Beyond Capitalism

Building Democratic Alternatives for Today and the Future

Jeff Shantz, José Brendan Macdonald, Jeff Shantz, José Brendan Macdonald

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623563646
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Économie
• Sous-sujet: Politique économique

Capitalism as a global system barely allows the needs of the majority of the world's population to be met. Whether from an industrialized country such as the US or from South Africa, the need for an alternative can be felt all over the world. It is clear nowadays that, due to the non-democratic nature and inadequacies of capitalism, another system must take its place. Such a process has already begun through the cooperative movement, which this book examines along with other initiatives. Featuring essays by international scholars and activists from various spheres of the anti-capitalist left, the work features many examples from the north and the south, to cover both the historically-advanced and late capitalist economies. It discusses such initiatives as participatory economics, the Mondragon experience, worker cooperatives in Europe and Latin America, solidarity economy in South Africa, and more. Written in an accessible manner, Beyond Capitalism will be an invaluable resource for any student of social movements and political thought and for anyone looking for alternative to today's ongoing systemic crises.

CHAPTER ONE

The Challenge of a Democratic Economy

José Brendan Macdonald

In this essay we hold it as a given that the so-called democracy implanted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still referred to as such today stops at the doorway to the business enterprise. Since the dawn of the capitalist social formation it has been contested by the workers who conquered universal suffrage but who must still build enterprises which surpass the capital/labor dichotomy. In many cases the ideal of self-management by the workers is translated into practice but in many others—indeed in most cases—thanks to the omnipresence of bourgeois culture it is seriously jeopardized. In order for self-management to be successful the forces of the market and the state must be faced. Although it is impossible to foresee the outcome of this struggle, the presence of self-managed enterprises and the diffusion of their need and their advantages is a strong indication in favor of a project for a new civilization.

The two-centuries-old liberalism in force

The main ideas still in force on democracy and economics came to the surface first in the eighteenth century, the so-called century of the Enlightenment. The économistes or physiocrats in France elaborated what is held today by many to be the beginning of an economic science. They diffused the doctrine of laissez-faire or a minimum state in the economy since the market, that ensemble of the comings and goings of the exchange of merchandise, is supposed to have its own laws which would make the interference of governments in the economy unnecessary. The so-called classical British economists—Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and others—also defended the free market. Whence comes the expression liberalism applied to economic thought. But not only economic thought. One also speaks of political liberalism. It is said that all are equal before the law, all have the right of freedom of religion, of assembly, of demanding rights before the legal authorities, and so on. It is during the eighteenth century that the encyclopedists in their Parisian drawing rooms exalt their ideas on freedom. Carlyle ([1837] 1934) calls them Anglomaniacs, influenced as they were by British institutions, then freer than those of France. All that nascent political democracy has created a powerful impact which has endured to this day. The great majority of national states today have constitutions which exalt these liberal values. The institution of the eighteenth-century idea of the rule of law and order pervades to a greater or lesser extent all the continents today.

When the encyclopedists defended the thesis that all are equal before the law, that all exercised this or that right, the all they had in mind included only property owners—the nobility and the rising middle and wealthy class. It was only to them, perhaps 1 or 2 percent of the population, that the right to participate in political life as electors and as candidates to political posts was reserved. This was inherited from the medieval and modern burg. Only they were the literate, the ones capable of governing. Politics was not permitted for the ignorant masses.

It was in the 1840s in England that the ruling class first conceded the right of universal suffrage to the masses (i.e. to all male nonproprietors). This was due to painful pressure from the people. As Karl Polanyi [1944] shows, the British bourgeoisie made that concession only after they were convinced that the new situation would not do away with their privileges. This historic experience became the fashion all over the world during the following decades.

The discourse of both political and economic liberalism supposes an equality of rights that does not exist. On the one hand one speaks of the equality of all—the equality between capitalist and laborer when both sign a labor contract, equality of freedom of speech which both the poor and the rich person are supposed to have, inviolability both of the poor person’s and the rich person’s property, and so forth. On paper a capitalist country is a republic of free and equal people. Hence it is understood that the market is free for all too, that competition between capitalists departs from the right of all to compete. Those who win the competition struggle are exalted in the thought of the economic elite and of opinion formers as national heroes to be emulated somehow. Those who lose are said to be less ingenuous, hardly given to discipline and creativity.

On the one hand there is the discourse of economic wisdom which is said to have a scientific character: competition is free, trade must be free, decisions of capitalists and laborers are free. And, albeit not saying so publicly, there are entrepreneurs who even view any legislation on a minimum wage as an encroachment on their freedom.

Free too is supposed to be the political atmosphere: free is the right to information although an enormous part of it is manipulated by the elite through the mainstream media and other means; free is the choosing of the people’s representatives although they don’t have to promise and certainly don’t have to materialize solutions which would take into account the needs of all the citizens. Free is the press although the owners of its organs disseminate news through Goebbelsian tactics.

