Many socialists in the Imperial Core today see creating co-ops as a way to combat capitalism. In co-ops, they say, there are no owners extracting surplus value from the workers. Therefore, the existence of co-ops both prevents Capital from exploiting workers and demonstrates to the working class, as a whole, that it’s not necessary to have a separate owner class.
To understand why this co-op solution is counter revolutionary, we need to start with the basics. Rather than taking ownership of the means of production for their class, a member of a worker co-op has personally taken ownership of their own means of production. They’ve become joint owners of an enterprise in which the workers collectively own the means of production for their private benefit. Workers in a co-op operate their own business. In other words, they’re no longer members of the proletariat, but members of the petit bourgeoisie.
Members of the proletariat, we’ll remember, have nothing to sell but their labour power, and must depend upon the sale of their labour power for everything necessary to their subsistence. This puts them in direct opposition to the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production and are driven to rent the labour power of the proletariat for the lowest possible fee.
This direct opposition of the two classes, the natural tendency of wages to sink to subsistence levels under capitalist production, and the natural development of brutal working conditions, all combine to make the proletariat a revolutionary force. The proletariat, as Marx famously said, have nothing to lose but their chains.
That isn’t so for the petit bourgeois, co-op joint owner; (let’s call them what they are, since they’re not merely workers.) The co-op joint owner is in a competitive business relationship against a small section of the bourgeoisie. They don’t depend on the bourgeois class as a whole to provide them with employment necessary for survival. They create products or services, using their own means of production, and sell them in direct competition against other businesses in their industry. Truly this sounds like a revolutionary class that’s inevitably driven to overthrow the bourgeoisie!
Or, as Marx said in The Manifesto of the Communist Party:
“The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”
These co-op joint owners have clear incentives to work against the proletarian revolution for as long as they’re able to maintain their own privileged position. Only when they face the threat of becoming members of the proletariat will they find their revolutionary spirit and fight the bourgeoisie. Consequently, these joint owners in each industry, and in each co-op, will want to join the workers at different points in time, if at all. Far from empowering a mass of revolutionary allies, the widespread creation of worker co-ops – if such a thing is even possible – would create small, occasional groups of resentful allies. The rest of the time they’d be allies of the bourgeoisie.
Yet people who promote the creation of worker co-ops tell us that it will help take power away from the bourgeoisie and hand it to the workers. They can only do this by using obfuscating terms like ‘working class’ or ‘the workers’ however. As soon as we start talking about the proletariat and the petit bourgeoisie, their whole illusion falls apart. The liberal individualism they’re really promoting becomes clear: petit bourgeois, individual ownership of the means of production, rather than the collective ownership of the means of production by the proletariat as a class.
The co-op movement, like democratic socialism, is another type of reformism. It’s counter revolutionary and promoting it, even unwittingly, makes you an enemy of the proletariat. The people who promote these strategies are either so lacking in political education that they don’t understand why it’s impossible to reform your way to socialism, or they’re doomers who’ve secretly given up on the idea of revolution.
There’s no shame in falling into the former camp. Political education is an ongoing process, after all. But if we really want to organize the workers for class struggle, our job is to build the communist parties, labour unions, and other mass organizations. The proletariat isn’t going to reform the economy with co-ops, it’s going to take ownership of the economy by seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie.
