Gar Alperovitz gave an interesting interview on the Real News Network on Spain’s worker-owned Mondragon Corp. and the future of worker-owned co-op businesses in a capitalist economy.
He advocated a 30-year effort to build up worker co-ops to the point where they can become a dominant force in the economy. I think his ideas are good, but I don’t think that either the United States or the rest of the world can afford to wait 30 years before changing direction.
If you, like me, think our present corporate capitalist system is not working, and if you, like me, thinks state socialism and central planned economies are proven failures, what is the alternative?
Economist Gar Alperovitz, in a flawed but thought-provoking new book, What Then Must We Do? says the answer is economic democracy – worker-owned businesses and cooperatives. Unlike the giant for-profit corporation, the worker co-op would operate for the benefit of the employees instead absentee stockholders. Unlike with nationalized industry under central planning, the worker-owners would be deciding for themselves and not trying to rule over other people.
I think so, too, and so do other people, whose books I’ve reviewed on this web log. Alperovitz’s book represents an advance over David Graeber’s The Democracy Project in that he suggests some practical ways in which this ideal can be advanced. Alperovitz’s blind spot, compared to Graeber, is his failure to see the magnitude of the opposition that would have to be overcome.
Alperovitz pointed out that there already are quite a number of worker-owned businesses and cooperatives. In Cleveland, there’s a worker-owned Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, which is powered by solar panels bought from the worker-owned Evergreen Energy Solutions. In Madison, Wisconsin, there is the worker-owned Isthmus Engineering and Manufacturing Co., which makes precision machines and robots. He has a long list covering much of the country.
Local governments spend a lot of money subsidizing private businesses. Instead of providing economic incentives to bring in a big box retail store, which is likely to put established retail merchants out of business, or a manufacturing plant, which is likely to relocated in 10 or 15 years in search of low wages and new economic incentives, why not help the worker-owned businesses in your own community?
Executives of big corporations (except for family-run companies such as Corning Inc. or Wegmans Food Markets) have no tie to any community or, indeed, to any country. Workers, along with small-business owners, are the ones who are committed to living in a community and building it up.
Along with worker-owned businesses, there are credit unions, electric power co-operatives, businesses with employee stock ownership plans – all with more democratic forms of organization than corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange. There is something called a “B” corporation, whose charter says it is organized for public benefit rather than maximizing shareholder value. All these provide something to build on and expand. One simple reform, Alperovitz noted, is to allow owners of stock under ESOP plans to vote their own shares rather than giving their proxies to a trustee.
He advocated public banks, such as the Bank of North Dakota, as a way of serving local communities and providing a safe haven for depositors. He said states such as Vermont. which is working on a single-payer, universal health insurance plan, could show the way for health care reform. In the next financial crash, the federal government is likely to take over some failed corporations, as it did AIG and General Motors, and the next time around it should ask for reforms to make these companies serve workers and the community.
In time, over a period of decades, Alperovitz thinks that worker-owned and public enterprises could gain constituencies and crowd out the dysfunctional corporate system that we have down. Such an approach offers more hope, he wrote, than supporting the declining labor movement or progressive political action. In this I think he is naive. The corporatist elite that have worked for decades to crush organized labor and thwart progressive politics is not going to stand idly by and let themselves be threatened by worker co-operatives.
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