With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives

Abstract

To shed light on polarized perspectives regarding the virtues or downfalls of worker cooperatives among variants of Marxists, this article focuses on Marx’s own Janus-faced analysis of worker cooperatives. Marx had great faith in the radical potential of worker cooperatives, properly organized and politically oriented, but he also was greatly critical of the tendency of cooperatives to shrink their political horizons and become isolated from broader labor movements. Although thinkers in the Marxist tradition criticize worker cooperatives when they operate as isolated circles of ‘collective capitalists’ within the existing capitalist system, Marx himself saw important potential in the cooperative movement, to the extent that it was integrated into broader campaigns for social change. Marx believed that cooperatives could help point the way to an alternative system of free and equal producers, and could prompt radical imaginings among their advocates, but only to the extent that cooperative practitioners recognized the need for class-conscious, industrial scale organizing of workers against the capitalist system. In the end, Marx did not so much focus on promoting a certain type of labor organization as being most conducive to transformation (e.g. worker cooperatives or labor unions). Rather, he focused more on the importance of class consciousness within labor organizing, and on the development of radicalized class consciousness among workers, whether through the expansion of labor unions, worker cooperatives, or any other institution of worker empowerment. It is the nature of a labor institution’s focus on developing and sustaining class consciousness, not the nature of the labor institution itself (i.e. cooperative or union), that Marx believed to most powerfully shape the radical or degenerative tendencies of local forms of labor activism.