right about my loose use of the word syndicalist. I already responded a bit on my own blog to your comment, but I’ll also say that I see the syndicalist response as wanting to degrade the oppressive conditions of capitalism from within as opposed to from without via the State, which as any good Marxist knows is not “outside” the market.
I agree with you that re-distribution is not the goal per se of most Marxist or otherwise seriously anti-capitalist movements. Re-distribution on its own resonates too well with the rags-to-riches myth, which is why I think Obama feels okay invoking it. Obama’s response to “Joe the Plumber” is that, now that he’s successful, Obama wants to make sure that those “behind” him (i.e. behind him on the route from rags to riches) have a chance at success too. The obvious problem with this is that no one should be in ‘rags’ in the first place, and creating a human community where this is realized is the point of most anti-capitalist movements.
Comment by Joe Clement — October 30, 2008 @ 11:35 pm
Joe,
I agree that there are seriously problems with Woolf’s proposal, but I probably come at it from a different angle than you do. Above, and in your post at your blog, you seem to equate socialism with action via the State, implying perhaps something similar to the Leninist interpretation of Marx’s ambiguous claims about “the dictatorship of the proletariat”? But there are many forms of socialism and communism, not to mention Marxism, that don’t see the State as the only arbiter of class struggle, or the only force that can contravene capitalism. And there are many, me included, who think that such socialisms that locate anti-capitalist agency only within the State are ultimately merely “re-distributionist” in character. To put it another way, and to use the terms of your critique of Woolf: for me, there’s simply no way to address the capitalist mode of production without addressing the relations of productions. All socialisms that don’t address the relations of production are redistributionist in character. I take this to be the chief failure of actually once-upon-a-time existing socialisms, whatever their achievements. That doesn’t mean redistribution isn’t worth struggling for, nor does it mean we should ignore the problem of the state, only that such forms of action are unlikely, in my humble view, to bring an end to capitalism. Indeed, as I see it, one of the problems with Woolf’s proposal is that it doesn’t adequately address the relations of production. For example, even if the collective of janitors and the collective of software programmers end up getting the same share of the average rate of profits from the market, the former group have pretty shitty jobs and the latter have pretty good ones. In other words, the problem of division of labor gets ignored under this proposal. And finally, another reason why Woolf’s proposal is also inadequate is that it doesn’t address the problem of inter-collective competition. These groups would end up competing against each other for larger or smaller shares of the average rate of profit. This is where, I think, syndicalism of the sort Nate favors would be different–in that it would envision an inter-collective organization that coordinates production through means other than market-driven competition. . .In effect, this is what did exist/happen among anarcho-syndicalists in Spain. Ultimately, for me, the nature (and class character) of this co-ordination is what would determine whether or not such collectives would give way to a durable, egalitarian society or not.
I should note, though, that I do assume that Woolf isn’t really proposing a few collectives here and there, but a collectivization of “all” industries, even if it began industry by industry. If you had such a total collectivization, and the kind of organization above, I’m not sure it’s something we should scoff at. Granted, there’s much that could go wrong there, but if you did that you could begin to unhitch production from the market, or unhitch the production of necessaries and basic goods from the market–in other words, you could make those things free.
I agree, though, that this requires political force and begs the question of destroying/seizing/forcing the power of the state. And there are significant debates to be had about which of those alternatives are the right ones.
Comment by Jasper — October 31, 2008 @ 12:21 am
hi
I watched that video and must say didn’t hear Wolff offering his software design start up anecdote as any kind of socialism; he was using it to illustrate that while the usualy dogma these students of economics will hear points to the creativity of capitalism and suggests it is due to the wisdom of the market, the wisdom of finance, so that investor control is a good thing generally, in fact capitalist entrepreneurs themselves prefer to make their own decisions, and then he suggests their businesses do better in the sense of producing more of these vaunted social goods “capitalism” brings to humanity, than companies whose strategies are dictated by management thinking of shareholder value ort venture capitalists who aren’t skilled workers etc. I don’t think he’s suggesting software start ups are socialistic, just that worker management is really recognised as better by capitalist entrepreneurs themselves though the economists deny it.
It’s a contrast to negri, whose argument was that because these kinds of skilled workers can basically buy the means of prodiuction of their product -(software) on amazon with a credit card (don’t have to seize it from capital, not like coca plantations or coltan mines that way, but the tools of the immaterial labourer are supercheap thanks to genocidal imperialist policis) they have a revolutionary potential. They can work/produce software without going to work for a big company. But for negri this means revolutionary potentials in freelance and software entrepreneurship. I don’t think Wolff is suggesting this at all - he’s not saying these start up companies are not capitalist or are anticapitalist. He ois just bringing them into evidence against some dogma about worker management, to show that in fact capitalism favours it, or ought to because the labour aristocracy is kept happier and make better search engines and online advertisements when they’re not being dictated to by know nothing investors and shareholders and boards.
