Cooperatives’ March to Modernity: Market-Oriented, Apolitical Cooperation

Abstract

This chapter explains how commodity based, market exchange notions of cooperation were favored over collective, communal cooperation notions to form a fourth cooperative philosophy. It has become dominant as the cooperative praxis of the contemporary co-op movement. This chapter undertakes a detailed examination of its proposals. It critiques a prominent explication of this fourth cooperative social philosophy that has been articulated by John Restakis and endorsed by prominent cooperative spokespeople. Restakis endorses market-oriented cooperation as a third way between extreme capitalism and centralized socialism. The critique finds the theoretical and historical justification for this cooperative social philosophy to be specious. Restakis points two examples of pre-capitalist markets as models of cooperation that modern co-ops should follow. Yet, his examples include noncooperative institutions such as banks and the merchant class. Other pre-capitalist market relations such as equal exchange on simple economic markets are equally uncooperative. The chapter cites Marx’s critique of simple market relations as alienated. Restakis also condemns socialism as anti-cooperative. However, he is misinformed about Marxist theory. The chapter reiterates how Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci argued that socialism is cooperation writ large. The founding Marxists also accepted an auxiliary role for markets within socialism. Restakis commits an intellectual mistake by identifying socialism with the failed Stalinist and Maoist revolutions. These revolutions were socialist only in name. Their practices violated all the basic democratic, communal propositions of Marxist theory. Thus, the denunciation of socialism as antithetical to cooperation fails on theoretical and historical grounds. Restakis’ cooperative model also rejects political challenges to capitalism. The guiding principle is co-existence. Restakis argues that apolitical co-ops, operating as enclaves within capitalism, can humanize society. This chapter disputes his claim. It demonstrates that apolitical tactics can never resist the incessant anti-cooperative pressures of capitalism. On the contrary, cooperation can only flourish (within co-ops) and in the society at large, by directly challenging anti-cooperative practices, not by ignoring them.

End Notes

1. Marx says,

But whatever may be the social organization of the spheres of production, whose exchange of commodities the merchant promotes, his wealth exists always in the form of money and his money always serves as capital. Its form is always M—C—M’. Money, the independent form of exchange value, is his starting point, expansion of the exchange value his independent purpose. This M—C—M’ is the characteristic movement of merchants’ capital which distinguishes it from C—M—C, the exchange of commodities between the producers themselves, which has for its ultimate end the exchange of use-values (Marx 1962, p. 321).

2. This has important consequences for understanding social life. Social life is difficult to understand because it is a series of uncontrolled, unpredictable acts by independent individuals. Social life is the by-product of individual collisions. It is not consciously, rationally planned. It is therefore alien to the observers, not of their making. Even the wealthiest, most powerful, politically connected capitalist has no control over or knowledge about what other capitalists might do at any moment. The overall society is not within the grasp or understanding of any individual because competing, independent, and secretive other individuals are outside him.

This leads to the paradoxical problem that human social life is less understandable and less understood than natural phenomena. Social life should be more understandable because it is constructed by us. Natural phenomena—such as the formation of the universe, the formation of the earth, the phylogeny of species, and the chemical structure of water—are independent of humans and should be more mysterious than social phenomena that humans create themselves. However, natural phenomena obey strict natural laws that are comprehensible. Social life does not obey such strict laws because humans are active and creative agents. Social life can only be understood if social dynamics are rationally designed and administered by humans so that most individuals act concertedly. Capitalism, in particular, is not rationally designed, which makes its dynamics difficult to gage.

3. Experimental studies on decision making demonstrate that people are less altruistic when they are paid, or expect to be paid, for some behavior, compared to doing it as a community activity.

More organic, collective social relations are necessary to realize cooperation, social concern, social support, equality, and freedom to express oneself and control one’s social life (Ozgun 2010).

4. From the perspective of most people in eastern European countries, the recent communist/socialist past was better than the market economy that replaced it. In 1999, 50 % of Slovakians considered the former socialist regime to be ‘better than current democracy’. In the same year, in Russia, it was found that 85 % of Russians regret communism and Soviet Union’s demise. In 2004 the figure fell to 74 %. In 2002, 56 % of Poles were telling opinion pollsters that life ‘was better before’. In 1995 and 2003, 88 % and respectively, 86 % of Slovenians considered life in the former Yugoslavia, as ‘good’ and ‘very good’. More recently (2009) 72 % of Hungarians, 62 % of Bulgarians and Ukrainians, 60 % of Romanians, 45 % of Russians, 42 % of Lithuanians and Slovaks, 39 % of Czechs, and 35 % of Poles declared they were worse off than during communism (Velikonja 2009).