Worker Cooperatives in the USA

**History of**

**Work Cooperation in America**

**WORKER**
COOPERATIVES OR WAGE SLAVERY

**Co-ops,**
Unions, Collectivity and Communalism from Early America to the Present

**By John Curl**

http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html

*Notes on the most recent period, 1960-2000*

The
"inter-communalist" Black Panther Party, begun in 1966 in Oakland,
organized a host of "survival programs pending political revolution."
In the late '60s and early '70s these included distribution of free shoes (from
their own factory), clothing, food, health care, plumbing repair, pest control,
and transportation for the aged. Communal houses provided survival for party
workers

The
first "hippie" comune was started in Trinidad, Colorado in 1965.
"Drop City: To sponsor and create the avant garde of civilization,
utilizing all the remnants, at least of art, science, technology, etc."
The Drop City Newsletter, 1966

"We
create the seeds of the new society in the struggle for the destruction of the
empire. For our generation that has meant the birth of communalism and
collective work in the most individualist, competitive society in the world.
Revolution is the midwife bringing the new society into being from the
old." Weather Underground, 1974

a common ideological base
of working to build a new social system based on cooperation and sharing
"within the shell of the old.'

The
roots of the counterculture go back to the late 1950s, when young people in
cities around the country began moving into inexpensive neighborhoods, creating
at first simply loose networks of scattered friends and acquaintances helping
each other survive as best they could, joined together by their alienation from
the dominant society. Most were also underground cultural centers. Among the
earliest were in New York and San Francisco; by 1960 their centers began to
move from the "bohemian" and "beat" Greenwich Village and
North Beach, over to the lower East Side and the Haight-Ashbury, which became
the early nuclei of the "hippie" movement and the counterculture – this is one of the stages
of formation of a revolutionary party in America

The
basic idea was to withdraw energy from the system of competition and
exploitation, and use it to create a new system based on cooperation, which
could expand to embrace all of society when the old system collapsed – this is what the wife of
Igor Danilov thinks she is doing

A
collective is a work group in which all members have equal power and decision
is by consensus (that is, with unanimous consent). A collective can be formed
for almost any purpose, short or long term.

A
collective is unbureaucratic, anti-hierarchical, based on the most direct
participatory democracy and genuine equality.

Almost
all the early countercultural forms such as freestores, communes,
"underground" newspapers "free" schools and universities,
collective gardens, cooperative houses and food conspiracies, chose the
collective form instinctively.

Freestores
were run entirely on collective energy. The idea was simple: people could bring
and take what they wanted and needed. The result in many places however turned
out to be that most were soon being destroyed by people who would come at
favorable hours and clean out anything saleable. Most freestore collectives
burned out this way, and the system usually gave way to free boxes scattered
around the community, a more efficient method.

Besides
newspapers, radio collectives were formed in some areas. The organizing force
was almost always people with connections to sources of money; but the projects
themselves were staffed by people coming from all social classes.

since
it was only people with access to money who could gather the resources to get
the projects started, they usually wound up in control, at least in the
beginning. Many founders never relinquished control, and those projects never
became truly cooperative.

The
movement was deeply motivated by the insight that "the personal is
political": in order to change society we must change the ways we relate
to each other in our daily lives, many of which changes need not be delayed
until after a political revolution; on the contrary, "the revolution"
has to be waged in daily life today.

Collective
living did not seriously undermine monogamous sexual coupling, which continued
despite premature forecasts of its demise, although sometimes in a looser form.
Similarly, monogamous coupling continued in the rural communes and communities
too. Sexual practices in communal living were scarcely indistinguishable from
practices in the larger society. The vast majority of communalists eventually
became involved in a couple relationship and a biological family household.

The
woodshop I work in was originally organized as a centralized collective, part
of Bay Warehouse Collective. The collective as a whole took in all work and was
responsible for it, and we paid ourselves salaries. Later, because it better
suited our changed situation, we decided to switch over to a cooperative system
whereby we are each responsible for a fair share of shop maintenance and
expenses, while the economics of any particular job is handled individually by
the actual worker or workers.

Bay
Warehouse Collective, where I worked, was founded in Berkeley, California in
1972. As centralized collective we ran an auto repair shop, a print shop, and a
woodshop out of a large warehouse. All shop income went to the central
collective, which paid workers a salary based partly on need. At its height Bay
had about 35-40 members, and also operated a pottery shop, a food conspiracy, a
theater, an electronics shop, a collective garden, and let space to a legal
collective. Bay Warehouse Collective was formed out of the wreckage of an
"alternative" trade high school (Bay High) formed in 1970. The school
was nominally structured as a democratic collective, but a sharp struggle soon
developed between shop workers and academic workers (who were also the legal
administrators) over real control and over the academic workers' refusal to do
manual maintenance work. Some of the teachers didn't want to sweep the floor.
The shop workers staged an insurrection, took over, kicked out the
administrators, disbanded the school and, shortly after I joined, we organized
Bay Warehouse Collective

Like
most countercultural organizations, there was no one ideology, at least in
words: the organization itself contained most of the ideas. For some it was
enough to work in a non-bossist non-sexist shop, although salaries were
pathetically low; others saw us becoming more communal and buying large houses
to live in, eventually branching out into the country; still others dreamed of
us growing large and strong enough to become--in federation with other
collectives and cooperatives--a challenge to the capitalist order, with the
final goal to be able to do our work for where it was most needed by society,
not for those who could afford it. – this is similar to vision of «Что делать?» Чернышевский.

the
warehouse we inherited from the school was too costly for our needs and
abilities; we simply did not find ways to make our energy outflow flow back to
us transformed into enough dollars to provide for our needs and pay our exorbitant
rent, so we folded after a year and a half. Yet we did not really fail. We
disbanded the larger Collective into three autonomous worker collectives, each
of which found a smaller space. The print shop retained its centralized
collective structure. The auto shop became a joint-partnership. The woodshop
became a collective-cooperative. Inkworks, CarWorld and Heartwood all continue
today –
re-integration into the larger capitalist society

We
made decisions collectively: nothing was considered decided until everyone was
satisfied enough to go along with it. This system took into account depths of
feeling as well as numbers, unlike the majority-rule system. It worked pretty
well, even when the group grew larger (our height was about fifty);there were
frustrating times, usually when two individuals had an ego problem, but over all,
most things (a couple notable exceptions jump immediately to mind) got
straightened out. We treated all except very personal possessions as common
property, and had a common clothing room where any traveler in need could be
supplied.

The
concept of "openness" started out as a strength in the movement but
eventually turned into a weakness. Open communes proved to be generally
unlivable in the long run because they were too unstable. Since people did not
choose each other, they were often not committed to each other. Not every two
people can share the same bathroom and kitchen in peace. The communes attracted
not only people willing to work for their survival, but also people looking for
free trips.