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The most common sense answer to unemployment (by socialist party usa.)
+ YouTube Video
This is another Thom video, he's interviewing the chairman of the socialist party, mainly about how Obama is not nearly a socialist, what socialism is and what socialist solutions would be. A lot of what he says is what we've been saying all the time (the commons should be publicly owned, national industries should be publicly owned, other companies should be worker owned and worker run), So he was saying that BP would be nationalized.
But what was very interesting was one solution to unemployment, give them government grants to start co-ops. When I heard that my first thought was, Why the hell have I not thought of that.
This is actually something that dickhead republicans should be in favor of, instead of more money for unemployment, economically support coops for umeployed people. How the hell is this not THE answer. It makes so much sense its almost painful.
Because Republicans and the right-wing in general are sadist fucks who would rather waste the precious tax dollars that they cry on and on about daily as opposed to seeing poor people succeed, maybe?
Not to mention, as steadfast, unapologetic protectors of power and privilege, the last thing they want is a series of successful examples of worker power manifesting itself in contrast to corporate power.
Remember, what matters most to a capitalist or a supporter of capital isn't efficiency, certainly not if it would mean diminishing their power.
YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS
You know, I understand that GPDP, but this is just SO common sense, but yeah, of coarse the republicans and most of the dmeocrats are corporate whores. This sort of thing is something that is absolutely workable in the US and should be pushed.
I like the idea of workers getting grants to operate businesses and then taking those businesses and running them themselves. I'm really nor in favor of the government running the businesses. The government running anything would be a disaster.
Except that all evidence points to the contrary.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Yeah, I hav'nt heard it in public media discorse before.
I remember talking with Jimmy jazz on here about the idea a year or so ago, and how it could be a platform for a leftist group. The idea does have a lot of sense, if grants were given there are certainly many co-ops that could compete in markets where the corporate model is either obsolete, poorly managed, or both.
Buy yes, the idea is seldom ever talked about.
Well I'm lookin real hard and I'm trying to find a job but it just keeps gettin tougher every day
Hey finally got speakers--great vid lol
To be fair, Conrail was a disaster for the few years the govt ran it. It's not that I couldn't see a govt sponsored co-op or corporation being successful, its the idea of congress writing the bidget and deciding exactly where the money goes that's scary. In conrails case, it took making it essentially a govtfuned private corporation and de-regulation of the industry before the company expanded.
In that case, it's clear that the money needed to be spent in order to keep a major part of our infrastructure intact, I believe the same case could be made for the industrial regions of this country which have been depleted.
Well I'm lookin real hard and I'm trying to find a job but it just keeps gettin tougher every day
What if the coops do not produce enough to be worth the salary of the unemployed?
Otherwise seems like a good idea overall.
To speculate is human; to hedge, divine
In my state, there is a LOT of road construction going on (takes forever to drive anywhere)
It is a very good idea to do this during a recession, because it keeps people working. It occurred to me that public-works projects like this should ONLY be done during economic downturns, to keep people on the job, and NEVER done during good economic times (with a few exceptions like repairs, of course.) The construction crews could temporarily work for the private companies during upturns in the economy.
This means not only road-building, but all public projects, like schools, hospitals, etc as well. This is better than paying out money for inactivity.
Last edited by Klaatu; 27th August 2010 at 01:21.
money is to politics as fertilizer is to garden weeds.
I disagree. My school seems to do just fine, being government-run. Same for my local police and fire departments, government runs those, too.
I feel as though government-run health care, as well as a government-run banking system would be better also. Reason is that they don't pay taxes, dont make a profit, nor pay CEO's tens-of-million dollar bonuses, on top of an already-overbloated compensation scale. Some businesses may actually be cheaper to be publicly-run than private "collectivist" corporations now do. See my signature:"Capitalism itself is anti-democracy. What private company is not, in it's constitution, a genuine dictatorship?"
But I do agree with you in that worker-owned business would be much better than what we are stuck with now, such as a growing corporate power and influence, in humongous companies like Whale-Mart, BP, and other union-hating, pollution-generating private enterprises.
money is to politics as fertilizer is to garden weeds.
