Co-operatives, capitalism and the IWW

I like the tone of this, comradely but critical, hopefully the IWW will respond to the constructive criticism. Of course this is standard criticism of co-operatives but since the IWW are chatting about this it's still very relevant.

Good article, and LOL at socialist realism espressos.

Personally, I'd have nothing against working in a 'workers cooperative' if it meant better conditions at work under capitalism and not being treated like shit every single day - though whether it does this long term is open to question. Similarly, I'd rather work for a boss who at least treats me like a human being rather than a boss who acts like a little Hitler and makes me miserable every day.

However, seeing cooperativism as anything other than a localised, immediate, temporary and partial solution at improving your working lifestyle is definitely a big mistake. And if cooperativism were taken as something more than a palliative measure to problems at work, then those involved would not only be on a hiding to nothing but would certainly place them at odds with the 'ablition of the wages system' bit in the preamble.

Meanwhile, what Steven says is 100% correct. And as Bob Miller once said, 'Smash hip capitalism!'

Edit: Hmm... looking at the image again, it does seem to imply that a 'barista cooperative' coffee house is not a 'capitalist coffee house'

Edit again: Wait a minute, unemployment doesn't exist by design as a check on the rate of inflation. That's just rubbish.

Ha, well I'm glad my MS paint skills are appreciated.

Also, I'm glad that the tone seems okay, because it can be difficult trying to offer constructive criticism.

Looking at the original image posted again, it has nearly 300 likes and over 200 shares in its original incarnation, so actually I think it probably was worth writing this.

As serge says, I also of course have no problem with people working in co-ops as such, especially if it does make your conditions slightly better. However setting up co-ops is not a revolutionary strategy or one which advances the interests of the working class as a whole, and as such isn't something we should promote. There are also dangers with it as described in the Mondragon example, in that workers at a capitalist enterprise facing pay cuts can take direct action such as strike action against it. But workers at a co-op cannot do this as they would just be striking against themselves.

Why did the IWW even produce this stupid picture? They don't AFAIK seek to create workers coops and why they would think advertising them would get people to sign up is beyond me.

Serge, I think the bit about unemployment and inflation is half or maybe a quarter right. When things were going well in the neoliberal era state policy was that unemployment shouldn't be allowed to fall below 5% because that would lead to inflationary wage rises.

Australia with IIRC 5.2% unemployment right now is considered to have full employment. A big change from the post-WW2 boom when it was widely considered that unemployment above 2% was certain electoral death for the party in power.

I think you are reading a lot of things into this graphic that isn't actually there. Nowhere in here is it claimed that coops aren't "subjected to competition and the whims of the market".

I don't know who made this, but I would assume that it was one of the existing IWW coffee shop coops, and that the graphic relates to this, and not to some utopian post-capitalist future.

All valid points Steven, now if you can just incorporate that critique into an easy-to-digest poster that will draw people into reading it......ahhh....

My work has recently changed to being a workers coop, and i much prefer it. Thats a 'reality' for me.

I am a member of the IWW.

I don't see this as constructive criticism, i see this as nit-picking, with an air of 'holier than thou' point scoring.

Sorry, I'm sure you consciously have the best intentions and i respect other things that you have written on Libcom, but thats how i feel.

a guy called Richard Myers made it, but it was also posted up by things like the official London Wobblies Facebook page.

Okay, saying it is about existing IWW coffee shop co-ops (do these exist BTW? Are these like US radical cafes?), how does showing this relate to telling people to join the IWW? To turn their capitalist coffee shops into them? Or to quit and set up their own IWW co-op? Or what?

FWIW it's my understanding that this isn't any official image but rather was made by one IWW member, who put his name in the lower corner of the image. So, this is just one member's opinion in a personal capacity.I'm also just one member speaking in a personal capacity here. I wish he had made it clear that this was just his thing and all that, and nothing official. This is something that we're really bad on in the IWW. The positive side is that people can make whatever literature they want for their uses and it represents them as an IWW member - I could put out anything I wanted in my workplace etc - but there are some obvious downsides. I don't know what the fix is, unfortunately. Or rather there's probly no good formal/policy fix and maybe the best response is conversation to shape what people will and won't want to put out. I dunno.

That aside, I agree with you on all points Steven. The only other thing I'd add is that co-ops facing competition have one option other than slash wages etc, which is to go more niche market: make the co-op part of their brand and market themselves to people for whom that would be a selling point. That's a really minor detail and doesn't change any of the political points you make here, I just thought it was worth pointing out because there are some worker owned co-ops where I live that do this.

