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Editorial: The New Cooperativism Marcelo Vieta1 (Issue Editor2)
Beyond “capitalocentrism” Cooperative forms of associated labour and self-help communities long predate the capitalist era. Pre-modern examples of cooperative experiences include groups practicing collaborative production and mutual aid, the economic life of the commons, and the social organization of many indigenous communities. In the modern era, cooperatives developed as bottom-up responses to the callous exploitation of emergent industrial capitalism, in synchrony with other worker organizations such as friendly societies, mutual associations, and unions.3 Cooperative experiments that formed specifically because of the stark inequalities of the new economic order include Scotland’s Fenwick Weaver’s Society in 1761, Robert Owen’s worker-centred revival of the New Lanark mills in the first decades of the 19th century, the London Cooperative Society of 1824, the promising but short-lived Equitable Labour Exchange of 1832-1833, and the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in the 1840s.4 Already by the early 19th century, utopian socialists like Owen and Charles Fourier were campaigning for a more equitable society for workers in the midst of a rapidly industrializing Europe via a socialized economy of cooperative communities. For classical anarchists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, cooperatives, as locally rooted, collectively owned, and federated associations, were vital for building the alternative to the capitalist state system. Karl Marx too had favourable views of “workers’ cooperative factories”5 which, for him, proved to be one of the two most promising victories for the struggle of “living labour” against capital.6 Indeed, although also critical of the potential for cooperators to become “their own capitalist” within a market system centered on the commodity-form,7 for Marx, worker coops provided “the proof that the capitalist has become… superfluous as a functionary in production….”8 Throughout the 20th century, cooperative modes of organizing social, cultural, and economic life proved to be viable alternatives to centrally planned or capitalist modes of production, distribution, and consumption. Cooperative experiments flourished in diverse socio-political contexts such as, to name only a few: the credit unions of Germany, Italy, France, and Quebec; Argentina’s rural coops and urban mutual societies; the USSR’s kolkhozy before their collectivization; Nova Scotia’s Antigonish movement of worker cooperatives; Catalonia’s self-management movement around the years of the Spanish Civil War; industrial coops in Nationalist and early Maoist China; Yugoslavia’s selfmanaged factories; post-colonial Algeria’s originally spontaneous selfMarcelo Vieta, “The New Cooperativism” (Editorial), Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, Volume 4, Number 1, Summer 2010, pp. 1-11.
2 management movements; producer cooperatives in the plywood industry of the US’s Pacific Northwest; Chile’s cooperative agricultural experiments during the presidency of Salvador Allende; or Israel’s kibbutz movement. By the late 1960s, thinking around cooperativism merged with broader social and economic demands for self-determination and workers’ control around the concept of autogestión (self-management). Inspired by the ideas of Marcuse, Castoriadis, Vaneigem, Gorz, and the Situationists, amongst others, the students and militant union protagonists of the May 1968 events in France, the May-June 1969 events in Córdoba, Argentina, and similar late 1960s movements throughout the world adopted the notion of the self-managed control of production as a key demand and desire. The fight for autogestión for these militant students and workers was not only a struggle for more democratic workplaces, less alienated and exploitative labour processes, and the return of the me