Marx’s Interpretation on the Worker-Owned Cooperative

All concepts of Marx are not doctrines but methods. They do not provide completedoctrines but starting points for further research and methods for that

research” (Engels, 1895, quoted in Jossa 2005, p 4)

In celebrating the “International Day of Cooperatives” in

2009, the International Labor Organization (ILO) noted that worker

cooperatives worldwide offered a unique opportunity to “effectively

contribute to global economic recovery in times of crisis.”

Workers cooperatives were argued to be well suited to helping

migrant workers access small loans, and save and invest their own

money, while also providing worker education, job opportunities and

even social services to the most desperate of workers (source cite:

http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/press-and-media-centre/insi

ght/WCMS_110094/lang--en/index.htm). Although it is important to

help impoverished people access small amounts of credit and perhaps

learn new job skills as ILO documents described, there are other

ways to see far more radical possibilities in the growing coop

movement (source cite: http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---

ed_emp/---emp_ent/documents/publication/wcms_094046.pdf). The more

radical ways of viewing coop movement is to view today’s coop

1

movement a “survival strategy” invented by the dispossessed in

their ongoing class struggles against ruling capitalist class. By

viewing “the coop strategy to be immanent to a global class

struggle” (Mookerjea 2010, 129), a new coop movement brings a fresh

perspective from the frame of class struggles. The coop principles-

democratic control of the workplace and accumulated capital by

members; members’ economic participation through personal

investment; autonomy and independence from non-worker supervisors;

continual worker education; co-operation with other co-operatives;

a commitment to a socially beneficial purpose; and concern for the

community are aligned with a radical notion of workplace democracy,

set forth by the International Cooperative Alliance in 1995. These

foundational key principles of worker cooperatives align with a

radical notion of workplace democracy, which defined a worker

cooperative as a democratic enterprise in which “control rights

follow from membership in the firm's workforce (Bonin, Jones, and

Putterman 1993, p. 1307) and that worker owned cooperatives have a

purposeful “social mission” to improve community conditions.

Many Marxist scholars and activists, however, dismiss the

institution of worker-owned cooperatives as a very incomplete and

2

inadequate response to capitalist exploitations and argue that

worker coops are little more than a boutique, reformist response to

capitalism, when what is really needed is a far more complete and

holistic revolution of the entire capitalist model of production.

In reality, however, Marx himself often spoke very favorably of

worker cooperatives and their role in progressive history.

Furthermore, there are significant ways in which the mission of

workers cooperatives directly aligns with the core theoretical

concerns of Marx, on issues such as appropriation of surplus value,

alienation, and celebrating the creativity of labor. This paper

will demonstrate that a Marxist analysis can find good reasons to

celebrate worker owned cooperatives as the coops play a vital role

in creating a different kind of economy, while also bringing

workers together in collective ways that can foster a larger social

and political transformation.

Early Marxist Views on Cooperatives

As workers cooperatives spread throughout Europe and the

United States in the mid to late 1800s, as a response to

increasingly immiserating industrial work and the growing loss of

3

worker ownership and control of their workplaces (Rothschild 2009),

Marx’s general response to the cooperative movement was very

positive. Karl Marx (1864) observed in his inaugural address at

the founding of the First International Working Men’s Association

that: “The value of these great social experiments [cooperative

factories] cannot be overrated” (Marx, 1864, p 11).

Marx immediately qualified his optimism, however, by noting in

his address that the actual history of cooperatives in the early

1800s showed that they had been rather casual affairs--small-scale

and very limited in impact. This history proves “beyond doubt,”

Marx claimed (1864), “that, however, excellent in principle and

however useful in practice, co-operative labor, if kept within the

narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never

be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of

monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the

burden of their miseries.”

