Cooperatives – for Wales and direct action
There is hardly a family in Wales that has not already been hit hard by the loss of work as a direct consequence of the global credit crunch. The Welsh economy is now beginning to experience the sting in the tail of the success of overseas inward direct investment attracted to Wales by Government support over the last 25 years. Now the international economy is in a crisis much of that investment is being considered marginal by the multi-national corporate owners and is being withdrawn or run down.
In addition to inward investment the UK Government and since 1997, the Welsh Assembly Government, has also supported the economic development policy of new start ups through financial support, enterprise policies and innovation from higher education. But even in this area, the role of external ownership and control has taken its toll, with many new start ups being purchased by multi-national corporations as soon as they show promise and profit. Rachel’s Yogurt and Tynant Water are well known examples being respectively owned by North American and Italian companies. With international research indicating that 1/3 of small and medium sized enterprises will change hands over the next 10 years and will require succession strategies the issue of who owns and controls should be taken seriously.
Ownership and control are the missing ingredients in the Assembly Governments economic development policy. Cooperatives and mutuals in their various forms owned and controlled from below by their members provide a way forward that addresses ownership and control issues to provide a more sustainable from of governance than simple share ownership. Successful mutual building societies such as the Nationwide and Principality; the turn around in the fortunes of the Cooperative Group; and Welsh successes such as Tower Colliery, credit unions and to some extent Welsh Water are an indication of what this different form of ownership can achieve. Cooperatives should be moved up
Over the last 10 years colleagues at the Wales Institute for Research into Cooperatives (WIRC) at UWIC have undertaken international research into cooperatives and their economic and social potential. We have developed some key ideas about how and why cooperatives could provide a firm foundation for the Welsh economy of the future. First, there needs to be a rebalance of policy away from inward investment toward indigenous capital growth and the mobilization of small savings for local investment. Second, sustaining this capital within the territory it has been created through ‘capital anchoring’. This goes a considerable way to preventing a sell off by spreading the cooperative ownership through many members who, in the case of worker cooperatives, are also the employees. Thus there is a smaller financial attraction per member in a sell off and possible loss of employment act as incentives to maintain ownership and control. Cooperative ownership can also be backed up by legal means and within the articles and memorandum of governance.
Third, following the example of Quebec, a Welsh ‘solidarity’ investment fund needs to be established that is itself a cooperative, owned by the investors with a single vote, who will only be able to save up to a maximum. Investment will be ethically made in Wales to cooperatives and organisations that have good records in areas such as climate change, fair trade, health and safety and trade union recognition. Such a fund will help start ups and employee buyouts and help cooperatives smooth and cope with changes in economic activity between sectors.
Taking these principles forward we have explored the possibilities of cooperatives in a number of areas based upon research into existing cooperatives or organisations that come close to the model.
Tower Colliery: although now closed as a deep mine the workers cooperatives was a tremendous success for 13 years sustaining a highly technical modern coal mine with a very active democratic governance structure. Tower consistently made a surplus whilst maintaining employment, having an excellent safety record and 100% trade union membership. The cooperative still continues to operate in the coal mining industry and is central to a heads of the valleys development project. It has been an inspiration to workers around the world.
Cultural industries: in research produced for
Knowledge cooperatives: original this was based upon our work in the declining Welsh engineering industry where we suggested that ailing firms could work together as ‘consortia cooperatives’ to sell their skills to a wider market. More recently, following work on the relationship between higher education and the economy, we have proposed that knowledge cooperatives could form a method of bringing together academics and producers as equal owners to develop and market a stream of innovations in specific sectors. The cooperative form ensuring that the benefits are anchored within Wales.
Cooperative history in the UK is one that is rooted in forms of direct action and self activity with workers coming together to find collective solutions to the problems that face them. Direct action is alive and well in the green movement through organisations such as the Transitional Towns, which is aimed at finding local solutions to the event of oil supplies being exhausted without waiting for state action. The movement has only been in existence for just over two years but has inspired action throughout the UK as well in countries such as New Zealand.
In the same way it should be possible for us to start a new tradition of cooperative direct action. For example, it is possible to link the issues of climate change, price and employment together in local cooperative action. Consumer cooperatives could be formed locally to collective organise the purchase of energy supplies. The Phone Co-op established in the UK recently does this in relation to phone and broadband providing a service that is reliable, price competitive and returns a profit share to members. Local energy cooperatives could similar reduce price but also specifically target renewable energy supplies using revenue and savings to invest in local renewable energy production. Car cooperatives have started in the UK and provide a form of reducing the ownership and use of individual transport. Similar arrangements have and can be made for fresh food etc.
The point about bringing these cooperative initiatives together locally is that they not only provide a method of tackling climate change and prices of basic energy through a method of collective direct action but also the new cooperatives will provide a source of permanent employment.
Although states have to play a key role in the current crisis, cooperatives provide a way of enabling those affected by the crisis to take direct action now to address the personal impacts, whilst making links to other members of their local communities who are also interested in issues of climate change and energy prices.