Oh yeah, I guess one other thing - in some cases this isn't an abstraction. Like, in the coffee industry, the idea that baristas at Coffeebucks will quit and open their own coffeeshop is really, really unlikely because of the combination of cost to enter the coffeeshop market and baristas low wages. For other markets, though, wages are higher and entry costs are lower (in the trades and in service-provision). Off the top of my head I know of three examples where individual IWW members have stopped working in a campaign and instead started a co-op. This has happened once with a bike messenger, a house cleaner, and someone in home construction/maintenance (that last one might have been someone who was organizing in a different industry then went into construction, it was like 6-7 years ago and I can't remember the details). I don't fault people deciding individually that they can make better pay and have better conditions this way, but it's frustrating to lose organizers this way and it's doubly frustrating if people act like their making some kind of positive political step by doing so.

How did that change happen? Did you leave your previous job and get a new one at a co-op? Do you think this is something which is applicable to all workers?

And how about looking at work other than your own. For example, I work in the public sector in children's services. The government is encouraging workers in my sector to set up cooperatives to take over the services -to privatise public services and cut wages and conditions. Do you not think this means that cooperatives are not always a good thing?

Thanks Nate, interesting points. On this one:

yes, I agree with you. There is a market for "ethical" or even "radical" consumerism, but because this would mean higher prices it will always be a small niche and can never be generalisable for workers as a whole.

I think using this a a stick to beat the IWW is stupid, as it's just one image produced by one guy and put about a bit on social media. I dont think Steven's doing that, more using the image as a hook to hang an argument which many in the IWW probably agree with.

While I more or less agree with the criticisms of co-ops, I think there's a few points it's easy to miss. In no particular order:

- Agitational propaganda is basically about puncturing 'capitalist realism' by getting people to imagine things being different. This image does that using a visual representation of piles of cash for the boss vs equal distribution. Obviously taken literally that's not 'the abolition of the wage system', but agitationally it gets people to question the 'right' of private property, and could lead to questions like 'if all wages are equal, why do we need wages at all?' So while it's not 'politically correct', it lays down the gauntlet to represent communist ideas with simlar visual immediacy imho.

- As Nate's says, not all competition is on price. If coffeebucks is serve shit burnt coffee, a premium independent co-op with a nice vibe might have a viable niche to survive in. A lot of the same pressures apply, but competition doesn't have to be head-to-head on price with the corporate chains. The cash that would have gone on management could conceivably be banked as a hardship fund to soften the impact of downturns etc too, mitigating against wage cuts and/or redundancies. So it's not impossible in principle for some co-ops in some niche markets to improve conditions and job security. But it's not generalisable, or a strategy for escaping capitalism or anything.

- Finally, I'm not sure coffee making is necessarily unskilled. Doesn't mean coffee shops would be the same thing in communism, but insofar as there's a skill to it and it requires specialist machinery, there's likely to be public social spaces where said machinery resides which may well be self-managed by a collective of coffeephiles, even if it's not a straight up worker-customer division. Where else will the communist hipsters sit all day with their macs and (now ironic) tomes on communisation theory?

Actually, I just remembered something related to this has, before, when the IWW posted a press release to our news section about the members of a worker co-operative joining the IWW en masse a little while ago: http://libcom.org/news/local-worker-owned-restaurant-joins-iww-10052011

Absolutely. And it works in a passive or diffuse way -- "we're different" as a general attitude in the workplace and as part of the message that the company sells to consumers -- but also in an active and direct way in some cases, when co-ops and associations of co-ops actively promote themselves and their ideology. These things are really shakey in the US as far as I know (this isn't a moment when co-ops are being promoted and isn't a moment conducive to new small companies, I think) so they're not a big deal, but I do know there have been federations of worker co-ops that tried to promote co-operativization (or whatever the word is). I'd prefer to shop at a co-op than a WalMart, like I'd rather buy fair trade than not, but the idea that it's a radical political thing... nah.

Edit: Gah, that was jumbled. What I mean is, I think that the social practice of co-op businesses encourage muddy ideas among workers and consumers. In addition, these companies and their associations sometimes actively promote a somewhat worked out ideology about co-ops which is another problem. This image fits with that, IMHO.

Here is a parallel exchange on Facebook with Larry Gambone, who also shared the image:

I forgot to add (which I will do now) that in response to the comment about getting improvements under capitalism (although of course these aren't on the cards at the moment, we can't even adequately defend our current standard of living, let alone improve it) that I think we could potentially do that, but the way we should get it is by collectively fighting our employers with direct action, not by "getting on our bikes" and setting up co-ops.

Got a good point about the fact coffee shops are useless junk (although caffeine junkies may disagree... lol) .

