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Can Workplaces Be More Democratic?
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Dan Clore
Aug 13, 2012, 5:05:21 PM8/13/12
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http://www.alternet.org/richard-d-wolff-can-we-remake-our-workplaces-be-more-democratic?paging=off
Richard D. Wolff: Can We Remake Our Workplaces To Be More Democratic?
Economist Richard D. Wolff is known as a critic of capitalism, but
lately he's been arguing for an alternative: cooperatives.
August 11, 2012
The economic crisis of the past five years has caused a lot of people
around the world to question the very foundations of our system -- is
capitalism really the best way to do things?
One of the biggest problems, though, is that there seems to be no other
way to run an economy. Communism has been discredited—the Soviet Union
failed, and China has moved to a strange hybrid that at times seems to
take the worst of both communism and capitalism—and no one's got an
alternative.
Dr. Richard D. Wolff has spent the better part of his life as a critic
of capitalism. Since the rest of the world caught up with his critiques,
he's spent some time trying to do just that—come up with an alternative.
He's been studying cooperatives and collectively run, worker-owned
businesses for a while now, and he's launched a new Web site, Democracy
at Work, to explore the concept. He's also got a new book coming out in
September from Haymarket Books, titled Democracy at Work: A Cure for
Capitalism, in which he makes a case for worker-owned co-ops as an
alternative system that presents a real challenge to the way we do
things now.
Wolff took some time to talk to AlterNet about his new projects, the
Mondragon Corporation in Spain that forms the basis of many of his
arguments for the potential of successful collective enterprise, and
some real-world ideas to revitalize the labor movement, rebuild the
economy, create jobs, and most of all, give Americans more freedom where
they spend the majority of their lives: on the job.
Sarah Jaffe: I want to start off by asking about the Democracy at Work
Web site and your upcoming book.
Richard Wolff: I guess the best way to say this is that over the last
three years, my life, just personally, was completely transformed by
this [economic] crisis. I decided to say goodbye to the University of
Massachusetts, where I was teaching, and come to New York City. I left
in 2008 and to say the least, the crisis was already underway.
I got swept up in a peculiar way because I'm a critic of capitalism.
It's what I've done all my life; I've written books and articles, but
most of the time I'm the edge guy, the strange one, the one who doesn't
fit. My parents are immigrants, English is my third language, so as an
immigrant, you have to make up for what was interrupted or stolen in a
sense from your parents. They hope to recoup what they couldn't do in
life through you. There was no question I had to be the good student, I
had to play a musical instrument, I had to be on the football team, so I
did all those things. I was always marginal but because I had been a
good student, I went to Harvard and then to Stanford and then my Ph.D.
At Yale.
By American standards, I'm a poster kid for all that stuff. It's all
phony as a three-dollar bill, what goes on in these schools, I can
assure you. The metaphor I use is when you watch an ad for some soap and
the ad says, “If you use this soap your sex life will be improved.” They
want your money and they're going to tell you anything to buy that
stupid soap.
Harvard, that's what they do. It's the same gambit. You'll get an
education more or less like you get anywhere else, with one
exception—the people have been sold a bill of goods and they believe it.
So I was the radical economist, but I could function. You rolled your
eyes, as if, "What happened to this nice young man, somebody hit him on
the head with a frying pan and he got a little crazy."
The irony is, after the crisis then suddenly capitalism doesn't look so
good. Wait a minute, there's something wrong. Who can we get to talk
about it? And the answer is not too many people, because you made it
unbearable for the last 30 years. But I had been able to get a job at U
Mass where I was paid to be a radical economist. I made them sign a
letter when they hired me that I am understood to teach Marxian
economics. They said "Why do you want such a letter?" I said "Because I
don't want some pint-sized legislator coming down the road later saying
I'm not doing my job!" I have that letter in my files to this day.
So the joke is, for the last three or four years, I'm a rare commodity.
I do two, three, four interviews almost every day, I write like there's
no tomorrow. And when anybody makes a noise, I wave the pedigrees and
they go “Ehhh.” Like you wave the garlic or the cross at a vampire.
I've had a wonderful time for three years being the critic of
capitalism, basically recouping for people all the insights accumulated
by the numberless critics of capitalism that are as old as capitalism
itself. Like every social system it had its critics – you could pretend
it didn't but they're there. They wrote the articles and the books and
they made the movements. Only in the weird imagination of American
conservatives is there not a long tradition of anti-capitalist thinking,
agitation, strikes, movements, parties, government. It's very rich.
Over the last six, eight months, I've noticed something. Am I still
called to provide criticisms of capitalism? Yes. But something new has
happened – call it the maturation of the critical movement here in the
United States and the rest of the world. It's no longer enough. They
want to know, OK, you're right, capitalism sucks -- for many of them
that's a big step, I don't want to in any way minimize it. But they're
saying to me, OK, we've read your stuff, now give us an alternative.
That's what I'm doing. I'm saying OK, fair question, I'm one of the
people producing that question in your mind, I can't not offer an answer.
The book is a product of this, the Web site is a product of this. I
appeared on the Charlie Rose show 10 days ago, I talked about Mondragon,
because Americans listen better if you describe something that exists
than if you describe something that could exist. Because that's where
the most advanced thinking of people that have been caught up in this
crisis, that's what they want to talk about. It's not necessarily that
they agree with me, but they want to have a proposal to chew on. They
want to hear how and why this is different from capitalism, and how and
why this should do any better in dealing with any kind of social problem
and then how and why should we believe that if it's better, that it
could ever be actually achieved. We don't want pie in the sky.
That Web site is a tension of these parts—part criticism of capitalism,
part argument for an alternative, and part lots and lots of concrete
discussions of people doing that, whether they're forming a co-op in a
laundry in Cleveland or food service in Massachusetts, or Mondragon, the
big one. The Web site is going to be full of examples, first-person
descriptions, case studies, not so much because any of them are the
be-all and end-all but because the reality of people who look and sound
like you, who are in this state where you might be surprised to find
them (for example, South Carolina) makes it more real, more American.
People are fascinated, when I start doing a little bit of the history of
co-ops in the United States, it's a shock, Americans are so
underdeveloped about their own history.
The book is the best case I can make for transforming the organization
of enterprises from a top-down hierarchical capitalist model into a
cooperative worker self-directed model. What does it mean, where does it
come from, why is it the solution, all as if I was the lawyer you hired
to make the case.
SJ: When you are a critic of capitalism, people say “Well, what do you
want then? Communism didn't work!”
RW: And the book doesn't shy away from being critical of socialism.
SJ: But in your last book, Occupy the Economy, you made the point that
communism didn't actually change the way the job worked—it replaced the
capitalist boss with the party boss, but didn't make the workplace more
democratic.
RW: I develop that idea more in the new book.
I don't want to disrespect the tradition. What socialism and communism
did, if you count from the end of Marx's life, 1860s, '70s, to the
present, a good 150 years, socialism and communism brought ideas, a
worker should be what we celebrate in this society, notions of real
democracy, real egalitarianism, and internationalized them on a scale
we've never seen before. There are Marxist and socialist, communist
parties, clubs, newspapers, in every country on the face of the earth.
It spread a little bit like what happened to the Muslim religion, to
Christianity. It must speak to something in people to have that kind of
spread.
I want to be respectful—you did a lot, what you did and what you said
spoke to people. But that's not an argument that, the conditions of the
21st century being what they are, you don't need a radical questioning
and rethinking of your strategy. It says you changed society, socialized
property, bravo to you. You substituted a rational attempt at planning
for the irrationality of the market, good for you. But you didn't
transform the inner structure of the production process.
If I had more time I would say the same thing is true for the family.
But I can't fight every battle.
In conventional socialism, China, Soviet Union, Cuba, they didn't
transform the workplace, for all kinds of reasons which I understand.
But I do come later, I do look back, and I think that's where they went
wrong. And the argument of the book is because they didn't change it,
they bred the kinds of angers, resentments, envies, tensions, that in
the end destroyed what they had created. It isn't that you should've
gone further because it would've been nice. It's that you didn't go
further and that undermined what you did.
SJ: Corey Robin and some other folks have been taking on libertarians
with this argument, saying "If you're so concerned about liberty, how
come you aren't concerned with liberty on the job?" Connor Kilpatrick
argued that the place where most Americans face tyranny isn't the TSA,
it's the boss.
RW: The overwhelming majority of people who lost their jobs in the great
crisis of the last five years were fired by a private capitalist
employer. That's the man or woman who told you not to come back Monday
morning because you weren't needed anymore. The overwhelming majority of
the people who were turned out of their home because of foreclosure had
that foreclosure procedure initiated by a private capitalist banker or
other lender. In a reasonable inference, you'd think that the
unemployed, the foreclosed, would be angry at the person who did it to them.
