Die Neue Zeit
2nd May 2010, 22:28
Critique for Direction Towards Cooperative Production
"Cooperative productions [...] were defeated not only by British corporations, but by a larger force: the mammoth German state capitalism. In fact, even English corporations declined during the process of heavy industrialization, defeated by the same force [...] Observing this, Engels as well as the Germany Social-Democratic Party came to appreciate mammoth corporations and conceived that socialization (state ownership) of them would necessarily lead to socialism, ignoring cooperative production." (Kojin Karatani)
Again in his usage of the philosopher Immanuel Kant to read Marx and vice versa, Kojin Karatani put into context how the so-called “nationalization” question achieved its historically disproportionate programmatic standing relative to other, more disparate economic demands raised by the class-strugglist left. This disproportion expressed itself fullest in the Programme of the Communist International. Here, co-authors Bukharin and Stalin himself outdid Trotsky in outlining an almost maximalist transitional program for “the revolutionary transformation of the property relations of capitalism into relationships of the socialist mode of production” based almost exclusively on “the expropriation of the landlords and capitalists, i.e., the conversion of the monopolist property of the bourgeoisie into the property of the proletarian State” in industry, transport and communication services, land estates, wholesale and retail trade, finance, housing, and “means of ideological influence” (the mass media).
Nowadays, the class-strugglist left is quite divided on this question, and would probably remain so after the introduction of “national-democratization” even on the level of reforms. Consider the Weekly Worker’s Draft Program for a revived Communist Party of Great Britain:
The historic task of the working class is to fully socialise the giant transnational corporations, not break them up into inefficient national units. Our starting point is the most advanced achievements of capitalism. Globalised production needs global social control […] However, specific acts of nationalisation can serve the interests of workers. We support the nationalisation of the land, banks and financial services, along with basic infrastructure such as public transport, electricity, gas and water supplies.
There is still too much discussion on nationalization, too little on the festering problem of small-scale production and the continued hiring of labour for profit at that level, and now too much vacillating on the huge grey area filled by “medium enterprises” in between small-scale production and the commanding heights.
On the other hand, the long-lived cooperative movement itself is far from blameless. Instead of adopting and improving upon one of the earlier “Socialist” political economies like “Ricardian Socialism” (the basis of economic republicanism), it spawned class-conciliationist distractions: consumer cooperatives such as The Co-operative Group in the UK, housing cooperatives, mutual insurance, and all forms of cooperative banking (since employee-owned cooperative banks still extract from society economic rent in the classical sense). It is no accident that the cooperative movement has avoided and continues to avoid political struggles! As Yuri Steklov noted in his book on the International Workingmen’s Association:
At that time, most of the German workers still accepted the views and the political leadership of the liberal bourgeoisie which, denominating itself the Progressive Party (Fortschrittspartei) was then carrying on a struggle with the Prussian Government to secure the franchise. At the same time the Government, of which Bismarck, the reactionary junker, was the chief, was endeavouring to win the support of the workers and to use them as tools in its contest with the bourgeois liberals.
The very few circles then extant for the promotion of the political education of the workers were dragged along in the wake of bourgeois liberalism. In the economic field, bourgeois propagandists urged proletarians to practise “self-help” and “thrift,” declaring that this was the only way of improving the workers’ lot. The chief exponent of this sort of humbug was Schulze-Delitzsch, a Prussian official, founder of co-operative associations and a people’s bank – a Prussian counterpart of the French bourgeois economist, Bastiat.
In their attempts to secure independence of thought, the German workers had to free themselves from the influence both of conservative demagogy and of liberal sophistry. A notable part in the liberation of the German proletariat from bourgeois influence in political matters was played by Ferdinand Lassalle, who was instrumental in founding the first independent working-class political organisation in Germany. This was known as the General Union of German Workers (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein – A.D.A.V.) and it came into being on May 23, 1853. The aim of the Association was to conduct a “peaceful and legal” agitation on behalf of manhood suffrage. This, Lassalle thought, would lead to extensive working-class representation in parliament, and eventually to the passing of a number of desirable laws. One of these would be a law for the State aid of productive associations, whereby the workers would be freed from the tyranny of capital.
