May Day: workers of the world unite and take over – their factories.
From Istanbul to Barcelona, the co-operative movement is flourishing as employees revive what the bosses buried.
“we’ll be better off – psychologically, politically, economically – than we ever were when we had bosses. We’re working for each other. That’s the difference”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/01/may-day-workers-of-the-world-unite-and-take-over-their-factories
The cooperative mode of production is based upon production for social use, for use value as against exchange value.
At its heart is the principle and practice of social control, a self-socialisation from below based upon the practical restitution of power from the alien systems of production and politics and its reorganisation and exercise as social power. That active social power through social self-mediation is within our grasp.
“All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.”
From Solidarity Forever
I’d just add that we need to go further than these claims of mastery and ownership, get beyond possessive relationships, make room for the claims of nature, and devise social relationships that do more than contest the terms of our possession of the Earth and instead give up that possession.
And on that basis, I fully support the idea of the cooperative commonwealth.
Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini
Capitalism would have us believe we need our bosses. This book reveals the history of workers who dare to disagree.
From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and have gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. Looking at specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often under-appreciated historical tradition.
Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers’ control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
https://freedompress.org.uk/store/products/ours-to-master-and-to-own-workers-control-from-the-commune-to-the-present/
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/search?q=Ours-to-Master-and-to-Own
http://socialistreview.org.uk/362/ours-master-and-own
The Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center Presents: Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present A conversation with Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini Capitalism would have us believe we need our bosses. Tonight's discussion reveals the history of workers who dare to disagree. From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajbHDNxL_Y0
Their Democracy and Ours: the transformative potential of the workers’ council
file:///C:/Users/owner/Downloads/99-400-1-PB.pdf
‘For more than one hundred years, workers have occupied factories and workplaces, they have formed and become engaged in workers’ councils and a variety of self managed enterprises in all parts of the world. Under all forms of political systems in all forms of industrial and agricultural sectors, workers have struggled to participate in the decision making structures of their workplaces. Workers have taken over enterprises that have been at risk of closure in times of economic crisis and have successfully managed to operate them as going concerns. Even workers that have previously had no experience of activism or political engagement have been able to occupy and become involved in the collective administration of their workplaces.’
As the current economic crisis deepens, governments around the globe are attempting to force savage austerity measures on the working class. The argument about a different kind of society, one that is run and controlled by workers and in their interests, is now an urgent one.
With the sheer scope of the examples, this book is a serious contribution to debates around workers' control, what is possible and how to achieve it.
Ours to Master and to Own is a compilation of articles offering a historical and global overview of workers’ efforts to gain control over their workplaces, the economy, and governance.
"Ours to Master and to Own is the most substantive and comprehensive work on workers control and self management today. I strongly recommend this work, which provides examples drawn from throughout the world of workers struggling for justice and power."
—Gary Younge, Columnist, The Guardian and The Nation. Author, Who We Are and Should It Matter in the 21st Century (Penguin/Viking)
"With the global capitalist order entering a period of crisis, but also with the dramatic increase in worker’s struggles especially in the global South, this collection is extremely opportune. Workers will seek greater control over market forces and workers councils are bound to re-emerge. A must read for labour analysts and activists alike."
—Ronaldo Munck is theme leader for internationalization and social development at Dublin City University and visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Liverpool
Also well worth checking out is The tradition of workers' control by Geoffrey Ostergaard, just 150 pages long but packed with details and full of insights.
“We are as far as ever from the realisation of a society which a William Morris or a James Connolly would recognise as socialist. What is wrong with Labour Party socialism is not its pace but its direction. As Geoffrey Ostergaard shows, however, libertarian socialism is not dead.”
http://freedompress.org.uk/store/products/the-tradition-of-workers-control/
https://libcom.org/history/tradition-workers-control-geoffrey-ostergaard
Me, I’m with William Morris and James Connolly on this, and with all those who affirm that ‘the emancipation of the working class is an act of the working class themselves.’ Socialism comes from the inside and from below, not from the outside and above.
The Proletarian Public by Peter Critchley
http://libcom.org.libcom.org/forums/general/peter-critchleys-proletarian-public-26032014
‘The book was never published in hard copy form. It was written up from notes I made early in my doctoral research. I wanted to write a thesis on the proletarian transformation of politics and the tradition of 'socialism from below'. I share that commitment to working class self-emancipation and autonomy, and so gathered materials for a thesis on proletarian order. As it happened, the thesis took a more philosophical direction, and the notes were left unused. I decided to gather them up and put them out, hoping to inform a little, inspire and just pay tribute to the James Connolly's and the Tom Mann's and all those who breathed fire and life into socialism. We need them back. We need to follow their example.’