But they aren't, because of an ideological argument which teaches people
to leap over the proximate cause of their misery and find an ultimate
cause, which is the government. So you lose your job and you're furious
at your congressperson, or the president. “I'm going to vote for Romney
because I lost my job and Obama was president when I lost my job.” What
the link is between Obama and your firing is, you couldn't articulate.
Your ideology never went that far. You just know that the allowable
thing to hate in our culture is the government.
The libertarian is taking a free ride on an ideology that comes from
sources they don't even respect, but they don't question. And in doing
so they do an enormous disservice, you elide, you destroy, you undermine
what could be the basis of a movement to challenge the prerogatives, the
power, the tyranny of the capitalist, which “libertarians” would
otherwise oppose.
We Americans are very strange. The boss fires us, and we're angry at the
congressman who didn't even know about it. And if I were a capitalist
I'd be laughing all the way to the bank. I kick you, and you're angry at
somebody else!
SJ: Josh Eidelson wrote a piece about Chick-fil-A employees who'd been
fired because they weren't properly Christian. Everybody's talking about
this company trying to impose its religious beliefs on people through
political donations, but what about the way they're forcing those
beliefs on the people who work for them?
RW: If you do philosophy, you know that this discourse of rights and
freedom is a hornet's nest. The only way to sustain this is to be blind
to the obvious contradictions. The freedom of enterprise denies the
freedom of a job. Either I'm free to have work that's meaningful so I
can support myself and my family, or if you have freedom of enterprise,
you're taking away mine.
SJ: We're in this moment where most Americans have never been in a labor
union, they don't know that what labor unions did was more than fight
for better wages, they were there to give you a say in the conditions of
your labor.
RW: "Democracy at work" is also a kind of branding. There's a hundred
ways we could've called it; democracy at work is a way of introducing
the fact that democracy in this country doesn't include work, and any
democracy that doesn't include work ain't going to be a democracy very
long, if at all.
People pick that up. Here we are, people who go to work five days out of
seven, that's the majority, 9 to 5, we get dressed, we get in our car,
we go to work, the whole day is built around work. If you believe in
democracy, then how in the world can you justify not instituting it in
the place where we spend most of our adult lives?
And you wonder why people don't give a damn in the community, don't
participate in politics, they don't vote, if they vote that's all they
do, the number of people who could tell you where the Democratic party
club in their neighborhood is one out of 50. That's because nobody has
any aptitude for this, any taste for it, and they don't have any taste
for democratic procedures because they don't have them where it matters
most, which is on the job, where they spend most of their time.
And people look—you can see almost a sadness because they know it's
right. They know they haven't thought that way. I can see it in their faces.
SJ: In that vacuum of "There is no alternative," there is suddenly space
to propose an alternative. Everyone was saying "Occupy hasn't proposed a
new system," and my response is "We're just getting to the point where
we have space for the discussion of a new system."
RW: The critique of Occupy for not having an alternative—the right wing
comes up with 47 reasons to hate Occupy, of course. But our people? The
broader left? That's the best thing that has happened to the left in
this country in 50 years! Up from below, massive power, against all the
odds of newspaper blackouts and police hostility, and, for me, here's
the difference that I stress: up until now, every oppositional movement
after the 1940s, from the civil rights movement or the women's rights
movement or the ecological movement have been unable to dare to be
anti-capitalist. It was considered to be too dangerous, it would split
us, it would bring down the wrath of God and the police on us, and the
government, and the newspapers would hate us, we wouldn't dare.
So organizations either abandoned any movement in that direction or
split into smithereens. Occupy, whatever anyone says about it
historically, didn't shy away from that, didn't do that. The 1 percent
versus the 99 percent, you're not going to scare us into being quiet
about the economics. If there weren't other reasons to applaud Occupy,
that would be enough. It's sad that it hasn't continued the same way,
but that isn't surprising, you've got 800 obstacles to overcome, you
can't do everything at once, that's a sadness you share, that there are
all these obstacles.
I can personally attest that my invitations, my reception, the whole
tone of my work were transformed by that. City Lights Books in San
Francisco wanted that book [Occupy the Economy] because it would be sold
to the Occupy movement and all of its supporters. Something as tangible
as the assemblage of those things into a book is an Occupy product.
SJ: I want to go back to Mondragon, and hear about how it works, and
anybody in the US who is working on bringing those ideas here.
RW: I went in May and June of this year and visited. They were very
gracious, gave us about seven, eight hours one day, they answered every
question we had, took us around to see the place.
I think it's wonderful—for me it's like Occupy in the sense that, of
course there are problems. It's an amazing achievement and it has to be
celebrated, and then we can analyze the strengths and weaknesses.
It starts in 1956, it's got six people and a wayward Catholic priest.
Clearly a leftist, but that's not so unusual in European priest ranks.
What's more important is that they're in the Basque territory. The
Basques are a people apart, they have their own language, their own
culture. They control the northern quarter of Spain as a country. They
go over the Pyrenees, into France. And the Basques have been willing to
fight against the Spanish government and the French government, for
their independence and their right to have their own language. It's a
highly cohesive, deeply traditional, militarily equipped, very hilly
country where they are, so you're going to have a hard time fighting
them, which the Spanish and French keep discovering. Every 30 years some
idiot doesn't understand this and gets reminded.
At the end of World War II, having had the civil war and then World War
II, the Spanish society is decimated, there's no jobs for anybody. This
wayward priest said, we Basque people are going to take care of each
other, and we're going to do whatever we want, and if the people in
Madrid say anything, we will remind them what we will do if they bother us.
He says OK, there's no capitalists around to hire everybody, we're going
to make our own jobs. He sets up a cooperative enterprise with six
people in 1955. Now it's got 85,000 worker-members and another 15,000 to
20,000 others. I'm not clear whether that's their number in Spain or in
Europe or includes all of them, because they now have about 75 little
enterprises around the world. But the big enterprise, their core, is in
Spain, in the northern part, in Basque area they're the number-one
employer. You're talking big corporation.
I drove in, and on the side of a hill is a beautiful, modern, corporate
headquarters. Glass, beautiful shrubbery, grass is clipped perfectly, we
park our car in a lovely sculpted parking area. It looks for all the
world like you're going into some corporate headquarters, you can see
right away this is a serious operation. All their businesses look like
that, they look like what they are, which is a big business, except
they're an assemblage of co-ops. It's like a holding company, within
which are all these subordinate units which are co-ops.
They include an immense supermarket chain, factories that make washing
machines, the one we visited, and then co-ops as little as 10 people
raising rabbits and everything in between, agriculture, industrial,
service. On the other side of the hill they have this set of other
buildings which are their labs, where they have scientists. They've
hired I think 600 or 700 full-time scientists who do just research and
development, new products. They are so good at it that General Motors
has a team of researchers who work together with them. A variety of
companies partner with them because they're so good at their R&D.
So what can I tell you about it? First, the growth. From six people in
1950 to more or less 100,000 workers is stunning. Very few capitalist
enterprises have such a history over the last 50 years. That's a history
which tells you that with all of the ups and downs, and there are
plenty, they have managed to survive competitively and to grow. So the
viability of a cooperative enterprise, in its competitive situation with
non-co-op enterprises is stone-cold proof that it can be done and done
effectively.
I'll give you an example. We take a tour of a washing machine factory,
and first off, you and I could adjourn to the floor and have a picnic,
that's how clean it is. And I say to our guide, 'How do you decide on
machines when you need a technology? Do you always buy your parts from
within the co-op?'
No! he says emphatically. Every co-op in the Mondragon system has the
following order: you find the best equipment at the lowest price. If two
pieces are identical and one of them is made by a co-op member, sure,
you buy that. But short of that.
And then he takes me over to this—by the way, this factory is an immense
building, think of the biggest Walmart you've ever been in, like that,
these cavernous places—this big machine, and it's German, I read German,
I can see that.
So then, what is the co-op? How does it work? He smiles and says "It
would take me days to get it through to you but I'm going to give you a
few examples. See those two women over there?" He points to these two
women working on an assembly line. He says "They're about done, in about
15 minutes they will be done with two hours of work. In every factory,
at the end of two hours, you do something else. No worker is kept on the
same job for more than two hours."
I asked why, and he said because it's stultifying, it makes you a
zombie. He used all kinds of colorful language to say that the workers
don't want to do the same thing every day, it's not healthy, and it's
not good for morale. So every two hours a little bell goes off, and
they'll do similar work but it's a different machine, different action,
different body movement, different workers to coordinate with, that's
what a co-op does.
He said, "I'll give you another example. Once a month we have a meeting
where we make a whole lot of decisions. The meeting is on company time;
workers get paid their regular wage, because this is considered an
essential part of the business." They're also paid to read the reports
that they need to read to take part in the meeting. Financial decisions
that have to be made, production decisions. Because, he said, if you do
not provide pay you teach people that the running of the enterprise,
your role in that, is not as important as your role making widgets on an
assembly line. That would be counterproductive to the whole thing. They
wouldn't then participate. A co-op requires that.
