Marxism and the workers movement in Britain Pt. 4

4. The fake socialism of Cooperative Trading

We have dealt with the various controversies which have surrounded tha notion of cooperation, both in its utopian stage, and at the beginning of its open bourgeois phase. This last point was dealt with in the previous article in this series where we elaborated the debate between Ernest Jones, in conjunction with Marx, and a leading cooperator Vansittart Neale in the pages of Notes to the People in 1851/2. It demonstrated the gulf which existed between the proletarian movement and the process of bougeoisification taking place on the fringes of the workers movement. To recap on the fundamentals, we are not against cooperation in principle, because some of it can be workers seizing or setting up units of production for the purpose of meeting social needs, but against the process whereby cooperation becomes instruments of exploitation and consequently pillars of the establishment.

These two phases we have indentified – utopian and bourgeois – did not end w 1th a neat break at one moment in time for the former with the other conveniently taking up the vacant opportunities. The utopian phase actually took many decades to fully exhaust itself, or to be finally incorporated into the bourgeois one. The bourgeois phase really began in 1844 with the founding of a shop to sell groceries in Rochdale, This motley collection of disheartened trade unionists, owenites and former chartists, known as the Rochdale Pioneers, abandoned any notion of transformation of society for the joys of shopkeeping – we can justly use the phrase “the trading of principles for the principles of trade” in this case. Cooperation was put forward as an alternative to trade union pressure in the struggle towards industrial freedom, Amongst the principles established were selling at the market price, the customer takes away their own goods bought, and of course no credit without adequate. collateral, Good sound shopkeeper principles, exactly the same practices which Cobbett in: his Rural Rides denounced as the stranglehold the shopkeepers have over the working people of England replacing those of the farmers of previous centuries.

The utopian phase had not totally collapsed by 1844, indeed the last great experiment on placing people back on the land did not totally fail until two years later when the owenite scheme at Queensford in Hampshire miserably failed. That being the last of the great land experiments did not mean that there were no other such attempts in manufacturing and distribution, Indeed their was a qualitive shift in trying to work within the system rather than attempting to break their heads against the new capitalist relations, Some distributive cooperatives were set up, not entirely an the Rochdale pattern, to provide unadulterated food as some shopkeepers were notorious for contaminating products with dust, sand and other materials to make up the bulk weight to increase their profits. Other workers established their own distributive networks because of blockades on credit against strikers during long disputes, Sometimes the shops were owned or controlled by the factory owners, so the workers had little other choice in the matter, either set up their own networks of distribution or submit. It was also part of the experience in learning whose side sections of society were on with regards to the class struggle.

Vith no doubt this in mind Marx, in setting out the strategy for the First International in his Instructions for Delegates to the Geneva Congress of 1866, wrote the following:

5. Cooperative Labour

It is the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalize the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever. The Congress should, therefore, proclaim no special system of cooperation, but limit itself to the enunciation of a few general principles.

a) We acknowledge the cooperative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is practically to show, that the present pauperising and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.

b) Restricted, however, to the dwarfish form into which individual wage slaves can elaborate it by thsir private efforts, the cooperative system will never transform capitalistic society, To convert social production into on6 large and harmonious system of free and cooperative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realized save by the transfer of the organized forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.
     c) We recommend to the working men to embark in cooperative production rather than in cooperative stores- The latter touch but the surface of the presen t economical system, the former attacks its groundwork.
     d) We recommend to all cooperative societies to convert one part of their joint Income into a fund for propagating their principles by example as well as by precept, in other words, by promoting the establishment of new cooperative fabrics, as well as by teaching and preaching,
     e) In order to prevent cooperative societies from degenerating into ordinary middle-clasd joint-stock companies (sociétés par actions) all workmen employed, whether shareholders or not, ought to share alike. As a mere temporary expedient, we are willing to allow shareholders a low rate of interest.

The agitations of the First International found very little support within the cooperative movement. Hostility was the norm to all political solutions to the problems, of society, until the cooperative movement formed its own political institutions, eventually its own party. So conservative was the cooperative movement that affiliation to the Labour Party was rejected by the Cooperative Congress in 1905, no doubt because there was still some residue of class struggle within the new Farty. Only in 1917, with the Labour Party patriotically supporting the nation, and Empire, in war and castigating all manifestations of the class struggle, and defending the employing class that the Cooperative Movement thought it right to affiliate to the Labour party.

The construction of the bourgeois cooperative movement had two bases of support, The first was in the Christian Socialism movement established in 1848 for the purposes of extinguishing the irreligious tendencies displayed both in the Chartist movement in Britain and the Revolutionary Social ism in France, It found in the new cooperative attempts, and in the concept of co-partnership, an instrument for their work in pacifying the proletarian movement, The leading figures in this movement were people such as Frederick Maurice and Charles Kingsley, with the support of many others pursuing their evangelist aims, and set up in 1850 in London a Society for Promoting Working Men’s Associations. This Association was there to found cooperative enterprises, mainly small units of production which could be easily controlled. These manufacturing enterprises were viewed with suspicion by the distributive cooperatives after a regular number of failures by the productive units.

