I (Gar) said
:
> 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.
>
Carrol replied
>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 (Gar) now reply
No - good principle, wrong application. The power to establish co-ops would come long before such prejudice was eliminated, let alone before we had the strength to establish socialism. Take the example of the Olympia Food Co-op - whicch is not of course a Winipeg style Co-op, but a more conventional one. It has two food stores, much smaller than a supermarket, much bigger than say a so-called convenience store. The Olympia Co-op is extremely granola and mostly sustained by a core of dedicated members. But it also has a tremendous variety of foods. I would be surprised if at at least a third of the population of Olympia did not visit it once every three years or so. I would be surprised, but not too surprised if a majority visited. If the Olympia Co-op was Winipeg style co-op, I doubt anyone would be scared away. "Boss Free Zone" is not as scary a slogan as 'Workers should own the means of production". Yet it is a damn well implies it.
And yet the Olympia Co-op is about 5% or less of retail space devoted to food (excluding resteraunts) in Olympia, maybe a lot less. And of course a food co-op is not the on ly co-op possible. The point is that a movement far from taking power might find some sort of Winipeg style co-op worth finacings - especially since co-ops generally are self finacing and able to pay back their initial loans. A movement that had two million dues paying members and say 100,000 activists would be far from able to seize or smash the state. But they would have the ability to float loans to start new co-ops. For that matter they might offer grants to existing co-oops who joined their network.
Yoshie replied to Carrol and me
>
>
> 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.
As I said above - not neccesarily doing all or even most of their shopping.
>
Yoshie then quotes me (Gar)
>
>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.
>
Yoshie replies
>
> 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.
That actually is my point. Co-ops on a large scale would be an arm of a larger movement, large unions, a significant political party, or possibly some other mass form comparable in size. I admitted that this is not somnething we can do now.
In the mean time , they can accomplish this same propaganda function on a smaller scale, as well as providing bandaids and asperin for some of the wonds and pains inflicted by captialism - not anything like enough, but providing some real relief of suffering nonetheless. Right now everything leftists do is on a smaller scale than we would like.
Again I want to emphasize that I don;t share the anarchist rejection of using the state as an arena of struggle, In spite of an overwhelming defeat of single payer in Oregon, I still think that single payer health care has some of the greatest potential possible - both for reliveing a great deal of suffering and for building a real movement - for transforming leftists into a left.