Bertell Ollman on co-operatives, workers owned enterprises and market- Socialism
From here
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/ms_ch04.php
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/ms_ch04.php
There are different versions of market socialism. What makes them market societies is that buying and selling, however restricted, continue to go on for commodities and labor power and, in some versions, even capital. And money continues to mediate between people and what they want as under capitalism. What makes them socialist is that the capitalist class has been removed from its dominant position in society. In the more popular version, workers own and/or control their enterprises and collectively, or through the managers they elect, make the decisions now made by the capitalist owner and his manager. The capitalists, as a distinct class, are either abolished or, in cases where a small private sector remains, have their power severely restricted...
As co-owners of their enterprise, the workers, like any capitalist, will buy raw materials, hire labor, and sell finished goods. Though—except for managers—these activities won't take much of their time, the experiences they provide workers will be completely new. Selling their own labor power and especially buying commodities, on the other hand, will continue to take a lot of time and will offer many of the same experiences that workers have today. Furthermore, when the worker first applies for a job and is treated by the collective as an outsider, the fear and insecurity he will feel is all too familiar. The collective, after all, will only hire new people if it believes their work will increase its profit, or secure or improve its market share (ultimately reducible to profit). With this approach, the collective is unlikely to show more concern for the human needs, including the need for a job, of the unemployed and others in the community than businesses do under capitalism.
Even on the job, the interests of the individual worker and the interests of the collective do not coincide, for while he may wish to work shorter hours, at a reduced pace, etc., the collective may force him to work longer and faster so that it can keep up with the competition, still viewed as an impersonal power beyond human control. And, as in capitalist society, it is the owner of the enterprise whose interests predominate. The worker's desire to reorganize his job in function of his interests as a worker will carry little weight in comparison with the profit maximizing interests of the collective, backed as it is by the logic of the market. In which case, the worker's actual experience in selling his labor power, even where he is part of the collective that buys it (and whatever soothing label is used to hide the reality of this exchange), will not be very different from what it is now.
The political scientist, Robert Lane, studied a number of worker owned enterprises in capitalist society, and found that, while there was some increase in empowerment and in overall morale, this change did not produce the expected effect on the workers' quality of life or on their general satisfaction. What people actually do at work, their ability to use initiative and their own judgment, and how much of the process they control, turn out to have a much bigger effect on their satisfaction than simply acquiring a new status as co-owners in a context that doesn't allow for major changes in work conditions. "Marx was right", Lane concludes, "the market economy is unfavorable to worker priority [treating workers' needs first] ... because any costs devoted to improving work life in the competitive part of the economy make a firm vulnerable to reduced sales and profits because of the violation of the efficiency norm".12 There is no reason to believe that the situation in market socialism, where enterprises are owned by workers—even with considerable democratic control—but market relations continue to operate, would produce a very different result...
...The new relations of ownership do not affect the fact that it is individuals who will decide what to buy, and—like now—will compare goods on the basis of their price, and compete with others to get the best deal. They will constantly desire more money so that they can buy more, or have the power and status of someone who could. As now, they will worship money as something that gives them this power. And in order to be more effective in the competition for goods and money, they will develop an indifference for the human needs of others against whom they are competing. Coming out of all this, they will view having a lot of goods and money as success, as now—never thinking they have enough; money will retain its mystery; and the greed and indifference people display in their dealings with each other will continue to be misconstrued as human nature....
....The mystery surrounding money also gives no signs of disappearing under market socialism. Money, we will recall, only has the power to buy goods, because the workers who produced them have lost all connection to them. In capitalism, having produced a good conveys no right to use it, no matter how great the need; nor do workers have any say in who can; nor can they easily understand why this is the case. The context in which workers have lost control over whatever it is that their labor has transformed is hidden behind the apparent independence of the final product on the market and the power of money to acquire control over it. All this applies equally to capitalism and market socialism. Even if a case can be made that exploitation no longer exists under market socialism because workers, as co-owners of their enterprise, belong to the collective entity that retains the surplus (the alternative interpretation is that the collectivity exploits the individual workers), it is clear that alienated relations of labor would remain substantially intact and with them the mystification and deification of money. The modifying influence that one would expect to come from workers electing their own manager is more than offset by the regime of production for the market and its pitiless logic of profit maximization....
