IT’S TIME TO BUILD (socialism)
Now is the time to build alternatives to failing capitalist institutions
I enjoyed reading The Professional Revolution by Virginia State Delegate Lee Carter. It’s a call to build sustainable infrastructure within the left; sort of like Marc Andreessen’s build stuff post, except Carter is smart and a socialist. The first two thirds of the essay summarizes the strategies common on the left today and what he sees as their common shortcoming:
I propose now that the fatal flaw in all of these organizations has been that they had no engine of production behind them. Without a way of producing materials, goods, and services that was all their own, they rely on the spare time and motivation of their activists to fight against capitalism, after a full day of working for a capitalist is done. Even those that manage to collect enough dues to hire full-time staff still rely on the dues to be paid by activists who had to work for capitalists to survive and to pay those dues. Eventually, the organization’s ability to collect membership dues is worn away through burnout, attrition, internal conflict, or state repression, and the organization withers away. Meanwhile, the capitalist has taken their share from those same workers who sustained the activist organization, and a share from every other member of the working class, and funneled some of it towards the class of functionaries that protects them.
I certainly feel this; the day after the 2016 election I started down a road that led to me dedicating more and more of my life to political struggle, culminating in quitting my job at Facebook and taking a role on the Sanders campaign. I put a lot of hours into building up DSA San Francisco while holding down a job and a three-hour daily commute. Unsurprisingly, I burnt out on both my job and my political aspirations, and I’m taking a several-month sabbatical now to figure out what my next role will be.
Towards the end Carter lays out his strategy: build sustainable worker-owned cooperative enterprises that pool their resources into cooperation councils that act on behalf of the working class to e.g. pass laws that favor the flourishing of cooperatives. One law I’ve thought about: any government contract needs to be offered on a right-of-first-refusal basis to cooperative companies before going to legacy privately-held companies. There’s no reason that our democratic government should ever enrich a few people when better alternatives are available.
This strategy agrees with Erik Olin Wright’s How To Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century, on which I just finished leading a reading group. Wright refers to his strategy as eroding capitalism. It’s a “yes-and” strategy that includes building cooperative alternatives to capitalist enterprises, playing electoral politics to create a better climate for winning socialism, and organizing resistance against the worst excesses of the entrenched system.
While Wright goes too far and speaks against revolutionary tactics, I do agree that building alternatives is a necessary component of winning a better future. This strategy has worked before. When I think about how neoliberalism came to triumph over the 20th century, I think of how, starting with the Mont Pelerin Society, advocates for the ruling class built up networks of think tanks and institutions aimed at propagating their arguments against the minor collectivism of the New Deal era. When the still-capitalist system inevitably went through shocks and crises, these institutions were ready to step in and offer prognoses slanted their way.
The left needs similar institutions, but it’s a lot harder to find funding for opposing capitalism than for propping it up. That’s where the cooperation councils come in; self-sustaining cooperatives fund the cooperation councils which then work for the working class. This is a form of a venture commune (Hey! That’s the name of the blog!). Ben Tarnoff makes the point that as people see non-market institutions succeed in their daily lives, their expectations of the practice of democracy at a larger scale would rise, as well.
Sign me up! What are we building?
Well, I don’t know. I’m not ready to go all-in on something yet. And I’d love to hear your pitches for cooperatives. Here’s some of the things I’m thinking about:
Time banking. Time banking asks the right question: How could one human’s time be more valuable than any other’s?
The Food Coop in Park Slope. A high-quality, affordable grocery store where you can only shop if you also work regular shifts. (Though member shifts are currently suspended.)
The ongoing collapse of privately-owned pseudo-markets: Lyft, Uber, WeWork, Airbnb
The danger of a collapsing food service industry following the pandemic, while ghost kitchen startups wait in the wings
Pinduoduo’s massive success in China; PDD enables self-organized “group buying” of commodities from produce to electronics
Here’s a meandering thesis based on these ideas: The privately-held “sharing economy” companies have failed to find a sustainable business model and will go under. The sharing economy majors were fueled by huge amounts of speculative capital and needed to show growth/returns at a scale commensurate with high-risk investing, but they could not. But people still need food and still want niceties like prepared meals and point-to-point transport. Cooperatives do not feel the same pressure to show growth; they need to serve their stakeholders, which are always more decentralized than the global financial capital interests that fueled Uber/et al. Thus cooperatives may prove more robust in prevailing conditions than their capitalist predecessors. There are about to be a lot of gaps in the market, and shy capital may be weary of jumping in to fill them (with a few exceptions; companies like Amazon could buy major stakes in many industries, and that’s a concern). This presents an opportunity to build decentralized sharing economy-inspired cooperatives. To head off a critique that a hypothetical “Postmates but worker-owned” is still a luxury service for the well-off, time banking strategies like those employed at the Food Coop equalize time to a degree. And finally, to add some urgency, any advantage that I might have as a skilled engineer is rapidly declining due to outsourcing; the next generation of FAANG-level companies are outsourcing from day one.
You’re doing YC? *snicker*
My hope is that we will find new forms of innovation by adopting new forms of organizational structure. Like the way modern VC revolutionized scaling publicly-funded innovations, cooperative enterprises would enable new kinds of innovation that aren’t possible under the private model. And haven’t we probably exhausted the supply of VC-backed innovations, anyway? When I joined Google in 2010, I knew Google was the safe option and that most of its major contributions were in its past, not future. Today, graduating from Stanford and going through YC is the safe option where you’re likely to make some money through a soft landing acquisition, but you’re probably not going to make a dent in the universe or whatever. Capitalism may be a highly dynamic mode of production, but this particular form of capitalism has just about run its course.