OMG Marxism

It's a short interview from Counterpunch, so, you know (usually about as charming as finding Noam Chomsky at a $1 kissing booth) but I was impressed by Prof. Wolf's metaphor of Silicon Valley and a grander remake of the U.S. Economy. - FSL


ER: So if workers could establish cooperatives under fascism, could they do so under a so-called representative form of government, like in the U.S.?  
(I, like you, exhale a sigh of exasperation at the tone of that question, even if there is meat to the point, but press on. -FSL)


RW: Absolutely. It should be much easier. In fact, it is much easier. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of these worker co-ops or producer co-ops… Many companies, including famous names like Apple computers, if you go back and look at the early days you may be surprised to find out that they were co-ops. The original founders were often workers dissatisfied by being mere employees in somebody’s company, so they got together with others, often at young ages, and pooled their enthusiasm and energy and setup a different kind of enterprise. Very common in Silicon Valley. Every year, hundreds, in some years thousands, of engineers quit their jobs in big companies like IBM, Oracle or Cisco, and get together with friends and say, “okay, we want to start a different kind of business. We’re all going to take our laptops and gather at Harry’s garage, and here’s what we want: We don’t want to come to work every day in a suit and tie or for some executive who doesn’t understand anything about computers telling us what to do. We don’t want any of the rigmarole; it’s stifling, it kills our creativity. We’d like to go to a place where there are no bosses, where we’re all equal. Where we can wear Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts and bring our toddlers.”

(I heard the full lecture at Alternative Radio - the anecdote was that he was talking to all these guys, who were often Republicans, and watching their faces as he pointed out that this competive system of work, cooperatively and democratically organized, was the precise dream of Karl Marx. -FSL)

And that’s what they’ve done. And in many cases they’ve been very strict: All decisions have to be made by consensus. Everybody is equal. No chiefs, no Indians, we’re all equal here… Nothing would more quickly and definitively reduce U.S. income inequality than allowing every worker in all businesses to participate in deciding the range of incomes from one worker to another. They would never — except in the most bizarre circumstances I can’t even imagine — do what is now a matter of normality, give one person millions, in some cases billions, while others have barely enough to make a living. Moving to a cooperatively organized enterprise is one of the best ways to really do something about unequal distribution of wealth.

In America we debate everything: Education, sexuality, etc. — except for asking critical questions about capitalism… If there’s an institution in your society that’s above criticism you’re giving it a free pass to indulge all of its weaknesses and darker tendencies. In part the crisis we’re in now has to do with the inability of our society to face up to the fact that capitalism has its strength, but it also has its weaknesses. It has its time of growth and its time of shriveling and dying. And an honest, healthy society would never shrink away from debating where we’re at with capitalism — can we do better? How might that work?