Rebuilding working-class institutions cooperatively: Earthworker and workers’ co-ops
Alienation and belonging
‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.’ Marx wrote these words at the height of the industrial revolution as the forces of industrial capital wrought shattering changes on rural workers, turning them into proletarians crammed into dirty, crowded cities. In response, workers organised into unions and cooperatives, created political parties, and demanded and won industrial, social and political rights.
In a gradual, halting, sometimes bloody process over the following 120 years, the labour movement and its allies sought to embed the economy within a social framework, to de-commodify labour and some of life’s necessities, and to bring markets under some form of political control.
The neoliberal revolution of the last four decades shattered these efforts, unleashing capital from any form of social restraint, while crushing organised labour under punitive regulations and privatising the commons. Combined with the rise, in the twenty-first century, of an unhinged and unrestrained tech sector, Marx’s words have never rung more true. Nothing seems solid anymore. Nothing is sacred.
In the face of this descent into a form of cyber-tyranny that has no concept of limits—we’ll build data centres until they absorb every solar panel produced and then we’ll explore colonies in space—it is important to come up with an alternative, no matter how feeble our attempts might seem, no matter how enormous the forces ranged against us.
Such an alternative must push back against the core experience of the ‘techno-feudalist’ project: alienation. We are to be alienated from the fruits of our labour by AI and robots, and we are to be alienated and set against each other by social media. We have to build an alternative that gives life to one of the most important political concepts of the twenty-first century—belonging. We have to develop a sense of belonging that is inclusive and radical, not the false belonging offered by the Far Right, which is predicated on a sense of identity given meaning only by whom it excludes and which is deeply reactionary.
An absence of belonging can easily lead to nostalgia, as James Bloodworth writes:
Communities that once sustained civic pride—trade unions, working men’s clubs, local associations—have withered. When the social foundations of solidarity weaken, so too does the imaginative architecture that stems from them…
[A]ttachments arise from the spaces and routines in which people encounter one another. Where such spaces deteriorate, people retreat into personal identities or digital tribes. Nostalgia fills the vacuum because it requires only memories, real or invented.
The mainstream political response to this alienation is proving unsuccessful: the Far Right continues to grow in strength. In large part, this is precisely because the social foundations of solidarity on which such a response might be built have been devastated. There is no shortcut to their reconstruction. Tim Dunlop recently made the point that ‘If Labor’s “substitution” of an old working class for a new one has reached its limits, perhaps the answer is not to find yet another sociological segment to plug into the coalition, but to rebuild institutions in which those people are organisers and leaders, not segments.’
Utopian realism: the cooperative response
It is in response to this crisis of alienation that worker cooperatives provide some measure of hope. The Earthworker cooperative ecosystem is an attempt to build a ‘social foundation of solidarity’, to create institutions that give workers real control over their lives and spaces of attachment in which visions of a decent future can be imagined. The worker cooperative can help to re-embed the economy in the social, democratise it, and empower workers to take control of their labour.
This is a kind of utopian realism that understands there are two elements to the expression ‘building socialism’—that socialism can’t be just willed into existence but must be built from the ground up. Our program, therefore, is prefigurative and prepared to explore the idea of dual power, whereby alternative grassroots institutions are established to supplement and ultimately challenge existing authority. Further, the need to build an anti- or post-capitalist alternative should encourage us to radically rethink the social democratic approach that has characterised much of the Left’s efforts for decades. Instead of concentrating almost entirely on how wealth can be redistributed, we need to recover the original Marxist emphasis on how wealth is created. We need, in other words, to talk about who owns the means of production, not just about how we distribute the wealth that is created through it.
Panagiotis Sotiris describes well what this means in the 2015 November issue of Salvage:
We must think of ‘productive reconstruction’ not as ‘return to growth’ but as a process of transformation and intense confrontation with capital, based on public ownership, self-management, and forms of workers’ control. It has to be a process of experimentation and learning. Contemporary forms of solidarity, of self-management, of alternative non-commercial networks of distribution, of open access to services, the discussions on how to use the public sector or how to run public utilities, are not only ways to deal with urgent social problems: they are also test sites for alternative forms of production and social organization…
So, not only must we experiment with new forms of economic organisation, but we must also demand and experiment with new approaches to labour. ‘The right to interrupt one’s working life without loss of income’, Andre Gorz pointed out in Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, ‘together with the right to “freely choose one’s working hours” and to manage one’s own hours of work, amount to emancipatory demands that are now achievable’. Worker-owned cooperatives that enable workers to determine how they organise their own work are vehicles for these forms of experimentation. In the longer term, we see experimentation with new forms of worker control and ownership as constituting experimentation with new forms of political organisation and expression.