Every single existing American company?
That sounds a lot like Keynes basic outline, that when investment spending and consumer spending both decline govt spending is necessary to bring the economy back to an equilibrium (or so the very very basic keynsianish thing we were taught in schools). And yes, it seems to work quite a bit, though the New Deal didn't have enough behind it, in my opinion, it did a lot for the infrastructure (TVA, Hoover Dam, many highways, etc) and was used perhaps more effectively in Germany at the time with the mammoth armament, industrial, as well as projects like the autobahn creating loads of jobs.
But why should the work programs, reminiscient to FDR's CCC, be solely relied upon during downturns? Obviously a boost can be given by these projects but why should private contractors immediately resume handling everything once the economy sparks? I could see building for private enterprise but roads, hospitals, etc?
Well I'm lookin real hard and I'm trying to find a job but it just keeps gettin tougher every day
Good question. I would say that the larger the company, the more likely it is to be dictator-like. Conversely, the smaller the company, the more partnership-like (hence "worker co-op" like) For example, if two people go into business, and are equal partners, that is a lot like a socialist co-op business. The thing is to get this purely-democratic form of business to work on a larger scale. A worker-owned co-op can be just as competitive as a capitalist business. That is, a company does not need a wealthy owner in order to function well.
money is to politics as fertilizer is to garden weeds.
Alright, this is certainly more democratic socialist than revolutionary communist, but,
The debate about throwing money into worker co-ops has never really been discussed in the discourses of the mainstream politicians/media/lobbying firms (which are generally owned by the same, relatively small number of people) but the notion of the US govt serving as a kind of venture capitalist ("venture cooperativist" lol) into worker co-ops should be an enticing one.
There are, however, several issues which come to mind. The first is, as Havet points out, the notion that some, if not most, worker co-ops may fail. In this case, it would appear that the govt has simply thrown away money at a failing project. However, the counter argument one could make is that even is some projects do not pan out, that is still dollars that have been pumped into the wallets of American workers in a much more direct fashion than many of the corporate bailouts we've seen recently. In this sense, the money spent would serve its most basic purpose.
The other issue I, for one, foresee deals with the relative foreigness of co-ops, real or perceived. It is one thing for an investor to go before a budget hearing in Congress and ask for billions to save their company, but rarely is ever have a group of workers gone before congress to ask for billions to save our company. Obviously, it is hard to foresee, in our current political clime, any such movement being succesful, however, even if that were the case, it is still somewhat hard to visualize. That is, the business model presented to show a corporations path to profitability is going would be quite different (to say the least) than a co-op explaining how it hopes to create sustainable, high quality jobs while making a competitive product.
The response to this, I think, must be much more nuanced and must focus around the many co-ops which have been succesful, ranging from small industries to nail salons. This needs to be reinforced in a economic culture of the US which has come to believe in nothing but the corporate model--which has failed us.
Personally, I have little doubt that such a program could be a great success, though if implemented I think it should be somewhat staggered, as in, the US govt should invest more in US business which give more benefits, more pay, better working conditions, and more democratic control of the workplace, though not necessarily being a co-op. I don't mean large corporations when I write this but rather small businesses in which there is little demand to become a co-op and in which buying out hard working and quick thinking owners may be more costly in terms of losing good management and lead to more unemployment (at least in the short term).
It seems a decent way to help jump start this movement would be, aside from awarding grants to co-ops which provide a decent vision and an appearingly viable plan for long-term success, would be to invest in areas which have been hurt most by the corporate model in the last few decades. I've mentioned recently how I find the lack of high quality industrial jobs to be hurting the work force today quite severely, so funding for co-ops which may move certain markets forward seems the most logical.
Grants may be awarded to co-ops which build solar panels, for instance, as this industry would benefit a coal devouring US but is very much under-represented in our industry. The same could be said of wind turbines as well as geothermal equipment. Perhaps the most tempting, an undobtedly most expensive, would be co-ops given grants to build electric cars and then sent to compete against one another, one perhaps rising to become a major market force.
