Re: [ox-en] Cooperatives furthering GPL society? (was: Generosity begets wealth)
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2005 19:06:57 -0800 (PST)
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The inside/outside barrier:
What I mentioned earlier, the book of Dominique Pelbois, has an answer to this. By making the clients the majority owners of the entreprises (and the income derived from them is by definition higher than the salaries), he proposes a mode of governance which has a priority outside itself, yes has to negotiate with the workers owners as well. In this system there is no external market, but the market is internalized through the client owners in a endless chain which allows for cooperative planning.
Another attempt to go beyond this inside/outside dilemma is taken place in Venezuela, where the constitution supports cooperatives, but insider egoism is balanced by a principe of 'co-management'. See below an excerpt from P2P News 106,
Michel
P2P Political Movements (4): The new cooperative movement in Venezuela http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/harnecker051205.html
1. The New Cooperative Movement
?To deal with this social and economic situation, the Chavez administration has embraced a new development model, referred to as "endogenous development." Its conceptualization draws heavily from Osvaldo Sunkel's ideas in Development from Within: Toward a Neostructuralist Approach for Latin America (1993) which calls for an adaptation of import substitution policies which prioritize equity, human development, and development adjusted to specific local conditions and employing local resources. The official interpretation of endogenous development also emphasizes the importance of local, diversified, and sustainable development, and the commitment to respect Venezuelans' different cultures and identities.
The cooperative production model has increasingly come to define the development strategies of the "Bolivarian Revolution." In its August 2005 report, SUNACOOP registered a total of 83,769 cooperatives, with more than 40,000 cooperatives created in 2004 and almost 30,000 more cooperatives formed in the first eight months of 2005. The total number of associates in October 2004 was 945,517, up from 215,000 in 1998. This proliferation originates in the recognition of cooperatives throughout the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution as key economic actors within the nation's social economy, portrayed as tools for economic inclusion, participation (article 70), and state decentralization (article 184). More significantly, the state is expected to "promote and protect" cooperatives (articles 118 and 308). It wasn't until the Ley Especial de Asociaciones Cooperativas (Special Law of Cooperative Associations) was published in September 2001 that numbers started growing wi
th
almost 1,000 cooperatives in 2001, more than 2,000 in 2002, and more than 8,000 in 2003.
?I arrived in Caracas in July 2005 with a few contacts at different cooperatives, anxious about how I would sort through the more than 70,000 cooperatives that the Superintendencia Nacional de Cooperativas (National Superintendence of Cooperatives -- SUNACOOP) had referred to in its recent press statements. Indeed, I found cooperatives everywhere. Between one night and the next morning, I stumbled on cooperatives in some rather unexpected places: a group of artisans in the neighborhood near my hotel, a group of tour guides who entertained children in a nearby park, the cleaning crew of an office building where I went to conduct an interview. Even the taxi drivers in front of the hotel where I was staying had left their private employer to form a cooperative.Spaces for small enterprises, especially cooperatives, have been opened by a great number of local governments, public institutions, and enterprises, including Venezuela's oil company, PDVSA. These ag
encies
have established contract-bidding procedures that, while demanding competitive quality and costs, don't discriminate against small enterprises and cooperatives. They have also encouraged workers employed by private contractors to form cooperatives. For example, CADELA, one of the five regional branches of the state-owned national electric company, encouraged its maintenance and security subcontract workers to leave their private employers and form their own cooperatives. CADELA is an enterprise under co-management and has been very supportive of cooperatives.1 Similarly, most of the stations of Caracas's state-owned rapid transportation system are maintained by cooperatives created by employees of former private businesses. The Public Works Division of Caracas's main municipality has promoted Local Works Cabinets (Gabinetes de Obras Locales) through which neighbors organize themselves in working tables to decide which public works on infrastructure should be don
e and
supervise them. The community also decides which cooperatives in the neighborhood carry out the work.?
2. Co-Management in Venezuela
URL = http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1587
Below is a talk that Michael A. Lebowitz gave at el Encuentro Nacional de Trabajadores Hacia la Recuperación de Empresas (the National Meeting of Workers for the Recovery of Enterprises), organized by la Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT, the National Union of Workers) in Caracas, Venezuela, 22 October 2005. The meeting was preparatory to el Primer Encuentro Latinoamericano de Empresas Recuperadas por los Trabajadores (the 1st Latin American Gathering of Companies Recovered by the Workers), to be held in Caracas on 27-29 October 2005.
Now, some people may be bothered by what I'm going to say now, but I have to tell you that for many workers in capitalist firms the idea of state ownership with decisions made at the top has not been a real alternative. My father was a machinist, and I was never able to convince him. For him, state ownership was just a bigger, more powerful boss. What he wanted was to escape, to get out of the factory.