In The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing makes a distinction between work and labour, the latter being ‘work having exchange value’. Work is done ‘for its intrinsic usefulness’, and includes activities like caring for others, running a home and so on, that take place outside the realm of paid work and jobs. The second half of the twentieth century, according to Standing, saw the rise of ‘labourism’, the attempt to build rights around paid labour, to treat paid labour as the most important form of work and to discount entirely the realm of unpaid work. Accordingly, paid labour—jobs—became the dominant source of personal identity and the obsessive focus of social democrats everywhere, at the expense of the enormous amount of socially useful work performed outside jobs, often by women. Standing’s important insight is that, as the world of labourism has broken down in the face of globalisation, leaving an increasing number of workers in precarious employment, the protections of the old labourist framework have been rendered increasingly useless and members of the precariat increasingly vulnerable. At the same time, there has been no related recognition of the importance and value of unpaid work. Thus, an important source of social dignity and identity—long-term, full-time labour—has disappeared without replacement, leading to anxiety, social dysfunction and widespread insecurity.
Perhaps the experience of the radical devaluation of work in the public world of labour explains the popularity of the trip to the hardware store on the weekend, and the house and backyard renovation programs. Dignified labour, stripped from our working lives by corporate HR practices and a culture that celebrates unearned wealth (house and share price inflation), remains only in those little projects or bigger renovations around the house in a shrinking domain of unalienated work. Contemporary consumer culture, with its emphasis on buying in services, has rendered the handyperson redundant, unless, of course, he or she is operating under a franchise arrangement. As G. M. Tamas describes it in New Left Review 80, ‘capitalism as a total system, with capital as the only Subject…[has become] a palpable, quotidian reality’. Given this, it is vital to preserve spaces that challenge the ubiquity of capital and commodity relationships, that allow pleasure in the performance of work in a cooperative way, that allow for a smaller-scale, more social, less alienated form of labour. Workers cooperatives, in Earthworker’s view, play an important role in the creation of this space.
Worker cooperatives are an effort to take control of work and to extend democratic control of economic production. In many ways, workers cooperatives are the most radical form of cooperative, because their intent is not just to provide protection for people through a collective, but also to change the nature of work and production itself by collectivising work. Worker cooperatives, at least in the way that Earthworker sees them, arise from a dilemma, described by Bob Rowthorn in Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation:
A strong and militant trade union movement may force up wages and resist wage cuts even in the face of high unemployment. In a boom situation, this may squeeze profits and bring expansion to a premature end, whilst there is still a large surplus of labour, and in a depression, it may delay recovery by reducing profitability. This may sound like a condemnation of the trade union movement, but it is not. It is simply stating the obvious fact that, so long as capitalists control production, they hold the whip hand, and workers cannot afford to be too successful in the wages struggle. If they are, capitalists respond by refusing to invest, and the result is a premature or longer crisis. To escape from this dilemma, workers must go beyond purely economic struggle and must fight at the political level to exert control over production itself.
The unique character of Earthworker’s project is that it is both economic and political. Some revolutionaries think the task of socialists is to destroy capitalism first and worry about what will replace it afterwards. We think this is irresponsible, but also that practising cooperation in today’s world is a revolutionary act in itself, helping to raise consciousness and confidence, while experimenting with new forms of ownership and control. We are interested not only in democratising work and ownership of the means of production in the existing economy. We are interested in prefigurative action, that is, in creating the structures that would help transition beyond capitalism and serve as the basis of a post-capitalist economy. In this sense, worker cooperatives are a form of praxis, helping workers and communities learn that they can control their own economic futures, and they don’t have to rely on bosses or capital.
Small and fragile as it may seem now, Earthworker is engaged in just such a prefigurative effort to build socially embedded economic institutions and a sense of belonging to something bigger than contemporary consumer capitalism can offer, something that might just survive the collapse towards which capitalism is hurtling.