There arises the ideal of equality and solidarity

There is no denying that bourgeois democracy—self-named liberal democracy—has potentially emancipative elements. Doubtless the right of freedom of conscience on religious and other matters, periodic elections, the right of a responsible freedom of expression and other rights of the liberal creed of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries need not be belittled per se. But they hardly function fully since a supposed political freedom and equality in the last analysis are the hostage of an economic inequality which reaches today the proportions of an abysmal asymmetry. As it expresses what it has potentially better, liberal bourgeois democracy is bound to formalities. As an observer put it acutely and ironically about a century ago: “Both the banker and the beggar are forbidden to sleep under the bridge.”

Two centuries ago there is born, first in England, and shortly thereafter in other countries, the working class—the wage-makers (and the unemployed who are frequently potential wage-makers) on a large scale—as the counterpart to the rising bourgeoisie. It was the working class, as we have already stated, that broke the privilege of voting as something exclusive to proprietors. Since the bourgeois discourse speaks of liberty and equality as if they were universal or absolute, the best labor leaders have for a long time taken advantage of what political liberalism promises. And for various reasons they frequently manage things in such a way that the bourgeois elite make concessions to them. They develop various forms of the defense of their class: benefit societies, labor unions, cooperatives. The latter bring us to what interests us here. A cooperative in principle, unlike a capitalist enterprise (and a state enterprise too) is a democratic enterprise or, at least in principle, is supposed to be.

The cooperative was an invention of common people, hence of the working class. One frequently refers to a group of 28 tailors, the so-called Pioneers of Rochdale, England, in 1844 as the beginning of the cooperative movement. Indeed the movement gains force from that. But Birchall (1997: 4) tells us that there is news from the 1760s about English dockyard shipwrights who began to dedicate themselves to running their own flour mills so as to be no longer subject to the high price and poor quality of bread in their towns. This development and others during the rest of the eighteenth century were the reflections of the first attempts by workers to organize their own production and consumption. Thus there arise the first cooperatives in England, and in the first half of the nineteenth century in France too. One can speak of a cooperative movement in those two countries and soon thereafter in many others. This movement was sometimes supported by philanthropic middle- and upper-class people who understood and sympathized with the needs of the majority of the population.

Today there are numerous cooperatives with varying degrees of success on all continents. Already during the nineteenth century they were present worldwide. Every cooperative by definition is an enterprise. But in principle it is not a capitalist enterprise. In the latter profit, stimulated by interminable competition, is an end in itself.¹ In a cooperative, profit is to be seen as a means: a means to improve the quality of the work and the life of the members of the cooperative and to be one of the factors of the improvement of the quality of life of both member and nonmember consumers.

There are various kinds of cooperative: production cooperatives, consumer, credit and other types of cooperatives, cooperatives in activities such as industry, agriculture, mining, electric energy, services, and so on.

It was in the decade of the 1840s in Great Britain that organized workers first formulated cooperative values or principles. And at the end of the nineteenth century the International Cooperative Alliance was founded. The cooperative principles first formulated in Great Britain went through a certain evolution for a century and a half. During the congress which celebrated the centennial of the ICA in 1995 they were formulated as the following seven: (1) voluntary (spontaneous) and open membership; (2) control through a democratic process, which includes the practice of one vote for each member; (3) the economic participation of all; (4) autonomy and independence especially in economic and financial matters so that a cooperative be not the hostage of banks and other external entities; (5) constant education, training, and information for their members; (6) cooperation among cooperatives; and (7) concern for community (Birchall, 1997: 65).²

Nowadays the various forms of economic organization alternative to capitalism express similar values or principles. The second cooperative principle is the equivalent to self-management, which is cultivated by the solidarian economy, by Parecon or participatory economics and by the followers of P. R. Sarkar, that is, the Prout movement. (All these three forms of thought and action are presented in various chapters in this book.) All these three forms of thinking and acting also esteem the greatest solidarity possible, which is an aspect that pervades the whole discourse of the ICA besides its seventh principle particularly. Due to the dangerous exhaustive exploitation of the environment and the resources of the Earth, the cooperative movement and the three movements cited emphasize the importance of respecting Nature, of not committing aggression against her. Furthermore, the cooperative is the present day juridical form most found all over the world which is most tuned in to the aspirations which have historically motivated the formulation of ideas and doings alternative to capitalism.

The origin of many values such as those brings us to ancient attitudes opposed to Mammonism.³ The peasant, that chiliastic character who has had to resist the aggressiveness of aristocrats and later on of bourgeois, sees the land and its material goods above all else as a means of reproducing life, of giving it continuity. To the peasant the earth and its riches should belong to whoever makes their living out of it, which, as we know, does not usually occur in the societies where the peasant lives. The peasant is the one who in a class society exploits the land exactly for that reason, his survival, besides having to hand over a part of the product of his labor to a landowner who reaps where he has not planted. As a defense mechanism the medieval European peasant had access to the commons, not infrequently of a quality inferior to the private lands of his lord, and belonging to the local peasant community as a whole.

