Abstract
Charles Fourier was a maniac. An early 19th century utopian socialist, he really did seem to believe that the miseries of the industrial revolution were temporary, and would be replaced by an ideal world which would last 80,000 years. During this time, six moons would orbit the earth, the North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean and the seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade. His new world will also contain 37 million poets as good as Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists like Molière. Oh, and every woman would have four lovers or husbands simultaneously.
I would like to think that Organization is quite an utopian journal, although it doesn’t make any claims about the number of lovers you might get by reading it. For quite a few years now, I’ve been reviewing books here which open the possibility of ‘alternatives’. The promise of this journal, I have always hoped, was that it would move from being critical of management theory by using a different set of theoretical assumptions, to actually exploring how organizing could be done differently. As some old beardie said once, we can interpret the world as much as we like, but the point is to change it. There is good news and bad news in these books. The good news is that there are a growing number of people for whom organization and organizing are central categories for rethinking work and economy. The bad news is that what we might call ‘core CMS’ is not very well represented here. Or, perhaps that is good news too.
Chris Rogers’ splendid book is lucid, and held together by a cool sense that good arguments might bring about better worlds. This is a book which could easily be used as a ‘text’—and I mean that in the sense that such things might be topics for pulpits. Rogers comes from a background in political economy and wants to take his reader by the hand and show them what some theories of capitalism look like. The question of the role of the state is crucial here, as is an assessment as to whether capitalism is an intrinsically crisis prone system. He is clear that different understandings of what ‘alternative’ means depend on what you think capitalism is in the first place. So, for example, he draws some lines between ‘alternative capitalism’, ‘alternatives to capitalism’ and ‘anti-capitalism’ (p. 3). Finally, he insists all the way through the book that ‘alternative’ should be thought of as a way of doing things, a process, and not an utopian state of affairs which can be constructed and inhabited in a ‘happy ever after’ form of fairy-tale politics.
The book begins with an elegant tour through Smith, Marx, Keynes and Hayek. In each case, Rogers asks just what theory of capitalism animates their account of what human beings are like, and what that means for the economy, and for the state. It’s a lovely chapter, one which could easily be recommended to students as an introduction to political economy. The following chapter shows how these theories have come to life as policies, variously characterized as laissez-faire liberalism, embedded liberalism and neo-liberalism. Rogers insists that none of these are stable, however, because the history of capitalism is a history of crises. It is a system, he insists, that however governed, will produce catastrophe. So, what are the alternatives?
Chapter 3 lays out two theories which attempt to rethink capitalism. The first is libertarianism, which takes individual rights to be paramount, and hence disposes of any forms of association which constrain such freedoms. Rogers carefully points out how inequalities are likely to be manifest in the absence of mechanisms to redistribute from the powerful. His next alternative he simply terms co-operation. Beginning with a balanced description of Robert Owen’s New Lanark, Rogers then observes the ways in which co-op workers often report higher levels of engagement, and mutual financial models promote greater stability. There is no eulogy about particular ‘ends’ here, but an insistence that co-operation is a practice that presents an alternative to capitalism. The same goes for his argument about socialism, suggesting that socialist practices are quite likely to reproduce other inequalities, such as those relating to gender. Once again, Rogers insists that we must also think of socialism as a process, not the outcome of certain sanctified struggles.
The final chapter explores anti-capitalist struggles, largely classifying them according to their relation to the state. Rogers mentions philanthropy, paternalism, intentional communities, parliamentary socialism and state communism in this category, but ultimately concludes that the world cannot be changed through the state. It is only by refusing the top down politics of statism, by making new forms and economy and organization through everyday action, that anti-capitalism can replace the category of ‘employment’ with the much simpler idea of ‘doing’. And so we move from political economy to the politics of the everyday, from the seeming obduracy of social structures to the social construction of a new world.
The other two edited collections I have here illustrate a range of the positions that Rogers explores. Maurizio Atzeni’s collection has a wide geographical coverage, but focusses almost entirely on co-operatives operating within a capitalist economy. Chapters from the United Kingdom, Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, India and Kenya provide a marvellously varied picture of workers ownership and control. Atzeni’s framing, in his full introduction, employs a Marxist analysis of capital, and Braverman and Burawoy’s picture of the workplace. There is little utopianism here, but instead a pragmatic assumption that any work organizations within capitalism will have to shape their labour processes by engaging in exchange within the market. Collective management and ownership doesn’t change that, although it may well alter the specific social relations within any given workplace. Atzeni approvingly quotes Rosa Luxemburg suggesting that co-ops are small islands of socialism in a sea of capitalism (p. 13), a metaphor which underlines both their distinctiveness but also just how small they are, and the scale of the forces they face.