Lassalle was unable to fulfil his hopes for the speedy creation of a mass party of the workers. In the autumn of 1864, the membership was 4,600, and by the end of November, 1865, it was no more than 9,420, when the Association comprised fifty-eight branches. But his brief and stormy agitation had the effect, in large measure of freeing the German workers from the dominion of liberal bourgeois ideas.
Thus, this programmatic thesis has attempted to accommodate cooperative solutions within a rent-free and class-strugglist framework by listing three immediate reforms, one threshold reform, and one directional measure – all of which emphasize cooperative production:
1) The redistribution as cooperative property of not some but all productive property where the related business has contract or formally hired labour, and where such property would otherwise be immediately inherited through legal will or through gifting and other loopholes;
2) The non-selective encouragement of, usage of eminent domain for, and unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprise operations;
3) The heavy appropriation of economic rent in the broadcast spectrum, unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for independent mass media cooperative startups – especially at more local levels, for purposes of media decentralization – and anti-inheritance transformation of all the relevant mass media properties under private ownership into cooperative property;
4) The protection of workers’ cooperatives from degenerating into mere business partnerships by means of prohibiting all subcontracting of labour, including whereby at least one contractual party is a workers’ cooperative; and
5) The enabling of society's cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common plans.
The festering problem of small-scale production and the continued hiring of labour for profit at that level could be addressed by modifying the directional measure:
The full replacement of the hiring of labour for small-business profit by cooperative production, and also the enabling of society’s cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common plans.
Should there be agreement upon and not mere acceptance of this directional measure, it can facilitate the nationalization debate but in a way such that private ownership of productive and non-possessive property is altogether outside the boundaries of debate; there can be no advocacy on the class-strugglist left for a combination of small-scale cooperative production with “medium enterprises” still under private ownership.
REFERENCES
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani [http://books.google.com/books?id=mR1HIJVoy6wC]
Programme of the Communist International by Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin [http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/6th-congress/index.htm]
Draft Programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain by the Provisional Central Committee [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1002562]
History of the First International by Yuri Steklov [http://www.marxists.org/archive/steklov/history-first-international/ch03.htm]
"Cooperative productions [...] were defeated not only by British corporations, but by a larger force: the mammoth German state capitalism. In fact, even English corporations declined during the process of heavy industrialization, defeated by the same force [...] Observing this, Engels as well as the Germany Social-Democratic Party came to appreciate mammoth corporations and conceived that socialization (state ownership) of them would necessarily lead to socialism, ignoring cooperative production." (Kojin Karatani)
Again in his usage of the philosopher Immanuel Kant to read Marx and vice versa, Kojin Karatani put into context how the so-called “nationalization” question achieved its historically disproportionate programmatic standing relative to other, more disparate economic demands raised by the class-strugglist left. This disproportion expressed itself fullest in the Programme of the Communist International. Here, co-authors Bukharin and Stalin himself outdid Trotsky in outlining an almost maximalist transitional program for “the revolutionary transformation of the property relations of capitalism into relationships of the socialist mode of production” based almost exclusively on “the expropriation of the landlords and capitalists, i.e., the conversion of the monopolist property of the bourgeoisie into the property of the proletarian State” in industry, transport and communication services, land estates, wholesale and retail trade, finance, housing, and “means of ideological influence” (the mass media).
Nowadays, the class-strugglist left is quite divided on this question, and would probably remain so after the introduction of “national-democratization” even on the level of reforms. Consider the Weekly Worker’s Draft Program for a revived Communist Party of Great Britain:
The historic task of the working class is to fully socialise the giant transnational corporations, not break them up into inefficient national units. Our starting point is the most advanced achievements of capitalism. Globalised production needs global social control […] However, specific acts of nationalisation can serve the interests of workers. We support the nationalisation of the land, banks and financial services, along with basic infrastructure such as public transport, electricity, gas and water supplies.
There is still too much discussion on nationalization, too little on the festering problem of small-scale production and the continued hiring of labour for profit at that level, and now too much vacillating on the huge grey area filled by “medium enterprises” in between small-scale production and the commanding heights.