... Marx spoke of the cooperative factories of his day as turning "the associated laborers into their own capitalists".13 With their aim of maximizing profits, workers, as collective capitalists, are likely to behave very much like capitalists do today, i.e. producing what sells, producing for those who have the money to buy and ignoring the needs of those who don't, cutting corners on quality and safety whenever they can get away with it, creating needs for their products—or for more products, or for their brand of product—where they don't yet exist, and besting the competition in whatever ways the laws allow (and often in ways that they don't).....
To the extent that workers participate in these activities directly, or even indirectly, they will share in far more than the profits that typically go to a capitalist class. For by making workers into collective capitalists, market socialism has added capitalist alienation to their alienation as workers, while modifying the latter only slightly. Now, they too can experience the lopsided perceptions and twisted emotions, the worries and anxieties that derive from competing with other capitalists; they too can manipulate consumers and themselves as workers in quest of the highest possible profit; they too can develop a greed for money abstracted from all human purpose; and they too can turn a blind eye to the human needs of others. There is not much room here for acting as one's brother's keeper. Marx aptly characterized competition between capitalists as "avarice and war between the avaricious".14 The same description would apply to competition between workers as collective capitalists in market socialism....
market socialists don't realize just how much of capitalism, of its practises and ways of thinking and feeling, and of its problems, are contained in its market relations, and, consequently, how much retaining a market, any market, will interfere with the building of socialism. Here, the fundamental error in their analysis is to identify capital with capitalists, the current embodiment of capital, and not see that capital, as a relation of production, can also be embodied in the state (as in state capitalism) or even in workers' cooperatives (as in market socialism). Capital is self-expanding wealth, wealth used not to satisfy wants but to create more wealth, satisfying wants only where this does so and developing new, artificial wants where it doesn't. What is decisive is its goal, and not who owns it. It is how capital functions in pursuit of this goal that gives our society most of its capitalist character and problems. The market, through which newly created wealth circulates allowing what initially takes the form of commodities to return to the owners of the means of production in the form of capital, is a more important feature of capitalism than is private ownership. Thus, ownership may be transferred to the state (as has occurred with nationalized industries in many countries) or to workers' cooperatives, but if the market remains essentially intact so, too, will most of the problems associated with capitalism. Market thinking, as we saw, is produced by people's experiences in any market without regard to who owns the values that are exchanged....
From here
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/ms_ch04.php
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/ms_ch04.php
There are different versions of market socialism. What makes them market societies is that buying and selling, however restricted, continue to go on for commodities and labor power and, in some versions, even capital. And money continues to mediate between people and what they want as under capitalism. What makes them socialist is that the capitalist class has been removed from its dominant position in society. In the more popular version, workers own and/or control their enterprises and collectively, or through the managers they elect, make the decisions now made by the capitalist owner and his manager. The capitalists, as a distinct class, are either abolished or, in cases where a small private sector remains, have their power severely restricted...
As co-owners of their enterprise, the workers, like any capitalist, will buy raw materials, hire labor, and sell finished goods. Though—except for managers—these activities won't take much of their time, the experiences they provide workers will be completely new. Selling their own labor power and especially buying commodities, on the other hand, will continue to take a lot of time and will offer many of the same experiences that workers have today. Furthermore, when the worker first applies for a job and is treated by the collective as an outsider, the fear and insecurity he will feel is all too familiar. The collective, after all, will only hire new people if it believes their work will increase its profit, or secure or improve its market share (ultimately reducible to profit). With this approach, the collective is unlikely to show more concern for the human needs, including the need for a job, of the unemployed and others in the community than businesses do under capitalism.
Even on the job, the interests of the individual worker and the interests of the collective do not coincide, for while he may wish to work shorter hours, at a reduced pace, etc., the collective may force him to work longer and faster so that it can keep up with the competition, still viewed as an impersonal power beyond human control. And, as in capitalist society, it is the owner of the enterprise whose interests predominate. The worker's desire to reorganize his job in function of his interests as a worker will carry little weight in comparison with the profit maximizing interests of the collective, backed as it is by the logic of the market. In which case, the worker's actual experience in selling his labor power, even where he is part of the collective that buys it (and whatever soothing label is used to hide the reality of this exchange), will not be very different from what it is now.
