Responding to the metacrisis, worker cooperatives can help to prefigure and build a post-capitalist future
We can imagine the end of the world, but we can’t imagine an alternative to capitalism.
Fredric Jameson
How might the radical Left reclaim and reinvigorate its greatest weapon: the emancipatory imagination? This question in turn leads us to another question: how might the Left, in dramatically uncertain and chaotic times, become powerful through embodying the transformative power of cooperative action?
This said, the radical Left has a major problem: it is trapped in what I call a tactical hell. In all of its guises, tendencies and factions, the Left has no economic, social, political or ecological vision that may introduce long-term transformation, and there can be no strategy or development of a strategic culture without a vision. Much of the Left is trapped within a single tactic—the demonstration, and it has been so for decades. It has fallen into a mode of permanent protest, obsessed and addicted to the reactive negation; it has ultimately lost any perspective on or even awareness of the more creative or transformative negation of the negation.
This discussion regarding negation harks back to Marx’s reflections on Hegel and his relationship to revolution in Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Without a vision, bereft of strategy, the Left’s reactive negation today is driven by the 24-hour news cycle; consequently, we only know how to react, lurching from crisis to crisis. Thoroughly entangled and to a degree addicted, we are unable to step back and reflect; to do the work necessary to break free from merely reacting to learn how to actually respond: in other words, create various forms of organisational and community power. In many parts of the Left, being powerful is a dirty word; victim status is the only valid currency. But our internalised powerlessness and loss of direction are further compounded as the abyss revealing itself in the outer world widens and deepens and picks up speed, sucking us in to its centrifugal force.
If we survivors of the slow but intense implosion of the radical Left are to be successful at any level, we need to find opportunities in the unfolding crises and uncertainties we find ourselves in. First, to prepare, we must hone our understanding of the subtle differences and tensions between polycrisis and metacrisis, because it is those who can respond best to crisis who will gain strategic advantage and have a bigger say in how communities and organisations find their way through collapse.
It’s in this regard that I suggest that the development of workers cooperatives, as part of the development of a broader social sector, can help reinvigorate the radical Left, creating organisations and communities that are perceptive, resilient and adaptable. In other words, be prepared for what is coming. It is in this context we must summon the emancipatory imagination to create a vision of how best to respond to the utter destructiveness and insoluble contradictions that contemporary capitalism has unleashed.
Polycrisis or metacrisis?
There won’t be too many people who will object to my saying we live in a time of many intersecting and intensifying social and ecological crises, which include: the end of the US Empire and the breakdown of the international order; climate chaos; the sixth great extinction event; corrosive levels of wealth inequality; the threat of artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons proliferation; the housing and cost of living crisis; and so on.
A quick survey of the state of the nation reveals a litany of failures of the radical Left. Unions cannot strike; class as a social and political signifier is losing traction, if not disintegrating. The collective culture traditionally associated with the union movement has largely collapsed, partly due to the vice-like grip of the Labor Party over the leaderships of so many parts of the labour movement, effectively integrating it into their defence of the decomposing status quo. Over the past three or so decades, green groups and the Green Party have been unable to get any real traction on climate chaos. The sixth great extinction event is unfolding, and on a range of levels, Australia continues to lead the way. The Greens, following in the tradition of the Democrats, are rapidly heading towards irrelevance. The Indigenous movement is deeply divided and has been unable to stem, let alone stop, deaths in custody. No police officer has ever been charged and found guilty for any of the more than 450 deaths in custody in this time. Ten-year-olds can now legally be imprisoned. The widespread destruction of Country continues unabated. These are the score cards of just three of the major social movements in this country.
The crisis is real, multidimensional and intensifying, yet it is not just the external situation that is transforming. How we experience crises is also changing rapidly. Indeed, how might we respond to crises when crises are merging, intensifying and unfolding in hitherto unimagined ways? Perhaps foundational to this line of inquiry is seeing that our very way of knowing and being in the world may be part of the crisis. This insight unveils a pressing problem—that a crisis in how we comprehend and react to crisis is feeding into the tactical hell outlined earlier.
