A shortage of disciplined members and a lack of finances are two related challenges that plague left movements and parties in the neoliberal period. Building a progressive mass movement has always faced these challenges. In the current historic moment though, — one marked by non-existent or precarious employment, the weakening of trade unions, and the apparent triumph of capitalism as the only game in town—this already difficult task of funding and populating radical, alternative movements, even at the best of times, seem impossible. Meeting attendance among left groups has largely declined (outside of episodic eruptions of mass mobilisation) and dues-paying members are even fewer and further between.
The reasons usually provided to explain these trends have become familiar: the loss of the material, political and ideological support from what was described as “actually existing socialism” by some people with adverse consequences for aligned unions and groups; the generalisation of an individualist and entrepreneurial mindset among citizens, as a fallout of neoliberalism; and the difficulties of life in the neoliberal capitalist economy, making it necessary to spend ever increasing amounts of time on “side-hustles” and survivalist pursuits. All of these reasons have made socialisation, political education, and fundraising difficult tasks for left groups in our contemporary period.
The absence of the mid-20th century conditions of stable employment, relatively predictable wages, leisure time, strong unions, and support of the Soviet bloc for some sections of the socialist movement prompts some difficult questions. Are left groups perpetually confined to existing only as a handful of comrades with either the rare gift of material security, or the jaw-clenching resolve of moral crusaders (or both)? How do we build formidable left political parties and social movements if we are largely composed of precarious intellectuals and under-employed or poor workers struggling to make ends meet in an increasingly inhuman economy? How do we encourage the vast majority of extremely poor working barely eking a living to participate in radical politics when we can barely afford to do so ourselves?
There are no easy answers to these questions, and it must be acknowledged that building left movements in a neoliberal neocolonial economy will be a daunting and long-term task. This justifies the importance that serious left groups place in the painstaking tasks of political education and directly confronting today’s capitalist system ideologically, through regular public communications and media engagement, as well as practically through street protest.
But there is an additional tool embraced by left groups in some parts of the world which may also hold some promise in Nigeria. It is a form of organizing that takes the material precariousness of present and would-be comrades as a starting point. It seeks to address the social welfare of comrades today rather than waiting only for “after the revolution” — all the while providing a practical hands-on education in self-management, economic democracy, and solidarity.
Known as the worker-run cooperative, this form of organising has gained particular prominence in parts of the world, such as South America, where left groups have had relatively more success. But what are cooperatives? How did they originate? Don’t they reinforce capitalism? And to what extent can they contribute to the building of left movements under the difficult conditions of the neoliberal present? The origins and promise of this form of organising, as well as some practical examples of its use in parts of Latin America, are what this article briefly explores.
Cooperatives and anti-capitalist history
Cooperatives are forms of enterprise or association that are owned and democratically managed by their workers and members. They can provide services such as housing and credit or engage in direct production — such as in the case of farmer cooperatives or worker owned companies which produce goods for sale. In both cases, cooperative members are able to democratically decide on what to do with the resources or services generated by the cooperative.
In their formally recognised form, cooperatives emerged in 19th century Europe, drawing ideological inspiration from the early utopian socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. These mutual aid and solidarity-based associations were anti-capitalist in sentiment, seeking to provide alternative social organisations in response to the harsh living and working conditions of the Industrial Revolution.
Marx and Engels were harshly critical of forms of cooperatives that appeared to reject revolutionary action and eschew class conflict, and rightly so. However, Marx also found unique merits in cooperatives, praising them for demonstrating how production does not need to be managed by capitalists. Writing in 1964, Marx argued that
The value of these great social experiments [co-operative factories] cannot be overrated. 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 labour need to not be monopolised as a means of dominion over and exertion against the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart’ .[1]
Gambina and Rofinelli, two scholars of cooperatives in Latin America, cite numerous other examples in Marx’s writing where cooperatives are lauded as an initial attempt by workers to “appropriate their own potentials, demonstrating that the despotic management of capital can be replaced successfully by the democratic management of workers themselves’.[2]
Such experiments in self-management and control of the production process offered workers an opportunity to develop an anti-capitalist social imagination, recognizing themselves in the fruits of their everyday effort, while experiences collective decision-making with colleagues.
