Worker Cooperatives: Creating Participatory Socialism in
Capitalism and State Socialism

 By Peter Ranis
 Professor Emeritus
 City University of New York

 October 1, 2012
 Democracy at Work

 http://www.democracyatwork.info/articles/2012/10/worker-cooperatives-creating-participatory-socialism-in-capitalism-and-state-socialism/

 Karl Marx in 1859, in A Contribution to the Critique of
 Political Economy, wrote of new modes of production
 developing within old forms. He wrote, "At a certain stage
 of development, the material productive forces of society
 come into conflict with the existing relations of production
 or with the property relations within the framework of which
 they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of
 the productive forces these relations turn into their
 fetters." This clearly is the breach into which working
 class cooperatives can enter today.

 In a world where capitalism and state socialism seem the
 only apparent alternatives, the Occupy movements in the U.S.
 as well as the recuperated enterprise movements in Argentina
 have been joined of late in Cuba by a significant public
 push to form worker cooperatives. This demonstrates
 forcefully, the demands among workers in all forms of
 political systems to aspire to worker self-management and
 democratic participation in their working lives.

 The recent Occupy movements in the US to resist home
 foreclosures, renegotiate student debt and rein in Wall
 Street financial prerogatives needs to also embrace the
 occupation of factories and enterprises that threaten to
 downsize, go off- shore or declare fraudulent bankruptcies
 as they prepare to move to cheaper labor venues.

 In Argentina over 200 worker cooperatives employing over
 12,000 workers have formed with the assistance of municipal
 and provincial expropriations. In the US we have the case of
 the Chicago Windows and Doors factory as a model that has
 formed a cooperative and is in search for financing to allow
 its workers to move forward. In Cuba, the government of
 Raúl Castro has had to bring the cooperative worker
 alternative into the public dialogue by way of the new 2011
 Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the
 Revolution. There are already several hundred small worker
 cooperatives in the US and a number of state-dominated
 agricultural cooperatives in Cuba. But now there is a
 growing understanding among public intellectuals, students
 and workers themselves that greater worker management and
 control of the work place will lead to increasing
 democratization and efficiency that promotes national
 development under both capitalist and socialist models.

 Cooperatives, whether in Argentina, Spain, Italy, Canada,
 Great Britain or the US have the virtue of fulfilling four
 features that provide the working class with both justice
 and equity.

 1) They are all encompassing ideologically, absorbing
 different sectors and individuals of the working class, be
 they radical, progressive, liberal or conservative in
 outlook.

 2) They share the potentiality of creating working class
 autonomy and a sense of class consciousness based on learned
 experiences in the process of production.

 3) They create a working class community setting beyond
 the factory or enterprise that promotes forms of both
 interest and involvement in politics, by way of their
 outreach programs into communities in cultural activities,
 creative arts, health care and continuing education.

 4) Once established, cooperatives are available for wider
 struggles against repressive capitalist and state socialist
 policies.

 In essence cooperatives represent democracy as a form of
 people's power rather than simply a capitalist state form of
 representative democracy or a state socialist form of
 centralized control structure. Today we have the
 "indignados" of Spain, the Wisconsin worker uprising, the
 Arab Spring and the US Occupy movements - all testimony to
 the potential of workers' response to injustice and support
 for rebellion for democratic causes.

 A prominent recent example points up the change in the
 political climate in the US. Many of us recall the case of
 the Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors factory that
 was unceremoniously closed in December of 2008 without the
 requisite two-month notice as stipulated by the US Warn Act.
 After six heroic days of occupation by most of the 260
 workers of the plant and significant support from local,
 state and national politicians, including President Barack
 Obama, the owners relented via a newly stipulated loan from
 Bank of America, which had just been bailed out by the
 federal government to the tune of $25 billion. Eventually a
 buyer was found from California called Serious Energy
 (formerly Serious Materials) which promised to rehire all
 the workers as they resumed production. Three years later
 only about a third of the workers had been rehired. By late
 February of 2012, the new owners again announced an
 immediate illegal shutdown. Again the workers occupied the
 plant asking for time to come up with a plan to find a new
 buyer or establish a worker- managed cooperative plant.
 This time because of the groundswell of community support
 arriving at the plant led by Occupy Chicago and Jobs with
 Justice, instead of taking six days, it took but eleven
 hours for the workers of Republic Windows to be given a
 three-month reprieve. The workers are now in the process
 of establishing New Era Windows Cooperative as the first
 large industrial cooperative in the US. One of the leaders
 of the workers, Armando Robles, spoke of plant occupations
 and worker cooperatives created in Argentina as their model.
 He also hoped that their struggle through occupation would
 become something repeated across the US and the world when
 workers face similar arbitrary closings. It should not be
 lost on workers in the US that the watchword for Argentine
 workers recuperating their factories was "Occupy, Resist,
 and Produce!"