However, the idea that a co-op can´t be sucessful whithin the current system regarding the competition with big business, may be revised.

In fact the all idea of a co-op (if it's meant to be sucessful), is that it should be fully integrated within the community (and members of the community should be part of the co-op), and therefore provide or facilitate the acquisition of goods and services which are sought after by the community.

I can tell you that around here there are some sucessfull agricultural co-ops (some not officially registered, because good communication is all people need) in which different farmers and costumers(substantial part of the local population and many non-locals) working together, are able to provide good quality produce at competitive prices against big supermarket chains.
I can tell you the people involved don't think twice about where they'll go to get the merchandise.

More over, in a co-op the idea is not to work according to fixed wages and working hours. Is a bit of blood, sweat but no tears because the hapiness come from the fact that people working together, have better chances to overcome or mitigate the enslavement of salaried work just for the sake of the salarie, regardless of life itself.

Actually, the proliferation of useful co-ops (food, energy related, etc) everywhere, would be an excellent way of attacking the current system by rendering it obsolete, simply by diverting people away from the crap they give, sell and impinge on us.

By the way, around here starbucks is generally considered crap and more expensive than our traditional coffee business. No way they'll get a foot hold soon, and the fact that drinking coffee is deep seated in social interaction which regularly happens in local pastry/coffee houses and restaurants, will eventually play an important role in delaying the invasion of that particular brand, at least.
Yeah, it's a bit of a community thing.

Nonetheless, a few things must be kept in perspective...
The success of a co-op or any other form of collective action resides largely in the hability of people being able to: overcome their differences, eliminate the pursue of individual power and profit out of their minds and get to work together towards common good.
Yes, that's hard for many!
I can tell you that I've seen some collective actions fail because some people with their selfisness of wanting to travel the world or some other personal craving (and using the results of collective hard work for fullfiling those personal dreams..) managed to blow up years of fruitful collective action.
With that, I'll finish citing something I've seen printed on a card board in some occupy movement somewhere:

"The strenght of the oppressor resides in the mind of the oppressed."

All the best

True. But it's always been a minor thing. What's happened over the past few years is a sort of cycling through of people. There's pretty predictably a handful of IWW members who have some positive ideas about co-ops and who are actively trying to do something about those ideas - promote the ideology, start co-ops, etc - and who are trying to get the broader IWW onboard/involved officially or get more IWW members involved. That rarely goes very far. There's turnover a lot among the people (so most of the active pro- co-op people I can think of have lasted maybe 2 years in their active promotion of co-ops). At any given time there's more or less people doing this but people seem to keep coming back through to take on those roles. Over all these are a really, really tiny fraction of IWW members (and we're a tiny organization, so it's a tiny fraction of a tiny group). I tried to say this but I don't think I was clear, I think some of this speaks to both strengths and weaknesses of the IWW. Officially speaking the organization has a lot of openness for a range of ideas and it's usually constructive internally within the organization/the membership as it actually exists. On the flip side, it leads to stuff being put out that I find annoying and we're not doing enough informally to create constructive discussions and stuff where we educate each other collectively as members. I think the IWW part of all this is probly the least interesting, though.

The most interesting bits I think are along these lines -

So, the IWW is a pretty organic organisation, and as already been mentioned this graphic was produced by someone becoming politically conscious but obviously he either hasn't grasped some of the "army of the unemployed" rhetoric or is outright ignoring it for the purpose of this graphic.

In the former case, well nobody is onboarded and expected to be super-solid politically (although I have taken to forcing new members to sit through a brief lecture on the IWW Preamble to the Constitution so that they at least start with common ground). And hell, going through the peer-guided learning that the union is very good at might produce interesting hybrid models of thought. The union doesn't really go in for ideological hegemony. You'll find in practice that if things like promoting co-op membership actively impacted organising drives then they would quickly be addressed. So critique this piece and the union all you want for individuals engaging in these sorts of behaviours, but its not like our fundamental behaviour changes. We just end up with this odd co-op section of the union, which, to be blunt, gives us some degree of flexibility if the assertions we make about co-ops as anti-capitalist institutions turn out wrong (I don't believe this by the way, I just remain prepared for multiple outcomes).

The latter case would probably be a post-Occupy thing in which I've seen many good political groups in North America (the IWW is in some ways the least bad in this regard) start producing rhetoric that is just cringe-worthy but probably very appealing to early naive participants of the movement. In this case, I see this graphic as part of a pattern of behaviour that I am very unhappy with, but its so widespread at this point that its not like we can really do anything about it.