This is, however, largely dreaming. But the notion of grants being used to start co-ops in every corner of the economy, from the burger joint to the ice skating rink to the health spa to the auto mechanic shop is a noble one and could work.
At least, I think so.
Well I'm lookin real hard and I'm trying to find a job but it just keeps gettin tougher every day
The extent of current unemployment is caused by the crisis.
The underlying cause of the crisis, as Andrew Kliman showed, is an excessively low rate of profit.
Higher unemployment = Lower wages.
Lower wages = Higher rate of profit (for co-ops as much as anybody else).
So, not the best time to be solving unemployment while preserving capitalism, perhaps.
That's it - I'm gonna repost my article here in case nobody's visiting the link. The demand is this:
The genuine end of “free markets” – including in unemployment resulting from workplace closures, mass sackings, and mass layoffs – by first means of 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 as even an alternative to non-insolvency restrictions like legally binding workplace closure vetoes and coupling prohibitions on mass sackings or mass layoffs with socially secure transfers to more sustainable workplaces.
Eminent Domain for Pre-Cooperative Worker Buyouts
“Our ideal suggests a reform agenda, aimed at moving us in the direction of Economic Democracy. Among these reforms would be demands for [...] Technical and financial support for worker buyouts of existing enterprises.” (David Schweickart)
The term “reform agenda” sounds shocking at first, especially coming from an advocate of “market socialism” (the retention of a “free” consumer goods and services market while eliminating the capitalism-specific markets of labour and capital) like David Schweickart. However, the same dynamic oppositionist test that was applied to the aforementioned, proven-to-be-dynamic oppositionist demands is to be applied to this demand.
Does this reform facilitate the issuance of either intermediate or threshold demands? It does indeed meet the Hahnel criterion, since more general demands may eventually have to be made regarding unconditional economic assistance – from the more technical aspects of drafting startup plans and operations management issues to the legal mechanism of eminent domain or compulsory purchase (due monetary compensation but without prior owner consent) to the more financial aspects such as monetary and physical assets provided for cooperative startups of sufficient mass (as opposed to business partnerships without employees), and since demands will eventually have to be made regarding necessary restrictions on subcontracting (especially amongst workers’ cooperatives) and regarding the necessary restriction of competition amongst workers’ cooperatives. Even in a more limited application – such as countering a workplace closure, mass sacking, or mass layoff – this revival of one of the truly and radically social-democratic measures enacted by the Paris Commune suggests the need for more creative and pro-active approaches towards countering unemployment. More important, however, is the fate of “free markets” in general – their genuine elimination, and not mere regulation, arising from means other than dirigisme, or selective mercantilism. Even the anarchist Michael Bakunin had this to say about the historic Eisenach Program’s call for “state support of the cooperative system and state loans for free producers’ cooperatives subject to democratic guarantees”:
There are [...] planks in this program which free-enterprise capitalists will dislike [...] Clause 10, Article 3 – is even more important and socialistic. It demands state help, protection, and credit for workers’ cooperatives, particularly producers’ cooperatives, with all necessary guarantees, i.e., freedom to expand. Free enterprise is not afraid of successful competition from workers’ cooperatives because the capitalists know that workers, with their meager incomes, will never by themselves be able to accumulate enough capital to match the immense resources of the employing class... but the tables will be turned when the workers’ cooperatives, backed by the power and well-nigh unlimited credit of the State, begin to fight and gradually absorb both private and corporate capital (industrial and commercial). For the capitalist will in fact be competing with the State, and the State is, of course, the most powerful of all capitalists.
Does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? Well, this demand is historically loaded and can be extremely tricky. Consider a very similar demand raised in the Gotha Program, which was criticized heavily by Marx:
“The German Workers' party, in order to pave the way to the solution of the social question, demands the establishment of producers' co-operative societies with state aid under the democratic control of the toiling people. The producers' co-operative societies are to be called into being for industry and agriculture in such dimensions that the socialist organization of the total labor will arise from them.”