Up to the present where there are still peasants and aboriginal peoples, those simple people have a weltanschauung or a social ethic quite different from the ethic which is the mobilizing force of capitalism. Instead of the ideal of “each one for himself” there prevails the ideal of “one for all and all for one.” That simple person sees in others his own image or the image of God or the gods whereas the bourgeois exalts individualism as the guarantee for progress.

Thus, values such as self-management, solidarity, a view of profit as a means and not an end among others incorporated by the cooperative movement, by the three movements cited above and still other alternatives to the capitalist ideals and practices, which have flourished since the defense of people’s interests in the nineteenth century have got, albeit in a not highly elaborated way, chiliastic roots.

For more than two centuries the bourgeoisie has exalted democracy and freedom. But liberal democracy and freedom refer par excellence to the very bourgeoisie itself and not necessarily to other sectors of the population. As a matter of formality, due to historical pressures they can be extended to almost the whole adult population. Adherence or nonadherence to that is a question of a correlation of forces. There are conquests and there are regressions for the materialization of the common good.

Our own concept of liberty does not fit into the liberal scheme. To us “[a] person is free when they do not give in to pressures which prevent them from fully developing their capacities and fully materializing their needs” (Macdonald, 1987: 5, emphasis added). The possibility of achieving that is reserved to the elite or ruling class. Then we have what could be called individualistic liberty, which is not for everybody. We can also think of a universalistic liberty, where all enjoy liberty because there are no segments which prevent it from flourishing. But does it really exist? Today it does not exist. Such a society was seen only when there were no social classes, that is, during the Stone Age. It is not impossible for it to come back into existence in a future classless society. It will have to be invented for obviously we are not recommending a return to the Stone Age.

In liberal society democracy stops at the doorway to the enterprise. The liberal insists that the right to make decisions and give orders in an enterprise is to be attributed only to the owner of the enterprise. And he or she will construct a whole discourse to justify that. To speak of a democratic enterprise for him or her is a contradiction in terms: it is like speaking of a pregnant male.

Thus the wage-maker as such cannot feel free. He or she runs the risk of losing his or her job. The determination of their working conditions do not depend on them. Hundreds of millions or even billions of people around the world must submit to monotonous and tedious jobs. A similar fate also subjects legions of workers to outsourcing and the degradation of the terms of their working conditions. And even in the case of qualified laborers whose work may be more stimulating and edifying the obligation of following orders reminds them to what degree they are not free as laborers.

Historically, cooperatives began when the capitalist mode of production was beginning to become hegemonic, that is, when, due to the First Industrial Revolution and the irreversible use of the steam machine on a growing scale as of the decade of 1800 first in England, there arises the tendency of private interests to generalize the hiring of wage labor. As we have already said, cooperatives were one of the ways of defending the new working class. To put it in informal terms we might say that the cooperative is in principle an enterprise without bosses and therefore a democratic enterprise where profit is held to be a means and not an end in itself. But both during its early history and nowadays, the cooperative is immersed in a vigorous capitalist sea. Competition hardly offers a truce. There is a formidable concentration and centralization of capital which can have perverse effects on cooperatives.

The struggle of the ideologies⁴

Cooperatives cannot avoid feeling the winds of capitalism. Furthermore they are not totally foreign to bourgeois ideology. Between the ideal of the democratic and solidarian enterprise and the bourgeois seduction to profit heralded as a guarantee for grandiose progress the distance need not be great. Mammon is capable of corrupting even those who began by saying they would not render him homage.

Thus those two influences—capitalist competition and bourgeois seduction—quite often show their face.

Competition is dictated by an impersonal market which demands there be a constant alert for every businessperson to take measures which aim at minimizing costs and maximizing profits. It can demand the dismissal of laborers, the intensification of work even when that harms the laborer’s health, deceitful advertising, the increase of red tape methods, and so on. Self-management which turns to assemblies vertically directed by technocrat partners to set up a ritual said to be democratic may get a hold on many cooperatives. Thus, a cooperative may face capitalist competition more efficaciously.

Here is an example of this phenomenon: the case of many credit cooperatives in the so-called developed countries:

Credit cooperat...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• 1 The Challenge of a Democratic Economy
• 2 The Parecon Proposal
• 3 Economic Democracy through Prout, Progressive Utilization Theory
• 4 Anarchy in Action: Especifismo and Working-Class Organizing
• 5 An Economy for the Common Good with Social Currencies
• 6 Innovation, the Cooperative Movement, and Self-Management: From the Technical School to the Centers of Research and Development and the University in the Trajectory of the Mondragn Experience
• 7 Worker Occupations and Worker Cooperatives Examining Lessons from the 1970s and 1980s
• 8 From Direct Action to Workers Assemblies: Unions and the G20 Protests in Toronto
• 9 The Emerging Paradoxical Possibility of a Democratic Economy
• 10 The Social Economy in Venezuela: Between the Will and the Possibility
• 11 Argentine Worker Cooperatives in Civil Society: A Challenge to Capital-Labor Relations
• 12 Challenging the Globalized Agro-Food Complex: Farming Cooperatives and the Emerging Solidarity Economy Alternative in South Africa
• Index