John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Sadly, capitalism is not so kind. Guy Standing’s identification of the “precariat” reveals a harsher truth. The precariat is the working class stripped of trade union protection or regular employment, frequently laid off or working to zero-hours contracts in unregulated areas of the fast-food industry, cleaning, retail, marketing, etc. The precariat is not an underclass–it encompasses workers with families and mortgages, single young people in rented accommodation or multi-occupancy homes, and educated migrants willing to take any job. It takes the process of working-class decomposition and finds instead “recomposition”, i.e. marginalised, exploited people tied to economic serfdom by the logic of the neoliberal economy but not, as was once the case, centralised in big industrial complexes run by identifiable owners and opposed by visible trade unions.

There are still significant areas of full-time working-class employment outside the precarious service sector and the gig economy, i.e. in manufacturing, engineering, construction and transport. But as the examples of the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland and Port Talbot steel works in Wales demonstrate, “full-time” and “secure” are now relative terms. Neoliberalism has introduced precarity right across the working class. A steel worker is at the mercy of corporate outsourcing as much as a shared services provider. Whatever class de(re)composition has occurred or is occurring in the global economy, trade unions remain essential to defend workers from exploitation in the workplace and to provide a better quality of life outside it. But they cannot reset the clock to the days of mass industry or preserve every existing job regardless. Nor should they want to.

Protecting public services and local communities from the ravages of austerity is vitally important, but ultimately it is still laagering the wagons. Lasting social emancipation consists in campaigning for and helping to create new, innovative, high-quality work that provides not only good pay, decent pensions and early retirement, but freedom from coercion and hierarchy, from the fate of becoming a cog in the machine of corporate capitalism. In 1982, André Gorz wrote, “Protecting jobs and skills, rather than seeking to control and benefit from the way in which work is abolished, will remain the main concern of traditional trade unionism. That is why it is bound to remain on the defensive”. 30

It is still on the defensive. For many years now, the left and the trade unions have failed to articulate a convincing narrative of an alternative, better and fundamentally different society, of the kind suggested by earlier Marxists like August Bebel, William Morris and Alexander Bogdanov, a community in which democratic ownership of natural resources means a reduction in compulsory labour in favour of greater leisure, creativity, altruism and public welfare. For most people there are no funds, no social framework, no moral endorsements or financial inducements to reject the work ethic in favour of the full development of one’s personality and potential, to participate in a process in which, as Trotsky put it in the conclusion to Literature and Revolution , “Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of the same process”. 31We are a fair way from that, but not as far as defeatists and cynics suppose.

New models of work are emerging within the folds of a dysfunctional, dying capitalism. These range from large collaborative business models such as the Spanish Mondragon Federation of Workers’ Cooperatives, to small non-profit social enterprises that rely on unpaid voluntary work to achieve definite social goals. The Mondragon Federation is Spain’s seventh-largest company, employing 75,000 people in 257 companies covering retail, industry, finance and knowledge products. Because it has its own financial support structure (local banks, mutual funds, etc.) it responds to recession differently than do traditional companies. It does not lay off workers but reassigns them, it accepts a temporary lack of profit, it provides workers for whom it cannot for the moment find work with non-monetary rewards. With wages determined by Mondragon’s worker-owners, the ratio between those who perform “executive” functions and the average worker is only 5:1, compared to 475:1 in large capitalist corporations.

In 2009 Mondragon signed an agreement with the US United Steelworkers Union (USW) to create worker cooperatives in the United States. In 2012 the USW, Mondragon and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center launched a “Union-Co-Op Model” to rescue and reinvigorate declining rust-belt industries. The model is part of a budding alternative economy in the US. Already over 13 million Americans work in 11,400 Employee Stock Ownership Plan Companies (ESOPS), with many more in a variety of not-for-profit enterprises. Extrapolating this trend, the socialist SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s visionary novel 2312 suggests that three hundred years hence the basis of the solar system’s entire economy (beyond an Earth devastated by climate change) will be a vast co-operative network run by quantum AIS called “the Mondragon”.

That network is reaching out, building on experiments begun decades ago. The town of Marinaleda in Andalusia is a successful “cooperative municipality” run on communist lines. After the death of Franco, the citizens of Marinaleda rejected mainstream political parties and elected members of the Workers’ Unity Collective to oversee their town and surrounding rural area. After buying up vacant landed estates the town merged all of its agriculture, industries and services into one integrated cooperative in which all citizens work and reward is distributed equitably. Although private enterprise is permitted (there are private bars and cafes run by locals, but a Starbucks would not be allowed), most people work for the cooperative. All workers receive the same salary and profits are re-invested to create more jobs. Its priorities and plans are decided in the town’s General Assembly, a democratic forum similar to those of the Occupy movement or the Kronstadt Soviet.

Marinaleda has no police force because there is no crime. Once a month volunteers perform necessary municipal tasks such as cleaning and maintenance. Alone in post-2008 Spain, wracked by economic depression and austerity, it has full employment (from 60% unemployment in the 1970s) and no poverty. Speaking of Marinaleda’s “communist utopia”, the town’s mayor Juan Manuel Gordillo said, “We have learned that it is not enough to define utopia, nor is it enough to fight against the reactionary forces. One must build it here and now, brick by brick, patiently but steadily, until we can make the old dreams a reality […] We sincerely believe that there is no future that is not built in the present”. 32

Mondragon and Marinaleda exemplify the real, protracted transition from capitalism to socialism, not the Leninist fantasy version. Other examples are micro-enterprises with social aims, credit unions, mutuals, ESOPS and workers’ cooperatives, supported by the use of labour-saving technology to reduce working hours with no loss of pay. The over-riding characteristic of such organsations is that they are value-driven, motivated by social goals rather than distribution of profit. From them to become firmly established - to succeed, connect and grow–the entire structure of privatised, corporate-led neoliberalism must be replaced by an enabling economy of intelligent regulation and state-sponsored support. With this in mind a growing number of left thinkers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Nick Srnicek argue that one of the 21st century left’s central tasks is to foster new value systems, new business models, new working patterns, new relations of production, and insert these into the DNA of capitalism, reconfiguring its operating code, mutating the system from within, liberating knowledge, information, creativity and labour-time.