Workers’ Control
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An interesting interview on the concept of what he calls "recuperated workplaces"
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/04/why-is-workers-control-an-important-issue/
Quote:Many cooperatives are driven by entrepreneurial or ownership logic, and by doing that they lead workers into what I call a “class limbo”. Workers no longer know that they are workers. This is especially strong in the US, where cooperatives are presented as an alternative business model, and not as an alternative model for society, or communities, or part of the workers’ struggle, which is what cooperativism historically meant. But given the way they live, the way they work, they are not entrepreneurs, they are workers!This is in high contrast with the recuperated workplaces, where workers, having gone through these struggles, see themselves of part of the workers’ movement…In a nutshell, cooperatives wage a struggle for survival in a capitalist system. Recuperated workplaces wage a struggle against the bourgeois law, often manifested in state repression, against the capitalist owners and private property. So workers are reinforced in their subjectivity as struggling workers, and as workers without a boss, and that is a fundamental difference.
Quote:In a nutshell, cooperatives wage a struggle for survival in a capitalist system. Recuperated workplaces wage a struggle against the bourgeois law, often manifested in state repression, against the capitalist owners and private property.And fail spectacularly, leading to no income to survive under capitalism and to disillusion and bitterness. No wonder workers choose the first option, even if that's what coops have only ever been and only ever can be — a way of trying to survive under capitalism. The only anti-capitalist way-out is political action to dispossess the owning class and end the market system by bringing about the common ownership of the means of production and inaugurating production directly to meet people's needs not for sale or profit.
I think, as you point out, that both strategies are ultimately doomed to failure but i do acknowledge a difference in motives, one remains committed to capitalism and the other committed to the class warFactory occupations and workers councils are something i am sure will occur in the closing days of capitalism and the dawning of socialism….but as for now…these times seem too far-off still and we cannot foster the illusions and delusions that they are stepping-stones on the path to socialism. Argentina is offered as an example.https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/10/occupy-buenos-aires-argentina-workers-cooperative-movementBut once legitimised they appear to transform into conventional co-opshttps://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/03/23/argentina-worker-co-op-media-model-emerges/(an article that uses the term 'recuperated', a new word for myself.)
alanjjohnstone wrote:(an article that uses the term 'recuperated', a new word for myself.)That'll be a literal translation from French or Spanish. The English word would be "co-opted" (just realised that's an unintentional pun).
It has been done several times in Argentina and they were run as any other business enterprise, and they were producing profits, and the government passed a law to take them back from the workers, and now they are back in the hands of the capitalists. It is capitalism within capitalism. Those are distorted conception created by the Trotskyist's leftwingers and the Anarchists. Marx never considered the Commune of Paris as a socialist state, it was Lenin
The darling of the “middle class” liberals, the John Lewis Partnership, promoted as an enlightened employer, shows that when push becomes shove, it acts the same as any other conventional business – cut costs at the expense of its workers.
It is ditching any link to final salary in its pension scheme in a bid to save £80m annually despite any honey-coating excuses for its actions.
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