Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  Why are worker cooperatives so rare, and why do so few people find them appealing? At present, they number between 300–400 in the US and with 2,500–3,500 worker-­owners and total assets at approximately $130 million.11 Those ­thirty-five hundred workers in the US represent .0022%—that is, twenty-two thousandths of a percent—of a workforce of 157 million, or one out of every 45,000 workers. Even in the coop movement, dominated by consumer coops (92% of all coops) worker cooperatives only represent 1% of all the cooperatives in the US.12

  This is not to deny that there are the success stories like Mondragon, the large multi-billion dollar cooperative of cooperatives in the Basque country of Spain that employs over eighty thousand workers. But even Mondragon is not all success, as the 2013 bankruptcy of the Mondragon subsidiary, Fagor, demonstrated. Moreover, to maintain its viability, Mondragon has found it necessary to organize itself along the lines of more traditional businesses, as anyone who has visited their headquarters will know. The buildings have a sleek, corporate look to them, indistinguishable in appearance, and feel, from what one might expect from visiting the corporate headquarters of Apple or Coca Cola.

  And the cooperative hasn’t merely replicated corporate appearances: it has also followed a fairly traditional corporate strategy for growth. While Mondragon is technically a ­worker-controlled cooperative, until recently that was only true in Basque country. Elsewhere in Spain until 2009 in its Eroski-brand supermarkets the workers were all employees. The workers I approached in one market weren’t even aware their boss was a “worker collective” and didn’t seem to notice a significant difference between working for a corporate or a “cooperative” boss. And that’s still true of fully one third of the workers in Mondragon, such as those who work for the company in China, Morocco, Argentina, Mexico, Thailand, Egypt and other places where Mondragon has assembly or ­other plants.13

  The subject of wage differentials in worker cooperatives is a hot and often fiercely debated topic and many see any differential as the opening mouth of the road to hell. Mondragon settled on a wage differential of 8 to 1,14 which is actually fairly large by some standards, and double the wage differential between industrial workers and management in a country like Norway at 4 to 1.15 This wage differential has led to internal class differences that were expressed in great conflicts in the past, such as the Ulgor strike of 1974 that many of the assembly workers in the Ulgor plant (later reorganized and renamed as Fagor, the cooperative business that went bankrupt in 2013) attributed to “professionalization” in the cooperative.16 But without wage differentials larger cooperatives like Mondragon would likely be unable to retain quality managers.

  These and many more contradictions that emerge as worker-cooperatives grow larger might explain why the model isn’t more popular and why worker-cooperatives remain small, or dissolve at certain levels of achievement when the contradictions become severe and these “limited utopias” hit against the even harsher contradictions of the outside world of business, class struggle and conflicts between line workers and management.

  A much more viable, but less glamorous, alternative to the most savage forms of capitalism (that is, the traditional workplace of a boss with employees or “wage slaves”) is the ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). These hybrids between worker-owned and traditional businesses are more common business structures that have grown in popularity over the years as a result of government incentives and tax breaks.17 But they’re also not viewed as favorably on the left as worker cooperatives, perhaps in part because they’re one model of employee ownership that even Ronald Reagan approved of, seeing in them “an intimate connection between employee ownership, nationalism and an identification with capitalism.”18

  ESOPs and worker cooperatives are concrete ways workers can improve their lives, when those options are available and viable. Internally they can provide greater freedom, flexibility, greater democracy, and worker empowerment for participants and shield them from the more brutal, demeaning and anxiety-provoking aspects of the capitalist market economy that is now a worldwide system. Nevertheless, neither ESOPs nor worker cooperatives are magical remedies to the problems of the capitalist system (much less “alternatives” to it), and they won’t resolve the problems a majority of workers face in the “labor market” where people rent themselves out for increasingly lower wages and more insecure working conditions to capitalist enterprises over which they have little or no control. Furthermore, as many of my old IWW comrades and others on the far left would argue and as the experience of Mondragon demonstrates, ESOPs and ­worker-owned businesses inculcate a “bourgeois” mindset in their worker-­cooperators which often leads to a growing distance from the plight of other workers. It’s not likely, for example, that one will find many worker-cooperators in the movement for a living wage and other struggles where workers battle their bosses for a bit more of the pie. That’s because worker cooperators and workers in ESOPs have a divided allegiance: in their space in the workforce they have to think like both workers and owners—but over the long term worker-­cooperators generally begin to think more like owners than like workers. To function as a business the worker-cooperators have to internalize market values of efficiency, productivity, profitability, and apply these values to the exploitation of resources and labor, even if that labor is their own.

  The real problem, I would argue, is not “capitalism” (we’d need another book to define that word) but how markets are structured, organized and, more importantly, what society allows to enter them. Karl Polanyi’s ideas are helpful in clarifying the problem.19 He says that the market has increasingly taken over more and more of the world and of human society and incorporated it into itself. Our situation now is that rather than having a society with a market embedded in it, we have a society embedded within a market. As such, we find ourselves using language, proposing alternatives, considering solutions, and doing all our planning, thinking, and even plotting our revolutionary activity, within the market. Even the values by which we measure or judge the market and society, and the world (the environment) are market values because all our measuring and judging is done within the market.