So all of these meetings are on paid time. And all of them are
mandatory. Just like you say to a worker you can't decide not to show up
for your shift at the factory, you can't decide not to come to the
meeting. Your job description has these multiple dimensions, that's what
the co-op is. If you don't want to do that, we understand, but then you
don't belong in the co-op.
I thought it was a marvelously straightforward way of making clear to a
worker when he or she begins the work that this is a different operation
from anything you've been used to before. That got confirmed later when
they explained to me the difficulties they're having when they open
plants around the world—which, they explained, they have to for
competitive reasons—he said we've always taken the steps necessary to
secure this enterprise and the jobs we provide. So, he said we opened
four plants in China, we tried to get the Chinese workers to come to the
meetings. They won't. They have no idea what you're talking about. They
get extremely uncomfortable, paying them makes no difference. Which is a
comment on China, by the way. This “communist” country has workers who
find the whole thing off-putting. There's something very poetic about that.
He says we rigidly apply the following rule, the gap between the
highest-paid worker and the average worker cannot be more than six and a
half times and our average is four times.
SJ: That's for the equivalent of the CEO?
RW: Right. Here, CEOs get paid like 300 or 400 times. And that you could
see everywhere. There was a casual relationship. At every moment we
could see—and I watched—the eyes of the men and women assembly line
workers, when Miguel, who's taking us around, stopped and introduced
them to us and us to them, and we would have a conversation.
The comfort and the relationship between them I had never seen in any
place I've ever been. They were way too comfortable with this guy, in a
way that I wouldn't have been. I don't shrink in fear, but I know who
that is. You didn't have that there.
The other thing I think was so stunning was, in the community—we drove
around, the community—the city of Mondragon is a small city. They
obviously dominate this place. You can feel it, it's hard to
describe—everybody looks like everybody else. You see it right away
because you're used to people displaying their different incomes. In any
American city you can see it right away, you know what neighborhood
you're in. Here we drove around, and it looked very similar everywhere.
I asked about it, and he said, yeah, the gap, it's not that big a
difference. When you factor in the scale, one family's larger, one
family's smaller, it cancels out.
So I found all of this stunning. They were very honest. I said between
you and me, do the workers really participate in making all the
decisions? And he said, it varies. Some co-ops they really do, some
co-ops they don't. We try to figure it out, we try to adjust, we can
succeed sometimes, others we don't. It's an ongoing struggle to maintain
this kind of an enterprise.
He said, look around you and you tell me. It is an attempt, 50 years
old, to build this kind of a structure, to struggle with it, to fight
against the political system that doesn't really want this, the
capitalists we compete with who don't have to pay anybody to sit around
in a meeting, and look at this.
He took us to a bank, they have their own bank. That's the bank, it
lends money to our members, and it pays, they pay us back because it's a
mortgage. And they're good bets, because we employ them!
The two biggest things that he attributed their success to: solving the
capital problem and solving the labor problem. What did he mean? "We
take a cut of the profits of every co-op in this enterprise, and there
are thousands of them, and that is our fund. And with that fund we help
every member if and when they need it. So if you're doing great for a
while you put in, until the time comes when you need, and then you get."
He said, if we hadn't done that, if we hadn't coordinated and unified
the co-ops, we would've died.
The second thing: labor. We basically say to our workers, you come and
you join--there's a probation period like joining a fraternity or
sorority or something—we're going to take care of you in terms of
finding you a job.
He gave an example. Because of the recession in Europe, which is huge,
their washing machine company, which is a major producer and exporter,
suffered. They had 2,500 workers, they had to lay off 600. They did. But
they have an elaborate rating system, every single worker has a point
system he or she gets, and it includes their education, if they have a
medical problem, the size of their families, their work history, and it
ends up giving you a number that ranks you. For example, he said, "When
we had to lay off 600 people, we could find jobs for 412 elsewhere in
Mondragon. But what about the other 100-and-something? We would pick
those who by our criterion system were eligible for retirement, and we
offered them retirement. So they would go into our retirement program,
which is also maintained by Mondragon, it's self-insured. We offered
them a retirement if they wanted to, and if not we would sustain them
until we found them a job."
It's just the obvious in some ways. They take the 400, they give them a
training program, they give them choices of where else in Mondragon
where they can take people, if it's more than a 20-minute drive you are
not only retrained, you are given a subsidy to cover your transportation
costs so that you can drive. Nobody loses a nickel of income throughout
this entire transition period.
Those things—we share capital, and we go to the ends of the earth to
keep you working. I said "At a time where the official unemployment rate
in Spain is 25 percent, you must be popular." It was the one time in the
meeting where he laughed. "Yeah, it's hurting us, but in other ways it's
the best thing for us, because we do something that nobody else does. We
make sure you keep working."
So here's a concrete effort and experiment. It has its
peculiarities—it's Basque, it's a homogeneous population, ethnically,
religiously, everybody looks like everybody else, everybody goes to the
same church, speaks the same two languages. But those are not all
game-changing situations. It can be done.
In terms of the United States, someone has to spell out for the labor
movement what it would mean. What would a real partnership be, between a
traditional labor union like the United Steelworkers and a movement of
the sort that I would like to see. And here are some wonderful things to
play with.
Imagine a union that had an official two-pronged strategy. Prong one,
you bargain collectively, you do what unions traditionally do. Prong
two, we're going to organize workers into self-directed enterprises.
We're going to move energetically the minute we hear that there's a
factory or enterprise planning to shut down, to close a facility, to
move a facility, we're on it like white on rice. We're in there saying
go, we'll take over. You can leave, but you've got a whole new problem
here, Mr. Corporation. You think you're moving, you're not moving,
you're adding capacity in China, in Bangladesh—we're going to continue
here, and we're going to be a competitor of yours. Because we're
American, we'll be producing locally, we're not going to have your
transport costs, we're going to have a lot better PR than you are,
because we're going to tell everybody, you've got a choice, we, who kept
it going, or them, who are exploiting cheap labor over there.
Then, what happens to the bargain between the union and the boss about
that move when that's in the wings? That's a very different
conversation. If I'm sitting across the board from the boss, begging and
pleading, that's a very different conversation from "When you leave,
we're going to be right here, we're going to make your life so
unpleasant." That is much more powerful.
Suppose a movement like this begins to coordinate with sympathizers,
students and we begin to become a social force, saying hey, there ought
to be government support for this. Just like there's a government
administration that favors small businesses, or a minority-owned
business association from the government, there ought to be a
worker-self-directed enterprise administration that provides seed money,
subsidized loans, technical assistance, orders, to these, to help them.
Here's how it would be sold, today, by me: it's an unemployment
solution. And there's a model for it: the Marcora law in Italy. It dates
from the 1980s, and I advocate for that here. If you become unemployed
in Italy, you are given a choice. Option A: you go on unemployment like
in America, you get a weekly check for a couple years, that's your
unemployment benefit. But you can choose an alternative if you wish. The
government of Italy will give you the entire two to three years of
unemployment right now in a lump sum. But here's the condition. You must
get together with eight or 10 other unemployed people to make the same
choice with you at the same time, and you must commit to using the lump
sum as the startup capital for a collective enterprise, cooperatively
owned and operated by all of you unemployed people.
In theory these people will now have a commitment to stay employed,
because if you get unemployed again you can't dip back into the
unemployment. The government's not out another nickel. We would've given
these people that anyway. Instead what we're getting is something much
better. Instead of these people sitting on their ass, we have people out
there busting their butts to make a successful enterprise because it's
their chance, it's their way out of their own situation.
The business community has gone after it three or four times, they've
weakened it but they haven't been able to get rid of it. For me the
shock value of telling people such a thing exists. You want to do
something? We already have a menu of concrete options, you could come up
with.
Could you imagine a union movement that stood behind these kinds of
efforts, to get a Marcora law or its equivalent? If the unions had a
two-pronged strategy like this, young people's eyes would pop open and
they'd be coming in droves. We could make it very exciting, a movement
not just to get a union person a better job and a better pension, which
is a worthwhile goal. But this is changing America.
If we do this, Americans will have real freedom of choice. They'll be
able to conceive of a job not just in a top-down hierarchical capitalist
enterprise, but they'll have the choice to go work in a different
enterprise, which these unions have helped to develop, with the help of
the government and the Marcora law equivalent. We're bringing freedom of
choice as to what kind of job you're going to have.
We're going to make sure that every product has a tag on it that doesn't
just say "Made in China," it's going to tell you where it was made. It's
going to have a new little symbol that is going to tell you whether it
was made in a capitalist, top-down hierarchical enterprise or the kind
of enterprise you and I would like to see. The same kind of energy that
goes into buying fair-trade coffee would now go into supporting worker
self-directed enterprise. Do you want to support workers having a decent
life? A life where they aren't drudges that someone else tells what to
do? Buy this plastic made from workers' factory rather than that one.
