Re: [Pen-l] Questions about the film Capitalism Hits the Fan

[Sandwichman <lumpoflabor@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rick,

My own reservations have more to do with "how" rather than "what". I wonder if the phrase, "preaching to the choir" is too optimistic. Maybe it's more along the lines of preaching to the seminary. The choir just likes singing the songs and doesn't pay that much attention to the theology.

I searched the database of 104,000 questions submitted to today's "Online Town Hall" and found three that mentioned the phrase "worker-owned". There were two questions on worker cooperatives and one each on consumer cooperatives and the "cooperative business model". In total there were less than fifty votes (out of 3,600,000 votes) of "I like this question" for the aforementioned.

Admittedly, this is not a "scientific survey" of public opinion or awareness. But it does jibe with the impression one gets that people start to look at you like you're a two-headed alien if you talk about such things as worker-owed co-operatives outside of the sacred confines of a university classroom or kaffeeklatsch of the Utopian Society.

Financial collapses notwithstanding, isn't the "free enterprise system" the best system ever devised for delivering the highest imaginable standard of living to the mostest deserving people on earth??? That is to say: financial collapses, war-for-oil, poverty, environmental degradation, waste, boredom, corruption, injustice, banality, etc., etc., etc. aside, is fundamental change of any kind just toooo scary to contemplate?

As possibly the last living non-professor in North America, I wonder sometimes if my tenured cohorts can't quite grasp what an immense privilege -- and thus what an ineluctable irony -- it is to be writing about social justice and whatnot while getting paid for doing it! I do it in my free time, which means 1. I don't get paid for it and 2. I need free time. I can't emphasize the importance of point number two, the need for disposable time, too strongly. 

-- 
Sandwichman

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Rick Wolff <rdwolff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

       If workers became their own board of directors - such that every job
description specified both the usual specific work assignment PLUS
participation in decisions about what, where, and how to produce and how to
distribute the surplus - our economic history would have been and would
henceforth be very different. If workers do their usual tasks Monday through
Thursday but on Friday gather to function as their own board of directors
(much as happens in many worker coops, in small hi tech firms across the US,
and elsewhere as well - it is not some utopian ideal but a practical reality
with a concrete and important history), here are some different outcomes we
might contemplate. First, in the 1970s such non-capitalistically organized
firms would NOT have stopped the historic rise of real wages in the US,
would thereby not have pushed workers to raise their consumption by
exhaustive labor hours and unsustainable debts (among the causes of the
current crisis). Second, such firms would fundamentally alter the ongoing
relationship between enterprise and community. Third, the attitude of such
firms to many "costs" of enterprise that capitalists have infamously not
counted (effects on workers' health, family life, artistic experience;
impacts on environment; etc.) would be to count them resulting in very
different calculi of what is "efficient", etc. In short, economic events
would vary significantly.
       Not only does the film state or gesture toward these points, and not
only would I argue that they can be successfully offered to the US public,
but I would go further. The old social democratic mantras about state
interventions have lost much of their ability to inspire - given what has
been done in their name and given their failure to sustain let alone advance
the gains they sometimes temporarily won for working people. People now,
given the loss of most that was won in the 1930s, will need something new
and more to fight for. And the film's suggested radical transformation of
the workplace - where people daily live the greater part of their adult
lives - might well provide the revolutionary target and inspiration a newly
revived left needs.

 

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