Instead of arising from the revolutionary process of transformation of society, the “socialist organization of the total labor” “arises” from the “state aid” that the state gives to the producers' co-operative societies and which the state, not the workers, “calls into being”. It is worthy of Lassalle's imagination that with state loans one can build a new society just as well as a new railway!
[...]
That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois.
Notwithstanding the scathing criticism, this call for the formation of producer cooperatives with state aid had a class-strugglist advantage: while forcing the hand of the state, this call forced the feeble, sectional struggles for such cooperatives to become part of the political struggle of the worker-class movement (in short, open class struggle).
The demand for the encouragement of, and unconditional economic assistance (both technical and financial) for, pre-cooperative worker buyouts of existing enterprises and enterprise operations – particularly in light of the recent “occupied factory” movements – improves upon this history with regards to class independence. The very premise of pre-cooperative worker buyouts is that the workers themselves “call into being” these cooperatives like they did in the Paris Commune, especially if they are about to lose their jobs in the ensuing mass sacking, mass layoff, or some other similar scenario. In the case of closures of workplace establishments not threatened by insolvency, bold workers may “call into being” their own cooperatives if they feel that even legally binding closure vetoes are insufficient. Yes, there is encouragement but not actual establishment by the bourgeois-capitalist state, and there is also “state aid” to both the workers and the capitalist deserters, but given the necessity to get past the Erfurt Program’s precedent for both the excessive “orthodox Marxist” phobia of cooperativism and over-reliance on the state structure (i.e., continued over-emphasis on state-based social welfare schemes, topped with “Marxist”-based “socializations” all over the place, which in fact perpetuate wage labour and capitalism itself as a money-commodities-money process, or the famed M-C-M abbreviation), these are limited specifically to the pre-cooperative worker buyouts – thereby preserving the politico-ideological independence of the working class – and these are qualitatively superior to the “privatize the gains, socialize the losses” effects of perpetual corporate welfare (further examples of which have arisen recently in the financial services industry).
The aforementioned limitation needs to be contrasted with an example of perpetual “state aid,” the Inveval cooperative story, as reported by Kiraz Janicke of Venezuelanalysis.com and quoted in my earlier work:
Francisco Pinero, Inveval’s treasurer, explained that although Inveval is legally constituted as a cooperative with 51% owned by the state and 49% owned by the workers, “real power lies with the workers assembly.” Rather than supervisors, the workers at Inveval elect, through a workers assembly, recallable ‘coordinators of production,’ for a period of one year.
“Everyone here gets paid exactly the same, whether they work in administration, political formation, security or keeping the grounds clean,” another worker, Marino Mora added.
“We want the state to own 100%, but for the factory to be under workers control, for workers to control all production and administration. This is how we see the new productive model; we don't want to create new capitalists here,” Pinero made clear.
All in all, this reform does indeed meet that all-important Kautsky criterion, by providing workers the opportunity to exercise cooperative ownership and control as a preliminary to social ownership and control, as noted by Marx himself on the Paris Commune:
If united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism?
REFERENCES
In What May We Hope? by David Schweickart [http://www.chicagodsa.org/ngarchive/ng89.html#anchor650664]http://www.chicagodsa.org/ngarchive/ng89.html#anchor650664[/url]]
The Civil War in France: First Draft by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx.../ch01.htm#D1s2]
Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (Eisenach Programme) by August Bebel [http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/...ocument_id=688]
A Critique of the German Social-Democratic Program by Michael Bakunin [http://libcom.org/library/a-critique...rogram-bakunin]
Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...otha/index.htm]
Venezuela’s Co-Managed Inveval: Surviving in a Sea of Capitalism by Kiraz Janicke, Venezuelanalysis.com [http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2520]
The Civil War in France by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...rance/ch05.htm]
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
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/inte...ress/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/stek...ional/ch03.htm]
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Their salery is chosen by themselves, they can't pay themselves more than they earn, a government grant is just that.