You do this properly and you could have a movement of support for this.
The labor movement could recoup, by doing this, what it once had, that
it wasn't just about helping workers get a better deal, that it was a
social movement to change the culture.
Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and
frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @sarahljaffe.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://www.alternet.org/richard-d-wolff-can-we-remake-our-workplaces-be-more-democratic?paging=off
Richard D. Wolff: Can We Remake Our Workplaces To Be More Democratic?
Economist Richard D. Wolff is known as a critic of capitalism, but
lately he's been arguing for an alternative: cooperatives.
August 11, 2012
The economic crisis of the past five years has caused a lot of people
around the world to question the very foundations of our system -- is
capitalism really the best way to do things?
One of the biggest problems, though, is that there seems to be no other
way to run an economy. Communism has been discredited—the Soviet Union
failed, and China has moved to a strange hybrid that at times seems to
take the worst of both communism and capitalism—and no one's got an
alternative.
Dr. Richard D. Wolff has spent the better part of his life as a critic
of capitalism. Since the rest of the world caught up with his critiques,
he's spent some time trying to do just that—come up with an alternative.
He's been studying cooperatives and collectively run, worker-owned
businesses for a while now, and he's launched a new Web site, Democracy
at Work, to explore the concept. He's also got a new book coming out in
September from Haymarket Books, titled Democracy at Work: A Cure for
Capitalism, in which he makes a case for worker-owned co-ops as an
alternative system that presents a real challenge to the way we do
things now.
Wolff took some time to talk to AlterNet about his new projects, the
Mondragon Corporation in Spain that forms the basis of many of his
arguments for the potential of successful collective enterprise, and
some real-world ideas to revitalize the labor movement, rebuild the
economy, create jobs, and most of all, give Americans more freedom where
they spend the majority of their lives: on the job.
Sarah Jaffe: I want to start off by asking about the Democracy at Work
Web site and your upcoming book.
Richard Wolff: I guess the best way to say this is that over the last
three years, my life, just personally, was completely transformed by
this [economic] crisis. I decided to say goodbye to the University of
Massachusetts, where I was teaching, and come to New York City. I left
in 2008 and to say the least, the crisis was already underway.
I got swept up in a peculiar way because I'm a critic of capitalism.
It's what I've done all my life; I've written books and articles, but
most of the time I'm the edge guy, the strange one, the one who doesn't
fit. My parents are immigrants, English is my third language, so as an
immigrant, you have to make up for what was interrupted or stolen in a
sense from your parents. They hope to recoup what they couldn't do in
life through you. There was no question I had to be the good student, I
had to play a musical instrument, I had to be on the football team, so I
did all those things. I was always marginal but because I had been a
good student, I went to Harvard and then to Stanford and then my Ph.D.
At Yale.
By American standards, I'm a poster kid for all that stuff. It's all
phony as a three-dollar bill, what goes on in these schools, I can
assure you. The metaphor I use is when you watch an ad for some soap and
the ad says, “If you use this soap your sex life will be improved.” They
want your money and they're going to tell you anything to buy that
stupid soap.
Harvard, that's what they do. It's the same gambit. You'll get an
education more or less like you get anywhere else, with one
exception—the people have been sold a bill of goods and they believe it.
So I was the radical economist, but I could function. You rolled your
eyes, as if, "What happened to this nice young man, somebody hit him on
the head with a frying pan and he got a little crazy."
The irony is, after the crisis then suddenly capitalism doesn't look so
good. Wait a minute, there's something wrong. Who can we get to talk
about it? And the answer is not too many people, because you made it
unbearable for the last 30 years. But I had been able to get a job at U
Mass where I was paid to be a radical economist. I made them sign a
letter when they hired me that I am understood to teach Marxian
economics. They said "Why do you want such a letter?" I said "Because I
don't want some pint-sized legislator coming down the road later saying
I'm not doing my job!" I have that letter in my files to this day.
So the joke is, for the last three or four years, I'm a rare commodity.
I do two, three, four interviews almost every day, I write like there's
no tomorrow. And when anybody makes a noise, I wave the pedigrees and
they go “Ehhh.” Like you wave the garlic or the cross at a vampire.
I've had a wonderful time for three years being the critic of
capitalism, basically recouping for people all the insights accumulated
by the numberless critics of capitalism that are as old as capitalism
itself. Like every social system it had its critics – you could pretend
it didn't but they're there. They wrote the articles and the books and
they made the movements. Only in the weird imagination of American
conservatives is there not a long tradition of anti-capitalist thinking,
agitation, strikes, movements, parties, government. It's very rich.
Over the last six, eight months, I've noticed something. Am I still
called to provide criticisms of capitalism? Yes. But something new has
happened – call it the maturation of the critical movement here in the
United States and the rest of the world. It's no longer enough. They
want to know, OK, you're right, capitalism sucks -- for many of them
that's a big step, I don't want to in any way minimize it. But they're
saying to me, OK, we've read your stuff, now give us an alternative.
That's what I'm doing. I'm saying OK, fair question, I'm one of the
people producing that question in your mind, I can't not offer an answer.
The book is a product of this, the Web site is a product of this. I
appeared on the Charlie Rose show 10 days ago, I talked about Mondragon,
because Americans listen better if you describe something that exists
than if you describe something that could exist. Because that's where
the most advanced thinking of people that have been caught up in this
crisis, that's what they want to talk about. It's not necessarily that
they agree with me, but they want to have a proposal to chew on. They
want to hear how and why this is different from capitalism, and how and
why this should do any better in dealing with any kind of social problem
and then how and why should we believe that if it's better, that it
could ever be actually achieved. We don't want pie in the sky.
That Web site is a tension of these parts—part criticism of capitalism,
part argument for an alternative, and part lots and lots of concrete
discussions of people doing that, whether they're forming a co-op in a
laundry in Cleveland or food service in Massachusetts, or Mondragon, the
big one. The Web site is going to be full of examples, first-person
descriptions, case studies, not so much because any of them are the
be-all and end-all but because the reality of people who look and sound
like you, who are in this state where you might be surprised to find
them (for example, South Carolina) makes it more real, more American.
People are fascinated, when I start doing a little bit of the history of
co-ops in the United States, it's a shock, Americans are so
underdeveloped about their own history.
The book is the best case I can make for transforming the organization
of enterprises from a top-down hierarchical capitalist model into a
cooperative worker self-directed model. What does it mean, where does it
come from, why is it the solution, all as if I was the lawyer you hired
to make the case.
SJ: When you are a critic of capitalism, people say “Well, what do you
want then? Communism didn't work!”
RW: And the book doesn't shy away from being critical of socialism.
SJ: But in your last book, Occupy the Economy, you made the point that
communism didn't actually change the way the job worked—it replaced the
capitalist boss with the party boss, but didn't make the workplace more
democratic.
RW: I develop that idea more in the new book.
I don't want to disrespect the tradition. What socialism and communism
did, if you count from the end of Marx's life, 1860s, '70s, to the
present, a good 150 years, socialism and communism brought ideas, a
worker should be what we celebrate in this society, notions of real
democracy, real egalitarianism, and internationalized them on a scale
we've never seen before. There are Marxist and socialist, communist
parties, clubs, newspapers, in every country on the face of the earth.
It spread a little bit like what happened to the Muslim religion, to
Christianity. It must speak to something in people to have that kind of
spread.
I want to be respectful—you did a lot, what you did and what you said
spoke to people. But that's not an argument that, the conditions of the
21st century being what they are, you don't need a radical questioning
and rethinking of your strategy. It says you changed society, socialized
property, bravo to you. You substituted a rational attempt at planning
for the irrationality of the market, good for you. But you didn't
transform the inner structure of the production process.
If I had more time I would say the same thing is true for the family.
But I can't fight every battle.
In conventional socialism, China, Soviet Union, Cuba, they didn't
transform the workplace, for all kinds of reasons which I understand.
But I do come later, I do look back, and I think that's where they went
wrong. And the argument of the book is because they didn't change it,
they bred the kinds of angers, resentments, envies, tensions, that in
the end destroyed what they had created. It isn't that you should've
gone further because it would've been nice. It's that you didn't go
further and that undermined what you did.
SJ: Corey Robin and some other folks have been taking on libertarians
with this argument, saying "If you're so concerned about liberty, how
come you aren't concerned with liberty on the job?" Connor Kilpatrick
argued that the place where most Americans face tyranny isn't the TSA,
it's the boss.
RW: The overwhelming majority of people who lost their jobs in the great
crisis of the last five years were fired by a private capitalist
employer. That's the man or woman who told you not to come back Monday
morning because you weren't needed anymore. The overwhelming majority of
the people who were turned out of their home because of foreclosure had
that foreclosure procedure initiated by a private capitalist banker or
other lender. In a reasonable inference, you'd think that the
unemployed, the foreclosed, would be angry at the person who did it to them.
