The Communal State: Communal Councils, Communes, and Workplace Democracy By Dario Azzellini

July 9, 2013Leave a comment

9 July 2013 — NACLA

Report

The particular character of what Hugo Chávez called the Bolivarian process lies in the understanding that social transformation can be constructed from two directions, “from above” and “from below.” Bolivarianism—or Chavismo—includes among its participants both traditional organizations and new autonomous groups; it encompasses both state-centric and anti-systemic currents. The process thus differs from traditional Leninist or social democratic approaches, both of which see the state as the central agent of change; it differs as well from movement-based approaches that conceive of no role whatsoever for the state in a process of revolutionary change.

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Capitalism in Crisis: Our Opportunity for a New System By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese

June 19, 20131 Comment

19 June 2013 — Truthout

Capitalism. (Photo: adam greenfield / Flickr)

[I can’t say I entirely agree with this essay’s approach to dealing with the crisis of capitalism (after all, it’s not the first crisis but the umpteenth) but nevertheless I still think it’s worth reading if only because it’s a refreshing change after the British left’s attempt at addressing the crisis (see for example Richard Seymour’s video, ‘In practical terms today, we are all reformists …’) Though I would argue that the British left has always been reformist, well at least William Morris’s time, and in any case, he speaks not for me. WB]

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Video: Venezuelan Democracy: A Tension Between Centralized Power and Local Democracy

April 12, 2013Leave a comment

12 April 2013 — The Real News Network

Manuel Larrabure: The Bolivarian Revolution succeeded in developing models of community power and reduced inequality but so far has failed to diversify the economy or extend workers democracy in the oil and mining sector

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Is There an Alternative for Capitalist Economics and Politics? Richard Wolff Says Yes

January 11, 2013Leave a comment

8 January 2013 — Truthout

(Image: Haymarket Books)

“Imagine a country where the majority of the population reaps the majority of the benefits for their hard work, creative ingenuity and collaborative efforts. Imagine a country where corporate losses aren’t socialized, while gains are captured by an exclusive minority. Imagine a country run as a democracy, from the bottom up, not a plutocracy from the top down. Richard Wolff not only imagines it, but in his compelling, captivating and stunningly reasoned new book, Democracy at Work, he details how we get there from here – and why we absolutely must.” — Nomi Prins, Author of It Takes a Pillage and Black Tuesday

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Cuba, Socialism and Cybernetics By Ivet González

January 8, 2013Leave a comment

7 Jan 2013 — InterPress

Cubans See Internet as Crucial to Future Development

HAVANA, Jan 5 2013 (IPS) – The Cuban government’s economic reforms must consider the myriad opportunities offered by the Internet, a key platform of the dominant economic model on the planet, according to interviews with both experts and average people.

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Book Review: Cooperatives and Socialism in Cuba

September 29, 2011Leave a comment

26 September 2011 SolidarityEconomy.net via Cuba’s Socialist Renewal

Cooperatives and Socialism: A Cuban Perspective is a new Cuban book published in Spanish earlier this year. A compilation of essays, it is divided into four parts. Part One introduces cooperatives; Part Two examines the views of Marxist theoreticians including Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin and Che Guevara on the role of cooperatives in a socialist-oriented society; Part Three looks at the experiences of cooperatives in other countries from Spain to Venezuela; while Part Four analyses the Cuban experience of cooperatives as part of its socialist project.

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A Different Kind of Ownership Society By Marjorie Kelly and Shanna Ratner

August 18, 2010Leave a comment

16 August, 2010 — Solidarity Economy – Yes! Magazine

Innovative strategies for cooperative local ownership make it possible for prosperity to be shared as well as sustainable

Photo by Brent Danley

Aug. 3 2010 – Drive across southern Minnesota near the city of Luverne, and you’ll see clusters of wind turbines poking up through the cornfields. Climb into one of these sleek, gleaming, white towers, and you’ll find sophisticated computer controls monitoring dozens of factors every moment (wind speed, pressure on the blades, and so on). Yet the way the turbines are funded and owned is just as innovative as the technology that runs them.

These wind developments were created by Minwind Energy, a limited liability company that is structured as a cooperative. Back when only corn was harvested in these fields, Minwind invited hundreds of local residents to make investments of $5,000 apiece, eventually raising $4 million to fund the turbines. In return, the residents became owners of the project—alongside the farmers on whose land the turbines stand.

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The Emilia-Romagna Coops: A Market Without Capitalists By Frances Moore Lappe

March 9, 20101 Comment

8 Mar 2010 — Alternet.com – SolidarityEconomy.net

Poster: Italy’s Federation of Consumer Coops

A market economy and capitalism are synonymous — or at least joined at the hip. That’s what most Americans grow up assuming. But it is not necessarily so. Capitalism — control by those supplying the capital in order to return wealth to shareholders — is only one way to drive a market.

Granted, it is hard to imagine another possibility for how an economy could work in the abstract. It helps to have a real-life example.

And now I do.

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Mondragón Coops: Worker-Operatives Decide How to Ride Out a Downturn By Georgia Kelly and Shaula Massena

July 7, 2009Leave a comment

6 July, 2009 – SolidarityEconomy.net

Surviving Crises: Cooperative Enterprises Weather the Market Economy

Photo: Spain’s Eroski grocery stores are Mondragón’s largest cooperative.

The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (MCC), the largest consortium of worker-owned companies, has developed a different way of doing business—a way that puts workers, not shareholders, first.

Here’s how it played out when one of the Mondragón cooperatives fell on hard times. The worker/owners and the managers met to review their options. After three days of meetings, the worker/owners agreed that 20 percent of the workforce would leave their jobs for a year, during which they would continue to receive 80 percent of their pay and, if they wished, free training for other work. Continue reading →

Marx, Marxism and the Cooperative Movement By Bruno Jossa

May 26, 2009Leave a comment

25 May, 2009 – Economics, University of Naples Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2005

1. Introduction

On several occasions Marx declared himself strongly in favor of cooperative firms, maintaining that their generalized introduction would result in a new production mode. At different times in his life he even seems to have been confident that cooperatives would eventually supplant capitalistic firms altogether. Lenin also endorsed the cooperative movement and in a 1923 work (entirely devoted to this subject) he went so far as to equate cooperation with socialism at large. More precisely, besides describing cooperation as an important organizational step in the transition to socialism, he explicitly argued that “cooperation is socialism” (Lenin, 1923). All the same, ever since the time of the Paris Commune the cooperative movement has received little attention from Marxists.