Also worth reading is Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader, edited by Chris Wilbert and Damian F White
“Widely regarded as Britain’s most influential anarchist thinker for over half a century, Colin Ward’s work ranges in scope from urban planning to deschooling, from mutualism to geography, from Kropotkin to Buber, to cotters, squatters, and beyond. Drawing inspiration from the everyday creativity of ordinary people, Ward championed a unique social and environmental politics premised on the possibilities of democratic self-organisation and self-management from below. Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility provides a wide-ranging overview of Ward’s earliest journalism and his later work, including seminal essays and extracts from his most important books.”
That’s my view, too, and Colin Ward writes simply, profoundly and beautifully.
https://www.akpress.org/autonomysolidaritypossibility.html
http://peacenews.info/node/7757/damian-f-white-chris-wilbert-eds-colin-ward-autonomy-solidarity-possibility-colin-ward-rea
“Recognising that we often act on the faulty assumption that history is made by ‘great men’ from up high, he re-examined the past through the activities of ‘ordinary’ people, constantly reminding us that the potential for organised anarchy (in other words, the organised ‘absence of authority’) exists in far more places than is often thought. Realisations of this potential he regarded as ‘green seeds in the snow’ – present, but sometimes difficult to detect – and drawing attention to concrete examples, such as allotments or the international postal system, formed a core part of his work.”
‘If we want to weaken the state we must strengthen society.’
I’ll go with the democratic constitution of authority, and see authority, autonomy and authenticity as complementary, but I fully support the politics of self-organisation and the society of democratic self-management. Understanding the ‘self’ here in the expansive sense of the unity of each and all. The way I see it, the cooperative commonwealth is a form of social self-mediation which contrasts with the external mediation of the abstract state and the capital system with their institutional, bureaucratic and systemic imperatives. With the alienation of our social power, we come to live in the service of ends which are external to us. Through the practical reappropriation of this social power from such alien forces, and the reorganisation of this power as social power through organs and forms of the common life under our conscious control, we come to exercise this power as our own, as social power, in association with each other.
This is from the Preface of Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility. It explains why I love the work of Colin Ward, and shows precisely how I have absorbed his work into my own views of self-socialisation within an associative public life.
"The starting premise of Ward's writings is that we are first and foremost creative and resourceful beings and that given the right circumstances we are fully capable of organising our own affairs in humane cooperative ways... Across some thirty books and hundreds of articles, Ward counters cynicism about the possibility of developing social institutions that maximise solidarity and autonomy by bringing to light a range of self-organised and self-managed social practices - in housing, work and leisure, urban policy, architecture and design. His work explores community gardens, allotments and credit unions, housing cooperatives and participatory design, self-build dwellings and multiple other grassroots ventures organised around mutual aid and communal support. Such writings argue that we should attend seriously to the history and politics of such activities because they can facilitate autonomy, build new solidarities and 'like seeds beneath the snow', open new possibilities for living differently."
https://www.academia.edu/1077147/Autonomy_Solidarity_Possibility_The_Colin_Ward_Reader_-Aug_27th_August_2010-2
How many politicians have you heard promising to make work pay? I've heard too many, and they don't mean what I mean when I argue for an economy which values and rewards the workers. The capital system is an organised free lunch, parasitic on the wealth of labour and nature, and we need to expose the exploitative reality of free trade agreements like NAFTA, TTIP and TTP.
This is worth looking at.
http://action.senatorwithguts.com/page/s/trade-treachery
It's these kind of arrangements that are shaping our societies and economies, locking us into self-destructive patterns of behaviour and subverting democratic principle and practice, because they are designed to put private priorities and profits before the public good. There's a world still to win, so long as we do more with this world that own, possess, use and exploit it - we could try sharing it, taking no more than we need, which is more than enough for a good life.
Left wing or right wing? Socialist or conservative? I see it as a functional, flourishing society of person, place and purpose in which the freedom and happiness of each is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom and happiness of all.
Spain's communist model village
Marinaleda, in impoverished Andalusia, used to suffer terrible hardships. Led by a charismatic mayor, the village declared itself a communist utopia and took farmland to provide for everyone. Could it be the answer to modern capitalism's failings?
