Reddit reviews Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class

Two relevant quotes by Marx here:

> But there was in store a still greater victory of the political economy of labour over the political
economy of property. 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
experiments cannot be over-rated. By deed, instead of by argument, 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 monopolised as a means of dominion over, and of extortion
against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is
but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil
with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.

So co-operatives do have positive potential in that they reflect very elementary and thereby contradictory forms of the new society in the old, an early and incredibly incomplete manifestation of the political economy of the working class. For more on the topic of 'political economy of labour' this I would recommend the excellent book by Micheal Lebowitz, Beyond Capital.

> The co-operative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first
examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases,
in their present organization, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce
them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished there, even if at first only in
the form that the workers in association become their own capitalists, i.e., they use the
means of production to valorise their labour.

But they are also fated to reproduce the "worst defects" of capitalist production, because the workers are compelled by capitalist competition to act more and more so like a collective capitalist. Those co-operatives that survive, let alone those that begin to really prosper and expand, are only able to do so by behaving like capitalists, and so are forced to either hire wage labour or contract out to other more conventional capitalist companies.

So the Mondragon Corporation, the most successful co-operative in the world, that many people love to point at as some sort of model for social transformation, now not only maintains in Basque country a large contingent of precarious wage-workers that are laid off during cutbacks in production, such as during a recession, but also "employ" both directly and indirectly tens of thousands of super-exploited workers in Third World Nations like Mexico and China. So not only are the workers acting as their own capitalists in such a scenario, they are also directly appropriating imperialist rents!

Or even the case of the moderately successful, but still relatively small "worker-owned" and "fair trade" co-operative that my partner was so unfortunately employed at for several years... as a wage-worker at a below poverty level wage. As it turns out, the "worker-owners" were 14 people, mostly original members of the co-operative, that exploit several dozens of people as wage labourers and the upper management generally ran the company like a personal dictatorship, firing people arbitrarily and unjustly and generally being extremely shitty people. As it turns out, my partner was essentially fired for standing up to her prick of an inept manager who had been sexually harassing the all female staff, after having already been written up for violating a "third party communication policy" that forbade workers from speaking to each other directly about workplace related issues.

For the record though, I do believe that co-operative forms of production have a whole lot of potential during the actual dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the transitory period of class rule of the working class and it's allies following a socialist revolution and the long transition to communism through socialism. For example, they've been doing great stuff in socialist agriculture in Cuba based on the co-operative model in the past few decades.