Class Processes and Cooperatives

Abstract

There has been a revival of interest in cooperative enterprises as an alternative to capitalist enterprises. After visiting the Mondragon Corporation, the largest workers’ cooperative in the world, established in the Basque region of Spain in 1956, the Marxian scholar Richard Wolff wrote an op-ed piece in The Guardian where he argues that cooperatives like the Mondragon Corporation must be seen as a central element of a socialist alternative to capitalism. While the conventional understanding of Marx’s own writing on cooperative enterprises suggests that such a form as a cooperative enterprise cannot escape the teleological thinking which subsumes it under the forces of monopoly capital, the actually existing cooperatives around the world have occasionally received a positive reaction from the Marxian scholars. This paper is an attempt to situate cooperative enterprises in the extant literature on production organization within the Marxian tradition, keeping in view the ambiguities and contestations about the place of cooperatives within the Marxian scheme of things. We argue that a perspective founded on the class processes, which entails the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus value, could help us understand the nature of a cooperative enterprise vis-à-vis capitalist enterprises. In this perspective, the conventional ways of judging ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ give way to an understanding based on the fundamental and subsumed class processes. Drawing on the works of Resnick and Wolff and using primarily the data collected through a survey of the handloom weavers’ cooperatives in West Bengal, and a few other cases from the literature as well, this paper aims at broadening our understanding of the potential of cooperatives for providing a viable alternative to capitalist production organization.