Color of Anarchism Re: Protest ISO.

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Gar Lipow wrote:
>  > Suppose a majority of the population, or even a huge minority did even a
>>  tiny percent of their shopping at co-ops where there were signs over the
>>  door saying "boss free zone" and pamplets explaining that the co-op was
>>  worker owned and run - no bosses, no separate managers.   I just think
>>  it would be a tremendous help in breaking down the prejudcie against the
>>  idea of workers owning and controlling the means of production.
>
>This is true, but in a different way utopian. If we _could_ do this,
>then we wouldn't _need_ to do this, because we (and "we" gets fuzzy
>here) would have already achieved the goals posited by it and would be
>well on our way to achieving yet more ambitious goals. Or to put it
>another way, a crucial precondition for widespread existence of coops
>such as you describe would be the the _prior_ elimination of the
>prejudice that you posit as the goal of such coops. Put another way, if
>we had the strength to establish such coops it would be a waste of that
>strength to do so because we would already have the strength to smash
>the state and establish socialism.
>
>Carrol

I agree with Carrol -- if we were in a position to get that far (= 
the majority or a huge minority doing shopping at openly 
anti-capitalist worker-owned & worker-controlled co-ops), we would be 
in a position to establish socialism.

At 10:07 AM -0800 1/4/03, Gar Lipow wrote:
>Italy has a bigger and more succesful co-op movement than Japan - 
>partly because the co-op movement in Italy is tied to labor unions 
>and political parties.

The only way that co-ops can become as big as you want them to be in 
a non-revolutionary context is either that co-ops in question are 
ones with limited objectives as in Japan or that co-ops are fostered 
by big unions and political parties as in Italy, as you mention.
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>