2 Responses to Movements, History, and Economic Transformation, Part 6: Coops and community, ecology and economics

1. welshTerrier2 October 14th, 2011 at 3:48 pm 1

   Excellent. Recommended.

   My most recent FDL diary discussed the painful split in “the movement” between the International Laborers Union (“we want jobs”) and a veritable parade of leading environmentalists over the proposed Keystone tar sands pipeline.

   This led me right into Gar’s video which couldn’t have been more timely. As a socialist, I have always thought the right structure was to put workers in charge of their employers rather than having companies run by investors and the capital they provide. The model for me, to that extent, was a very basic labor versus capital dynamic.

   But for some time now, I’ve been troubled with the environmental piece. While workers are unlikely to shut down their own place of employment or to ship their own jobs overseas, wouldn’t they have the same greedy incentives to lobby against pollution regulations and to pollute the environment?

   I took some small comfort in thinking that, perhaps, coops could be maintained at a small enough size such that workers would vote to refrain from polluting their own communities. Companies, in this utopia, would only do business locally. But, the reality is that the pursuit of profits might ultimately be a stronger lure for these coops and unlimited growth, including growth beyond the local community, might become the norm.

   The question then becomes, “how can we charter worker-owned cooperatives such that they serve the commons first rather than their own economic goals?” My solution thus far has been some form of incorporation whereby members of the public, perhaps elected, would serve on the coops board of directors and would wield a substantial amount of power. The idea would be to balance the economic interests of the workers with the more global interests, including environmental concerns, of the public.

   It would seem that this design is not too different from the non-profit, community-based oversight organization in Cleveland that oversees a number of worker-owned coops. I like this structure because there is one group overseeing many coops as opposed to staffing each coop with some form of public oversight. The latter could become a somewhat cumbersome process. It might even become impossible to find enough qualified people to do the job.

   I am less clear about your vision of having the public play a role in limiting growth. How would this work? Would public funds be used to subsidize smaller coops so that no single coop could grow too large? Would there be a “size limit” regulation? Would a public enterprise enter the market to create more competition for a private coop that had gained too large a share of a given market? I’d like to hear some elaboration on the idea of limiting growth.

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2. Grey Wolf October 15th, 2011 at 6:53 am 2

   Thank you, Gar Alperovitz;

   I have been grasping around for allies in my fight to build ESOP’s … you know, the whole “workers own the means of production” dream … and here you have given me a list of allies. (I’ll be contacting community-wealth.org and others directly …)

   Thanks again.

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