Wolff, co-ops and socialism
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Noam Chomsky and Richard Wolff are just a couple of ideological distorters. Socialists/communists in the USA is like looking for chicken teeth and fish legs. What Richard Wolff is advocating was also supported by the Trotskyists in Argentina
Sorting through some old papers I came across this article from 1991 by an ex-member who still shared some of our views. It’s about whether the concept of “self-exploitation” makes sense in relation to workers co-operatives. He argues that while the term might not make sense in regard to workers exploiting themselves, it does in relation to the cooperative as a legal institution exploiting those who work in it.
Unfortunately only the abstract is can be read freely on line:
The key passage in his reply to Alan Carter is:
”This conflict of interests between the institutional employer and its employees remains a central feature of workers’ co-operatives within a market economy. […] The interests of the institution in increasing profitability in order to finance the investment programmes necessary for its survival — and, hence, in maximising the surplus product it extracted — conflicted with his interests as a wage-worker, in pay and conditions.”
John O’Neil deals specifically with the reform to capitalism that Wolff proposes;
”Within democratic co-operatives the conflict takes a different form as a conflict of interests amongst members of the institution depending on which of two different roles they play — as policy formulators for the institution or as recipients of wages. It is in such situations that the inaccurate and misleading term ‘self-exploitation’ appears appropriate. The conflict also reveals a way in which, when the workers are paying themselves low wages, this may not be a confusion as Carter claims. It is when workers find themselves forced by market demands to pay themselves low wages that the conflict of interest between workers in their different roles becomes most clearly apparent.”
The best example of self-exploitation is the coops formed in Argentina and the Caribbean islands. In Argentina, they had an elite of workers which manage the factories to produce profits to be run as a capitalist enterprise, they produced so many profits that the government created laws to take them back from the workers, and share the profits with the prior owners, and the state became their partner. In the Caribbean it was the same case, now they are run by banks and credit unions and big supermarkets
O’Neil’s ‘Exploitation and Workers’ Co‐operatives: a reply to Alan Carter’ can be freely downloaded here: http://booksdl.org/scimag/get.php?doi=10.1111/j.1468-5930.1991.tb00286.x&key=RWM8YCRWC4X1LFBZ
The best example of the failure of the Coops is Robert Owen himself who was one of the creators of that conception. Coops movement is not a Marxist conception and Karl Marx never supported that idea. Communes were also implemented in Bolivia and it was a total failure
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/socialism-or-capitalism-heres-the-truth-about-chinas-economy/
Wolff on China and state-capitalism and transitions
Is socialism really centred on management as Wolff concentrates upon
“The dichotomous employer/employee relationship inside enterprises must give way to a democratically organized community of workers who collectively employ themselves as well as direct the enterprise. That economic foundation—what communism concretely means—offers us a better chance to realize the goals of liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy than capitalism or socialism ever could.”
Isn’t socialism about society directing production?
I’m sort of surprised by what Wolff leaves out. If state-capitalism was a transition, then so are corporations (joint-stock companies) according to Engels.
For Marx the transitional society was capitalism. State capitalism is a form adopted by capitalism like fascism and nazism is a form that capitalism adopted in Italy and Germany. The difference between Trotsky and Stalin was the management style of the state-capitalist society. Socialism/communism is a social production. He is just confusing the confused ones. He is also wrong about the causes of the capitalist crisis, he thinks that it is bad management instead of overproduction. He must be reading Marx upside down
There is also a Castillian ( Spanish ) and Portuguese version of the article. It is one of the best articles about Lenin transitional society
The book by him and Resnick mentioned at the end of Wolff’s article on China was reviewed in the Socialist Standard in June 2003.
It was clear even then what Wolff’s mistake was and where it was leading to;
”Because Resnick and Wolff concentrate on what happens at enterprise level their argument leads to the conclusion that communism can exist at enterprise level. This is, in fact, their argument; which makes producer co-operatives the typical communist organisation. Insofar as communism is equated with any kind of “common ownership” then such co-operatives could be called “communist” since the co-operative’s assets and products are commonly owned by its members. In fact, in their detailed economic history of the USSR between 1917 and 1990 that takes up most of the book, the only example of “communism” they identify in Russia are the collective farms set up in the 1930s, on the ground that, legally, the surplus they realised was not directly appropriated by state officials but belonged to the farmers as a collective group.“
So, for him, the only example of “communism” in the USSR were the collective farms. In that article he says the same about the “communes” in China:”China’s economic system is also clearly not a communism in the sense of having overcome the employer/employee structure or mode of production. To the extent that such overcoming once occurred during the era of communes early in the history of the People’s Republic of China, it mostly vanished.”So, Wolff has been wrong for a long time, even before he leapt to fame with his videos on the Crash of 2008. But we were on to him well before then.Incidentally, in the sane Study Guide section of our website there is an article on another, more obscure aspect of the theoretical position of Wolff and Resnick.The collective farms were part of the quinquennial created by Joseph Stalin by forcing the peasants to work in the countryside thinking that they were going to eliminate the Kulak, but it did not, the concept of market and the free market was applied to the collective farms. That process was also analyzed by Raya Dunayevskaya including all the quinquennials which were typical capitalist production planning
https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/ch03.htm
I have always said that Richard Wolff interpretation of Marx, is just Richard Wolff Marxism, it is like Lenin using some Marxist phraseology but in reality, he was creating his own state capitalist theory which has nothing to do with Marxism
The trouble is he is frequently referred to as “America’s most prominent Marxist economist” as, for instance, here.
Nothing new. In the USA anybody is a Marxist, a socialist, a communist or a leftist. They were saying that Barrack Obama was a communist, and now they are saying that Donald Trump is a socialist, and the term corporate socialism is very popular. The blinds guiding the blinds
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