It was this very skepticism about the ability of decentralized

worker cooperatives to generate broad revolutionary consciousness

and consolidated political power among workers that contributed

greatly to the First International’s split between Marx’s “red”

4

socialists (defending the need for a centralized, statist approach

to the revolution) and Bakunin’s “black” socialists (defending the

anarchist/localist perspective). As Rothschild (2009, 1033) tells

the history:

Marx believed that to avoid a retake of power on the part of the capitalist class, the working class would need to consolidate its power in the hands of a strongstate apparatus that would coordinate the economy, at least provisionally, until it “withered away.” Bakunincountered that central state control of the economy would prove to be “the most vile and terrible lie of the 20th century.” He urged, instead, a completely decentralized system in which workers would co-own andself-manage their own workplaces, with federative activity among themselves when needed. Similarly, citizens would manage their communities directly.

In the 1872 Hague Conference of the First International,

Marx’s “centralization” approach won over the delegates, and

Bakunin and his followers were expelled from the First

International, along with their model of decentralized workers

cooperatives. This expulsion “ensured the ascendancy of the idea

that socialism meant strong central state authority” (Rothschild

2009, 1033) and overshadowed Marx’s early support for the

decentralized worker cooperative model—a result that was to shape

5

Marxist thinkers’ criticism of worker owner cooperatives for years

to come.

Later Marxist Criticism of Cooperatives

Reiterating his earlier concerns with the revolutionary

potential of workers cooperatives, Marx later argued in Volume 3 of

Das Kapital (1894), that cooperatives “naturally reproduce, and

must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organization all the

shortcomings of the prevailing system.” Although he admitted that

that the “antagonism between capital and labor is overcome within

them,” he also noted that this result was only possible at the cost

of “making the associated laborers their own capitalists”--that is,

by enabling them to use normal capitalist means of production “for

the employment of their own labor” (Marx 1909, 521).

In this same section of Das Kapital, Marx actually was a bit

ambiguous on the potential role of such cooperatives, for even

while he claimed that these cooperatives did not wholly transcend

the existing capitalist means of production, he also noted that

they could be considered “as forms of transition from the

capitalist mode of production to the associated one.” He also noted

6

that the antagonism between the social and private character of

wealth was overcome “positively” through the cooperative model

(521). It is this kind of ambiguity that has subsequently allowed

scholars like Rothschild (2009, 1027) and Jossa (2005, 5) to both

cite the same passage in Volume III of Capital as evidence of Marx’s

skepticism concerning cooperatives (according to Rothschild), or as

evidence of Marx’s optimism about cooperatives (according to Jossa).

While Marx’s brief passages in Capital on the cooperative model

are a bit ambiguous, Marxist scholars that followed Marx have been

clearer in their critiques. Luxemburg, for example, was skeptical

of any reformistic programs, and worker owned coops to her

represented only a reformistic program that could not truly

transform the capitalist mode of production (Luxemburg, 1900). She

considered coops “as small units of socialized production within

capitalist exchange,” and further argued that coops were “totally

incapable of transforming the capitalist mode of production’

(quoted in p 656, Atzeni and Ghigliani). In Reform and Revolution,

she argued that coops could not serve as a democratic mode of

production as long as they operated within a competitive system

under capitalism (656), and that any such reformist models only

7

served to extend and “perpetuate the capitalist system.” Another

early Marxist, Ernest Mandel was critical of the coop model,

stating that “there is no real or meaningful self-management

insofar as it is limited to single companies operating within the

market” (656). Both of these critiques built on Marx’s notion in

Capital that workers’ cooperatives hardly transcended the market or

offered a new means of production, but were simply small-scale,

reformist efforts that could never upend current relations of

production.

All of these criticisms were influenced by the reality that

Robert Owen, an influential founder of the socialist movement, was

spreading the cooperative gospel (and building cooperative

institutions) through both England and America in the early 1800s.

One of the Marxist critics of the Owen’s cooperative movement,

German Social Democrat leader, Eduard Bernstein, believed that

capitalism would never be adequately challenged by the “utopian

dreams” of reforms like Owens (656). Similarly, the Marxist

Porter, powerfully criticized Owen’s worker owned coop model as

nothing but a utopian ideal that couldn’t be realized.