Earthworker was established more than twenty years ago to bring unions and environmental groups together in rejection of the ‘jobs versus environment’ dichotomy. From the outset, we took very seriously the slogan ‘there are no jobs on a dead planet’.
Many Earthworker people come from activist and protest backgrounds, and even the unionists among us were most familiar with fighting against injustice. Over the years, we have decided that we won’t just fight against something—we will take it upon ourselves to show that we can create a better world through our actions.
To do this, we chose the form of the worker cooperative because we firmly believe that much of what is wrong with the contemporary world—and this is the problematic essence of capitalism—is the lack of democratic control over work and economic life. We don’t accept that democracy is limited to formal processes of voting every few years. True democracy means workers and local communities having control of their economic activities and their working lives.
We also firmly believe that the climate crisis and the need for decarbonisation require deep democratisation of the economy. We know only too well that a relatively small number of large corporations are responsible for a huge proportion of the world’s CO2 emissions. We know that the essence of neoliberalism has been to remove control over the economy from elected bodies and to hand it over to ‘markets’, which means, in reality, to those who are able to exercise power, through their wealth, in market processes.
Renewable energy is fundamentally different to fossil fuel energy. It lends itself to decentralisation and democratisation in a way that the old technologies of large-scale power stations do not. Decentralised renewable energy can be used to give communities of varying sizes control over their energy needs and to engage them in the whole transition process. It can transform them from passive consumers of resources sold to them by big multinational companies into active participants in their economic and energy needs.
Earthworker’s factory in Morwell, in the heart of Victoria’s coal country, manufactures stainless steel water tanks for solar and heat pump hot water systems. It is a wholesaler of tanks to heat pump companies and a retailer of hot water systems to individuals. The factory was deliberately located in Morwell in an effort to provide jobs in a community at the frontline of the energy transition. This is about providing alternative jobs that workers can control—providing real alternatives for the local community.
Cooperation between cooperatives
The other important element of Earthworker’s work is the concept of the cooperative ecosystem. Taking one of the core principles of cooperatives—cooperation between cooperatives—we are building a network of cooperatives that can sustain itself in the present economic system as we try to transform it. We believe that worker cooperatives could play a major role in the shift to a democratic, sustainable economic system. But to do this, among other things, they must be capable of challenging some of the fundamental dynamics of existing capitalist methods of expanding and managing demand.
Simply competing with typical capitalist firms for a larger share of existing markets has some merit, in terms of increasing democratic control of the economy, but that is not sufficient to ensure that the potential of workers’ cooperatives for environmental sustainability is reached. But even competition for existing markets is a difficult task for cooperatives, which face many capital, production and marketing challenges. Not least of these is the unwillingness of banks, other financial institutions and investors to lend to or invest in cooperatives, either because they don’t understand cooperatives in the way they understand limited liability companies or because they recoil from their democratic nature: greater equity stakes do not give greater control.
However, worker cooperatives also have many benefits that might enable them to be both competitive within the existing system and transformational of that system. Earthworker is unusual in this sense. Unlike most businesses, it is not simply trying to sell more of its goods or services. Not only is it trying to give workers and their communities greater control of their economic and labour resources, but it’s also thinking about new ways for goods and services to be provided, how markets can be collectivised and how relations of reciprocity can be utilised, as well as giving a sense of ‘the commons’ restored.
Earthworker Smart Energy Cooperative (ESEC) and Cooperative Power are examples of this. The latter is an energy retailing cooperative that Earthworker co-owns with unions and environment, faith and community organisations.
Several years ago, Earthworker set up ESEC as the first stage in realising its vision of energy as a service rather than a commodity. The traditional view of energy systems has been that supply should match demand. That is, as consumers demand more energy (either at a particular moment during the day, or on an economy-wide long-term basis), the generation supply must increase to meet it.
The introduction of more intermittent forms of energy generation in renewables, and the need to reduce CO2 emissions from energy generation, have started to revolutionise the approach to energy: we are now starting to think about matching demand to supply to modify and constrain demand to fit with the patterns and quantity of available generation. This is a challenge not only to the way we think about electricity networks; it is a challenge to incumbent fossil fuel generators, whose business models are largely based on generating more power to satisfy ever-increasing demand.
