Should Socialists Use Cooperatives?: On Constructing Socialism Out of Capitalism

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Capitalist joint-stock companies [corporations] as much as cooperative factories should be viewed as transition forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, simply that in the one case the opposition is abolished in a negative way, and in the other in a positive way. (Marx, Volume 3, 571-2)

This morning I saw Moase’s comments on workers cooperatives and their relationship to socialist strategy:

Now I’ve been meaning to read their work on the topic, so please excuse if I’m touching on anything he already has. But this is a topic I think about a lot, and I wanted to write down some points I think are relevant to navigating what radicals should support in terms of concrete actions and policies. That is, how should those committed to revolutionary transformations view working in/with institutions that are not inherently non-capitalist or socialist?

A policy or institution cannot be judged purely for its economic content because in practice, many of them exist within a larger structure. If I say for example I want non-commodity (i.e., non-money) planning, sure that is pretty much in content and form socialist. However, if I talk about something like public banks, cooperatives or even communes, these are a little more complicated. The economic-form taken by productive activities within these institutions are not inherently socialist by any means.

What then should be the attitude toward them? How should socialists approach working in them? Should they do so at all? I believe there’s a discussion that needs to be had about using things as political tools for building alternative material bases of class power. To elaborate on this, I want to think about two ways we can understand institutions and policies under capitalism: working class vs socialist institutions.

I’m using the term policy/institution to capture historically-specific and concrete social relations of reproduction at a given historical conjuncture. Policies are broader and often encompass institutions, whereas institutions are more concretely existing forms of policies. The language of public-policy is unavoidable given the present reality of state hegemony, but do not judge this solely by its form.

Working-class institutions are those which empower members of the working class (i.e., those who must sell their labor-power to survive) relative to capital within a class-divided society. These institutions may challenge and alter the concrete form of capitalist relations, but they ultimately do not fundamentally challenge capitalism at a system level.

Socialist institutions are those actively working to create alternative relations of production which break the domination of capital in the reproduction of human social relations. Concretely, they are one that takes back the social reproduction process (understood here as a whole, not just the immediate production process) to be under conscious and collective control. The goal is to work to live, not live to work, and to construct socialism.

Now these categories are not mutually exclusive. An institution that promotes working class power can also be one that is directed towards constructing socialism. Rather than understanding them as externally related, they must be seen as concrete categories of social struggle that help us to guide our praxis. Historically, institutions can go from being radical and revolution, to merely working class institutions, all the way to bourgeoisified ones (i.e., unions).

In particular, seeing the potential for institutions to act as political mechanisms to empower the working class and build the political hegemony for socialism is useful. Furthermore, these institutions can in fact promote socialist relations and begin to abolish private property and capitalist relations. As Marx says in the quote above, cooperatives and other collective forms of ownership do so in a positive way. We must think of how other institutions can do the same.

There is a tendency instead to see any institution which does not directly construct socialist relations (i.e., non-capitalistic relations of production) as “bourgeois” and thus worthless for struggle. This is often the case when people reject using the workers and tenant unions, cooperatives, even states institutions.

Don’t be mistaken. I am well aware that many of these institutions can and are used to dominate the working class and that they are not socialist. I am not ignorant of this. The point is rather how we use them. Institutions have inherent features to them, but this is also determined by the broader totality in which they exist. Of course, the goal is to construct socialism, so I’m not arguing that these institutions will all exist in the future in the same form or at all.

The point is rather this: no institutions radicals use to build political power or hegemony will at this point be fully socialist simply because we live in a capitalist world-system. By definition, we are in capitalist, and the institutions in question are on some level determined by this totality. However, that does not mean we cannot use institutions to build both working-class power, socialist hegemony, and alternative relations of production, all of which are part of the concrete movement of socialist construction, even post-revolution.

To judge a political movement therefore requires looking at how they use institutions and policies so not as to determine their political content solely by one element. We must ask why is certain strategy, tactic being used? Or in the case of states, why is a certain policy implemented? Is it building power for alternative social relations? Or is it merely a concession that is stabilizing the present ones?

This is a general understanding that works for judging all politicians. Policy-fetishists who see public policy of whatever kind as fully determinate of its political content are commonplace . This is why its common for people to argue that “X politician is Y ideology because they implemented Z policy!”, when this alone is indeterminate.

For example, the use of cooperative housing by Mamdani is a policy which can objectively help many working class people. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and its public housing mandate could even be seen to be taking the actions of a working-class institution in function and purpose (not in organization or management). However, in this case Mamdani is building hegemony for the Democratic Party and liberal democracy, not socialism and revolution. People confuse what are often good policies (even if they are in the grand scheme limited), with the endpoint of building a revolutionary movement.

Take an alternative case of Venezuela in the early 2000s before the commune movement. Chavez experimented a lot with cooperatives, but there was a key different. The goal here was building working-class autonomy and alternatives to state-power. The overall project had the marking of working-class institutions, but they pushed this forward to build socialism (see Gilbert for more on this).

In short, there is a balance to be reached between ends and means, not in a moral but strategic sense. We cannot get to socialism through doing capitalism, but we cannot anymore deny that building socialism materially, both political and economically, starts now. To deny that there is no seed of socialist praxis in capitalism already is to deny the very reasons for socialism possibilities.

Our actions should be judged by what they are building toward and what conjuncture conditions they are reacting to. A system of cooperatives can connect workers, expropriates use-values from capitals circuits, and supports socialist politics can push struggle forward. Same for a federation of communes. There is more to say in regards to concrete examples of this, but I will leave it at that for now.

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