The political scientist, Robert Lane, studied a number of worker owned enterprises in capitalist society, and found that, while there was some increase in empowerment and in overall morale, this change did not produce the expected effect on the workers' quality of life or on their general satisfaction. What people actually do at work, their ability to use initiative and their own judgment, and how much of the process they control, turn out to have a much bigger effect on their satisfaction than simply acquiring a new status as co-owners in a context that doesn't allow for major changes in work conditions. "Marx was right", Lane concludes, "the market economy is unfavorable to worker priority [treating workers' needs first] ... because any costs devoted to improving work life in the competitive part of the economy make a firm vulnerable to reduced sales and profits because of the violation of the efficiency norm".12 There is no reason to believe that the situation in market socialism, where enterprises are owned by workers—even with considerable democratic control—but market relations continue to operate, would produce a very different result...
...The new relations of ownership do not affect the fact that it is individuals who will decide what to buy, and—like now—will compare goods on the basis of their price, and compete with others to get the best deal. They will constantly desire more money so that they can buy more, or have the power and status of someone who could. As now, they will worship money as something that gives them this power. And in order to be more effective in the competition for goods and money, they will develop an indifference for the human needs of others against whom they are competing. Coming out of all this, they will view having a lot of goods and money as success, as now—never thinking they have enough; money will retain its mystery; and the greed and indifference people display in their dealings with each other will continue to be misconstrued as human nature....
....The mystery surrounding money also gives no signs of disappearing under market socialism. Money, we will recall, only has the power to buy goods, because the workers who produced them have lost all connection to them. In capitalism, having produced a good conveys no right to use it, no matter how great the need; nor do workers have any say in who can; nor can they easily understand why this is the case. The context in which workers have lost control over whatever it is that their labor has transformed is hidden behind the apparent independence of the final product on the market and the power of money to acquire control over it. All this applies equally to capitalism and market socialism. Even if a case can be made that exploitation no longer exists under market socialism because workers, as co-owners of their enterprise, belong to the collective entity that retains the surplus (the alternative interpretation is that the collectivity exploits the individual workers), it is clear that alienated relations of labor would remain substantially intact and with them the mystification and deification of money. The modifying influence that one would expect to come from workers electing their own manager is more than offset by the regime of production for the market and its pitiless logic of profit maximization....
... Marx spoke of the cooperative factories of his day as turning "the associated laborers into their own capitalists".13 With their aim of maximizing profits, workers, as collective capitalists, are likely to behave very much like capitalists do today, i.e. producing what sells, producing for those who have the money to buy and ignoring the needs of those who don't, cutting corners on quality and safety whenever they can get away with it, creating needs for their products—or for more products, or for their brand of product—where they don't yet exist, and besting the competition in whatever ways the laws allow (and often in ways that they don't).....
To the extent that workers participate in these activities directly, or even indirectly, they will share in far more than the profits that typically go to a capitalist class. For by making workers into collective capitalists, market socialism has added capitalist alienation to their alienation as workers, while modifying the latter only slightly. Now, they too can experience the lopsided perceptions and twisted emotions, the worries and anxieties that derive from competing with other capitalists; they too can manipulate consumers and themselves as workers in quest of the highest possible profit; they too can develop a greed for money abstracted from all human purpose; and they too can turn a blind eye to the human needs of others. There is not much room here for acting as one's brother's keeper. Marx aptly characterized competition between capitalists as "avarice and war between the avaricious".14 The same description would apply to competition between workers as collective capitalists in market socialism....
market socialists don't realize just how much of capitalism, of its practises and ways of thinking and feeling, and of its problems, are contained in its market relations, and, consequently, how much retaining a market, any market, will interfere with the building of socialism. Here, the fundamental error in their analysis is to identify capital with capitalists, the current embodiment of capital, and not see that capital, as a relation of production, can also be embodied in the state (as in state capitalism) or even in workers' cooperatives (as in market socialism). Capital is self-expanding wealth, wealth used not to satisfy wants but to create more wealth, satisfying wants only where this does so and developing new, artificial wants where it doesn't. What is decisive is its goal, and not who owns it. It is how capital functions in pursuit of this goal that gives our society most of its capitalist character and problems. The market, through which newly created wealth circulates allowing what initially takes the form of commodities to return to the owners of the means of production in the form of capital, is a more important feature of capitalism than is private ownership. Thus, ownership may be transferred to the state (as has occurred with nationalized industries in many countries) or to workers' cooperatives, but if the market remains essentially intact so, too, will most of the problems associated with capitalism. Market thinking, as we saw, is produced by people's experiences in any market without regard to who owns the values that are exchanged....
No comments:
Post a Comment