Some experiments were made in co-partnership from the 1860s onwards, whereby the employers and trade unions cooperated in a form of profit-sharing. One well established scheme between a Yorkshire colliery owner named Briggs and the unions broke down during the course of a strike in 1875. The strikers were asked to choose between the scheme and their unions, with the miners determined to stand by their union.

The second basis of support for the new-style cooperative movement was the state, not in the form of financial support but by altering the law in order so this new form of organisation could be brought within the bounds of legality, In 1852 the law was changed by the passing of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act, along with later amendments, which allowed the cooperatives to function fully within the law – they could now have more than 25 members, take shares in each others societies and sue members who took off with funds, etc. In 1862 a new law was introduced to allow the cooperatives to begin to federate, while the full measure of the law was still directed against the trade unions ~ the state showed which side it was on. Through this new legal status the Wholesale side of trading took off, enabling them to buy in large bulk and so increase their profits, And so everybody seemed happy, the Government’s blessing bestowed up this frugal, christian operation demonstrating that not all working people were fire-brand revolutionaries.

It is no accident that the cooperators saw themselves as pillars of society and bulwarks against “revolution”. For not only were they trading in commodities, they had become employers of wage labour in their own right. Beatrice Potter, in her insipid little book on the Cooperative Movement, related how employed members were banned from standing for posts in the organisation arose out of a request from a manager for, wait for it…, a wage rise. This request, based upon an increasing family of the manager, was rejected by a resolution moved by an “experienced” member of the Committee. This same Committee member when seeking re-election found himself facing the aggrieved manager who had marshalled his fellow employees in order to defeat the hated employer on the committee. From that time on it became a firm principle that no member who was employed could stand for posts in the organisation concerned. It was not for nothing that Potter frequently referred to the Cooperative Movement as a “state within a state”, and we all know what a state is for, for keeping some body of people in line. In this case it is the employees, In 1891 the conditions of employment were so bad that Cooperative employees founded their own trades union to fight their employers. They had good sound class reasons for this!

The profiteering indulged in by the cooperators led to the buying and selling of factories, ships and coal mines, amongst other assets. They did not stop there, but also acquired property and assets throughout the Empire like all good little patriots should. Farms and creameries in Ireland, trading establishments in Nigeria and South Africa, tea plantations in India and Ceylon, all under the protection of British troops naturally. By 1914 the numbers of employees had nearly reached 150,000, showing how far the enterprises had developed. The cooperators had a definite stake in the continuation of society!

All this is quite clear, open and unattestable, so why go on the reader may wonder. The same Miss Potter, better known by her married name of Webb, who studied the cooperators activities so avidly, then declared that the whole enterprise to be SOCIALIST. Everyone was surprised at this conclusion, not least the cooperators themselves. But there was a logic to this conclusion to be reached, not in the examination made into the cooperative movement, but in the desired-for solution to a problem that the developing Fabians were looking for. The Fabians, a group of young intellectuals, were looking for a solution to an impasse they faced. They were passionately looking for someway of changing society without any of that unpleasant class conflict, especially VIOLENCE, or anything that was troublesome at all. To be rejected was the concept of catastrophe, so looking for crises in society was definitely out. So the solution must be something which is developing within society and is moving society forwards. Potter’s innovation led to an examination of other forces in society. If the cooperative movement is one of these searched-for developments, then maybe there are others. And so the solutions were staring them in their faces, the Progressive Party in the London County Council and other local council services were dubbed municipal socialism, the work of local state bodies such as the Board of Guardians (which administered the poor law relief payments), and other such phenomena. So here we had Socialism, socialism as far as the eyes can see!

The Fabians did succeed in being innovative. Nobody until that time would have dared to elaborate such outrageous ideas as being socialist. There would be no end of people at that time who were taking up opportunist positions, but nobody then would have tried to identify any never mind all of these tendencies with socialism.

The Fabians were instrumental in spreading this false socialism into other countries in a piece-meal fashion. It was their influence on Bernstein, particularly on the question of the cooperatives, which led to the emergence of revisionism within the German Social-democratic Party. Bernstein’s notions of gradualism, with capitalism transforming itself into socialism, was pure Fabianism. It was only a question of time before this same disease spread throughout the Second International.

Besides the rejection of class struggle to end class society, the real result of these ideas was that capitalism itself, shown by exploitation of wage labour, property, and the maintenance of the state, all these processes had become a form of ‘socialisms. So why should the workers (to use that unacceptable class-based concept), or the people in general, fight against capitalism when it is in the process of transforming itself into a better form of society. It is a notion which plays a role of disorientating the workers’ movement, dulling class consciousness and lowering the morale of the working class in general. Also it plays a much more pernicious role in making many workers disgusted with politics in general, because if that is “socialism” what future do they have at all! This is the role fake socialism plays.

(to be continued)