Occupy Sandy boosts worker-run coops amid rebuild

Peter Rugh writes that Occupy Sandy boosts worker-run coops amid rebuild.

Rugh gives a brief overview of worker-run co-ops around the world, especially in the coastal neighbourhood of Far Rockaway in New York City:

One of those bigger projects is a worker-run cooperative initiative, organised by Occupy Sandy and supported by the Working World, a group that specialises in incubating collectively owned businesses.

The initiative is well suited to Far Rockaway because worker-run enterprises have a history of flourishing in environments of economic distress or political upheaval.

In 2001, when Argentina defaulted on its international loans and the country’s ownership class fled, Argentines took over abandoned factories and established networks of producers and distributors.

In Venezuela, worker-run cooperatives were at the heart of the vision for 21st-century socialism, and Hugo Chavez’s administration helped create tens of thousands of collectively owned businesses over the last 14 years.

Most notably, Spanish workers in the Basque region created the Mondragon Corporation, the world’s largest federation of cooperatives, during the Franco dictatorship in the 1950s. Today more than 250 enterprises operate under the Mondragon banner. The federation, which spans 77 countries and employs 83,000 workers, has been widely praised.

As noted yesterday, Australia is beginning to see some progress in the adoption of worker co-ops.

Rugh argues that one important, immediate advantage of work co-ops is that:

Worker-run cooperatives, in contrast, could offer a way for community members to sell the products of their labor without selling their labor itself — a shift that would keep capital within the community and cash in the pockets of workers.

On the political development of workers' consciousness, Rugh writes that:

Richard Wolff, professor of economics at the New School and author of Democracy at Work, a study of cooperative businesses, argues that forming cooperatives can be the first step in enacting a sweeping social and economic shift.

Wolff envisions a transformation, similar to the social shift from feudalism to capitalism, in which cooperatives replace corporations and goods are distributed through a democratically planned economy.

The cooperatives that Wolff talks about, and the ones that Occupy Sandy is aiming to establish, are more accurately known as worker self-directed enterprises: businesses that organise democratically collective ownership at the point of production.

I would think that Wolff is naive to believe that the Capitalists are going to let the worker co-ops take over without a fight. As I noted in Argentine Factory Wins Legal Battle:

The main problem is that of dual power in Argentina. Some factories are controlled by the workers but they are relying on the Capitalist state for legitimacy through the parliamentry system. This deprives the workers' movement of a growth in consciousness in the hope of accomodation within the Capitalist system.

Unfortunately, one cannot accelerate the education of the workers about the Capitalist system, and the mythologies that are maintained about it. The workers will learn at their own pace.