But they aren't, because of an ideological argument which teaches people
to leap over the proximate cause of their misery and find an ultimate
cause, which is the government. So you lose your job and you're furious
at your congressperson, or the president. “I'm going to vote for Romney
because I lost my job and Obama was president when I lost my job.” What
the link is between Obama and your firing is, you couldn't articulate.
Your ideology never went that far. You just know that the allowable
thing to hate in our culture is the government.
The libertarian is taking a free ride on an ideology that comes from
sources they don't even respect, but they don't question. And in doing
so they do an enormous disservice, you elide, you destroy, you undermine
what could be the basis of a movement to challenge the prerogatives, the
power, the tyranny of the capitalist, which “libertarians” would
otherwise oppose.
We Americans are very strange. The boss fires us, and we're angry at the
congressman who didn't even know about it. And if I were a capitalist
I'd be laughing all the way to the bank. I kick you, and you're angry at
somebody else!
SJ: Josh Eidelson wrote a piece about Chick-fil-A employees who'd been
fired because they weren't properly Christian. Everybody's talking about
this company trying to impose its religious beliefs on people through
political donations, but what about the way they're forcing those
beliefs on the people who work for them?
RW: If you do philosophy, you know that this discourse of rights and
freedom is a hornet's nest. The only way to sustain this is to be blind
to the obvious contradictions. The freedom of enterprise denies the
freedom of a job. Either I'm free to have work that's meaningful so I
can support myself and my family, or if you have freedom of enterprise,
you're taking away mine.
SJ: We're in this moment where most Americans have never been in a labor
union, they don't know that what labor unions did was more than fight
for better wages, they were there to give you a say in the conditions of
your labor.
RW: "Democracy at work" is also a kind of branding. There's a hundred
ways we could've called it; democracy at work is a way of introducing
the fact that democracy in this country doesn't include work, and any
democracy that doesn't include work ain't going to be a democracy very
long, if at all.
People pick that up. Here we are, people who go to work five days out of
seven, that's the majority, 9 to 5, we get dressed, we get in our car,
we go to work, the whole day is built around work. If you believe in
democracy, then how in the world can you justify not instituting it in
the place where we spend most of our adult lives?
And you wonder why people don't give a damn in the community, don't
participate in politics, they don't vote, if they vote that's all they
do, the number of people who could tell you where the Democratic party
club in their neighborhood is one out of 50. That's because nobody has
any aptitude for this, any taste for it, and they don't have any taste
for democratic procedures because they don't have them where it matters
most, which is on the job, where they spend most of their time.
And people look—you can see almost a sadness because they know it's
right. They know they haven't thought that way. I can see it in their faces.
SJ: In that vacuum of "There is no alternative," there is suddenly space
to propose an alternative. Everyone was saying "Occupy hasn't proposed a
new system," and my response is "We're just getting to the point where
we have space for the discussion of a new system."
RW: The critique of Occupy for not having an alternative—the right wing
comes up with 47 reasons to hate Occupy, of course. But our people? The
broader left? That's the best thing that has happened to the left in
this country in 50 years! Up from below, massive power, against all the
odds of newspaper blackouts and police hostility, and, for me, here's
the difference that I stress: up until now, every oppositional movement
after the 1940s, from the civil rights movement or the women's rights
movement or the ecological movement have been unable to dare to be
anti-capitalist. It was considered to be too dangerous, it would split
us, it would bring down the wrath of God and the police on us, and the
government, and the newspapers would hate us, we wouldn't dare.
So organizations either abandoned any movement in that direction or
split into smithereens. Occupy, whatever anyone says about it
historically, didn't shy away from that, didn't do that. The 1 percent
versus the 99 percent, you're not going to scare us into being quiet
about the economics. If there weren't other reasons to applaud Occupy,
that would be enough. It's sad that it hasn't continued the same way,
but that isn't surprising, you've got 800 obstacles to overcome, you
can't do everything at once, that's a sadness you share, that there are
all these obstacles.
I can personally attest that my invitations, my reception, the whole
tone of my work were transformed by that. City Lights Books in San
Francisco wanted that book [Occupy the Economy] because it would be sold
to the Occupy movement and all of its supporters. Something as tangible
as the assemblage of those things into a book is an Occupy product.
SJ: I want to go back to Mondragon, and hear about how it works, and
anybody in the US who is working on bringing those ideas here.
RW: I went in May and June of this year and visited. They were very
gracious, gave us about seven, eight hours one day, they answered every
question we had, took us around to see the place.
I think it's wonderful—for me it's like Occupy in the sense that, of
course there are problems. It's an amazing achievement and it has to be
celebrated, and then we can analyze the strengths and weaknesses.
It starts in 1956, it's got six people and a wayward Catholic priest.
Clearly a leftist, but that's not so unusual in European priest ranks.
What's more important is that they're in the Basque territory. The
Basques are a people apart, they have their own language, their own
culture. They control the northern quarter of Spain as a country. They
go over the Pyrenees, into France. And the Basques have been willing to
fight against the Spanish government and the French government, for
their independence and their right to have their own language. It's a
highly cohesive, deeply traditional, militarily equipped, very hilly
country where they are, so you're going to have a hard time fighting
them, which the Spanish and French keep discovering. Every 30 years some
idiot doesn't understand this and gets reminded.
At the end of World War II, having had the civil war and then World War
II, the Spanish society is decimated, there's no jobs for anybody. This
wayward priest said, we Basque people are going to take care of each
other, and we're going to do whatever we want, and if the people in
Madrid say anything, we will remind them what we will do if they bother us.
He says OK, there's no capitalists around to hire everybody, we're going
to make our own jobs. He sets up a cooperative enterprise with six
people in 1955. Now it's got 85,000 worker-members and another 15,000 to
20,000 others. I'm not clear whether that's their number in Spain or in
Europe or includes all of them, because they now have about 75 little
enterprises around the world. But the big enterprise, their core, is in
Spain, in the northern part, in Basque area they're the number-one
employer. You're talking big corporation.
I drove in, and on the side of a hill is a beautiful, modern, corporate
headquarters. Glass, beautiful shrubbery, grass is clipped perfectly, we
park our car in a lovely sculpted parking area. It looks for all the
world like you're going into some corporate headquarters, you can see
right away this is a serious operation. All their businesses look like
that, they look like what they are, which is a big business, except
they're an assemblage of co-ops. It's like a holding company, within
which are all these subordinate units which are co-ops.
They include an immense supermarket chain, factories that make washing
machines, the one we visited, and then co-ops as little as 10 people
raising rabbits and everything in between, agriculture, industrial,
service. On the other side of the hill they have this set of other
buildings which are their labs, where they have scientists. They've
hired I think 600 or 700 full-time scientists who do just research and
development, new products. They are so good at it that General Motors
has a team of researchers who work together with them. A variety of
companies partner with them because they're so good at their R&D.
So what can I tell you about it? First, the growth. From six people in
1950 to more or less 100,000 workers is stunning. Very few capitalist
enterprises have such a history over the last 50 years. That's a history
which tells you that with all of the ups and downs, and there are
plenty, they have managed to survive competitively and to grow. So the
viability of a cooperative enterprise, in its competitive situation with
non-co-op enterprises is stone-cold proof that it can be done and done
effectively.
I'll give you an example. We take a tour of a washing machine factory,
and first off, you and I could adjourn to the floor and have a picnic,
that's how clean it is. And I say to our guide, 'How do you decide on
machines when you need a technology? Do you always buy your parts from
within the co-op?'
No! he says emphatically. Every co-op in the Mondragon system has the
following order: you find the best equipment at the lowest price. If two
pieces are identical and one of them is made by a co-op member, sure,
you buy that. But short of that.
And then he takes me over to this—by the way, this factory is an immense
building, think of the biggest Walmart you've ever been in, like that,
these cavernous places—this big machine, and it's German, I read German,
I can see that.
So then, what is the co-op? How does it work? He smiles and says "It
would take me days to get it through to you but I'm going to give you a
few examples. See those two women over there?" He points to these two
women working on an assembly line. He says "They're about done, in about
15 minutes they will be done with two hours of work. In every factory,
at the end of two hours, you do something else. No worker is kept on the
same job for more than two hours."
I asked why, and he said because it's stultifying, it makes you a
zombie. He used all kinds of colorful language to say that the workers
don't want to do the same thing every day, it's not healthy, and it's
not good for morale. So every two hours a little bell goes off, and
they'll do similar work but it's a different machine, different action,
different body movement, different workers to coordinate with, that's
what a co-op does.
He said, "I'll give you another example. Once a month we have a meeting
where we make a whole lot of decisions. The meeting is on company time;
workers get paid their regular wage, because this is considered an
essential part of the business." They're also paid to read the reports
that they need to read to take part in the meeting. Financial decisions
that have to be made, production decisions. Because, he said, if you do
not provide pay you teach people that the running of the enterprise,
your role in that, is not as important as your role making widgets on an
assembly line. That would be counterproductive to the whole thing. They
wouldn't then participate. A co-op requires that.
