Worker Cooperatives and Revolution
Worker Cooperatives and Revolution

Author: Chris Wright

Publisher: Booklocker

Published: 2014-08-20

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1632634325

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Since the financial crisis of 2008 and the global popular protests of 2011, more people have begun to wonder and speculate: what’s next for civilization? The economic, social, and political status quo seems unsustainable, but what can emerge to take its place? In this book, a historian examines the past and present to argue that the seeds of a more humane society are already being planted, on local and international scales. Whether they will bear fruit depends, ultimately, on grassroots initiative. Focusing on the new worker cooperative movement in the West, this study not only contains the first systematic discussion of the solidarity economy in the light of Marxist theory; it also introduces a major revision of Marxism that both updates it for the twenty-first century and illuminates our historical moment. It includes an analysis of the history of cooperatives in the U.S., showing where they went wrong and how we can correct their past mistakes. It has a case-study of the successful new worker-owned business New Era Windows in Chicago, which has been celebrated internationally for its defiance of conventional paradigms. And it shows a way out of the age-old conflict between Marxism and anarchism, arguing that both are more relevant now than they have ever been. Which is to say: a gradualist “revolution” is, for the first time, within the realm of possibility.

Worker Cooperatives in America
Worker Cooperatives in America

Author: Robert Jackall

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-28

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0520324765

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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1984.

Working Democracies
Working Democracies

Author: Joan S. M. Meyers

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2022-06-15

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1501763709

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In this inside look at worker cooperatives, Joan Meyers challenges long-held views and beliefs. From the outside, worker cooperatives all seem to offer alternatives to bad jobs and unequal treatment by giving workers democratic control and equitable ownership of their workplaces. Some contend, however, that such egalitarianism and self-management come at the cost of efficiency and stability, and are impractical in the long run. Working Democracies focuses on two worker cooperatives in business since the 1970s that transformed from small countercultural collectives into thriving multiracial and largely working-class firms. She shows how democratic worker ownership can provide stability and effective business management, but also shows that broad equality is not an inevitable outcome despite the best intentions of cooperative members. Working Democracies explores the interconnections between organizational structure and organizational culture under conditions of worker control, revealing not only the different effects of managerialism and "participatory bureaucracy," but also how each bureaucratic variation is facilitated by how workers are defined by at each cooperative. Both bureaucratic variation and worker meanings are, she shows, are consequential for the reduction or reproduction of class, gender, and ethnoracial inequalities. Offering a behind the scenes comparative look at an often invisible type of workplace, Working Democracies serves as a guidebook for the future of worker cooperatives.

Workers Cooperatives
Workers Cooperatives

Author: Eashvaraiah Pulluru

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781443829021

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The present book is an outcome of a seminar which focused on finding out the possibilities of rethinking socialism in terms of workersâ (TM) socialism vs. state socialism (or more broadly, workersâ (TM) and peasantsâ (TM) socialism vs. state managed socialism) which has been so well analysed by many scholars such as David Lane and Evan Luard. Scholars like Peter Bins, Tony Cliff, and Chris Harman have gone further and shown how the revolution was lost by the workers to state capitalism. However, there have been many instances and cases which have occurred simultaneously all over the world in non-socialist countries wherein workers have shown extraordinary zeal and commitment in forming workersâ (TM) cooperatives free of state support and intervention. Scholars like Robert Oakeshott and Sharit Bhowmik have written and documented this phenomenon extensively. The collapse of the state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the socialist federation of the USSR stand as a testimony to, and logically confirm the above accounts. The wave of failures of socialist patterns in states like India and welfare states in Western Europe and the USA have illustrated that even their public sector enterprises with loose state control have not succeeded. Hence, the retreat of the state and the moves towards privatization and re-privatization, have been embedded in the liberal paradigm. It is interesting to note that a different kind of phenomenon of production of goods and services by different groups, with reduced control of the state and with the initiative of the workers and peasants and other groups, has been in existence parallel to the above two phenomena. This phenomenon can broadly be called â ~workersâ (TM) cooperatives, â (TM) meaning worker-owned and worker-controlled cooperatives. Naturally, one looks to such phenomena and examines the possibilities of developing it as an alternative to capitalism on the one hand, and state socialism of varied types on the other. The main intention here is to see whether these phenomena of workersâ (TM) cooperatives can be developed into socialist formations with a redefined socialism by reinterpreting and unravelling the broad Marxist, socialist assumptions like self-activity and the self-organisation of workers. It is clear from the different authors of this book that the theoretical framework and empirical experiments suggest an alternative to state-controlled cooperatives and state socialism. This volume extensively covers the conceptual and empirical aspects of workersâ (TM) cooperatives across the globe with explorations of the possibilities of linking workersâ (TM) cooperatives with socialist politics. The book is a fitting contribution to the debates currently going on in search of alternatives to capitalist liberalization and globalization on the one hand, and the failure of different kinds of existing socialisms in the former Soviet Union and different parts of Eastern Europe on the other hand. The book is interdisciplinary in nature and will be useful to scholars, academics, practitioners, and students of political science, governance, development studies, economics, and other trade union and civil society activists.