In a sense, batteries and other forms of storage epitomise this new way of thinking. Instead of providing more supply, they are used to provide consistency of supply, and to help match demand and supply. They can provide short bursts of power into the system at times of peak demand but they do this not by increasing the total level of generation capacity but by making generation supply more efficient, maximising the potential of generation infrastructure, and mediating between demand and supply.
This has helped us to see that what we actually need to be engaged in is the provision of energy services. A crucial element of this is not only managing demand so that it matches supply but reducing demand in the first place. In the ‘energy as a service’ model, the focus is on the various needs that households and businesses have. It proceeds from there to assess the best way to meet them, and the role that energy plays in meeting them. Thus, a household has a need for a comfortable indoor temperature, rather than a need for heating or cooling, although heating and cooling may play a role. We presume, too, that it is in households’ interests to minimise their expenses. The question then becomes: what is the best way to ensure this thermal comfort at the lowest cost? Immediately we switch from thinking about how we meet an energy demand to thinking about how we meet a need for comfort, which may not require energy at all: it may be met by better design or by installing insulation or draught-proofing measures.
The concept of energy as a service lends itself well to Earthworker’s ecosystem model and our focus on well-being rather than profit maximisation. To take the concept to scale, Earthworker has been working with some private businesses in the Energy Efficiency and Electrification Alliance (3EA) to offer the full range of energy efficiency services that households need, with a particular focus on low-income households. The idea is to provide funding agencies—typically, at this stage, local governments—with a single organisation—3EA—that coordinates all elements of a home retrofit, thus minimising the difficulty of coordinating multiple trades and businesses and minimising disruption for households.
This is utopian realism: responding to a practical problem in ways that seek deeper transformation by reimagining how energy needs are met and emphasising the importance of cooperation over competition.
Another example is Cooperative Power (also known as CoPower). Earthworker is a co-owner of this energy retailing cooperative. It has taken the concept of energy democracy literally and seriously. It gives customers the opportunity, through democratic votes, to decide on how the cooperative’s surplus is allocated and what sort of strategic direction it takes. For instance, the cooperative did not initially sell fossil gas, as it contradicts the aim of being a renewable energy retailer. But customers had made it clear that they liked the convenience of a retailer that met both their electricity and gas needs. So, CoPower gave customers a vote on whether it should also retail gas, with the added twist that it would use the surplus from gas sales to fund Earthworker cooperatives to help people move their homes off gas appliances.
Again, the ecosystem concept and the principle of cooperation among cooperatives, together with the energy as a service approach, enable an experiment in utopian realism and practical transformation. It also pushes customers to a politicised consciousness about energy provision. Being an ‘energy consumer’ can be not just a matter of paying a quarterly bill but a conscious act to shape the ‘energy commons’.
A world beyond capitalism
Much remains to be done to build the Earthworker ecosystem to a sufficient scale to really achieve transformative system change. Thought needs to be given to the development of cooperative markets through, for instance, using cooperative products as a form of currency outside existing forms of monetary and commodity exchange, and how such a system can help cooperatives attain environmental sustainability objectives.
For instance, we are thinking of how we might work with unions to develop clauses in collective agreements that would allow workers to receive solar hot water systems as part of their remuneration. This would allow the creation of a dedicated market for Earthworker hot water systems while also providing greater long-term benefits than simple cash wages for workers, as well as having broader environmental benefits.
We are similarly interested in how cooperatively owned renewable energy generation could be used as a form of currency within a cooperative ecosystem. Cooperative members would be entitled to a certain amount of electricity generation from the cooperative’s ownership of generation assets. If they used less than they were entitled to, they could share it with others, sell it back to the grid or, potentially, use it to acquire other services from other cooperatives.
What these experiments reveal is that Earthworker and a growing worker cooperative sector provide a unique space for working out practical problems of political economy. Political parties cannot do this, concerned as they chiefly are with ideological and policy matters. Private businesses, focused on profit maximisation and committed to the fundamental tenets of capitalism, are also not instruments for experimentation in what a post-capitalist economy might look like. This is why Earthworker, small and battling but dynamic, remains a vital component of a left project that takes the urgent need for a world beyond capitalism seriously.