So all of these meetings are on paid time. And all of them are
mandatory. Just like you say to a worker you can't decide not to show up
for your shift at the factory, you can't decide not to come to the
meeting. Your job description has these multiple dimensions, that's what
the co-op is. If you don't want to do that, we understand, but then you
don't belong in the co-op.
I thought it was a marvelously straightforward way of making clear to a
worker when he or she begins the work that this is a different operation
from anything you've been used to before. That got confirmed later when
they explained to me the difficulties they're having when they open
plants around the world—which, they explained, they have to for
competitive reasons—he said we've always taken the steps necessary to
secure this enterprise and the jobs we provide. So, he said we opened
four plants in China, we tried to get the Chinese workers to come to the
meetings. They won't. They have no idea what you're talking about. They
get extremely uncomfortable, paying them makes no difference. Which is a
comment on China, by the way. This “communist” country has workers who
find the whole thing off-putting. There's something very poetic about that.
He says we rigidly apply the following rule, the gap between the
highest-paid worker and the average worker cannot be more than six and a
half times and our average is four times.
SJ: That's for the equivalent of the CEO?
RW: Right. Here, CEOs get paid like 300 or 400 times. And that you could
see everywhere. There was a casual relationship. At every moment we
could see—and I watched—the eyes of the men and women assembly line
workers, when Miguel, who's taking us around, stopped and introduced
them to us and us to them, and we would have a conversation.
The comfort and the relationship between them I had never seen in any
place I've ever been. They were way too comfortable with this guy, in a
way that I wouldn't have been. I don't shrink in fear, but I know who
that is. You didn't have that there.
The other thing I think was so stunning was, in the community—we drove
around, the community—the city of Mondragon is a small city. They
obviously dominate this place. You can feel it, it's hard to
describe—everybody looks like everybody else. You see it right away
because you're used to people displaying their different incomes. In any
American city you can see it right away, you know what neighborhood
you're in. Here we drove around, and it looked very similar everywhere.
I asked about it, and he said, yeah, the gap, it's not that big a
difference. When you factor in the scale, one family's larger, one
family's smaller, it cancels out.
So I found all of this stunning. They were very honest. I said between
you and me, do the workers really participate in making all the
decisions? And he said, it varies. Some co-ops they really do, some
co-ops they don't. We try to figure it out, we try to adjust, we can
succeed sometimes, others we don't. It's an ongoing struggle to maintain
this kind of an enterprise.
He said, look around you and you tell me. It is an attempt, 50 years
old, to build this kind of a structure, to struggle with it, to fight
against the political system that doesn't really want this, the
capitalists we compete with who don't have to pay anybody to sit around
in a meeting, and look at this.
He took us to a bank, they have their own bank. That's the bank, it
lends money to our members, and it pays, they pay us back because it's a
mortgage. And they're good bets, because we employ them!
The two biggest things that he attributed their success to: solving the
capital problem and solving the labor problem. What did he mean? "We
take a cut of the profits of every co-op in this enterprise, and there
are thousands of them, and that is our fund. And with that fund we help
every member if and when they need it. So if you're doing great for a
while you put in, until the time comes when you need, and then you get."
He said, if we hadn't done that, if we hadn't coordinated and unified
the co-ops, we would've died.
The second thing: labor. We basically say to our workers, you come and
you join--there's a probation period like joining a fraternity or
sorority or something—we're going to take care of you in terms of
finding you a job.
He gave an example. Because of the recession in Europe, which is huge,
their washing machine company, which is a major producer and exporter,
suffered. They had 2,500 workers, they had to lay off 600. They did. But
they have an elaborate rating system, every single worker has a point
system he or she gets, and it includes their education, if they have a
medical problem, the size of their families, their work history, and it
ends up giving you a number that ranks you. For example, he said, "When
we had to lay off 600 people, we could find jobs for 412 elsewhere in
Mondragon. But what about the other 100-and-something? We would pick
those who by our criterion system were eligible for retirement, and we
offered them retirement. So they would go into our retirement program,
which is also maintained by Mondragon, it's self-insured. We offered
them a retirement if they wanted to, and if not we would sustain them
until we found them a job."
It's just the obvious in some ways. They take the 400, they give them a
training program, they give them choices of where else in Mondragon
where they can take people, if it's more than a 20-minute drive you are
not only retrained, you are given a subsidy to cover your transportation
costs so that you can drive. Nobody loses a nickel of income throughout
this entire transition period.
Those things—we share capital, and we go to the ends of the earth to
keep you working. I said "At a time where the official unemployment rate
in Spain is 25 percent, you must be popular." It was the one time in the
meeting where he laughed. "Yeah, it's hurting us, but in other ways it's
the best thing for us, because we do something that nobody else does. We
make sure you keep working."
So here's a concrete effort and experiment. It has its
peculiarities—it's Basque, it's a homogeneous population, ethnically,
religiously, everybody looks like everybody else, everybody goes to the
same church, speaks the same two languages. But those are not all
game-changing situations. It can be done.
In terms of the United States, someone has to spell out for the labor
movement what it would mean. What would a real partnership be, between a
traditional labor union like the United Steelworkers and a movement of
the sort that I would like to see. And here are some wonderful things to
play with.
Imagine a union that had an official two-pronged strategy. Prong one,
you bargain collectively, you do what unions traditionally do. Prong
two, we're going to organize workers into self-directed enterprises.
We're going to move energetically the minute we hear that there's a
factory or enterprise planning to shut down, to close a facility, to
move a facility, we're on it like white on rice. We're in there saying
go, we'll take over. You can leave, but you've got a whole new problem
here, Mr. Corporation. You think you're moving, you're not moving,
you're adding capacity in China, in Bangladesh—we're going to continue
here, and we're going to be a competitor of yours. Because we're
American, we'll be producing locally, we're not going to have your
transport costs, we're going to have a lot better PR than you are,
because we're going to tell everybody, you've got a choice, we, who kept
it going, or them, who are exploiting cheap labor over there.
Then, what happens to the bargain between the union and the boss about
that move when that's in the wings? That's a very different
conversation. If I'm sitting across the board from the boss, begging and
pleading, that's a very different conversation from "When you leave,
we're going to be right here, we're going to make your life so
unpleasant." That is much more powerful.
Suppose a movement like this begins to coordinate with sympathizers,
students and we begin to become a social force, saying hey, there ought
to be government support for this. Just like there's a government
administration that favors small businesses, or a minority-owned
business association from the government, there ought to be a
worker-self-directed enterprise administration that provides seed money,
subsidized loans, technical assistance, orders, to these, to help them.
Here's how it would be sold, today, by me: it's an unemployment
solution. And there's a model for it: the Marcora law in Italy. It dates
from the 1980s, and I advocate for that here. If you become unemployed
in Italy, you are given a choice. Option A: you go on unemployment like
in America, you get a weekly check for a couple years, that's your
unemployment benefit. But you can choose an alternative if you wish. The
government of Italy will give you the entire two to three years of
unemployment right now in a lump sum. But here's the condition. You must
get together with eight or 10 other unemployed people to make the same
choice with you at the same time, and you must commit to using the lump
sum as the startup capital for a collective enterprise, cooperatively
owned and operated by all of you unemployed people.
In theory these people will now have a commitment to stay employed,
because if you get unemployed again you can't dip back into the
unemployment. The government's not out another nickel. We would've given
these people that anyway. Instead what we're getting is something much
better. Instead of these people sitting on their ass, we have people out
there busting their butts to make a successful enterprise because it's
their chance, it's their way out of their own situation.
The business community has gone after it three or four times, they've
weakened it but they haven't been able to get rid of it. For me the
shock value of telling people such a thing exists. You want to do
something? We already have a menu of concrete options, you could come up
with.
Could you imagine a union movement that stood behind these kinds of
efforts, to get a Marcora law or its equivalent? If the unions had a
two-pronged strategy like this, young people's eyes would pop open and
they'd be coming in droves. We could make it very exciting, a movement
not just to get a union person a better job and a better pension, which
is a worthwhile goal. But this is changing America.
If we do this, Americans will have real freedom of choice. They'll be
able to conceive of a job not just in a top-down hierarchical capitalist
enterprise, but they'll have the choice to go work in a different
enterprise, which these unions have helped to develop, with the help of
the government and the Marcora law equivalent. We're bringing freedom of
choice as to what kind of job you're going to have.
We're going to make sure that every product has a tag on it that doesn't
just say "Made in China," it's going to tell you where it was made. It's
going to have a new little symbol that is going to tell you whether it
was made in a capitalist, top-down hierarchical enterprise or the kind
of enterprise you and I would like to see. The same kind of energy that
goes into buying fair-trade coffee would now go into supporting worker
self-directed enterprise. Do you want to support workers having a decent
life? A life where they aren't drudges that someone else tells what to
do? Buy this plastic made from workers' factory rather than that one.