 What is missing in this scenario is the act of public
 expropriation that has been used by municipal and provincial
 governments in Argentina. In the US we have the same legal
 mechanism to achieve worker-owned and worker-managed
 factories and enterprises. It is eminent domain. Eminent
 domain has been used for decades for the building of
 highways, airports, hospitals, municipal offices, schools,
 libraries, public parks, sport stadiums and arenas for
 reasons of urban development and public benefit. It is
 appropriate during this critical global recession to defend
 against the loss of jobs, to apply this same mechanism on
 behalf of the working class. It can be defended as
 preserving a public resource that redounds to community
 needs and survival. The time is ripe for American labor to
 pursue the strategy of eminent domain as public policy to
 protect the livelihood and promote the general welfare of
 millions of "at risk" workers. Plant and enterprise
 closings have severe negative repercussions and societal
 externalities on workers and communities. The collective
 social rights of workers who have built up the value of the
 firm through years of hard work and applying their know-how
 and skill have to be legally asserted. The companies cannot
 be free of societal obligations. By closing or outsourcing
 jobs they have broken a contract for which there must be
 reparations and consequences. In a very real sense the
 workers are keeping their place of work that they have
 fostered and developed over many years rather than taking it
 away from an irresponsible and profit-maximizing and
 aggrandizing private employer.

 In Cuba we find a similar groundswell developing on the
 edges of a society still basically dominated by party, state
 and government bureaucracies. The recent Communist Party
 Guidelines of 2011 point to a recognition that the political
 system must adapt to the needs of working class productivity
 and empowerment. The expropriation process will be
 unnecessary in Cuba, but the implementation of cooperatives
 will follow similar processes and procedures as workers
 begin to organize themselves into collective and
 democratically-run enterprises separate and autonomous from
 state dominance and controls.

 The cooperative initiatives in Cuba, scheduled for late 2012
 and early 2013 are being approached parallel to the more
 troubling unleashing of small entrepreneurial businesses
 with limitations on the number of employees. However, the
 state presumptions and rationale are similar: workers must
 be afforded greater autonomy and decision-making in order to
 be more productive and less alienated. The Cuban state
 seems to have decided that cooperatives are 1) both rational
 in that they will keep the laborers and employees in
 productive jobs and avoid unemployment, extreme social
 poverty and malaise that is dangerous to the Cuban state and
 2) it is doing the right thing by way of enhanced income
 distribution for the majoritarian class in Cuban society.

 Markets in the US and Argentina would continue under
 cooperative development and Cuba will decentralize its
 economy by various cooperative and entrepreneurial reforms.
 With the rise of cooperative federations, already in
 formation in Argentina, we can envision economies based over
 time on more and more worker ownership, control and
 management. The state's role continues but it becomes less
 a state penetrated by corporations (like the US and
 Argentina) nor a producer state (like Cuba's). Argentina,
 the US and Cuba continue their functions as regulatory
 states focusing on fiscal and monetary policy, trade,
 ecology and the environment, consumer protection, health and
 human rights, economic investment banking, infrastructure
 development, education, foreign and defense policy but
 surrendering over time the reins over the domestic economy
 and eventually the commanding heights of the industrial and
 service economy.

 To return to Marx once more. In his Inaugural Address to
 the Working Men's International Association in London in
 1864, he made an early assessment of worker cooperatives.
 He said, "The value of these great social experiments cannot
 be over- rated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have
 shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with
 the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the
 existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands;
 that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be
 monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion
 against the laboring man himself; and that, like slave
 labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and
 inferior form destined to disappear before associated labor
 plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind and a
 joyous heart."

 [Peter Ranis is professor emeritus of political science at
 the CUNY Graduate Center and York College, CUNY. He has
 written three books on comparative politics in Latin
 America, and labor and contemporary Peronism in Argentina.
 He has authored articles in the last several years on
 cooperatives, eminent domain and the social economy for
 Monthly Review On-Line, Socialism and Democracy, Working
 USA, Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas
 andSituations. He is an active member of the PSC/CUNY
 faculty and staff union's International Committee.]

 [Many thanks to Jen Hill of Democracy at Work for submitting
 this article to Portside.]

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