Robert Owen’s co-operative ideal… was an ideal which required for its realization a science which had not

8

arisen, a character which had not been formed, economic and legal conditions existing nowhere in the purely aristocratic societies of Europe. Above all, unless it were to be subjected to an iron-bound tyranny, such a community would necessitate the development of an administrative system, of the nature of which even Owen himself had formed no conception, and which could only originate in a pure and enlightened democracy (Porter 1891; 29, quoted in Graham, p 132-133).

Finally there were Marxist critiques who argued that the

cooperative movement was not political enough, as cooperatives only

sought individualistic economic gains for workers through the

market system, and did not work to mobilize workers into radical

class consciousness nor revolutionary class struggle. Cooperative

movements from this perspective were simply an individualistic

capitalist enterprise that could not bring about fundamental social

change due to the absence of political mobilization (see Atzeni and

Ghigliani 2007 and Elliot 1987).

Marx’s Practical Defense of Worker’s Cooperatives

Karl Marx himself would not share the deep skepticism of many

Marxists concerning the cooperative movement. It is clear from the

scholarship of those like Rothschild (2009), Elliot (1987) and

Jossa (2005) that when Marx reflected on examples of workers

cooperatives in action he almost always spoke favorably of them,

9

and on several public occasions (most notably the Inaugural Address

to the First International), he “declared himself strongly in favor

of cooperative firms” (Jossa 2005, 3). Eliot (1987) shows quite

clearly how democratic self-management and self-governance among

workers, including “worker control over the physical means of

production” (295) which are all key elements of the cooperative

model, are also dominant elements of Marx’s thought, which led Marx

to generally celebrate worker cooperative institutions of his time.

As an example of this thinking, Marx remarked favorably upon the

cooperative model in his comments on the German Socialists’ Gotha

Program, describing socialism itself as “a cooperative society

based on common ownership of means of production” (cited in Eliot

1987, 287).

When Marx reflected on specific cooperative programs, such as

those led by Robert Owen, he loudly proclaimed his support, stating

that “in England, the seeds of the cooperative system were sown by

Robert Owen: the working men’s experiments, tried on the continent,

were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented,

but loudly proclaimed” (Marx 1864). Lenin, as well, when writing

about actual examples of the co-operative movement in place,

10

celebrated the practice of a cooperative society as helping to

inform the broader utopian dreams of a final, transformational

revolution. Lenin claimed that “[it] is one thing to draw out

fantastic plans for, building socialism through all sorts of

workers associations, and quite another to learn to build socialism

in practice in such a way that every small peasant could take part

in it” (Lenin, 1923, cited in Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007). In his

other comments on cooperation, Lenin argued that “not all comrades

realize how vastly, how infinitely, important it is now to organize

the population of Russia in cooperative societies.” Lenin argued

here that cooperatives play an important educational role in

developing class-consciousness and in developing civilized co-

operators of modern industries, concluding that a “system of

civilized co-operators is the system of socialism” (Dobrohoczki

2006).

Witnessing a powerful example of the building of socialism in

practice, through the Paris Commune, Karl Marx could hardly have

been clearer in his celebration of worker’s cooperatives. The

cooperatives of the Paris Commune “aimed at the expropriation of

the expropriators,” Marx wrote. They sought “to make individual

11

property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and

capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labour,

into mere instruments of free and associated labour.” The

communards sought to end the capitalist model of every individual

competing with each other and replace it with a model of a

democratic workplace and society. “It will therefore do away with

competition and replace it by association” (quoted in Elliott,

298). “But this is Communism, ‘impossible’ Communism!” Marx

wrote, in describing the cries of those who were skeptical of the

cooperative movement of Paris. And then Marx answered the

skeptics:

Why, those members of the ruling class who are intelligent enough to perceive the impossibility of continuing the present system—and they are many—have become the obtrusive and full-mouthed apostles of co-operative production. If cooperative production is not to remain a sham and a mare; if it is to supersedethe capitalist system; if the united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production—what else, gentleman, would it be but Communism, ‘possible’ Communism? (Marx [1871]. 1993, p 61)