Comment by chabert — October 31, 2008 @ 2:20 pm
hey y’all,
I’ve still not made time to watch the video, I need to do that. For now, Jasper said better than I did a lot of what I had in mind (I didn’t have that clear in my head). All I really was trying to establish in this post was that this view, mine and Jasper’s and others, has been called a socialist view by some adherents who called themselves socialists, and could conceivably be called one now. That’s an admittedly minor point and feels a bit like hair-splitting, hence my worry about being pedantic. The real issue is whether or not this view is *right* - it could be a socialist view that’s wrong, which is I think what Joe thinks, based on his post. I didn’t get into that yet, Jasper got more into that than I did.
One thing I want to add, piggybacking on Jasper’s comment. I don’t mean to put down co-ops or their importance. I just don’t think they’re as important for a viable revolutionary as some folk I know think they are (I live in Minnesota and there’s a real lot of co-ops up here, unfortunately a lot of worker co-ops have stopped being worker co-ops). I do think Jasper has a good point about cooperativization of whole industries. This may be simplistic, but I see it as like workplace struggles help set the lines of possible conditions while co-ops act within those lines. So workplace struggles can push back firms that compete with co-ops, alleviating some of the pressure on co-ops that comes from that competition.(Co-ops could also undercut conditions in other firms, though.)
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 31, 2008 @ 2:35 pm
In Minneapolis The Wedge Coop, just had layoffs.
Having not seen the video, my instincts are with Joe.
You don’t have islands of socialism, in a sea of capitalism.
Comment by Renegade Eye — October 31, 2008 @ 5:25 pm
fer yer convenience:
Wolff says “sure let’s regulate by all means. Let’s try to make a reasonable economic system that doesn’t allow the grotesque abuses that I’ve described….but let’s not have the self destruct button. This time the change has to include the following. The people in every enterprise who do the work of that enterprise will become collectively their own board of directors. For the first time in American history, we will make the people who depend on the survival of those regulations, whose quality of life, whose chances for a future, depend on a society not allowing this to happen again, will be in a position of having those resources – that is the profits, of their own work - and making sure that those are not utilised by some board of directors elected by and responsible to shareholders doing what we know they’ll do because we’ve seen them do it in the last fifty years.
“Now let me conclude by packaging what I’ve just said which might come as a bit of a shock to some of you in the language that makes it easier for Americans to digest.
“Okay here we go.
“This proposal democratises the enterprise.
That must be good right? I used democracy. That word is good. It must be. Everybody believes in that, that’s like motherhood and apple pie.
Democratises, in what sense? It says that the people who work in the enterprise, kind of the front line of those who have to live with what it does, where it goes, how it uses its wealth, they should be the people who have influence over the decisions. Let’s do that, that’s democracy.
Maybe we could even extend this argument we could say, that the democracy in our political life, which, you know, leaves a little bit to be desired, some people call it a formal democracy that isn’t real, maybe the problem akk aloing has been that you can’t have a real democracy politically if you don’t have an economic democracy underpinning it. If the workers are not in charge of their own lives, five days a week, nine to five, the basic time of their life, how much appetite are they going to have to control their political life when they’re not too exhausted on that Saturday to go to a meeting. Maybe we need the democracy of economics not just to prevent regulations from being undone, but in order to realise the political goals of democracy.
Another way to put this. If workers were to be their own collective board of directors, then a job description would be different. And I thought I’d conclude with an example, one that I use a lot which I owe to a graduate student named Kenny Levin who wrote this dissertation for Stephen. It goes like this. And its based on a company, many companies in Silicon valley in California. Every year engineers quit their jobs in big companies. They quit because some idiot supervisor tells them what to do, and they hate their jobs at Oracle or other places. The have to wear jacket and tie which they hate. They have to sit in a stuffy office – they don’t want to do any of that. They say it stifles their creativity and above all it makes them very unhappy. They wanna go and live and work differently, and together with people who feel the same way, they each carry their little laptop to Harry’s garage, Harry’s one of them, and there they arrive with Bermuda shorts on, with a Hawaiian shirt, Frisbee, dog, enough marijuana to get through the day. And they enjoy their work. They have a really good time. Monday through Thursday they work the way they always did making software programs. On Friday, they don’t, they come to work, with Frisbee, with dog, the whole bit, but on that Friday, they sit around and they decide what to do with the profits they make. What technology to develop. They function as their own collective board of directors. And what Kenny discovered was when you talk to these people, because you talk to them, when you write books about these people, and books have been written, these people say I’m much happier than I’ve ever been. I’m much more productive than I’ve ever been. And then they point out with great pride that most of the great breakthroughs in computer technology and telecommunications achieved over the last fifty years have been achieved by firms like that. What kind of firms would that be? Karl Marx called those firms communist. Which means that the great breakthroughs of technology for the last fifty years that have been claimed by capitalism – that’s a mistake. They have been the achievements of communism. They were the achievements of people who walked away from their jobs in the capitalist enterprise and voted with their feet to organise an enterprise completely differently, an enterprise in which the workers were their own collective board of directors. So the story I’m describing to you, the proposition I’m making to you is not only a way to cope with this crisis in such a manner as will not repeat the sad story of regulation that undoes itself. It’s also a story of something that workers in America have already been doing. That they’re not conscious that it’s communist that’s a kind of reflection on their education. That these people are not only not communist but most of these engineers are members of the Republican Party – that’s understandable. It’s America. They define what they did as – ready? – innovative entrepreneurship. Okay you could call it a yellow banana I don’t care. What’s important here is how they changed things. That is, the solution to this problem requires that the socialist proposal not be understood anymore as it so often is in America as having something to do with what the government is going to do or not do. The socialism I’m talking about begins and focuses at the bottom, on the kind of radical reoriganisation of production that’s long overdue anywhere in our society, simply on the grounds of democracy, but is now a viable opposition, because a movement that said this to the American people as they struggle with their fear and apprehension about where this is going is a movement that could get a response that would make socialism come out of the margins of our culture and enter the mainstream. I’ve been giving this talk for the last five weeks in a thousand places. I’ve gotten more invitations to do this, more response in the last five weeks, than the previous twenty five years of my life. Something is going on. ”
Comment by chabert — October 31, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
Real quick - Renegade Eye, whether or not aco-op is more like (and is a contribution to a movement toward) socialism is another matter, but the Wedge doesn’t count as a co-op for the purposes of this discussion. It’s a consumer co-op, not a worker co-op, it’s worker co-ops that we’re on about here. I don’t see much difference between consumer co-ops and any other company that has shareholders.
