Volume 1 - Issue 6
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There IS an Alternative!
Abby Horton
(Tweet: When life itself revolves around actively suppressing our emotions to perform labor in a monotonous and self-inhibiting manner, it’s not a surprise that 10s of millions of Americans every year suffer through major depression and anxiety. Capitalism and mental health don’t mix well.)
Our work lives are unhealthy. During this time, talking with friends who are either out of work, overworked, or reconsidering their career paths, it seemed like a great time to dig into ways our workday could be different. “Why is my self-worth and my health tied to my productivity at the office!?” I’m a freelance filmmaker, so I only have my own experience, but I believe we’re allowed to look around and imagine ways in which our lives, our family’s and friends’ lives, could be better. In dreaming about new ways to work, I have come across a few alternatives that I would like to explore in a series of writings. Firstly, I have been learning about Workers Cooperatives and Collectives, which offer different ways to imagine the workday and the agency we have in it.
What if, at work, you weren’t subject to a boss’s whims? What if your body/mind/creativity wasn’t optimized for maximum shareholder profit? In our current capitalist system, workers make a profit for the few owners and shareholders. Workers have little say in the direction and decision-making process of the company. Unions can step in to protect workers from low wages or bad conditions, but in the end, the owners of the business take the profit, and not the workers. Owners make the long-term decisions and decide whether to shut down a business.
In a Worker’s Cooperative, the workers are the owners. While hierarchies and managers may still exist, workers democratically govern the business, with a one-person-one-vote structure on major decisions. Some Cooperatives, known as Collectives, take this even further allowing all workersto take on the responsibility of management and make decisions affecting day-to-day operations, with little to no hierarchy. This 1999 documentary examines how responsibilities and decisions are shared at three workers' collectives—a bakery, grocery store, and a printing shop. Overall, Workers Cooperatives give economic power to workers who can decide to put their interests before profits.
Workers Cooperatives have often been born out of economic necessity. Discussing her book Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard points out that African-Americans have often had to turn to cooperative projects in order to survive a white supremacist economy. Starting with pooling money to buy freedom out of slavery, to working cooperatively to buy land, start farms and businesses, and then “[w]here white banks wouldn't lend money, credit unions arose.” And because they were creating an alternative economic system independent of white capital, “white terrorism or white supremacist violence actually surrounded almost every effort for African-American co-op development.” The Civil Rights leader Ella Baker, in her role as the National Director for the Young Negros Cooperative League, “organize[d] and promote co-operatives, as well as educate[d] the community about the economic advantages of co-operatives.” Cooperatives are more than a new workday, they keep wealth in their communities, “act as a bulwark against financial crises,” and can be a path to economic self-sufficiency and dignity within an oppressive system.
A Worker’s Cooperative could be a group of four people or 80,000, in the case of the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Region of Spain. Mondragon also started as a necessary economic alternative after the Spanish Civil War and during economic hardship under Franco’s dictatorship. Today, Mondragon has over 264 distinct cooperatives and no employee earns eight times the salary of anyone else. Using an intricate system of governance, workers vote on managers, and vote them out if they aren’t doing a good job. Workers are free to consider a variety of needs, besides maximizing profits, when voting. In times of economic crisis, Mondragon is excellent at retaining jobs because, as an employee says, “when times are bad, we cut wage costs by deciding it among ourselves."
There are many examples of current Worker’s Cooperatives here in the United States as well! Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx, NY, with about 2,000 staff, is a worker-owned home care agency and the largest worker-owned co-op in the U.S. One of their goals is to maximize salaries and benefits to staff. (CHCA is discussed further in this video report and this short documentary on economic democracy if you would like to learn more.) The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, started in 1967 with the support of the late Congressman John Lewis, is a “cooperative association of black farmers, landowners, and cooperatives.” The Federation is a “strategy for competing with the agricultural behemoths that currently dominate the whole industry, making it harder for small farmers to survive.” A widely-used ingredient, flour, is produced by an employee-owned co-op: King Arthur Flour. The Mandela Grocery Cooperative has been operating in West Oakland since 2009, and also has a great FAQ page for more resources on converting to a Co-op. And it is exciting to see that Central Brooklyn Food Co-op is opening soon which will be a “100% working member-owned and operated food store...to ensure access to affordable and fresh food” with a commitment to “maintaining…leadership representative of the mostly-of-color, low- and moderate-income communities of Central Brooklyn.”