Witnessing such examples of “communism in practice,” Marx

consistently viewed the cooperative as a transitional form between 12

capitalist mode of production and the associational one. Whereas

the capitalist owners of the means of production expropriate all

surplus value in a capitalist system, worker owners in cooperatives

make their own decisions on how the surplus is redistributed, thus

experiencing workplace and community democracy in action, while

also “enabling ethical economies” that actually attend to the

social health of workers (Gibson-Graham 2003). By allowing workers

to experience such democratic decision-making and workplace control

directly, while offering a model of “politico-ethical decisions

around markets, wages, technology, surplus appropriation, and

distribution” (Gibson Graham, 2003, 128), worker’s cooperatives

open up new pathways to a different economic future. “It is

through this process that economic imaginaries are made into

concrete, actually existing practices and institutions” (128).

According to Marx, the rise of the Paris Commune played just such a

role in confirming that associations of workers controlling the

means of production were not only an “economic imaginary,” but

could be the concrete reality.

Commenting on this kind of transformational potential of the

cooperative movement, Engels wrote in 1886 that “my proposal

13

envisages the introduction of cooperatives into existing

production…just as the Paris Commune demanded that the workers

should manage cooperatively the factories closed down by the

manufacturers.” Engels then added that neither Marx nor himself

“had ever doubted that, in the course of the transition to a wholly

communist economy, widespread use would have to be made of

cooperative management as an intermediate stage” (cited in Jossa,

2005, 15).

In this regard, workers cooperatives from a Marxist

perspective clearly go beyond “boutique reform projects” and have

the potential of setting workers down the path to a fundamentally

different political economy of labor. For just this reason, Marx

argues, “worker cooperatives constitute a great’ victory of the

political economy of labour over the political economy of property”

(cited in Lebowitz 1987, p 310). This is exactly the dynamic Marx

was commenting on in his Inaugural Address to the First

International when he celebrated the innate lessons regarding

political and class struggle embedded in the cooperative model.

We speak of the co-operative movement, especially of the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold ‘hands’. The value of these great social

14

experiments cannot be over-rated. By deed, instead of byargument, 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 employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means ofdominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring manhimself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying itstoil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart (Marx, 1864, “The Inaugural Address”).

Clearly, Marx viewed the cooperative movement as having

radical political potential. Offering a model in which workers

control the mode of production, and wherein workers appropriate the

surplus value of the production process, lays a foundation for

undermining capitalist legitimacy and challenging worker

exploitation and alienation. Workers have to democratically

exercise their political wills in order to participate in the

cooperative processes of production, which fundamentally undermines

“the capital- labour opposition,” or, in different words, “the

conflict between a class that wields all power and another whose

duty is to obey passively”(Jossa 2005, 6).

Marx stated very clearly in this regard, at the First

International meeting, that “We acknowledge the cooperative

movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society 15

based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically

show, that the present pauperizing and despotic system of the

subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the

republican and beneficent system of the association of free and

equal producers” (Marx [1894],1977, 513-4). Even when radical cooperative

movements fail, as they did following the two months’ occupation of

Paris by rank and file workers during the Paris commune, such

efforts provide aspirational hopes for the future, as the way to

achieve a new society is always “ inseparable from struggling for

it” (Marx [1871]. 1993, 70). As Marx wrote, “a desperate struggle

of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the

further school of these masses and their training for the next

struggles” (Marx [1871].1993, 94).

Marx’s Theoretical Defense of Worker’s Cooperatives

Workers’ cooperatives can provide a practical political model

of alternatives to capitalism, and thereby play a role in building

momentum towards a revolutionary praxis. But beyond the pragmatic

political reasons for a Marxist celebration of cooperatives, there

are foundational theoretical reasons for seeing workers 16

cooperatives as well aligned with Marxist thinking. A powerful

theoretical argument supporting the cooperative model begins with

Marx’s profound insight on how surplus is attained and who

appropriates the surplus. Based on his analysis of surplus value,

Marx connects the concept of ‘surplus’ to the concept of alienation

and worker exploitation.