You do this properly and you could have a movement of support for this.
The labor movement could recoup, by doing this, what it once had, that
it wasn't just about helping workers get a better deal, that it was a
social movement to change the culture.
Sarah Jaffe is an associate editor at AlterNet, a rabblerouser and
frequent Twitterer. You can follow her at @sarahljaffe.
--
Dan Clore
New book: _Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon_:
http://tinyurl.com/yd3bxkw
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-unspeakable-and-others/6124911
Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_
gekke josje
Aug 14, 2012, 4:01:20 AM8/14/12
to
Op 2012-08-13, Dan Clore schreef <cl...@columbia-center.org>:
Who else do we know worked at Harvard, 30 years ? Gene Sharp. Who is that ?
He is the guy who wrote the manuals for the fake color revolutions, the fake
arab spring and now the latest fakers: 'Occupy Wallstreet.' Who funds all
that ? You need to look no further then the website of Otpor/CANVAS which
is at the origin of these things when NATO conquested Yugoslavia: they
point to NED (National Endowment for Democracy), IRI (International
Republican Institute, chaired recently by Sen. John 'bomb Iran' McCain),
and the Albert Einstein Institute where Gene Sharp seems to be the main
character with his 'non-violent' manuals. The people in the NED (itself
accused of being nothing but a CIA front) have people also in the Brookings
Institute, and they interlock with the Council of Foreign Relations (the
CFR), who have been set up by the big banking houses to buy up the American
mass media (to sell war and reactionary ideas).
http://www.aeinstein.org
http://www.iri.org
http://www.brookings.edu
You work for the big banks and the CFR, when you promote this 'Occupy
Wallstreet' nonsense, Clore. It is not a mistake that 'occupy' has no
ideas, that they can not make up a real democracy for themselves, and
that they are provocative. It is a set up, it is fake controlled opposition.
They probably did that as a precaution, to misdirect people like you during
a crisis when the excitables become more excitable.
> You'll get an
> education more or less like you get anywhere else, with one
> exception—the people have been sold a bill of goods and they believe it.
> So I was the radical economist, but I could function. You rolled your
> eyes, as if, "What happened to this nice young man, somebody hit him on
> the head with a frying pan and he got a little crazy."
>
> The irony is, after the crisis then suddenly capitalism doesn't look so
> good. Wait a minute, there's something wrong. Who can we get to talk
> about it? And the answer is not too many people, because you made it
> unbearable for the last 30 years. But I had been able to get a job at U
> Mass where I was paid to be a radical economist. I made them sign a
> letter when they hired me that I am understood to teach Marxian
> economics. They said "Why do you want such a letter?" I said "Because I
> don't want some pint-sized legislator coming down the road later saying
> I'm not doing my job!" I have that letter in my files to this day.
They might have tolerated him, under the idea that 'Marxian' means
totalitarian plan-economy, something that the banks at times can also
use. The idea for cooperatives is good however, it is the way it should
be. The cooperatives should be in a free trade system and not in a
plan economy, and the cooperatives should not be too large either.
There could on the other hand be a financial system, a variety of
funds, that service and protect these cooperatives. However it must
ultimately also be a free market, so that those cooperatives who are
lazy, sell bad value, are corrupt or do other bad things can loose
costumers and eventually go bankrupt.
> So the joke is, for the last three or four years, I'm a rare commodity.
> I do two, three, four interviews almost every day, I write like there's
> no tomorrow. And when anybody makes a noise, I wave the pedigrees and
> they go “Ehhh.” Like you wave the garlic or the cross at a vampire.
>
> I've had a wonderful time for three years being the critic of
> capitalism, basically recouping for people all the insights accumulated
> by the numberless critics of capitalism that are as old as capitalism
> itself. Like every social system it had its critics – you could pretend
> it didn't but they're there. They wrote the articles and the books and
> they made the movements. Only in the weird imagination of American
> conservatives is there not a long tradition of anti-capitalist thinking,
> agitation, strikes, movements, parties, government. It's very rich.
I doubt this man has yet incorporated my criticisms of capitalism, is
he also promoting land-distribution, combining a free market with
democratized companies, socialized investment credit and a council
Government with national Sovereignty up to around 20 million per fully
independent nation ? Is he claiming to represent every criticism ?
If so fine by me but I like to see those ideas in there then too.
Great. It is interesting to know that 'corporations' at one time where
supposed to work for the common good and they needed to be chartered
accordingly (FWIK). America can be called a socialist experiment for it;
sadly this was destroyed by the Rockefeller types, who have taken over with
their dictatorial and Imperial ways.
> The book is the best case I can make for transforming the organization
> of enterprises from a top-down hierarchical capitalist model into a
> cooperative worker self-directed model. What does it mean, where does it
> come from, why is it the solution, all as if I was the lawyer you hired
> to make the case.
It is obvious why this works: the money always goes to who has the power.
If there is a boss in the company, he will take the money. That is the
essence of a failed economic model, it is dictatorship. In the market
this is moderated by the free market process to a degree, but it is still
inhumane and a disgrace. Then again, it remains to be seen if people have
the civility to talk with each other fairly to make a group democracy
work.
So this guy is a plan-economist ? If so that will not work, it is too
big to work.
[...]
Funny how you always have to have an Harvard PhD or whatever to be carried
by people like D.Clore. You better make sure not to be an actual 'grass
roots' individual without being embedded into the power structure in
whatever way, because if you are you can just forget it. Right ? Don't
discuss the proposals made up by Jos, although he is a published computer
programmer, don't touch his works; they actually work and that's the LAST
thing we really want. Right ? Now don't get real here, with actual
revolution and an economic system that is functional. That is scary.
--
Our enemies fear our determination to live, our willingness to die.
Phalanx of Freedom http://www.law4.org/o-5.html
He is the guy who wrote the manuals for the fake color revolutions, the fake
arab spring and now the latest fakers: 'Occupy Wallstreet.' Who funds all
that ? You need to look no further then the website of Otpor/CANVAS which
is at the origin of these things when NATO conquested Yugoslavia: they
point to NED (National Endowment for Democracy), IRI (International
Republican Institute, chaired recently by Sen. John 'bomb Iran' McCain),
and the Albert Einstein Institute where Gene Sharp seems to be the main
character with his 'non-violent' manuals. The people in the NED (itself
accused of being nothing but a CIA front) have people also in the Brookings
Institute, and they interlock with the Council of Foreign Relations (the
CFR), who have been set up by the big banking houses to buy up the American
mass media (to sell war and reactionary ideas).
http://www.aeinstein.org
http://www.iri.org
http://www.brookings.edu
You work for the big banks and the CFR, when you promote this 'Occupy
Wallstreet' nonsense, Clore. It is not a mistake that 'occupy' has no
ideas, that they can not make up a real democracy for themselves, and
that they are provocative. It is a set up, it is fake controlled opposition.
They probably did that as a precaution, to misdirect people like you during
a crisis when the excitables become more excitable.
> You'll get an
> education more or less like you get anywhere else, with one
> exception—the people have been sold a bill of goods and they believe it.
> So I was the radical economist, but I could function. You rolled your
> eyes, as if, "What happened to this nice young man, somebody hit him on
> the head with a frying pan and he got a little crazy."
>
> The irony is, after the crisis then suddenly capitalism doesn't look so
> good. Wait a minute, there's something wrong. Who can we get to talk
> about it? And the answer is not too many people, because you made it
> unbearable for the last 30 years. But I had been able to get a job at U
> Mass where I was paid to be a radical economist. I made them sign a
> letter when they hired me that I am understood to teach Marxian
> economics. They said "Why do you want such a letter?" I said "Because I
> don't want some pint-sized legislator coming down the road later saying
> I'm not doing my job!" I have that letter in my files to this day.
totalitarian plan-economy, something that the banks at times can also
use. The idea for cooperatives is good however, it is the way it should
be. The cooperatives should be in a free trade system and not in a
plan economy, and the cooperatives should not be too large either.
There could on the other hand be a financial system, a variety of
funds, that service and protect these cooperatives. However it must
ultimately also be a free market, so that those cooperatives who are
lazy, sell bad value, are corrupt or do other bad things can loose
costumers and eventually go bankrupt.
> So the joke is, for the last three or four years, I'm a rare commodity.
> I do two, three, four interviews almost every day, I write like there's
> no tomorrow. And when anybody makes a noise, I wave the pedigrees and
> they go “Ehhh.” Like you wave the garlic or the cross at a vampire.