If we want to learn and get some form of strategic advantage in this process, it is worth reflecting on the subtle but important difference between polycrisis and metacrisis.
The term polycrisis was coined in 1999 by Edgar Morin and Anne Brigette Kern in Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium. It refers to a ‘complex inter-solidarity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrollable processes, and the general crisis of the planet’. In this systems approach, the different crises are interwoven. The term was later popularised by historian Adam Tooze. Ville Lahde wrote about it in Aeon magazine.The Carbon Institute employed it, as have various academics. In the policy context, the Cascade Institutedefines polycrisis as:
Any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of the Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects.
Note, it is not merely that these crises are occurring simultaneously but that they exacerbate each other in complex and often unexpected ways. The whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Some examples of polycrisis: the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine has come to affect grain yields; COVID-19 has had a lasting inhibitive impact on supply chains, affecting economies and health systems in many nations; climate change has brought droughts, floods and fires to every nation on the planet. These crises contribute to the global cost of living crisis and food shortages in many countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The basic assumption in this notion is that the problems are all ‘out there’ in the objective world. They are often perceived as problems to be solved, but there is growing recognition that the intersection of unfolding crises makes this very complex. Crises and their effects are increasingly difficult to understand or predict and harder than imagined to actually address.
The term ‘metacrisis’ has only recently come into popular usage through the work of Jonathan Rowson, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Zak Stein. For Rowson:
The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding, misvaluing and misappropriating of reality. The metacrisis is the crisis within and between all the world’s major crises, a root cause that is at once singular and plural, a multi-faceted delusion arising from the spiritual and material exhaustion of modernity that permeates the world’s interrelated challenges and manifests institutionally and culturally to the detriment of life on earth.
Polycrisis names the convergence, morphing and flow-on effects of interacting crises, whereas the idea of metacrisis sees a crisis in how we perceive, understand and relate to crisis and the convergence of crises. Rather than just looking outwards, ‘metacrisis’ offers a reflexive turn, an opening to assess how the tools and approaches we use to perceive and engage with the world are part of the problem.
The notion of metacrisis is an unveiling: the problem lies not just out there in the world, it also demands that we look within to the subtle relationships between mind, body and heart, as well as looking beyond to reflect on the ways we imagine, relate, understand, listen to and speak about our place in the world. It’s what Mesoamericans call a cosmovision, and our lack thereof. What would it mean if we lived in a cosmos that not only was alive but one in which all forms of life were an integral and sacred part of one’s cosmovision? In this view, the pronoun ‘it’ as applied to non-human beings becomes redundant as we humans are kin with the rest of the creation.
An example of metacrisis: you are on the tram, you look at your phone and read a story about a massive bushfire in Eastern Australia that burns 58 million hectares and kills 3 billion animals; or it’s a report about the murder of 20 to 160 unarmed Palestinians or Iranian schoolgirls, who are killed going about their day. You hop off the tram, go to the supermarket, and buy groceries as if nothing is happening. Metacrisis is your daily experience of things falling apart. It is being caught in the liminal space between one world dying and a new world having not yet been born.
Whether we like it or not, we are very participants in the metacrisis. The metacrisis is not something we need to fix or solve so much as something we were born into; indeed is who we are. But in making this point, it needs to be drawn out that we are not passive victims to what is happening within us and the world around us. Our task is to find and develop the agency within and between us, and to use it well in whatever contexts emerge. Our role within the discombobulating experience of metacrisis is to create a transformative response and to do this by constructing the collective containers that can help us to adapt and endure and survive, perhaps even thrive, through the unfolding of the metacrisis. It is in this context that I look to the possibilities of the workers’ cooperative movement, as part of a broader development of the social or solidarity economy.