The bottom line for Marx is to trace the origin of all surplus

value to the living power of labor and this living power of labor

is the source of all surplus value in a monetary, economic sense

(and the source for all capitalist profits). But the essence of

labor is much deeper than merely the source of economic profits as

Marx calls the labor process the “workers’ own life activity, the

manifestation of his own life” (Avineri 1968, 107) and “man’s

process of self-becoming” (85). In a capitalist system, as surplus

value becomes appropriated by capitalist owners, the living power

of a worker’s own labor becomes appropriated by others and a worker

becomes detached from him or herself and becomes owned by alien

forces.

This analysis of the alienation of human beings from the labor

process itself, and from the products of labor, can be traced back

17

to Marx’s materialist analysis of historical development, based on

relations between nature and human beings. From Marx’s materialist

perspective, nature is an object that can be changed only through

human beings’ labor, in a process that involves humans realizing

themselves through laboring on the natural world. “Nature builds

no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-

acting mules, etc.,” claimed Marx. “These are products of human

industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human

will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are the

organs of the human brain, created by the human hand” (cited in

Tucker 1978, 285). Very importantly, by transforming nature

through work, human beings also transform themselves, developing

self-consciousness as a “species being.”

Humans, unlike animals, have a consciousness and a will. They have a conscious life activity, and in this activity, humans express free activity. Humans, because they are self-conscious, make their own life activity, and this part of the essence of humanity. Humans producewhen free from physical need, reproduce the whole of nature, and construct in accordance with beauty. This isthe essence of species-being. (Marx [1844], cited in Tucker 1977, 76)

In this regard, labor value is the most critical component of

Marx’s materialist interpretation of the world. Labor is the

18

source of all value and creativity—the way in which natural

material is transformed “into organs of the human will over

nature,” the source of all economic value and capitalist profits,

the expression of the free, conscious life activity of humans, and

“the means to achieve the fulfillment of man’s capacity as homo

faber” (Avineri, 114).

According to Marx, however, the capitalist organization of

the labor process inherently perverts the creative possibilities of

labor due to “class division of society into capitalists and

workers, rulers and ruled” (Elliot 1987, 298). This class division

entails the forcible imposition of degrading, repetitive and menial

jobs on employees by the modern division of labor, workers’

economic desperation and coercion attendant with low wages and loss

of surplus value to the capitalist overseer, and subsequent,

perpetual worker fears of losing a job, going hungry, and otherwise

being unable to provide for a family (Elliot 1987). In this way,

under capitalism, the fruits of labor become concentrated in the

hands of a few affluent capitalists, while actual workers (the

source of all value) become exploited and alienated. Marx

explained this as a process of “social theft,” whereby the surplus

19

labor generated by the “industrious” working class is appropriated

by the non-working, or ‘idle class’ (Gibson-Graham 2003, 130).

Not only does the capitalist structure allow the “idle class”

to take surplus value from workers, but it fundamentally undermines

the revolutionary potential of the collective energy embedded in a

social production processes. Through a social production process,

including the division of labor, cooperation among people and

families becomes critical in shaping communities and producing

escalating social wealth. The potentialities of collective action

and expanding social wealth are tremendous, Marx argues. “the

strength of the individual man is very small, but the union of a

number of very small forces produces a collective force which is

greater than the sum of all the partial forces, so that merely by

being joined together these forces can reduce the time required,

and extend the field of their action” (Tucker 1977,447).