But, worker management is a real alternative. If co-management succeeds here, it will be an inspiration to workers everywhere. And, if co-management fails, it will strengthen the rule of capital; the message to workers will be that there is no alternative.
Why Co-Management?
We should be clear, though, that the project of co-management in Venezuela is not at all the same as what has been called co-management in Germany. Although reflecting workers' strength at one point long ago in Germany, co-management there became co-optation. Giving workers' representatives a presence in capitalist decision-making in Germany was a means of incorporating workers into the project of capitalists, separating them from their representatives and creating an identity of workers with the particular capitalist firms in which they worked. In Venezuela, though, co-management is an alternative to capitalism.
In particular, the point of co-management is to put an end to capitalist exploitation and to create the potential for building a truly human society. When workers are no longer driven by the logic of capital to produce profits for capitalists, the whole nature of work can change. Workers can cooperate with each other to do their jobs well; they can apply their knowledge about better ways to produce to improve production both immediately and in the future; and, they can end the division in the workplace between those who think and those who do -- all because, in co-management, workers know that their activity is not for the enrichment of capitalists.
The development of worker decision-making, the process of combining thinking and doing, offers the possibility of all workers developing their capacities and potential. And this is the kind of society, one which encourages the full development of human potential, which the Bolivarian Constitution envisions. Without democratic, participatory, and protagonistic production, people remain the fragmented, crippled human beings that capitalism produces. Democracy in production is a necessary condition for the free development of all; it is an essential element of socialism in the 21st century.
Co-management implies a particular kind of partnership -- a partnership between the workers of an enterprise and society. Thus, it stresses that enterprises do not belong to the workers alone -- they are meant to be operated in the interest of the whole society. In other words, co-management is not intended only to remove the self-interested capitalist, leaving in place self-interested workers; rather, it is also meant to change the purpose of productive activity. It means the effort to find ways both to allow for the development of the full potential of workers and also for every member of society, all working people, to be the beneficiaries of co-management.
In Co-management, Who Speaks for Society?
If co-management is a partnership between the workers of an enterprise and society, though, who speaks for society? Ideally, with the transformation of producers as the result of the experience of co-management, producers themselves should be able to speak for society. In other words, in the world we want to create, socialism of the 21st century, recognition of the needs of society would be internalized and understood by all producers. There would be no gap between particular producers and society as a whole.
Yet, even in an ideal situation where differences no longer represent antagonistic interests, the needs of society must be identified; and this is necessarily a democratic process -- one in which producers as citizens function in a democratic, participatory, and protagonistic manner. This combination of democracy in production and democracy in society is at the core of the co-managed society, socialism of the 21st century.
But, is that possible at the beginning of co-management? Who speaks then for society in this partnership between democratic producers and society? Always, our answer must be the same -- the only way that society itself can speak is through democracy. Thus, where enterprises (for example, electric services) exist in particular communities, the democratic bodies within those communities identify their needs and what they feel those enterprises should contribute. The logic is the same for enterprises that serve the whole of the society -- the first step is to identify society's needs and then workers can determine how best to produce for society's needs.
Naturally, the smaller the community in question, the easier it is to develop democratic, participatory, and protagonistic solutions. Even in those smaller communities, however, the development of self-government by the producers is a process -- just like the process of development of co-management. It is a learning process which becomes richer through practice, through the transformation of the participants.
3. More Information:
See also: Co-Management in Venezuela, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1587
More on the ?expropriation movement? in Venezuela, at http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]/646p14.htm
Commentary by Le Monde Diplomatique on the victory of Morales in Bolivia, a political earthquate with far-reaching consequences, at http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/dossiers/bolivie/
Is there a future for self-management (on the ?autogestion tradition?), http://hussonet.free.fr/tcneolib.pdf
P2P Political Movements (5): Argentina and worker?s self regulation http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=26&ItemID=9042
?to date the Argentine occupations, we were told by a highly conscious organizer in the movement, "have not been acts of ideology or followed a revolutionary plan." They have been, instead, "acts of desperate self defense." Yet most interestingly, provocatively, and inspirationally, after taking over a company, which usually required a struggle of many months to overcome political resistance from the state, and after then running the plants for a time, the recuperation projects have become increasingly visionary. In addition to hearing about the overall situation of the "workplace recuperation movement," I visited an occupied hotel, ice cream plant, glass factory, and slaughterhouse, all recuperated by their prior manual, obedient, unskilled, and in most cases barely educated and sometimes even illiterate work force.