  Markets do an effective job of distributing goods and services and I think they’re better than any alternatives I’ve seen. However, as Polanyi also points out, the idea that they’re “self-regulating” is utopian—I would say, laughable—and they certainly aren’t the solution to every problem, as neoliberals seem to believe. I think the problem is not that we have markets but that we don’t design, regulate, limit, and control them effectively and we have allowed them to get so big that we have lost our society, our natural world, and even our humanity in them. The market has become a huge black hole that threatens to swallow everything on the planet.Until we have some social territory freed from the market (the university used to be one such territory, that is, until it was absorbed by the market), we have no “anti-environment” that would enable us to speak a non-market language to express non-market ideas and, especially important, establish non-market values, all of which could prove to be the lifeline to extract what we value from the clutches of the market. But the bottom line is that neither ESOPs nor worker cooperatives, for all their virtues, are that lifeline, firmly embedded as they are in that very market.

  Intuiting all this, I came to believe that New Earth Press would never be more than a business, and I no longer wanted to be a businessman. Dave and I had a conflicted, but ultimately amicable, parting of ways and we sold the business in 2000.

  I had managed to get my BA on my third pass through the University, so the way was now clear for me to go back to the University where I would, thirty years after starting college, finally set to work on a Masters degree in English. I went to work at Berkeley City College for the next few years as an English and ESL teacher.

  Meanwhile, I met the woman who would eventually become my third—and I swear, final—wife, Marcy Rein, a Jewish Marxist from Upstate New York who had been living in San Francisc
o for a number of years. She had been part of the Marxist party, Line of March, until it dissolved after the collapse of the USSR. At the time I met her, she was the editor of American Writer, the publication of the National Writer’s Union. Marcy was also doing 12-step work in her own program, so while our religious and political backgrounds were very different, we had the practice, principles, and traditions of the Anonymous programs to work from, and we found all our differences enriching. Her long trajectory in journalism and social movement work, especially in the queer, feminist, labor, and racial justice movements enriched my understanding of life, as my own work in poetry and Latin American politics I suspect did for her. We took our relationship a day at a time for a few years, but eventually we married. The wedding, an informal potluck at a park in Richmond, was a bittersweet day for me: it was held just a week after a memorial service for my friend Dave Smith, who had died just a little over a month before.

  Chapter Nine: Chasing the Bolivarian Dream

  I finished graduate work in May 2003 so Marcy and I celebrated by taking a trip to southern Mexico. We went first to Oaxaca and interviewed teachers in the plantón or occupation just three years before that situation exploded, gaining Oaxaca world-wide attention. We stopped briefly in Juchitán in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and had some good conversations with people about the gay and lesbian-­friendly Zapotec culture and the history of the COCEI (Peasant Worker Student Coalition of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec) activity in the 1980s. The visit was brief, indeed, as the area was like a blast furnace, a not too uncommon condition for the Isthmus. Finally, we headed into the cooler mountains of Chiapas where we hoped to visit Zapatista communities.

  In Oventic we were allowed into the community for a tour of the school, but no further, as we had no contacts and had made no prior arrangements. A teacher graciously showed us the bilingual school with a big mural of Zapata painted on an exterior wall, and then we spent some time talking to a man from Mexico City who told us he’d been there over a year and still felt he was being kept at a distance from what was happening at the center of the community. Such was the security around Oventic in 2003.

  There was, and remains to this day, an uneasy truce between the Zapatista communities and the government. As a result, the Zapatistas have been unable to expand and grow outward but have remained an insular force, withdrawn from the larger context of Mexican national life and only emerging dramatically in critical moments to let the world know they’re still around.

  I’d found a pamphlet in a bookstore in San Cristóbal referring to a popular education cooperative in a small town near the Guatemalan border so we took a bus to Comitán to meet members of the co-op. Antonio and Paula met with us and we spent a couple of hours talking about their projects, in particular, their attempts to educate communities about the Plan Puebla Panama.1

  At some point the subject turned to Nicaragua and the Sandinistas, and Antonio mentioned that they had the files from the Sandinista Ministry of Education that Fernando Cardenal had sent out of the country to protect them from destruction. “The new neoliberal government was burning up all the books and papers from the Sandinista period,” Antonio told us, “so they needed to get the papers somewhere safe.”

  It had been a while since I’d thought about Nicaragua. Like many of those who had spent years working in solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution and the revolutionary movements in Central America, I’d felt a great sense of disillusionment when the FSLN lost the elections of 1990. The disillusionment came from seeing the people we’d come to qualify as valiente (brave) who refused to take “ni un paso atrás” (not a single step back) suddenly vote out the Revolution they’d brought about.