>
> I've had a wonderful time for three years being the critic of
> capitalism, basically recouping for people all the insights accumulated
> by the numberless critics of capitalism that are as old as capitalism
> itself. Like every social system it had its critics – you could pretend
> it didn't but they're there. They wrote the articles and the books and
> they made the movements. Only in the weird imagination of American
> conservatives is there not a long tradition of anti-capitalist thinking,
> agitation, strikes, movements, parties, government. It's very rich.
he also promoting land-distribution, combining a free market with
democratized companies, socialized investment credit and a council
Government with national Sovereignty up to around 20 million per fully
independent nation ? Is he claiming to represent every criticism ?
If so fine by me but I like to see those ideas in there then too.
supposed to work for the common good and they needed to be chartered
accordingly (FWIK). America can be called a socialist experiment for it;
sadly this was destroyed by the Rockefeller types, who have taken over with
their dictatorial and Imperial ways.
> The book is the best case I can make for transforming the organization
> of enterprises from a top-down hierarchical capitalist model into a
> cooperative worker self-directed model. What does it mean, where does it
> come from, why is it the solution, all as if I was the lawyer you hired
> to make the case.
If there is a boss in the company, he will take the money. That is the
essence of a failed economic model, it is dictatorship. In the market
this is moderated by the free market process to a degree, but it is still
inhumane and a disgrace. Then again, it remains to be seen if people have
the civility to talk with each other fairly to make a group democracy
work.
big to work.
[...]
Funny how you always have to have an Harvard PhD or whatever to be carried
by people like D.Clore. You better make sure not to be an actual 'grass
roots' individual without being embedded into the power structure in
whatever way, because if you are you can just forget it. Right ? Don't
discuss the proposals made up by Jos, although he is a published computer
programmer, don't touch his works; they actually work and that's the LAST
thing we really want. Right ? Now don't get real here, with actual
revolution and an economic system that is functional. That is scary.
--
Our enemies fear our determination to live, our willingness to die.
Phalanx of Freedom http://www.law4.org/o-5.html
gekke josje
Aug 14, 2012, 4:28:49 AM8/14/12
to
Op 2012-08-14, gekke josje schreef <jo...@xs4all.DelmeNospam.nl>:
yourself how the big banks fund and set up Otpor/CANVAS and how it
all works together with this 'Occupy Wallstreet' thing. They don't
even hide it ! The openly point to reactionary groups to get your
funding (Otpor/CANVAS).
http://blogger.xs4all.nl/joshb/archive/2011/10/21/688920.aspx
Otpor/CANVAS is now openly training 'activists' in the U$A:
http://www.peacejusticestudies.org/conference/2008/canvas.php
That link was provided by me by someone who was already trained
by them, who was organizing/promoting a fundraisor for the
AEinsteitute within a group that is heavily absorbed in the
'Occupy Wallstreet' thing (on 'second life platform), while in
the 'real world' they are into actual political left wing parties
(sometimes). Their Gene Sharp thing is spreading like a disease through
the left wing political class, all funded by ... reactionary banking
houses. If you don't understand why, then you have some more understanding
to do about how this world works. Why do reactionary banking houses
fund their own opposition ? Because then they can control and misdirect
them, and when it comes to them they know them and can kill them.
They control them with money, and misdirect them with flawed manuals.
But don't they then foment opposition to themselves ? They make the
ideas (such as anarchy or totalitarian communism, or 'Occupy wallstreet,'
so deeply flawed that it will never work, and hence even if they win
they will fail from their own internal flaws, and they will not soon
attract people because too many people see the big flaws.) Welcome
to reality. It is bloody serious, perhaps these 'Occupiers' will find
that out in the coming years, to their horror (and death).
You're all being used, beeing played by the big banks like a tuned
violine. You - Occupiers - are a joke to them, they'll use you and
discard you as it pleases them.
*
This is the manual you could be reading instead of the stuff made up
by Harvard boy Gene Sharp: http://www.law4.org/book2 (all free for
the cause, I wrote that, thanks for your interest and doing your
due dillegence; if you don't do you due dilligence, you'll answer
your conscience one day.) Now I am just throwing dirt on my opposition ?
That is such a typical cop-out. Go read it and form an informed opinion.
The book is not so long either, 64 pages including 4 Constitutions
(which are to be implemented one after the other, through ratification.)
It is the *complete system* there in 64 pages; and although I wrote
probably thousands of pages in total, those 64 pages should be enough
to know and do.
> Op 2012-08-13, Dan Clore schreef <cl...@columbia-center.org>:
>> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
>> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>>
>>
>> http://www.alternet.org/richard-d-wolff-can-we-remake-our-workplaces-be-more-democratic?paging=off
[...]
>> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
>> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>>
>>
>> http://www.alternet.org/richard-d-wolff-can-we-remake-our-workplaces-be-more-democratic?paging=off
>> Harvard, that's what they do. It's the same gambit.
>
> Who else do we know worked at Harvard, 30 years ? Gene Sharp. Who is that ?
> He is the guy who wrote the manuals for the fake color revolutions, the fake
> arab spring and now the latest fakers: 'Occupy Wallstreet.' Who funds all
> that ? You need to look no further then the website of Otpor/CANVAS which
> is at the origin of these things when NATO conquested Yugoslavia: they
> point to NED (National Endowment for Democracy), IRI (International
> Republican Institute, chaired recently by Sen. John 'bomb Iran' McCain),
> and the Albert Einstein Institute where Gene Sharp seems to be the main
> character with his 'non-violent' manuals. The people in the NED (itself
> accused of being nothing but a CIA front) have people also in the Brookings
> Institute, and they interlock with the Council of Foreign Relations (the
> CFR), who have been set up by the big banking houses to buy up the American
> mass media (to sell war and reactionary ideas).
> http://www.aeinstein.org
> http://www.iri.org
> http://www.brookings.edu
Please re-investigate how these links work, then you can see it for
>
> Who else do we know worked at Harvard, 30 years ? Gene Sharp. Who is that ?
> He is the guy who wrote the manuals for the fake color revolutions, the fake
> arab spring and now the latest fakers: 'Occupy Wallstreet.' Who funds all
> that ? You need to look no further then the website of Otpor/CANVAS which
> is at the origin of these things when NATO conquested Yugoslavia: they
> point to NED (National Endowment for Democracy), IRI (International
> Republican Institute, chaired recently by Sen. John 'bomb Iran' McCain),
> and the Albert Einstein Institute where Gene Sharp seems to be the main
> character with his 'non-violent' manuals. The people in the NED (itself
> accused of being nothing but a CIA front) have people also in the Brookings
> Institute, and they interlock with the Council of Foreign Relations (the
> CFR), who have been set up by the big banking houses to buy up the American
> mass media (to sell war and reactionary ideas).
> http://www.aeinstein.org
> http://www.iri.org
> http://www.brookings.edu
yourself how the big banks fund and set up Otpor/CANVAS and how it
all works together with this 'Occupy Wallstreet' thing. They don't
even hide it ! The openly point to reactionary groups to get your
funding (Otpor/CANVAS).
http://blogger.xs4all.nl/joshb/archive/2011/10/21/688920.aspx
Otpor/CANVAS is now openly training 'activists' in the U$A:
http://www.peacejusticestudies.org/conference/2008/canvas.php
That link was provided by me by someone who was already trained
by them, who was organizing/promoting a fundraisor for the
AEinsteitute within a group that is heavily absorbed in the
'Occupy Wallstreet' thing (on 'second life platform), while in
the 'real world' they are into actual political left wing parties
(sometimes). Their Gene Sharp thing is spreading like a disease through
the left wing political class, all funded by ... reactionary banking
houses. If you don't understand why, then you have some more understanding
to do about how this world works. Why do reactionary banking houses
fund their own opposition ? Because then they can control and misdirect
them, and when it comes to them they know them and can kill them.
They control them with money, and misdirect them with flawed manuals.
But don't they then foment opposition to themselves ? They make the
ideas (such as anarchy or totalitarian communism, or 'Occupy wallstreet,'
so deeply flawed that it will never work, and hence even if they win
they will fail from their own internal flaws, and they will not soon
attract people because too many people see the big flaws.) Welcome
to reality. It is bloody serious, perhaps these 'Occupiers' will find
that out in the coming years, to their horror (and death).
You're all being used, beeing played by the big banks like a tuned
violine. You - Occupiers - are a joke to them, they'll use you and
discard you as it pleases them.
*
This is the manual you could be reading instead of the stuff made up
by Harvard boy Gene Sharp: http://www.law4.org/book2 (all free for
the cause, I wrote that, thanks for your interest and doing your
due dillegence; if you don't do you due dilligence, you'll answer
your conscience one day.) Now I am just throwing dirt on my opposition ?
That is such a typical cop-out. Go read it and form an informed opinion.
The book is not so long either, 64 pages including 4 Constitutions
(which are to be implemented one after the other, through ratification.)
It is the *complete system* there in 64 pages; and although I wrote
probably thousands of pages in total, those 64 pages should be enough
to know and do.
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