Cooperatives as Transitional Economics

Abstract

In contemporary discourse, cooperatives are often considered as vehicles for post-capitalist social transformation. However, theorists affiliated with the first, second, and third Internationals groupings of socialist parties suggested that cooperative potential was circumscribed by market coercion, leaving co-ops with limited pedagogical value and subordinating them to political movements. Their experience suggests it is important to avoid conflating cooperatives’ demonstration of post-capitalist labor norms with the strategic problems of creating a post-capitalist society. JEL classification: B14, J54

Expanding the scope of paradox scholarship on social enterprise: the case for (re)introducing worker cooperatives

“…This article is divided into three sections. In the first section, I describe why and how worker cooperatives constitute both a unique type of social enterprise and a concrete alternative to the dominant economic paradigm (Sharzer, 2016). Partly because they exemplify practices that are "simultaneously anti-, despite-and post-capitalist" (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010: 488), worker cooperatives have been overlooked not only in social enterprise and paradox literature, but also in mainstream economic and business education (Hill, 2000;Kalmi, 2007).…”

What’s so new about New Municipalism?

“…Mondragon, despite its contradictions, remains a common source of inspiration. However, as the ambivalent experience of Mondragon attests, there are fundamental limits to the power of co-ops to overcome global capital's value form (Sharzer, 2017). This underlines the need to develop and research the development of trans-local networks of non-commodified cooperative exchange in the inter-urban dimension.…”

“…It is this rejection of mediation, assert Bolton and Pitts (2018: 133–8), and its replacement by an immediate expression of value in things – mirroring populist notions of ‘the people’s will’ and ‘taking back control’ – that motivates (impossible) age-old appeals for ‘socialism in one country’. The possibility of municipal-socialism in our increasingly globally-mediated economy is problematised by Mondragon’s experience: the world’s most successful cooperative group has effectively internalised capitalism’s contradictions, relying on the exploitation of wage labour in the Global South in order to maintain its competitive advantage (Sharzer, 2017).…”

Forging a diagonal instrument for the global left: the vessel

“…Zeinab Tufeki's (2017) study of movements that have been enabled by social networking notes their fragility and susceptibility to disruption. Greg Sharzer (2012Sharzer ( , 2017 recounts the fate of utopian communities over the past two centuries that are usually either die out for become reincorporated back in to capitalist business as usual.…”