Communes or cooperatives
By Solidarity Economy Assocation. Illustration by Rory Robertson-Shaw.
Traditional capitalist businesses are dictatorships. Small groups of managers and shareholders make all decisions, and reap most of the profits. In contrast, a workers’ cooperative is a business where the employees own and control everything. Workers are members, which means they have an equal say in decision-making and decide how profits are invested.
However, cooperatives do maintain some of the logic of private property. True, if the entire economy were made up of cooperatives, there would no longer be any capitalists, and everyone within a firm would be equal owners. However, the logic of market exchange would impel the cooperatives to act in competition with one another in much the same way as in capitalism. Each would have to lower costs, raise productivity, and find new markets to survive. This dynamic would make them behave less like a democratic alternative and more like a self-managed version of capitalism, with a 'collective capitalist' of workers councils replacing individual capitalists and shareholders. By examining the historical situation in Yugoslavia and Spain, we can identify these problems and how to overcome them.
Yugoslavia
Following the Tito-Stalin split in 1948, Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union. Developing a critique of the authoritarian bureaucracy and the lack of genuine workers’ control in the USSR, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia introduced workers’ self-management in industry, transferring partial control from the state to cooperative businesses. Factories, farms, and offices were run by a workers’ council elected by employees. These councils determined hiring, investment, wage, and production goals. In theory, this gave workers some real control in their workplaces and replaced bureaucratic central planning with participatory democratic control- although it was always partial, as many decisions were still taken at the state/regional level and by political organs.
The market mechanism and workers’ councils
However, alongside workers’ control, Yugoslavia also utilised the market mechanism, meaning each enterprise had to be financially self-sufficient, selling its products and services to others and covering its own costs, which created a problem of parochialism. Yugoslav workers’ self-management meant an effective fusion of capital and labour, as workers took on the logic of capital into their hearts and souls. Each enterprise competed with one another by cutting costs and competing with others for contracts, labour and access to credit. Those firms that failed to do so would go bankrupt (although the state often intervened at this stage). Decisions that might have benefited all of society, such as supporting weaker industries or redistributing surpluses to poorer areas or people, were difficult to justify when each cooperative was struggling to survive and make a profit on its own. This ultimately produced a highly geographically divided society, which partially contributed to Yugoslavia's eventual fracture along ethnic lines in the 1990s.
The hard limits that workers’ co-ops face when operating within a market-exchange context significantly curtail their ability to shape their own world. Of course, the fact that Yugoslavia was also under the tight control of an authoritarian one-party state, which meant workers had little control over their lives outside of production, remains another vital factor in the equation.
Spanish Revolution of 1936
The Spanish Revolution of 1936 is one of the most significant revolutions in terms of workers’ self-management. Led by the approximately 1.5 million-strong anarcho-syndicalist unions, many areas of Spain not under the control of General Franco were collectivised and turned into cooperatives under the control of workers and peasants. These communes and workers councils, often organised through federations and unions, attempted to share resources and plan production together. Unlike in Yugoslavia, people attempted to build a system of industrial federations that did not rely on market competition between enterprises. Instead, they sought to replace the market altogether through direct cooperation and mutual aid.
This was more or less successful depending on the area. In many rural areas, especially in Aragon and parts of Catalonia, a form of libertarian communism was established, where money was abolished, and peasants collectivised the land to form communes. Work teams would add all produce from their workday to a communal store, from which people could take items either for free or based on labour vouchers, depending on the scarcity of the product. They would also collectively decide on production decisions.
Although coordination between villages was initially scattered, by the time of the May 1937 clashes in Barcelona and subsequent government repression, which fatally weakened the revolution, industrial federations of supply across areas were starting to be established. In the cities and towns, a similar situation of generalised workers’ control took place. However, these collectivised workplaces faced some of the same market pressures as Yugoslavia. Whilst many urban collectives tried to federate supply and coordinate production, many para-market exchanges continued to occur. Whilst this balance between coordination and competition between collectives varied by sector and region, Spain didn’t totally overcome the problems that Yugoslavia would also face.
Cooperatives or communes
These examples are not to say that cooperatives are not a valuable part of social movements. On the contrary, they are an important part of how social movements can gain strength. But we must always bear in mind that even a fully cooperative economy doesn’t necessarily overcome the capitalist system. As we have seen from history, when workers control exists in a system of market exchange, the law of value continues to discipline firms to market pressure. This can lead to a situation in which there is only a change of ownership from individual capitalists to a ‘collective’ capitalist- whilst this may be slightly better for workers, it is still ultimately a form of self-managed capitalism.
To overcome the law of value and capitalism, we need to fundamentally change how work, production, and life are organised at the root. Many theorists and critics argue that a substantial share of contemporary work is socially unnecessary and so could be reduced. Angry Workers put the figure at approximately 20% of the work currently carried out as necessary for society to reproduce itself- the other 80% being unnecessary labour and bullshit jobs. We need a total reorganisation of production that results in massive reductions in work time and changes how we relate to other people —not just a change of owners.
The commune
We can see in these examples that a preferable model is forms of social ownership via communes and confederation based on workplace and community councils rather than individual cooperatives. An isolated cooperative in a competitive market economy will be forced towards parochialism and a lack of concern for others, unlike a commune, which is an integrated part of a whole social organism. One proposed alternative is the participatory economics model developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, which outlines decentralised planning, workers’ and consumers’ councils, and nonmarket allocation as a theoretical framework for replacing market allocation and central planning.
There are, of course, other examples of the spectre of the commune, aside from the examples here. From Paris in 1871, to Ukraine in 1917, to the Zapatista autonomous government, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) and the Venezuelan communal movement, among many others. Ultimately, none of these models is perfect, but what is important is that they are models that we can learn from to inform our own practice. Maybe there isn't such a thing as a final destination- but we can, as the Zapatistas, say, walk asking questions, whilst exploring what went wrong in the past, and how it can be different in the future.
Solidarity Economy Association is a worker-led cooperative based in England, Scotland & Wales working to overcome capitalism by building up the solidarity economy from below.
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