Thread by @BlackSocialists

Here’s a short passage from Karl Marx on worker co-ops from his 1864 Inaugural Address of the First International, but as a thread for dogmatists who don’t study heterodox economics, and who mistakenly assert that he thought worker co-ops could only be “capitalist” and futile. 😁

“But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property.

We speak of the cooperative movement, especially of the cooperative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold ‘hands’.”

“The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated.

By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behest of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters...”

”... [the cooperative movement has shown] that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself...”

“... [the cooperative movement has shown] that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.”

Another great quote (“Das Kapital”):

“A musical conductor need in no way be the owner of the instruments in his orchestra, nor does it form part of his function as a conductor that he should have any part in paying the ‘wages’ of the other musicians.“

“Cooperative factories provide the proof that the capitalist has become just as superfluous as a functionary in production as he himself, from his superior vantage-point, finds the large landlord.”

Another one (“The Civil War in France”):

“If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a mare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if the united cooperative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their control...”

“... [if cooperative production is to put] an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but Communism, ‘possible’ Communism?”

Another one (“Critique of the Gotha Programme”):

“... as far as the present cooperative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeoisie...”

BONUS:

Engels said, in response to the question, “Will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible?” within “The Principles of Communism,” that “it is to be desired that this could happen, and Communists certainly would be the last to resist it.”

That said...

Engels added that peaceful approaches were being stifled by the capitalist class and that their use of violence to stifle peaceful advances was likely to push poor and working class people to fight in seeking liberation.

If you’re interested in reading more of an analysis of Marx’s views on worker cooperatives, please check out Italian economist Bruno Jossa’s “Marx, Marxism and the cooperative movement,” published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics back in 2005:

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/downlo…

Jossa wrote this paper for two main reasons:

1) “... to ... confute the wrong but widely held assumption that Marx was inimical to the market and rejected cooperation as a production mode even for the transition period...”

2) “... to argue that ... neglect of Marxists both of the [co-op] movement and of the passages from Marx (and Engels) that present a system of producer [co-ops] as a new production mode can be traced back in part to the late emergence of an economic theory of producer [co-ops].”