However, in a capitalist system, these collective

potentialities become perverted as capitalists reduce workers to

“individual wage slaves,” (Marx, quoted in Gibson-Graham 2003,

132), isolating wage workers intellectually and politically from

each other, even while depriving workers of the value of their

20

labor products. In such a system, there develops a deep

“antagonism between the character of wealth as a social and as

private wealth” (Marx 1909 [1894], cited in Tucker, 521). This

antagonism results because capitalism allows for the private

accumulation of socially generated wealth, by means of the

appropriation and exploitation of the labor of others,” which not

only degrades workers but also encourages “the purest and most

colossal form and gambling and swindling” (522) by capitalist

overseers and stock manipulators.

For such reasons, cooperation among workers in a capitalist

system no longer aims as pure collaboration among workers to

maximize efficiency and collaborate for the collective good.

Rather, capitalists manipulate the cooperation of labor to “exploit

the social wealth” (522) by depriving workers of the full value of

their labor, detaching workers from intellectual cooperation among

their peers, and systematically repressing worker organizing

efforts. This manipulated division of labor reduces human beings

to “one-sided being,” preventing workers from “developing

capacities to develop towards universal production. By producing

only one-sided beings through the division of labour, the emergence

21

of this particularism sets one man against another, making the

basic inter-human relationship one of antagonism instead of

mutuality…negating men as a universal being” (Avineri,122). As

workers are reduced to one-sided wage-slaves, they sell their labor

to a capitalist overseer, whose “soul is the soul of capital” and

who lives only by “sucking living labour” (Marx [1867].1977, 342)

As a capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has onesole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, tocreate surplus value, to make its constant part, themeans of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire like, lives only by sucking living labour, and the more it lives, the more labour it sucks (p 342)

The outcome of sucking living labour to produce maximum profits is

unavoidable exploitation and alienation of workers, as workers

become detached from the production process and receive little of

the surplus that was produced by the workers themselves. Every drop

of surplus value is absorbed “vampire-like,” the alienation of

workers grows as their once-creative labor becomes only a soul-less

commodity. Capitalists organize laborers to produce only goods that

have, in addition to use-value, an “exchange value,” i.e., by

converting labor to a commodity destined to be sold, and to

22

“produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of

the communities used to produce it” (293).

In this regard, capitalists’ aim is “to produce not only a

use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not

just value, but also surplus-value” (293). Workers become

alienated in such a system because their labor is no longer able to

represent creativity, no longer able to express their human nature

through the laboring process, nor can workers enjoy the full degree

of value that was created through the products they made. Instead

of being “object creators,” workers become alienated from work as

“his creativity is no longer present in his work” and as “the work

is external to the worker, that is not part of his nature” (Marx

[1867].1977, 106; Avineri 1968l, 124-125).

Regarding the absence of creativity in work, some Marxist

scholars (Rosensik, Wolff, DeMartino) argue that rather than

viewing exploitation simply as a form of economic theft, as much

Marxist analysis does, exploitation should be regarded more broadly

as a situation in which humans are “cut off from the conditions of

social possibility that surplus both enables and represents”

(DeMartino 2003, 16).

23

Thinking of the surplus not as property and prize but as the origin of distributive flows [offers] a new understanding of class exploitation. The trauma of exploitation is not that something is taken from you. Rather, it is that you are cut off from the conditions ofsocial possibility that the surplus both enables and represents. Restricted to the necessary labor that sustains you, separated from the surplus that sustains the larger society, you are constituted as an “individual” bereft of a possible community and communal subjectivity (cited in DeMartino 2003, 16).

From this perspective, workers in a capitalist system are deprived

of the possibility of politically participating in distributing

surplus because almost all “social wealth” in capitalism is

appropriated by private capitalists, who make private decisions

about how to distribute their wealth. Because the common view is

that “political rights depend on participation in the common

ownership, “the private appropriation of surplus value eliminates

for most workers the political right to shape the distribution of

social wealth, since such political rights “depend upon possession

of private property” (Avineri 113). In this context, considering

surplus value as the origin of “distributive flows” opens up a new

understanding class exploitation as including the loss of one’s

communal self and political rights (DeMartino 2003, 24).