  Of course, when I’d lived there in 1987 I came to understand why people would be willing to consider an alternative to the Sandinista Revolution. On one block where he lived, a friend told me, six families had lost sons defending the Revolution from the US-backed contras. The country was running on bald tires and you never knew when the blowout was coming. The US had mined the harbors in Puerto Corinto; it had blown up oil storage tanks; and with the help of the comandantes, it had wrecked the Nicaraguan economy: all this had happened because the little country had decided to overthrow a bloody dictator the US had helped bring to power fifty years before, or so I viewed it at the time, with my limited knowledge. It was all true as far as it went, but it didn’t encompass the complexities of the situation. In the intervening years of the revolution thousands had lost their lives defending the process, and many thousands more would live their lives maimed or with deep emotional scars. Who were we, the solidarity movement of the US and the world, to be “disappointed” and disillusioned? But we were. Along with many Nicaraguans.

  But worse still was the betrayal of the comandancia when the FSLN prepared to leave power. Sandinistas claim that what was known as the piñata was simply a hasty response to defeat and an attempt to ensure that many of the revolutionary reforms and redistribution of land and wealth be maintained under the new administration. And so land titles were handed out, they maintain, to cooperatives, poor workers, and peasants who had informally occupied lands confiscated from Somoza and his supporters after the revolution. However, it also is acknowledged that many ministers and comandantes and other previously trusted figures in the Frente comandancia, people like the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto, and Tomás Borge, transferred money and properties from the state into their own personal accounts.

  The ironies weren’t lost on many in the movement who, in watching this process, recalled the line in the Sandinista hymn, “los hijos de Sandino no se venden ni se rinden ¡jamas!” which, roughly translated is, “the children of Sandino NEVER sell out nor surrender!” Nicaragua, it seemed, had surrendered and its leadership had sold out, it seemed, FOREVER. And much of the solidarity movement became disillusioned and closed the book on Nicaragua while a minority ignored all this and continued supporting the Sandinistas.

  The following year, in June of 2004, I decided to reopen that book, mostly as a result of Marcy’s encouragement. She’d mentioned at least once that she thought a trip to Nicaragua would help me resolve what she saw as a “political bitterness” that often slipped into cynicism. So when I finished my first year of teaching at Berkeley City College (then named Vista Community College) I went to Nicaragua to conduct interviews with Sandinistas and their critics. I hoped in the process to find out what happened to the Revolution that defined the 1980s for much of the world, and certainly for me.

  For some, the electoral defeat of the FSLN and its aftermath signaled the end of the Revolution. Such was the view of Fr. Ernesto Cardenal who was Minister of Culture from 1979 to 1990. “The electoral defeat was just that. The FSLN could have won the next time around. But the piñata was the loss of the Revolution.” The FSLN’s later refusal to democratize the party structure resulted in the further erosion of support among many Nicaraguans who had participated in the revolutionary process.

  Since the electoral defeat in 1990, there had been a number of attempts to democratize the party. One sector of the FSLN attempted to reform the party and make the comandancia more accountable to the grassroots, but without success. This sector eventually split from the party to form the Movement for Sandinista Renewal (MRS). A series of splits in the party and defections over the years left the FSLN weakened, but increasingly centralized: the Ortega brothers, Daniel and Humberto, former President of Nicaragua and Minister of Defense under the FSLN, respectively, and their allies swept in like vultures to consume what was left of the FSLN and convert it into a populist party under the direction of the self-appointed caudillo, Daniel Ortega.

  In preparation for the trip to Nicaragua I bought a video camera and left to spend the summer interviewing some ex-Sandinistas and getting their perspectives on the past and present situation of their country. I first arranged an interview with Fr. Ernesto Cardenal at his Casa de los Tres Mundos.

  To get to the Casa de los Tres Mundos I had to take a taxi
and we hit some very rough patches of highway in between. It looked like the road had been intentionally destroyed and, when I asked the driver about it, he confirmed that it had been. “Every year, you know, the students have demonstrations and the police come and there’s always a fight. The students tear up the pavement to throw at the police when they arrive.”

  We arrived and I went into the Casa and sat as Ernesto finished an interview with a group of European tourists. After they left he brought me into his office. I began by asking him what possibilities there were for some sort of revolutionary change in Nicaragua. “None. There’s no possibility for revolutionary change in Nicaragua,” he replied flatly, “especially not with the FSLN under the present caudillo dictatorship of Daniel Ortega.” We talked a bit about other processes in Latin America and then, at some point, the aging poet mentioned his one hope at the moment was centered on the process in Venezuela. As he talked about Venezuela and President Chávez I became more and more curious. By the end of our conversation, I was convinced that I would have to visit Venezuela to see for myself what was going on.

  I didn’t know anything about Venezuela at the time, having been immersed for nearly three years in a graduate program that didn’t allow me time to keep up with world events. But what Ernesto told me, and what he wrote in an essay I later read, piqued my curiosity.2

  All I knew of Venezuela was what I’d seen in The Revolution will not be Televised, a controversial film on the 2002 coup that took Hugo Chávez out of power for two and a half days.3 The most powerful scene was the return of Chávez on the night of April 13, 2002, the helicopter arriving in the darkness, its spotlight casting a celestial beam onto the expectant crowds. These images awakened the archetype of the returning hero, the savior of the people: Jesus rising from the grave, Osiris reemerging into life or the return of Quetzalcóatl.