In each of these plants, ranging in size from about 80 to about 500 employees, as in all other plants recuperated by worker actions, the workers quickly established a workers' council as the decision making body. In such councils, each worker gets one vote and majority rule establishes overarching workplace policies. Workers call the process self management and each plant decides its own norms and relations. Almost immediately, however, in most of the occupied plants, "workers leveled all salaries to the same hourly pay rate." Workplaces that varied from this egalitarianism tended to allow "slightly higher wages for those involved in the workplace longer and somewhat lower wages for those just coming aboard." Also, more recently, a discussion has begun about incentives. What type should they use, in what mix? Some workplaces have opted to pay more for conceptual and managerial labor. Others have paid more for more demanding and debilitating work. Most have
stuck
with equal pay rates for all, however. All have begun wondering, how can they best have equity "but also have incentives to induce hard work?" Even where more onerous work wasn't paid more, which was most places, we were told there was much concern that people now stuck in rote positions should "have opportunities and be educated to do more interesting work" and that there was also a reduced tendency to refuse to share knowledge because everyone saw general advance as being in everyone's interest, not just in an owner's interest.
In all the recuperated plants, although we were told certain tasks having to do with specifically capitalist control have proved "no longer relevant," we were also told "many other organizational, managerial, and otherwise empowering tasks previously done by professionals have needed to be accomplished by the remaining workers." A subset of the workers have thus taken up doing new tasks, including sometimes having to become literate as a prerequisite. When I asked organizers whether there was a division of labor in workplaces like that found in capitalist corporations, with about a fifth of employees doing mostly or even only empowering and more pleasant labor, and with four fifths doing mostly or even only rote, repetitive, and more onerous labor, including the former dominating the latter by setting agendas, dominating debate, and otherwise establishing its will, the answers I got tended to agree that this difference between more empowered and more rot
e
workers existed and then to talk about the need to induce workers to participate more not only in wage discussions, but in other discussions too. The answers didn't at first acknowledge that there was a structural impediment, not just old habits, interfering with participation. But then pressed further the organizers would agree that old divisions of labor countered egalitarian impulses though the only solution they offered was for more manual workers to learn to do managerial jobs. They failed to note or acknowledge that there wouldn't be enough such jobs to go around unless there was a change in the component tasks of jobs so that everyone had a share of empowering tasks.?
Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hi Franz and all!
2 months (63 days) ago Franz Nahrada wrote:
Stefan Merten schrieb am Dienstag, 25. Oktober 2005 um 20:35 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]:
Well if they sponsor some special people then this bread is not a Free
Product. This to me seems more like a Genossenschaft [sorry, missing
the English term at the moment] to me which acts in solidarity
internally but has walls to the outside like every market participant.
Well, this model is also very close to the anarchist's paradise BTW.
"Genossenschaft " means cooperative.
Right.
The interesting thing is when "cooperatives become virtual", when they see
that they are *unlimited* by the very nature of their endavour.
They are not. You say it yourself two lines later:
They are not just built for common success on the market, but for
protection and the life maintainance of their members.
Exactly: They are for "the protection and the life maintainance of
*their members*". Effectively they are private enterprises - and this
is regardless of their internal goals and methods. Mondragon (sp?) in
Basque for instance is such a cooperative (with very special
preconditions BTW) but the barriers to the outside world exist (and
recently the outside world kills more and more of the internal goals).
On the contrary Free Projects in the spirit of Free Software are
effectively societal projects. The barrier between inside and outside
is no good for the project so it simply doesn't exist.
So if they can work more efficiently by working together - why should they
not?
Exactly the same question applies to multi-national corporations. In
fact as far as the relationship to society as a whole is concerned the
question is actually the same.
I think we have a big difference here. It seems to me that you are
mostly looking at the (social) goals of a project. I look more at the
structure of a project and its relationship to the society as a whole
instead.
To me Free Projects are societal projects per se - and for the first
time in history they are societal projects with a high general
relevance which are not state-driven. In the contrary they emerge from
the society itself. It actually is like Marcuse once said: "The new
society needs to be a deeply felt need in the individuals." This is
*so* true and actually I'm happy to witness a germ form where you can
more or less grab this deeply felt need with your hands :-) . There is
some hope for this planet ;-) .
Global Villages as concept are more or less local cooperatives or
communities that enter the Free Modes because it helps them function
better on a local level.
But as long as they have this inside / outside barrier IMO they belong
to the old society.
It is definitely worth thinking about how to shift the "market based"
cooperative model to a "life maintainance based" cooperative model and
propagate the simple fact that especially globalized markets are simply
no means of life maintainance any more, while "biomorph" cycles of mutual
supply are self-enforcing.
I completely agree with your analysis of the current situation but
what you are trying with Global Villages has been tried a thousand
times. It never worked - and I have witnessed a few attempts.
Today - after the Oekonux experience - I think the deeper reason for
this chain of failures is that they were not able to abolish this
inside / outside barrier.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
- --
Please note this message is written on an offline laptop
and send out in the evening of the day it is written. It
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reached my mailbox since yesterday evening.
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