Creating worker cooperatives as part of a burgeoning social sector
Worker-owned-and-run cooperatives have a long and deep history on all the continents of this big blue planet, going back in some cases a millennium, although of course they weren’t formally called or structured as workers’ cooperatives. Rather, they were organisations of producers, running on cooperative or mutualist lines, taking a wide range of forms and names. Sometimes these organisations lasted a few years, at other times they were central to the reproduction and day-to-day workings of culture. In the modern period, the first formal worker cooperative was the Rochdale Co-operative Manufacturing Society, established in 1864 in a cotton mill in Rochdale, England. A rich history of workers’ cooperatives in various settings has ensued since. Mondragon, a massive network of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, established in the 1940s, is probably the most impressive. It currently employs more than 85,000 owner‒workers within its vast network.
Workers’ cooperatives are much more commonplace and influential than most people realise. It is refreshing how much important work has already been done in this realm. At the same time, there have also been numerous discussions and (creative?) tensions within the radical Left as to the viability, role and relationship of worker cooperatives to the labour movement, and to social transformation more generally. These debates are ongoing and worth dipping into, even if they do not really address today’s unique set of circumstances.
After decades of corrosive neoliberal policies, this unique set of circumstances sees populations living in the ruins of the social that had been bequeathed and achieved by earlier labour and other social movements. Much of the radical Left exemplifies this ruin, corroded by identity politics and unwilling or unable to look deeply at the present conjuncture or rethink old theories and strategies. One of the key reasons I champion workers cooperatives is that they are potentially a powerful way to help us reconstitute the social, which I believe is foundational to re-imagining any process of radical transformation.
Coupled with this, we also find ourselves in the very tumultuous and vexing context of an unfolding metacrisis. This convergence of crises will no doubt unveil significant opportunities if we pay attention and are willing and able to seize the moment. Finding ourselves on a strategic ground that is incredibly uneven, riven with uncertainties and chaos, the best way forward is to build capacity in the broader community. A great way to do this is to create powerful organisations that are perceptive, resilient and adaptable. In this way, we are in the best position to respond, rather than simply react, to what comes our way.
The vision proposed here is that we develop workers’ cooperatives in a market economy as a form of market socialism. This is not to defend the market or market system, but to recognise this is where we find ourselves—the situation we need to creatively respond to. To help us mitigate the destructive impacts of dog-eat-dog market competition, worker cooperatives need to feed into and be part of a growing social or solidarity sector of the economy.
This social sector, distinguished from both the private and public realms of contemporary economy, would include a range of models of worker cooperatives, as well as consumer cooperatives, including food and housing, and other social enterprises and associations that put people and the planet before profits. The idea behind the creation of a social and solidarity sector is that, rather than co-ops and social enterprises competing individually on the open market, they would create an internal economy. They would prioritise working with and producing for other cooperatives and social enterprises within their network. In taking this up today, worker cooperatives are facilitating the renewal and reconstruction of communities. Building the social sector is a way to shield and protect worker cooperatives and parallel organisations from the worst elements of the market economy, and act as precursors to a different future.
Central to this is how effectively we may respond to the tactical hell we are immersed in. Another way of framing this: are we able to let go of our internalised powerlessness—our obsession with reactive negation—and open ourselves up to the creative and potentially transformative response of negating the negation?
This is only one way to frame the task at hand. A big part of it is how we want to relate, or not, to the emancipatory imagination. Do we, of the radical Left, really want to champion change and transformation or are we stuck simply mouthing the rhetoric, leaving others to decide the fate of our species and life on earth? This is a big question, a reckoning I suspect, and we can only act where we find ourselves. Experience suggests that the only way forward, the only real way to facilitate and enable this radical transition, is to give as many people as we can the experience of being involved in substantial projects of ongoing cooperation. Change happens through doing, not merely through thinking about it. Through giving people a taste of what is possible, a morsel of the possibilities associated with the idea of ‘power-with’, and what it feels like to be courageous, to act and succeed cooperatively, we can overcome the decades of defeat and paralysis that the radical Left has suffered.
Becoming powerful comes with expectations and responsibilities. It also means we need to face painful truths about ourselves and each other. The alternative is to remain stuck in that tactical hell, forever circling back on itself, being done to and never doing. What do you want to do? Are you ready to throw in the towel? Or do you want to push back, explore your options and find out exactly what’s possible? If your answer is the latter, you need to find your people: we’ve got some organising, fierce loving, and fighting to do.