On the other hand, the long-lived cooperative movement itself is far from blameless. Instead of adopting and improving upon one of the earlier “Socialist” political economies like “Ricardian Socialism” (the basis of economic republicanism), it spawned class-conciliationist distractions: consumer cooperatives such as The Co-operative Group in the UK, housing cooperatives, mutual insurance, and all forms of cooperative banking (since employee-owned cooperative banks still extract from society economic rent in the classical sense). It is no accident that the cooperative movement has avoided and continues to avoid political struggles! As Yuri Steklov noted in his book on the International Workingmen’s Association:
At that time, most of the German workers still accepted the views and the political leadership of the liberal bourgeoisie which, denominating itself the Progressive Party (Fortschrittspartei) was then carrying on a struggle with the Prussian Government to secure the franchise. At the same time the Government, of which Bismarck, the reactionary junker, was the chief, was endeavouring to win the support of the workers and to use them as tools in its contest with the bourgeois liberals.
The very few circles then extant for the promotion of the political education of the workers were dragged along in the wake of bourgeois liberalism. In the economic field, bourgeois propagandists urged proletarians to practise “self-help” and “thrift,” declaring that this was the only way of improving the workers’ lot. The chief exponent of this sort of humbug was Schulze-Delitzsch, a Prussian official, founder of co-operative associations and a people’s bank – a Prussian counterpart of the French bourgeois economist, Bastiat.
In their attempts to secure independence of thought, the German workers had to free themselves from the influence both of conservative demagogy and of liberal sophistry. A notable part in the liberation of the German proletariat from bourgeois influence in political matters was played by Ferdinand Lassalle, who was instrumental in founding the first independent working-class political organisation in Germany. This was known as the General Union of German Workers (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein – A.D.A.V.) and it came into being on May 23, 1853. The aim of the Association was to conduct a “peaceful and legal” agitation on behalf of manhood suffrage. This, Lassalle thought, would lead to extensive working-class representation in parliament, and eventually to the passing of a number of desirable laws. One of these would be a law for the State aid of productive associations, whereby the workers would be freed from the tyranny of capital.
Lassalle was unable to fulfil his hopes for the speedy creation of a mass party of the workers. In the autumn of 1864, the membership was 4,600, and by the end of November, 1865, it was no more than 9,420, when the Association comprised fifty-eight branches. But his brief and stormy agitation had the effect, in large measure of freeing the German workers from the dominion of liberal bourgeois ideas.
Thus, this programmatic thesis has attempted to accommodate cooperative solutions within a rent-free and class-strugglist framework by listing three immediate reforms, one threshold reform, and one directional measure – all of which emphasize cooperative production:
1) The redistribution as cooperative property of not some but all productive property where the related business has contract or formally hired labour, and where such property would otherwise be immediately inherited through legal will or through gifting and other loopholes;
2) The non-selective encouragement of, usage of eminent domain for, and unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprise operations;
3) The heavy appropriation of economic rent in the broadcast spectrum, unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for independent mass media cooperative startups – especially at more local levels, for purposes of media decentralization – and anti-inheritance transformation of all the relevant mass media properties under private ownership into cooperative property;
4) The protection of workers’ cooperatives from degenerating into mere business partnerships by means of prohibiting all subcontracting of labour, including whereby at least one contractual party is a workers’ cooperative; and
5) The enabling of society's cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common plans.
The festering problem of small-scale production and the continued hiring of labour for profit at that level could be addressed by modifying the directional measure:
The full replacement of the hiring of labour for small-business profit by cooperative production, and also the enabling of society’s cooperative production of goods and services to be regulated by cooperatives under their common plans.
Should there be agreement upon and not mere acceptance of this directional measure, it can facilitate the nationalization debate but in a way such that private ownership of productive and non-possessive property is altogether outside the boundaries of debate; there can be no advocacy on the class-strugglist left for a combination of small-scale cooperative production with “medium enterprises” still under private ownership.
REFERENCES
Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani [http://books.google.com/books?id=mR1HIJVoy6wC]
Programme of the Communist International by Nikolai Bukharin and Joseph Stalin [http://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/6th-congress/index.htm]
Draft Programme of the Communist Party of Great Britain by the Provisional Central Committee [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1002562]
History of the First International by Yuri Steklov [http://www.marxists.org/archive/steklov/history-first-international/ch03.htm]