I'm just guessing here but I bet a lot of those "shares" and "likes" on that graphic can be attributed to folks in the occupy movement and not just the IWW. Worker coops are huge inside occupy. There's a bit of controversy in the IWW with regards to our relationship to worker coops. There's some folks, like myself, who think they aren't something we should be very involved with while others feel they could be a source of member recruitment. How this builds us as a union I don't know but I try not to be a dick about this because a lot of folks are sincere. Also I really agree with Nate, a lot of bad politics is actually emotionally easier than organising - which is often very difficult. Things like worker coops are hard work but don't face the same amount of repression so I can understand why people make bad political decisions based on what are actually personal reasons, understanding this can go a long way to addressing how we turn this problem around.

Richard Myers has a large number of graphics that he does for the IWW, and many of them are very good. I think that, while there are the problems with coffeehouse image that have been very well hashed out above, there is a definite strength to it in it's weakness. It's very effective propaganda towards lefty-liberals ('progressives' in US political terms) in getting them to look at simply the stupidity of bosses, and advantages of a parecon or mutualist economy. It's a lot easier to bring people from parecon to lib communism than straight from liberalism to libcommunism.

Lot's of people would love to have a cafe with their friends. Just like an extended living room I presume. Obviously this is difficult under capitalism unless you have a trust fund to fall back on, and why the "crappy" bit.

Your later point about the Tory scheming and the threat of this affecting you is much more important imho.

People working for small businesses might not immediately relate to this though because often the manager is your biggest problem at work. Getting rid of the overhead spelled manager/owner would prolly improve many peoples life even if it doesn't bring you closer to the revolution.

Co-ops don't exist outside capitalism but you can at least have some say in how you are exploited which is an improvement for many. Workplace organizing isn't exactly killing capitalism atm either.

The arguments against co-ops are macro-scale which doesn't make them less important but amongst the compromises and less that ideal choices people have to make starting a co-op seems at worst harmless.

Yeah, as was said before, this dude makes his own graphics and slaps the IWW logo on it. This kind of usage is usually tolerated pretty widely unless it gets into making money. Like, a member of a certain anarchist political organization was doing one of those easy online deals where he sends them his designs or logos of other groups and they print out the tees on demand. The tees were on American Apparel, though, which has a history of union busting and sexual harassment of employees. We also had the same issue (t-shirts on AA) with one of the more well known radical book publishers. In the former case, the IWW intervened in an official capacity and in the latter, we intervened informally. That's really the only time when we deal with the use of our imagery and/or logo.

Co-ops have been accociated with working classmovements for a long time, although any fascination with them now in the States probably has more to do with the cooperative movement of the 1970s being one of the directions the white radical left splintered into. Here in the Minneapolis, which has quite a few co-ops rooted in this era, there were actually 'co-op' wars between those "who wanted personal liberation through the movement and those who wanted a working-class revolution". I think this broke down between hippie anarchists/liberals on one side and Maoists/Trots on the other. Someone wrote a book about this, actually.

Also, while the IWW's post-capitalist society has been historically vague, the term cooperative commonwealth is sometimes interpreted by some to be an economy of co-ops.

But yeah, I agree with Nate, there are some people who join the IWW to really push co-ops but they don't really get far. There are already cooperative associations that exist in any case, I'm not sure what they conceive the IWW can help with in that regard. I agree with EdmontonWobbly that people sometimes are drawn to them because its a relative easy to do.

That said, co-ops can be beneficial in many ways. In Madison, we met in one of Just Coffee's offices (not to mention I basically lived off their coffee...), printed all our pamphlets at Lakeside Press and made buttons, t-shirts had subcommittee meetings at Madison Infoshop. All three were IWW co-op 'job shops'.

I think this an important point. If the IWW (or indeed the wider class) succeeds in becoming an effective fighting body, then it's going to (a) need reliable movement infrastructure (meeting venues, social spaces, print facilities) and (b) going to have to face the prospect of blacklisted militants struggling to find work. Imho it's far preferable to have say, a cafe-bar run as a co-op 'job shop' than have it owned and operated by the IWW itself. that way you get the infrastructure and potential employment for blacklisted militants, without the contradictions of a union owning a business/employing people. In other words, just because co-ops per se aren't a strategy for getting rid of capitalism doesn't mean they can't play an important ancillary role in any anti-capitalist movement.

Where I live there's a self-styled 'revolutionary' cafe run by a self-styled 'revolutionary'. It's only been open a few months but it's already shrouded in loads of controversy. In short, I've heard so many rumours and contradictory information from talking to its workers and other gossipy types that I'm not sure what to believe.

