Co-operatives as Sheep-skinned Capitalism

A major concern for us who are genuine in our wanting to abolish capitalism is the lack of any specific plan or stragety towards our goal. This is one of the major results of the convergence of failures that we have outlined in our THESES ON THE DEGENERACY OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD AS A GENUINE PROLETARIAN ORGANIZATION. The lack of a centralised mechanism for deciding policy has resulted in a fetish for local autonomy in a time of global international capital. The principle of democratic control has invaded the IWW like a parasitic tumour which saps the strength and proletarian character away. The influence of those who do not hold an adequate (or any at all) understanding of political economy or the relationship of wage-labor to capital has turned the IWW from a union that was for the abolition of capitalism to one that seeks merely to manage capitalism on democratic lines. We are, of course, talking about the worker co-operative.

Co-ops are historically a mechanism for the defense of capitalist relations. Their main function is to take the burden of the capitalist and to place it on the backs of those who have to labor for a living. It is the ideology of the small business owner, and the children of the small business owner, the students, the academics, and those who mistake democracy for socialism. In other words, those who have little to no experience of wage labor and the production process or lack the means or ability to understand the system, causing the lack of an understanding in the production process.

In capitalism, a laborer sells their ability to labor, their labor-power, to a capitalist for a wage, for money. Labor-power is a commodity and it trades on average for its actual market price, just like any other commodity. The difference between labor-power and a powerloom is that labor-power can go on to create more value than was exchanged for it.

During the working day, laborers work for themselves for part of the day, to recuperate the value that they need to exchange for the production and reproduction of her life as a laborer. The rest of the day, they are laboring for free and this is the surplus-labor (or in other words, surplus-value). It is the source of profit. This is what the capitalist rests upon and the system of wage-labor obscures this method of exploitation.

And for capital to survive, it has to make a profit. It has to create more value than the value that went into it. This means that the capitalist has to squeeze down on labor, by extending the working day, lowering wages, making the worker work harder and/or more productively, etc. And what does the capitalist do with this surplus? They have to put it to market, turning the product into a commodity.

Commodities exist because there is a market, because there is property. Co-operative property, no matter how democratic it is, is still property. Things have to be produced to be exchanged, regardless of their use-values. The irrational logic of capitalist production comes from this fact.

By converting the worker into a co-operative worker, all that is being done is laying the problem of capitalist accumulation onto the shoulders of the proletariat. Commodity production is not abolished, nor is property itself, and the confrontation of alienated labor with the direct producer continues. The money-commodity would not be done away with in an economy based upon the commodity-form. The petite-bourgeois preachers of the co-operative movement, and their mindless intelligentsia, as such do not have any idea of what capitalism is. The best evidence of the reformist nature of co-operatives is the plain fact that they already function perfectly fine in capitalism, and most of them all share the same tendencies of workers working long hours, managing their own pay decreases and the growth of a managerial position.

So what does this to do with the abolition of the wages system? It shares in common the idea that the problems of the worker is not the existence of capitalism itself, but that the worker is not paid back their full value, as such, it also shares in common the reformist and conservative idea of a fight for a $15 minimum wage and universal basic income. What these people fail to understand is the fact for capitalism to exist it has to create every day a class of people who are forced to consume the means of production and means of subsistence. Just another mechanism for keeping the working class the working class.

As such, the co-operative movement is only one way for capital to try and manage its own crisis. Notably this has been the case in Argentina where workers have been taking over business and factories of absentee owners. It does not provide a mechanism for the abolition of capitalism, nor do the proponents even seek to do so in regards to the terms in the preamble. Socialism for these people (and their general goal) is a nicer, more democratic capitalism.

The promotion of this idea is an anarchist deviation. It has no place in our union and it goes against the ideas of our preamble. And if you don’t agree with the preamble, then you shouldn’t be in the IWW. No doubt that these are working class demands, and we would be entirely content if they were explained in the wider context of capitalist accumulation and the fact that they are mere band-aids patching up the haemorrhaging wound of capitalist crisis, but nowhere have we seen anyone doing this apart from us. Further proof that the IWW is just a social club for activists to feel good about themselves about “doing something”.

If the IWW had its shit together, and actually operated like it wanted to abolish capitalism, then it would stamp out this idea and promote a better understanding of what capitalism is, and to do that it has to promote Marx and Marxism. Maybe it would realize that organizing for the sake of organizing is a waste of time, or even counter productive if we’re just tying the proletariat to the bourgeois mode of production. This should be obvious, but unfortunately we have to piss on this activist parade as hardly anywhere does it seem that this goal of communism is raised. The IWW is currently not organizing for the end goal of communism, it is organizing a defence of capitalism. This is stemming from the deficiencies in theory and deficiencies in being a decentralized mess.

The amount of negative anarchist influence in the union, the same influence that unashamedly calls out “no politics in the union” as a thin disguise to keep their childish and bourgeois ideas dominant, is most clearly obvious in this pipe-dream of a demand of a hierarchy-free capitalism. These same people will promote the discussion of what ever theory is the soup du jour of that moment, and are the same people who try to denounce any mention of Marx. It’s little wonder they don’t like the preamble, or try to wiggle out of it like a bunch of lawyers, considering it’s more or less taken word for word from Karl Marx.