The main obstacle to starting a co-operative is raising initial capital. Traditional banks can be weary of loaning money to “untraditional” structures. But many would-be cooperatives have found allies in aforementioned credit unions, which are member-owned establishments themselves. With the advent of high-tech and automated work places (the documentary The Future of Work explores this thoroughly), I can see cooperatives and collectives becoming a necessary, and welcome, alternative. Instead of firing employees because a machine can now do their job, those employees could vote to work less hours but retain jobs and salaries. Wasn’t that the point of all this innovative tech in the first place?
As I mentioned at the start, I am beginning to dive into the rich history of Workers Cooperatives in the United States and across the globe. I am thinking about how filmmaking can be a more cooperative pursuit. In a time of economic recession and continued discontent with the current capitalist system, it is exciting to explore ways that people have joined together to prosper together.
A Buncha Gays Huggin Each Other by Laura Dickie.
For more art, follow Laura on Instagram.
Solidarity with the Workers of Belarus!
Dimitry Lukashov
I am not a long-time observer of Belarus, but last Thursday, August 13, I was glued to my screen watching several livestreams of workers at BelAZ (Belarus Auto Plant) in Zhodzina demand that their mayor end police violence and release political prisoners.
Zhodzina is a suburb of Minsk, the capital of Belarus, where many detainees were transferred and held after being brutally beaten and arrested by riot police (OMON) in the wake of Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election. Lukashenko, president of Belarus for the past 26 years, won 80% of the vote in an election filled with “shenanigans and intimidation.”
The livestream was one of many meetings on Thursday, when during breaks or after work, factory workers expressed shock at the arbitrary and brutal nature of the detentions, which were very excessive by Belarusian (and post-Soviet) standards. Before Thursday, the protests were limited to urban areas and consisted of liberal opposition groups and the people that would sympathize with them, such as doctors and nurses (who saw the injuries firsthand at hospitals), culture workers, tech company employees, and, quite memorably, women dressed in white.
After the destructive neoliberal reforms of the 90’s in Russia, my home country, the working class and the liberal opposition have rarely found common cause. Similar antagonisms exist in Belarus, so when such a large number of factory workers started asking questions about police violence, the Lukashenko administration had no choice but to retreat. After Thursday, mass arbitrary arrests stopped, as well as the use of noise grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets. The head of the Interior Ministry went on live TV to apologize for excessive force.
For me, the enthusiasm from this tremendous display of worker power was short-lived. The interests of the liberal opposition and the working class simply do not align. I would encourage everyone to read the letter to workers abroad published by the Telegram channel Zabastabel (republished by the Progressive International) detailing a list of worker demands, and the more detailed explanation and context published by the Anti-Imperialist Front.
The opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who many claim—without evidence—won the election, insists her only goal is to release political candidates, including her husband, from prison and hold new elections within six months. But prior to the election, her campaign published a hodge-podge of destructive neoliberal reforms (some of which have been copy-pasted from a Western-funded think-tank) including reducing hospital beds (during a pandemic), raising the retirement age, and privatizing the social security, state-owned enterprises and media companies.
Many commentators have referred to Tikhanovskaya as a symbolic candidate, but perhaps a more apt metaphor is a Trojan horse candidate.
Katia Kazbek, a Russian activist who now lives in NY, encapsulated the frustration: “there is almost no way to oppose inequality and authoritarianism in the post-Soviet space without this struggle being co-opted into an anti-communist, or anti-leftist, position.”
Both Marxist and classical economists agree that, most likely due to outstanding IMF loans, Lukashenko has already implemented a number of neoliberal reforms over the past 10 years, including Order #3, requiring long-term unemployed to pay fines. If the liberal opposition were to take power and have their way, these reforms would accelerate to such a point that the workers of BelAZ, who made this moment possible, may very well end up losing their jobs and their livelihoods.
COLLECTIVE Recommendations
Capitalism and Mental Health by David Matthews for The Monthly Review
Illustration by Andrzej Krauze (The Guardian, October 12, 2016).
H. O.A.