The chapters in the book tend to exemplify Atzeni’s general point, that ‘the goals of efficiency, productivity and profitability … put pressure on the democratic, participatory and more equalitarian values adopted by workers’ (p. 17). Stories about occupations and recuperations, of Mondragon in the Basque Country and Hugo Chávez’s ‘Special Law of Cooperative Association’ in Venezuela, show just how unique and inspiring many co-ops are, but also tempers any assumption that they can make their own weather. The chapter on Tower Colliery in South Wales captures this nicely, with its account of ‘deviant mainstreaming’ (p. 71). That is to say, it is both an extraordinary case in which new social relationships were forged, but one that was based on the logic of selling coal to fuel the fires of capitalism. So too Martino Ghielmi’s chapter on self-help groups in Nairobi, in which an inspiring collective response to deprivation meets big man politics, the informal economy and organized crime. Nonetheless, the logic of what Argentinian factory workers call compañerismo, which we can translate as ‘solidarity’, is powerful and important in every chapter here. In terms of Chris Rogers’ version of radical social construction, this again might be the most important message from Atzeni’s book, not co-operatives as an end, but co-operation as a process that produces new social relationships.
The final book in this small pile is clearly the most utopian. It begins with seven chapters that leave the reader both dizzy with fear, but clear eyed about the possibility that we humans might manage to get out of the mess that we have made. Beginning with a tilt at growth-based economics, and the two-dimensional humans that inhabit its models, Novkovic and Webb introduce a collection of extremely august (mostly) North Americans who tell us why we need both co-operatives and co-operation. The list provided in the first chapter, by Manfred Max-Neef, is enough to make you want to hide under the bedclothes—climate change, the end of cheap energy, depletion of key resources and a bubble of debt 50 times the real economy (p. 16). His solutions might not surprise, but they are echoed all the way through the book—localism of exchange, production and consumption; co-operative economics; protectionism; ecological taxes; and democracy in more than just name (p. 23). All the chapters in the first section press the point—we need to scale back in everything we do and ‘growth’—in terms of unrestrained externalities—must cease. Human well-being must be our collective goal, and no being can fare well in the face of a collapsing planetary ecosystem. A ‘steady state’ economy must be constructed, and that means less inequality and a different way of thinking about finance and markets because, as William Rees pithily asserts, ‘markets are as dumb as a post’ (p. 91).
The second section suggests, in a wide variety of different ways, that co-operative structures are the answer. In an obvious sense, it is easy enough to demonstrate (even using the narrow path of behavioural economics, as Morris Altman does in his chapter) that co-ops are more sensible incentive structures than corporations. Their workers are more motivated, their debts are lower, inequalities are less marked, psychological and physical health is better and so on. About the only thing that co-ops don’t do better is to make money for absent shareholders. More generally, a co-operative economy is more likely to support a polycentric form of order, one which is both more financially resilient, but also less capable of generating monopolies which gobble up or pollute common pool resources. The editors’ summary at the end of this excellent collection stresses that the question here is not simply about co-operatives, because they can and do exist within a capitalist economy, but how forms of ‘co-operative economics’ might be built, both in terms of the theories that influence policy and the practices that put bread on our tables, and give us clean water to drink.
Which takes us back to lemonade. Rosa Luxemburg ([1899] 2015) puts the matter very nicely indeed.
Fourier’s scheme of changing, by means of a system of phalansteries, the water of all the seas into tasty lemonade was surely a fantastic idea. But […] proposing to change the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness, by progressively pouring into it bottles of social reformist lemonade, presents an idea that is merely more insipid but no less fantastic.
Luxemburg is criticizing the utopian socialists for neglecting the importance of taking on the state, but the overall impression I get from these three books is really that many small actions do add up to remaking the structures. Because that is the thing about utopianism, only the mad or the dangerous would ever think we can get there all at once. The problem with CMS, it seems to me, is that it has said very little about what a post-growth co-operative form of ‘Management’ might look like, and is hence almost entirely absent from these three books about possible futures for work organizations. The Business School needs to be embedded into these debates because it is a crucial way in which they might be given some wider legitimacy. Teaching and researching ‘alternatives’ needs to become mainstream because one co-op might not change the bitter taste of capitalism, but lots of them might. These three books are nice additions to a growing pile which might begin to change the taste of the Business School library too.