cheers,
Nate
ps- thanks Colonel.
Comment by Nate — October 31, 2008 @ 10:57 pm
Hi Chabert,
Ha! I just made my own impromptu transcript of the Woolf video but then by the time I came back to post it, you’d beat me to the punch.
But seriously, then, and with all due respect, given that you have the talk in front of you, isn’t it obvious that Woolf is, in fact, claiming that this is the model for socialism (and what’s more, “communism”)?. He calls the products of these Silicon Valley cooperatives “the achievements of communism.” It could hardly be more unequivocal. And if you’re going to claim this is some sort of po-faced high burlesque, I’ll tell you right now that I don’t buy it. He’s deadly serious, and he really does believe that this is the way forward. The title of the talk is, after all, “Capitalism Hits the Fan: A Socialist Solution.”
The talk can be found here: http://links.org.au/node/676. And the parts quoted above are at 34:00 or so. There’s also an short piece at MRZine where he makes the same sort of pitch, which I offer as further evidence that he thinks of these collectives as anticapitalist:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/wolff141008.html
Comment by Jasper — October 31, 2008 @ 11:10 pm
I rarely post successfully on this blog. Much gets wiped out. bummer.
Comment by troutsky — November 2, 2008 @ 1:46 pm
Trout I’m sorry about that. I don’t understand the mechanics of what does and doesn’t work here. i’ve taken to writing a lot of my own comments in a text editor/word processing program then copying them and pasting them.
Re: Wolff’s specific example, I still need to watch the talk and read the article that Jasper linked to. From the discussion here, this reminds me of some stuff on the edu-factory list that I objected to here:
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/01/05/would-an-autonomous-university-accomplish/
(The responses to my objections on that list mostly amounted to denying my claim that this is basically cooperativism.) I think MJ’s comments there on that post are particularly relevant to this discussion. Anyhow, the example of silicon valley as the site of the co-op is interesting and that’s what reminded me of the edu-factory post. I don’t want to be unsympathetic, and I really know little about that industry, but my impression is that software engineers have it fairly good as jobs go. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t organize, but it does mean that I’m not sure how to tell if their co-ops are radical or if they’re increasing divisions in their industry, one which I believe involves pretty strong hierarchies between the different workers who make the industry happen (ie, I’m not sure that mass exodus of software engineers from silicon valley makes a difference, or a positive difference anyway, for assembly workers, receptionists, janitors, etc). This isn’t an argument, but at a gut level I’m less excited about cooperativization the higher up on the labor food chain we go.
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 2, 2008 @ 3:54 pm
” isn’t it obvious that Woolf is, in fact, claiming that this is the model for socialism (and what’s more, “communism”)?. ”
I guess yeah. when i first saw it, it sounded like a joke, because he leads in with all this about hgaving to talk not to frighten the americans, so the way he says “that’s commmmmmyooooonissssst’ i thought he was just sort of joking saying look, the basic principles of communism are nothing strange or scary. then he emphasises these guys who do this are republicans. we understand they are exploiting labour, just they don’t wanna be exploited - why should you?
but when i went to type it, i thought, maybe yeah he’s implying its also a bit serious. which is a pity. i don’t think he believes that’s communism or that it fits in with his general proposal.
Comment by chabert — November 2, 2008 @ 4:53 pm
” if you’re going to claim this is some sort of po-faced high burlesque, I’ll tell you right now that I don’t buy it”
well okay; i admit when i first listened this is just how i took it, as high burlesque, for the crowd. wishful thinking perhaps… since he, you know, has all the mannerisms and the accent and everything of all the good old reds who raised me, and that’s kind of the routine - “shareholders are communistic why shouldnt you be? works for them.”
Comment by chabert — November 2, 2008 @ 5:03 pm