Cooperatives coopted
Yet despite these origins, it must be noted that the forms of cooperatives that have gained prominence in much of the world in recent years express a decidedly non-revolutionary, and at times deradicalising, organisational form. As Veltemeyer notes, cooperatives and a wider social and solidarity economy — including other forms of mutual aid and collective and solidarity-based actions of mutual assistance among the poor — came to be coopted by some international agencies as part of a wider neoliberal mechanism of poverty reduction “via the absorption of surplus rural labour trapped in the informal economy”.[3]
The same author argues that such a depoliticising approach to cooperatives — treating them as a top-down intervention implemented by technocratic planners — was embedded in an idea of community-based local development designed by international development practitioners to direct attention away from the state and allow room for the private sector, while keeping workers and farmers docile. Divorced from their radical roots, cooperatives can thus serve to reinforce the capitalist status quo rather than challenge it.
A further problem noted with cooperatives is the fact that, even if they might produce goods and develop services democratically, they ultimately trade their goods and services within the existing capitalist commodity economy. Exchange is still premised on the logic of profit rather than the logic of need. This is the sense in which Vieta (22) notes the reality of co-operation in production and distribution tends to ‘clash’ with the logic of commodification. This clash places a firm limit on what cooperatives can achieve on their own without the political force needed to implement democratic forms of planning at a larger economic scale — that is, a scale not restricted to the level of the individual enterprise. This can itself be generalised only with anti-capitalist revolution and as part of the socialist reconstruction of society.
Cooperatives and the contemporary Left in Latin America
Despite these potential and actual limitations, cooperatives, when embedded in a revolutionary or left-oriented political project, have served as a laboratory for democracy and worker-self empowerment as well as a source of livelihood and material sustenance in the face of the neoliberal onslaught of capitalism. The embedding of cooperativism as a tool of left and radicalised social movement resistance appears to be fairly advanced in Latin America.
A vivid example of cooperatives and the wider social and solidarity practices serving this function is found among the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), a social movement that practices forms of self-government in autonomous municipalities in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The EZLN has become well known for having established and managed autonomous governance, schools, farms, and healthcare, based around solidarity and worker ownership since the mid 1990s.
The centrality of collective decision-making in regards to the production and distribution of goods and services within the autonomous zones governed by the Zapatistas is why scholars such as Veltmeyer conclude that, for the Zapatistas, ‘the social and solidarity economy is the nucleus of an alternative and emerging post-capitalist form of society’.[4]
Brazil’s Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST); Landless Rural Workers Movement in English— offers another example of how cooperatives can serve more transformative ends. The MST which occupies rural lands rendered unproductive by their large-scale capitalist owners, conceptualises and practices democratically managed forms of agricultural production as forms of social movement resistance as well as practical avenues to meet the material and care needs of its members.
These rural-based examples are also complimented by numerous instances where social movement affiliated urban unemployed workers establish collective enterprises, or examples of workers taking over troubled or bankrupting firms to establish worker recuperated firms (empreseas recuperadas por sus trabajodores, or ERTs) especially in Argentina.[5]
These recent examples from Latin America all suggest the promise inherent in cooperatives when they are part of a wider left political agenda. They also suggest new possibilities for how left groups can surmount the atomisation and resource limitations woven into the fabric of neoliberal economic life. Like several other left organisational models, the social and solidarity economy as expressed in cooperatives might not immediately exceed the boundaries imposed by the capitalist exchange economy. Nevertheless, these organisational forms deserve to be included in the wider repertoire of tools through which an alternative political future—and present— can be worked out in practice.
by Sa’eed HUSAINI
[1] Marx, K. (1864). Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules of the International Work-
ing Men’s Association, London, 1864, Retrieved from <https://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm>. Accessed 8 February 2016.
[2] Gambina, J.C. and Roffinelli, G., 2018. “Building Alternatives Beyond Capital.” in Novković, Sonja, and Henry Veltmeyer, eds. Co-operativism and Local Development in Cuba: An Agenda for Democratic Social Change. Vol. 121. Brill, 2018
[3] Veltmeyer, H., 2018. The social economy in Latin America as alternative development. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 39(1), pp.38-54.
[4] ibid.
[5] Vieta, M., 2014. Learning in struggle: Argentina’s new worker cooperatives as transformative learning organizations. Relations industrielles, 69(1), pp.186-218.