These communities are striking for being against all authority. "I have never belonged to the communist party of the hammer and sickle, but I am a communist or communitarian," Sánchez Gordillo said in an interview in 2011.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/marinaleda-spanish-communist-village-utopia
The Spanish town where people come before profit
http://www.contributoria.com/issue/2014-07/53714c7830d0f1ab0f000048/
‘As the Spanish economy continues its post-2008 nosedive, unemployment sits at 26 percent nationally, while over half of young people can’t find work. Meanwhile, Marinaleda boasts a modest but steady local employment picture in which most people have at least some work and those that don’t have a strong safety net to fall back on.But more than its cash economy, Marinaleda has a currency rarely found beyond small-scale activist groups or indigenous communities fighting destructive development projects: the currency of direct action. Rather than rely exclusively on cash to get things done, Marinaleños have put their collective blood, sweat and tears into creating a range of alternative systems in their corner of the world. When money hasn’t been readily available – probably the only consistent feature since the community set out on this path – Marinaleños have turned to one another to do what needs doing. At times that has meant collectively occupying land owned by the Andalusian aristocracy and putting it to work for the town, at others it has simply meant sharing the burden of litter collection.’
Then there is the Mondragon co-operative, founded by Catholic priests and practising the Catholic social ethic of the dignity of and reward to labour in a society scaled to human proportion and based upon justice.
Mondragon: Spain's giant co-operative where times are hard but few go bust
The northern Spanish town is dominated by its eponymous €15bn corporation that controls over 100 smaller co-ops
‘Whereas workers at other Spanish companies must answer to shareholder needs – often by sacrificing their jobs – that is not true at Mondragon, which acts as the parent company to 111 small, medium-sized and larger co-ops.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/07/mondragon-spains-giant-cooperative
Co-operatives in Spain - Mondragon leads the way
Co-operatives round the world could learn a lot from Spanish co-op giant Mondragon, says Andrew Bibby
"The Mondragon Corporation is based on a commitment to solidarity and on democratic methods for its organisation and management," says Mikel Lezamiz, director of Mondragon's c-ooperative dissemination unit. Mondragon demonstrates an alternative to the 'business as usual' mantra of shareholder-owned companies, he maintains: "Our mission is not to earn money, it is to create wealth within society through entrepreneurial development and job creation."
‘More generally, cooperatives in Spain are seen as an important constituent part of the broader social economy, which also brings in not-for-profit associations and foundations. "The concept of the social economy is relatively strong in Spain, and cooperatives are seen as one of the key actors," says Klaus Niederlander, Director of Cooperatives Europe. The Spanish social enterprise association Cepes, analogous in some ways with Social Enterprise UK, is a member organisation of the International Cooperative Alliance.’
https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/mar/12/cooperatives-spain-mondragon
In The Case for Workers' Co-ops Robert Oakeshott engages in a detailed empirical analysis of self-managed co-ops in France, Italy and Spain, making the case for workers' self-management thus:
'A Mondragon sector, though it might well take some sting out of the class war, would be working for its own interests and not for either traditional capitalism or for the state sector; it would be a genuine third alternative. Assuming it was anything like as successful as it is in the Basque country there would be a queue of workers - from both capitalist and nationalized undertakings - applying to join.'
The Mondragon co-ops in the Basque region of Spain offer a practical, working, enduring example of how the spirit of community and solidarity can insulate co-ops from the vicissitudes of the capitalist market as well as the political splits to which socialist movements are all too prone. The Mondragon co-ops have their origins in the technical schools founded by the Catholic priest Father Arizmendiarrieta. His idea was to alleviate economic hardship and find people jobs. An engineering co-op was founded, the ULGOR, whose success inspired a number of similar ventures. Nothing succeeds like success, and this small scale pragmatic concern with addressing immediate social issues developed into a socio-economic movement of a much greater scope than anyone had imagined.
The social and political environment which sustains Mondragon, the cooperative and solidaristic culture developed by direct relations between people, creates the fertile soil in which communal ties are renewed and can flourish. It is a culture that is forged through connections, relations and experiences of a life lived in common, and expressed through a network of social clubs, community groups, ties of friendship, neighbourliness and kinship. This is the associative culture which sustains the democratic economy, an economy which is embedded within a social and moral matrix and which ensures 'the economy' is no longer some abstract and external force, but functions for the well-being of the whole community.
Impossible? You only find the boundaries of the possible by locating them in practice. How? Easy.
"Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible" (St. Francis of Assisi).
And while I am here on May Day, I'd like to wish Karl Marx a happy birthday for the 5th May. Much maligned, much misinterpreted, a man who wanted to make philosophy worldly and the world philosophical - that's what I want from politics. I'm not interested in apologising for all that Marx may have missed and all that 'the alchemists of revolution' did in his name - he got plenty right.
Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton.
"This book had its origin in a single, striking thought: What if all the most familiar objections to Marx's work are mistaken? Or at least, if not totally wrongheaded, mostly so?"
"At the heart of this book is a simple but urgent truth: we need Marx more than ever before. This slim volume should help to arm a new generation of socialists with the ideas necessary to win the battles ahead. Only then will we all be able pack up our marching gear and enjoy a well-earned revolutionary retirement."
http://socialistreview.org.uk/359/why-marx-was-right