For example, it's supposed to be a coop but he's still the boss and holds all the money (apparently the coop element is in that the staff draw up their own rota). I've also heard that it's been making mad losses and therefore attempted a number of schemes to drive up profits, one of which being bringing in volunteer/unpaid staff to undercut the paid employees. On top of this, I've heard whispers that the perilous financial situation within the place means that the threat of closure constantly hangs over the staff, which seems to work as a sort of emotional manipulation into accepting all the shit that happens to them.

Like I say, many of the details are hazy (not least cos the staff members I've spoken to don't appear to be too clear on what's happening themselves, neither what a coop really entails, etc), but it certainly doesn't sound like the more comfortable, more relaxed working environment that we're led to believe coops actually are. I mean, AFAIK, Starbucks, Pret, etc don't use unpaid staff y'know...

Yeah, JK's right on the infastructure part. Co-ops actually would probably have to be utilized if the IWW grew. I mean, if the IWW got to 10,000 (which is the magic number that is often given as a realistic goal), there would be quite a few members who would be virtually blacklisted. Already, for some of the more visible members of the more visible campaigns, they are worried about future job prospects. I do think the larger question of what co-ops are and their limits is something that should eventually be brought up, both within the radical left in the States and the IWW specifically, but honestly there were/are other battles to be had. Fighting the 'Joe Hill Appreciation Society' syndrome in branches, combating stock activism in favor of workplace organizing and rooting out problematic old beards who have blocked progress where and are way more important issues that people (very thankfully) have put work into over the last 10 years.

Also, on a separate point:

I don't think this achieves this very well at all IMO. It uses - unexplained - terms like "labour value", "capitalism", and some shit about inflation which even I'm not inclined to read (why put an extended footnote in a brief flyer?). On a further note, it's very text-heavy and looks rather amateurish.

I mean, just cos it's a picture which gets passed around on Facebook (*ahem* - oh sorry, I mean a 'meme' ) doesn't necessarily make it any more adept at communicating a message in an accessible fashion. A well-written Facebook note on why (in this example) workers' coops represent a better deal for a Starbucks barista would have been much more accessible IMO. Apart from anything else, the designer's attempt to simplify and abridge the content has led to a lot of confusion as to its meaning and purpose no?

i saw it on my phone, didn't read the text and only looked at the pictures tbh. i imagine a lot of the people 'liking'/sharing it paid it about as much attention.

Steven,

I definitely agree with the first part in that the logical consequences of what Marx termed the 'coercive laws of competition' ultimately make things like progressive companies, co-ops, etc. difficult to create, and almost impossible to maintain. As good as employers' intentions may be at the start of their respective enterprises, they're eventually forced to seek greater profits while at the same time suppressing wages as much as possible, which is more often than not the only way they can survive in a field full of competitors compelled to do the same.

In many cases, employers as individuals are found to be good people (at least in my experience, any way), many of whom give generously to charity, want to provide decent wages and benefits for their employees, etc. Nevertheless, the logic of the system forces the hand of employers to exploit labour as much as they can; and at the same time, labour is coerced into the position of working for a wage and fighting for gains that employers quickly counter in an endless battle punctuated by regular economic crises (these days better known as the 'business cycle').

And it's not simply that these types of businesses are inherently less efficient, competitive, profitable, etc., but that the logic of the system is overtly hostile to their fundamentally pro-worker design. They can certainly be successful, especially in more supportive economic environments (e.g., the MONDRAGON Corporation, Red and Black Cafe, etc.); but they can never truly thrive on a mass scale when the deck is so overwhelming stacked against them—a point Rosa Luxemborg stresses in chapter seven of her famous 1900 pamphlet, Reform or Revolution:

Things like worker-owned co-ops are great in theory, but they're not immune to the driving forces of, and the logic behind, the global capitalist system of production and exchange they find themselves in. In order for more neighborhood-centric, worker-friendly, and/or worker-owned businesses to sprout and flourish, a more socialized economic 'field' needs to replace the current undemocratic one in which we presently plant our seeds of enterprise.

As for the part about coffee shop work being one of the pointless jobs, however, I don't agree so much. I personally love coffee shops (working at them as well as hanging out at them), and I'd certainly continue work at one after a revolution which abolishes wage labour. Coffee shops provide a place for people to socialize and/or enjoy specially prepared drinks; and in my opinion, no job is useless if it provides a wanted product or service, and no job is toil if it gives you some kind of fulfillment and you enjoy doing it (and that goes doubly for things like expert coffee roasters who treat coffee like wine, such as Frank from Chazzano Coffee, which takes a fair amount of skill).

Those are some of my thoughts, at any rate.