24

Benefits of Worker Owned Coops in addressing exploitation

There are many advantages to workers cooperatives in

addressing the most fundamental exploitations of capitalism. By

uniting workers themselves as the democratic owners and managers of

their workplace, cooperatives insure that the “socially productive

power of labour” is retained by the workers collectively, rather

than being given by “individual, isolated workers” as a “free gift

to capital” (Marx 1867, 451). Marx argues that a fundamental

exploitation of capitalism is that under capitalist relations

“being independent of each other, the workers are isolated. They

enter into relations with the capitalist, but not with each other.”

Cooperative institutions reverse this formulation, which can now

read: “being related to each other through a cooperative, the

workers are in community. They enter into relations not with the

capitalist, but with each other.” As a result, Elliot (310)

argues, “cooperative labor is free from direct capitalist

domination over production.”

Enjoying democratic control of their workplace through the

cooperative model, workers do not find the surplus value they

create being appropriated by another, but rather workers become

25

“their own capitalists” (Marx[1894].1977, 521) and find themselves

resolving the antagonism between private and social wealth in a

positive way—thus pointing the way to a different production system

(521). Because many worker cooperatives also set a “socially

beneficial purpose” as part of their mission (such as amelioration

of poverty, education of workers, or environmental responsibility),

cooperatives also are less apt to dissolve all labor into its

commodity, exchange-value form (Elliot 1987, 304), and more likely

to recognize socially beneficial “use values,” even while building

a more creative and healthy workplace far more suited to the

creative realization of labor’s “species being” (see, for example,

the many examples of exceptionally creative cooperatives in

Rothschild 2009 and Graham-Gibson 2003).

Cooperatives also offer an answer to the problem of workers in

a capitalist system becoming politically “cut off from the

conditions of social possibility that the surplus both enables and

represents” (DeMartino 2003, 16) since they are self-consciously

built on a model of internal democracy (allowing workers to

collectively shape the distributional flows of surplus value),

while also quite often include a commitment to external

26

politicization and civic engagement of their worker owners. As

Marx in his article, “The Civil War in France” (1871) noted regarding the

cooperatives of the Paris Commune, they “supplied the Republic with

the basis of really democratic institutions,” offering the world

“the political form, at last discovered, under which to work out

the economical emancipation of Labour.”

These are the principles of workers cooperatives that tended

to inspire Marx whenever he saw them in practice. Writing in 1866

to the members of the First International, then meeting in Geneva,

Marx clearly supported the role of the cooperative movement in

emancipating the oppressed workers. Though Marx noted in his 1866

“Instructions” to the First International that “dwarfish forms” of

workers cooperatives would never be able to leverage the necessary

“general social changes” to “transform capitalist society,” he

nevertheless celebrated the radical potential of “spontaneous

movements of the working classes” in these cooperatives, if only

they could be properly generalized throughout society. Marx

advised that the delegates of the First International should not

“dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever,” but should

27

simply enunciate “a few general principles” to help guide the

emerging system of workers cooperatives.

Conclusion

Observing the cooperative experiments developed by Robert Owen

in England and America, Marx celebrated “the practical upshot of

the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed” (Marx 1864,

cited in Tucker 518). Commenting on the cooperative associations

of the Paris Commune, Marx claimed they were undeniably examples of

“communism in practice,” ”What else would it be, gentlemen, than

Communism. ‘Possible’ Communism?” (1871). Even upon the failure of

the Paris commune, Marx maintained that “a desperate struggle of

the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further

school of these masses and their training for the next struggles”

(Marx [1871]. 1993, 94). These statements are evidence of Marx’s

practical approach to the reality of workers cooperatives offering

a real and pragmatic model of what Engels called “an intermediate

stage…in the course of the transition to a wholly communist

economy” (quoted in Jossa 2005, 15). In this regard, the efforts

of worker owned cooperates are well aligned with the principles of

Marxism in liberating human beings from the fetters of capitalism,

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and very importantly, these cooperatives are in existence now,

offering an immediate, concrete model of how to imagine a new

production and distribution process that is more humanistic and

free from worker exploitation.

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