My Politics: Libertarian Socialism (Pt. 1)

"I am Arthur, King of the Britons"

"Who are the Britons?"

"We all are and I am your King"

"I didn't know we had a king...I thought we were an autonomous collective!"

Introduction

A formative influence in my political outlook was Wilkinson and Pickett's 'The Spirit Level' which presents a pretty compelling statistical case that economic equality is beneficial to societies - this doesn't mean equalisation of wealth at any cost is justified though and it is quite possible that many attempts to redistribute wealth that you could imagine will, on the whole, be bad for human well-being - the authors themselves condemn the Soviet Union as a "failed experiment with state ownership" that simply transferred productive power from a few private individuals to a corrupt bureaucratic elite.  

Their suggestions of finding new forms of ownership for companies and "building a new world in the shell of the old" set me on to the idea of economic democracy as a means of more equitably distributing wealth and control over the economy to the people (the seed was also planted by a reference to a worker-owned co-op in Michael Moore's 'Capitalism: A Love Story'), without a repressive and inefficient state running the show.

The idea has been cropping up more and more recently in the wake of the financial crisis and the resulting Occupy Movement - people are looking for alternatives to the rabid individualism and glorification of greed left to our generation by the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan (though the Solidarity v. Rugged Individualism debate has been carried on throughout history in various guises) - worker's self-management can be seen, in fact, as the "true" form of socialism, as the ultimate empowerment of the working class.

Authority is, to say the least, problematic - just take a look at the results Milgram Experiments, or the Stanford Prison Experiment to see this - having just watched 'Compliance' I can say that the power of a supposed official position is shockingly absolute. As Noam Chomsky points out: 

"There is no human institution that approaches totalitarianism as closely as a business corporation. I mean, power is completely top-down. You can be inside it somewhere and you take orders from above and hand ‘em down. Ultimately, it’s in the hands of owners and investors."

 The corporate market is, then, a problem - it ordains hundreds of thousands of private tyrannies which force grown adults to submit to petty and capricious authority, it is destructive of human dignity and of the capacity for humans to develop their skills and intellectual capacities. So, corporations are bad, but can alternative means of ownership and organisation work in practice? Here are some concrete examples:

1. Mondragon

Located in and around Catalonia, the former CNT heartland, Mondragon employs over 80,000 people in over 200 separate "companies" and is one of the largest corporations in Spain; it is also owned entirely by its workers. It runs factories, workshops, a bank, a chain of supermarkets and even a university. Recently Mondragon has worked with US trade unions to set up workers' co-ops in de-industrialised areas of the US.

The pay differentials are tiny - the CEO of the whole corporation earns only 8x the salary of the lowest paid workers - in the top US companies the ratio of the CEO's pay to the average worker was 231:1 in 2011.

Just so you see this isn't some leftist propaganda, here is some analysis by the Financial Times, that notorious Trotskyite rag. 

2. Waitrose/John Lewis Partnership

Waitrose is not under "worker's self-management", it is not run by direct democracy on a day-to-day basis but it does distribute its profits to the workers in the form of bonuses instead of to shareholders, the feudal lords and absentee landlords of our modern capitalist system. 

This cooperative, it must be admitted, represents a very middle class kind of socialism - the products it sells are geared towards affluent consumers and supermarket staff wear tasteful shirts and ties - not very proletarian!

However, this should not put us off, in fact it should act as an argument against those who suggest that affluent rural communities with their upmarket supermarkets, farm shops and pubs (in other words, quintessential Tory utopias) would be destroyed under socialism - state communism is certainly associated with grim, concrete, urban sprawls, with pollution and radiation and standardisation and factories towers pouring out smoke. The localised, decentralised economics of libertarian socialism would act in favour of preserving these small communities while co-operative supermarkets would be much more likely than Tesco and Asda to give the farmers which form the backbone of rural life a fair price for their goods.

3. The occupied factories of Argentina

Naomi Klein's excellent film 'The Take' is a good starting point for anyone wanting to understand the expropriation movement in Argentina - the narrative is simple (maybe suspiciously so...this may need more investigation) - President Carlos Menem took the country from a path to first world affluence backwards to poverty and starvation by accepting the strictures of the IMF - the film includes the chilling warning that "this is what a globalized country looks like". 

The response of the people, in many places, to occupy bankrupt factories and restart production under control of the workers - 20,000 people now work in occupied factories and a combination of public support and direct action have forced the government to recognise this movement and officially expropriate certain bankrupt workplaces at the behest of the workers - "Nationalisation Under Workers' Control" is the new slogan.

General Assembly of the workers at the occupied Zanon tile factory in Argentina

Results have been mixed and some factories have chosen to operate under direct democracy without hierarchy while some have taken the less revolutionary path of appointing managers. A great account of the difficulties and benefits of the self-management approach can be found here, with reference specifically to the Zanon factory, a shining example of Mr Zanon's hard work and wealth creation abilities - it was built on public land with public subsidies in a corrupt deal with the government.

The Argentine example shows how change can be achieved through direct action, by bypassing politics and simply mobilizing enough people in the streets to force the hand of the state - a tradition with a long and shining history. To those who worry about property rights or the rights of capital - just remember that these are utilitarian social institutions created to promote the growth of business and the provision of employment - in a country where 50% of the industrial capacity lies dormant the utilitarian balance surely tips in favour of allowing this productive capability to be used instead of rusting away.

Where the market has failed the people, the workers, must step in and allow common sense to prevail - factories should not lie vacant while there are idle labourers and those who have to go without.

Closing thoughts...

This post is a mere outline, a simple sketch of my views - I recognise they are incomplete and that many schools of thought, economic theories and so on I have not mentioned, nor even read about yet - Proudhon's mutualist ideas, Marx's work (which I have just begun to engage with), the experiences of the CNT-FAI unions in the Spanish Civil War among innumerable others.