What would Rosa do?: Co-operatives and radical politics

What can co-ops contribute to the left and left debates?

Rosa Luxemburg was not a fan of co-operatives. Neither did she think of trade union politics as a particularly useful means of radical change. She felt that co-ops, as a ‘hybrid form in the midst of capitalism’, were bound to eventually succumb to competitive market pressures and either turn into mere capitalist businesses or dissolve completely.¹ Union politics, she argued, by focusing on the reduction of working hours and increases in wages, would merely contribute to the Sisyphean labour of regulating, rather than abolishing, capitalist exploitation (‘Reform or revolution’, p67). Citing England as an example, she argued that in many cases trade unions could not even achieve this goal, and remained limited ‘to the simple defence of already realised gains’ - and even that was becoming more and more difficult (p58). In sum: ‘Cooperatives and trade unions are totally incapable of transforming the capitalist mode of production’ (p83). Instead she proposed ‘the seizure of political power by the proletariat, that is to say by a large popular class’ (p95).

More than one hundred years later, Luxemburg’s writings read as the product of a particular time and place, and not just because of their language. The idea of seizing power through a revolutionary act - certainly in Western Europe - is one that seems to belong to a different millennium. At a time when even defending trade union politics seems to be the height of political radicalism, Luxemburg’s ideas seem a little far-fetched. Has her call for class struggle and conquering power lost all relevance, or is there still something here for us to learn today?

The fact that some parts of the left that formerly rejected organised party politics and the need to build power are now revisiting these questions is an indication that there might still be reasons for thinking with some of Luxemburg’s ideas. For example, Jodi Dean has recently warned of the dangers of left politics getting lost in a ‘long tail of micro-initiatives’, or even of mirroring neoliberal decentralisation, flexibilisation and self-transformation, and giving up on the idea of radical social change.² She maintains that ‘to advance, we need to organise’, and argues for reclaiming the party as a way of confronting individuation and creating a terrain for collectivity and solidarity (p265). Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams make a similar argument, stressing that the left should not limit itself to what they call ‘folk politics’ that favour the small-scale, the everyday and the local over the strategic and structural, and that radical change requires organising a broadly populist left, ‘building the organisational ecosystem necessary for a full-spectrum politics on multiple fronts, and leveraging key points of power wherever possible’.³

Co-operatives, as a form of prefigurative politics, could easily be characterised as reformist, as settling for the small-scale and the personal, and for local and immediate improvements, however limited they might be. Could it be argued that worker co-ops have indeed suffered the fate of co-optation and political irrelevance that Rosa Luxemburg predicted? Was she right to question their political potential, or can they play an active role within a radical politics for the twenty-first century? These are the questions I want to explore in this article. But first I will consider the undermining of their radical potential that occurs when entrepreneurial discourses frame co-ops merely as a superior business model.

Co-operatives - from politics to enterprise?

One of the earliest thinkers of the co-operative movement was the nineteenth-century British industrialist and utopian socialist Robert Owen. For Owen, co-operative villages were a response to the misery of the working classes in the early years of industrial capitalism. His project was decidedly political, aimed at replacing capitalism with a co-operative alternative. He believed in the possibility of transcending capitalism by expanding co-operative communities, without the need to claim institutional power. In the end, most of Owen’s experiments failed, but they nevertheless inspired other radical thinkers and activists to...