For All The People , livre ebook

Praise for For All the People
John Curl has been around the block when it comes to knowing workers cooperatives. He has been a worker owner. He has argued theory and practice, inside the firms where his labor counts for something more than token control and within the determined, but still small universe where labor rents capital, using it as it sees fit and profitable.
So his book, For All the People: The Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America , reached expectant hands, and an open mind when it arrived in Asheville, NC. Am I disappointed? No, not in the least.
Curl blends the three strands of his historical narrative with aplomb, he has, after all, been researching, writing, revising, and editing the text for a spell. Further, I am certain he has been responding to editors and publishers asking this or that. He may have tired, but he did not give up, much inspired, I am certain, by the determination of the women and men he brings to life.
Each of his subtitles could have been a book, and has been written about by authors with as many points of ideological view as their titles. Curl sticks pretty close to the narrative line written by worker owners, no matter if they came to work every day with a socialist, laborist, anti-Marxist grudge or not. Often in the past, as with today s worker owners, their firm fails, a dream to manage capital kaput. Yet today, as yesterday, the democratic ideals of hundreds of worker owners support vibrantly profitable businesses. Does capitalism offer any assurances?
For historians, Curl s book is a must. For young women and men considering the idea of starting a business they own and manage, he recounts just about as many ways your counterparts in the past fail as you can imagine. And for the philosophers among us, Curl does not ignore the theoretical threads.
-Frank T. Adams, co-author with Dr. Gary B. Hansen of Putting Democracy to Work .
FOR ALL THE PEOPLE
FOR ALL THE PEOPLE
Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America
John Curl
For All The People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America
John Curl
ISBN: 978-1-60486-072-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009901373
Copyright 2009 John Curl This edition copyright 2009 PM Press All Rights Reserved
PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org
Cover Design by John Yates/Stealworks.com Layout by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper with soy ink.
The earth for all the people. That is the demand. The machinery of production and distribution for all the people. That is the demand. The collective ownership and control of industry and its democratic management in the interests of all the people. That is the demand. The elimination of rent, interest, profit, and the production of wealth to satisfy the wants of all the people. That is the demand. Cooperative industry in which all shall work together in harmony as a basis of a new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic. That is the demand. 1
-Eugene V. Debs, 1902
Contents
Introduction
PART I: COOPERATIVES COOPERATIVE MOVEMENTS
1. Early Cooperation in the Americas
2. The Revolutionary Movements Begin
3. The Movements Renewed the Corporations Rise
4. The Aftermath of the Civil War
5. The Knights of Labor The Great Upheaval
6. The Bloody Nineties
7. The Progressive Era : Wobblies Radical Farmers
8. World War I and the Conservative Reaction
9. The Great Depression the Conservative Advance
10. Case Study: The Berkeley Co-op
11. Cooperatives and Counterculture: The 60s 70s Part I
12. Case Studies: Bay Warehouse Heartwood
13. Cooperatives in the Mainstream: The 60s 70s Part II
14. Surviving: From the 80s through the Millennium
Illustrations
PART II: COMMUNALISM
15. Cooperatives and Communalism
16. The Early Communalist Movements
17. Communalism in the 20th Century
18. Spiritual Communalism
CONCLUSION
Cooperatives Today and Their Potential as a Strategy of Social Change
APPENDICES
1: Listing of Some Unique Cooperatives Today
2: International Documents on Cooperatives
Bibliographic Essay
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Introduction
What must we do? I answer, study the best means of embarking in a system of co-operation, which will eventually make every man his own master, -every man his own employer; a system which will give the laborer a fair proportion of the products of his toil. It is to co-operation, then, as the lever of labor s emancipation, that the eyes of the workingmen and women of the world are directed, upon co-operation their hopes are centered, and to do it I now direct your attention There is no good reason why labor can not, through co-operation, own and operate mines, factories, and railroads. By cooperation alone can a system of colonization be established in which men may band together for the purpose of securing the greatest good for the greatest number, and place the man who is willing to toil upon his own homestead.
-Terence V. Powderly, Knights of Labor, 1880 2
COOPERATIVES IN AMERICA
In 2008, more than 120 million people in the United States are members of 48,000 cooperatives, about 40 percent of the population. Some 3,400 farmer-owned cooperatives market about 30 percent of all American farm products today. More than 6,400 housing cooperatives provide homes for more than 1 million households. Two million homes get service from two hundred and seventy telephone cooperatives. Nearly 1,000 rural electric cooperatives provide power to 36 million people. Over 50,000 independent small businesses belong to 250 purchasing cooperatives for group buying and shared services. Over 10.5 million people belong to ESOPSs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) in 9,650 plans, with over $675 billion in assets. Eighty-four million Americans belong to credit unions. Numerous small collectives running not-for-profit activities, and other small cooperatives fly below the statistical radar. Communities Directory lists over 900 intentional cooperative communities. But in 2008, there were only approximately 300 worker cooperative businesses in the United States. 3
Given that there are so many cooperatives of different types in America, why are so few of those worker cooperatives? Is that important? What is a worker cooperative? This historical survey will attempt to shed some light on those questions.
THE BOSS SYSTEM
The vast majority of working Americans today are employees, and most spend their entire occupational lives as one. Yet, only 200 years ago, just a tiny percentage of the workforce were employees, and the vast majority of free working people were self-employed farmers, artisans, and merchants. 4 In 1784, Benjamin Franklin wrote:
The great business of the continent is agriculture. For one artisan, or merchant, I suppose we have at least one hundred farmers, by far the greatest part cultivators of their own fertile lands, from whence many of them draw not only food necessary for their subsistence, but the materials of their clothing, so as to need very few foreign supplies; while they have a surplus of productions to dispose of, whereby wealth is gradually accumulated 5 .
Being an employee was considered a form of bondage, only a step above indentured servitude. One submitted to it due to economic hardship for as short a time as possible, then became free once more, independent, one s own boss. As the country industrialized during the 19th century, the transformation from a nation of self-employed free people to a nation of employees took place relentlessly, and continued through the 20th century. In 1800, there were few wage earners in America; in 1870, shortly after the Civil War, over half the workforce consisted of employees; in 1940, about 80 percent; in 2007, 92 percent of the American workforce was employees and the number of self-employed was under 9 percent. 6
The working population did not accept that transformation docilely. While the economic system was in its formative years, generation after generation of American working people challenged it by organizing visionary social movements aimed at liberating themselves from what they experienced as the abuses of the system, and abolishing what they called wage slavery . The Random House online dictionary defines wage slave as a person who works for a wage with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from such labor. The assertion that wage work coerced by social conditions is actually a form of slavery has been traced back to a group of women millworkers striking in Lowell in 1836. 7 From that era onward, early American workers planned to accomplish their liberation from wage slavery by substituting for it a system based on cooperative work and by constructing parallel institutions that would supercede the institutions of the wage system.
This book documents that struggle and its repercussions throughout American history.
BENEFITS OF COOPERATIVES
Historically, worker cooperatives offered a way for people to get out of the boss system entirely, and to reorganize their lives on a different basis. They still offer that today. They proffer group self-employment to people without the resources to start a business alone. They empower their members through internal democracy and increased job security in place of the typical hierarchical command structure and job insecurity of the capitalist form of business. Cooperatives provide innumerable goods and services at cost. Beyond the benefits to the lives of the individual members, worker cooperatives-and all cooperatives-offer numerous other benefits to community and society.
Cooperatives exist in almost every human activity. A cooperative can have as few as three members, or can be a multi-million dollar business. Around the world cooperatives provide jobs for more than 100 million people and