The Economics of Worker Cooperatives
The Economics of Worker Cooperatives

Author: John H. Pencavel

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781781005330

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The economics of worker cooperatives is a branch of economic inquiry with a long and esteemed pedigree, dating at least from the work of John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century. Since then, leading economists have paid intermittent attention to the topic, but the collapse of state-sponsored socialism in Eastern Europe and growing discontent with loosely-fettered capitalism have resulted in a resurgence of interest in worker co-operatives as a method of enhancing productivity and reducing income inequalities without heavy government regulation. Professor Pencavel's judicious selection of articles by leading scholars conveys the vigour and rigour of this new empirical research. His original introduction provides an authoritative guide to past and current thinking in this topical area and raises important issues, which point the way for further contributions to the already rich literature.

Collective Courage
Collective Courage

Author: Jessica Gordon Nembhard

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-13

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0271064269

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In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

Worker Participation
Worker Participation

Author: John Pencavel

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2002-01-24

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1610444434

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Once they accept a job, most Americans have little control over their work environments. In Worker Participation, John Pencavel examines some of those rare workplaces where employees both own and manage the companies they work for: the plywood cooperatives and forest worker cooperatives of the Pacific Northwest. Rather than relying on abstract theories, Pencavel reviews the actual experiences of these two groups of worker co-ops. He focuses on how worker-owned companies perform when compared to more traditional firms and whether companies operate more efficiently when workers determine how they are run. He also looks at the long-term viability of these enterprises and why they are so unusual. Most businesses are constantly caught in the battle over whether to use the firm's profits to pay labor or to increase capital. Worker cooperatives provide an appealing case study because the interests of labor and capital are aligned. If individuals have a role in setting goals, they should have an added incentive to help meet those goals, and productivity should benefit. On the other hand, observers have long argued that, since any single employee in a co-op reaps only a small benefit from working hard, workers may shirk work, and productivity can flag. Furthermore, co-ops often have difficulty raising capital, since they are constrained by how much money the workers have, and banks are often reluctant to lend them money. Using some fifteen years of data on forty mills in Washington State, Pencavel examines how worker co-ops really function. He assesses the practical problems of running a workplace where every employee is a boss. He looks at worker productivity, on-the-job injuries and financial risks facing owner-workers. He considers whether co-ops are inherently unstable and if they are plagued by infighting among the many worker-owners. Although many of the co-ops he studied have closed or been replaced by conventional businesses, Pencavel judges them to have been a success. Despite the risks inherent in such operations, allowing workers to make the decisions that profoundly affect them produces many benefits, including workplace efficiency and increased job security. However, Pencavel concludes, if more Americans are to enjoy such a working arrangement, labor laws will have to be changed, participation encouraged, and a more vigorous public debate about worker participation must take place. This book provides an excellent place to start the discussion.

Making Mondragón
Making Mondragón

Author: William Foote Whyte

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 0801471729

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Since its founding in 1956 in Spain's Basque region, the Mondragón Corporation has been a touchstone for the international cooperative movement. Its nearly three hundred companies and organizations span areas from finance to education. In its industrial sector Mondragón has had a rich experience over many years in manufacturing products as varied as furniture, kitchen equipment, machine tools, and electronic components and in printing, shipbuilding, and metal smelting. Making Mondragón is a groundbreaking look at the history of worker ownership in the Spanish cooperative. First published in 1988, it remains the best source for those looking to glean a rich body of ideas for potential adaptation and implementation elsewhere from Mondragón's long and varied experience. This second edition, published in 1991, takes into account the major structural and strategic changes that were being implemented in 1990 to allow the enterprise to compete successfully in the European common market. Mondragón has created social inventions and developed social structures and social processes that have enabled it to overcome some of the major obstacles faced by other worker cooperatives in the past. William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte describe the creation and evolution of the Mondragón cooperatives, how they have changed through decades of experience, and how they have struggled to maintain a balance between their social commitments and economic realities. The lessons of Mondragón apply most clearly to worker cooperatives and other employee-owned firms, but also extend to regional development and stimulating and supporting entrepreneurship, whatever the form of ownership.

Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society
Design of a Worker Cooperatives Society

Author: Geert Reuten

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-10-20

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9004531084

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What would an alternative to contemporary capitalism look like? In this book, Geert Reuten sets out a detailed design of a democratic society organised in worker cooperatives, followed by an equally detailed democratic transition to it, thereby making a convincing case. In Reuten’s design, Workers constitute the single economic class. However, unlike in capitalism, there is no class that owns the means of production. The legal structure of worker cooperatives is such that workers have full rights to the fruits of the cooperative without owning it, and yet the state does not own the cooperatives either. Interestingly, worker councils in the economic and state domains vote on all economically relevant matters. In Reuten’s work, the free choice of occupation and of specific consumer goods is even larger than in capitalism.

Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina
Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina

Author: Marcelo Vieta

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 680

ISBN-13: 9004268952

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In Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the history, consolidation, and socio-political dimensions of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises), a worker-led company occupation movement that has surged since the turn-of-the-millennium and the country’s neo-liberal crisis.