Ownership and control should become a key issue for the long term social and economic development in Wales. Cooperatives provide a method of putting this into practice. There is plenty that the Assembly Government could lead on and also help to facilitate local direct action. Even in the absence of any government policy lead, cooperatives provide a way for people at the local level to take action which could have immediate impact and also create a more sustainable Welsh economy.
Born 12.10.1947 near St Pancras in central London. I was a post war social statistic, baby bulge - now boomer - lived in flats in Stoke Newington North London until 7, then Hemel Hempstead new town, Basildon new town, then bungalow land in Thundersley Essex, near Southend. Went to a Secondary Modern School in that area and left school as early as possible in December 1962 just 15 with no formal qualifications. Secondary modern school was a good basis for knowing what working class meant as we were the factory fodder, the brighter ones being creamed off into the local grammar school. However mum and dad were fairly active at work and in community stuff like the Scouts and we knew what collective organisation was about and had a friend whose dad was a local Labour Councillor. One of very few in the very Tory dominated bit of Essex.Started work as an office boy in a solicitors office (lawyer) in New Square Lincolns Inn just off the Strand in January 1963. Around the same time largely through friends and connections with the Labour Councillor's son started going to Young Socialist - part of the LP - and CND meetings. Went on the Aldermaston marches at Easter and YS conferences and generally got involved with the left. At that time all the bits of the old Trotskyist RSL were active in the LP and I think I went to all their meetings. Politics were seriously honed at work with constant arguments with the working class Tories that I worked with - all Daily Mail and Express readers. Nothing like it for sharpening the mind! Also connections with CND offered contact with anarchist leaning organisations like Solidarity. All this politics and being a teenager in the 60's with access to all the Soho clubs with my 7 day a week rail season ticket up to London was a wonderful time to be around and alive. I was one of the youngest sub agents at 16 in the UK for the LP in the 1964 general election.Early that year I purchased a copy of the three volumes of Capital for 3/6d old money from the Chinese bookshop near the British Museum. I remember devouring it in a park nearby reading a couple of the chapters on commodities, use and exchange value before going back to work. It was my lunchtime. It made complete sense and fitted my experience of being a worker and still does. The other eye opening and formative experience was really quite strange. I was so keen on the first Wilson Labour Government that I went out and purchased their first White Paper which was about the economic crisis. I don't know what I expected to read but my heart feel into my boots when they hitched themselves to solving the balance of payments crisis which to me was a problem of how capitalism worked: they were going to prop it up as a priority! That was it for me for Parliamentary socialism. Early in 1965 I moved to Paignton Devon with my parents, partly forĀ health reasons,Ā still worked as a solicitors clerk but also working on the beach and in hotels. I quickly got involved in the local YS and CND, virtually the same people, and for a few months strayed into the Young Communist League. The following year 1966 I went to Russia with the old CP Progressive Tours staying in Leningrad and Moscow. We spent quite a bit of time hunting out young people and it became very clear that the Soviet Union had little to do with socialism. I came back a total convert to Trotsky and got involved in Young Guard which was part of the International Socialist Group that later became the SWP. I produced a little magazine for the local YS typing and duplicating the thing as you did in those days. It was noticed by a member of the LP who had some connections with the Mirror Group who owned the local papers in Torquay and shocked that I didn't have any qualifications suggested that I should take shorthand, typing, English language and literature 'O' levels at evening classes and I may get a start in journalism. I started these in 1965 and discovered that it was possible to get a grant and go to college full time if I stuck with the evening classes for a year. I managed to do this and started full time in 1966 doing O levels and an A level in one year and three As the following years. So within 2 years left clerking behind for ever and started doing Sociology and Social History at Durham University in 1968, getting married in the same year.After Durham I started PhD research in Swansea but although I gathered some really useful stuff - history it was - trying hard to be a professional revolutionary and a parent led to it not being written up. Still it was good enough to just about get a job at Llandaff Technical College in Cardiff where I started in January 1974 teaching day release apprentices Liberal Studies. My goodness that was hard! I moved on to teaching and then running the TU training provision for the TUC at the College until 1989 when Thatcherism saw it off. The College had by that time become the Cardiff Institute of Higher Education and eventually became the University of Wales Institute Cardiff. I finally complete a PhD in the 1990s and retired from the University in 2007 ending my career supervising PhDs and running a research institute into Cooperatives.During the 34 years at UWIC I was active in the lecturers union NATFHE at all levels from being branch secretary to being a member of the national executive and a UK negotiator. To me it was always essential to practise what you preach trying to unite theory and practice so the key was to link the reality of trade union struggle with the practice of building a revolutionary party and winning people to socialism by building organisation like the ANL and Rock Against Racism. Until 1984 this was through the SWP and organising all sorts of rank and file groups within the union. I didn't see the problem but the SWP decided that the 1980s downturn would compromise members so it was decided that we should not hold lead trade union positions. I could see the problem but didn't think pulling out of the struggle as the right answer. So, in the middle of a struggle over 40 compulsory redundancies I was expelled from the SWP. Of course I continued to fight the Tory Government through the union and through community activity such as trying to stop our local school from closing. In the end I had to have some political links so rejoined the LP in 1987.I'm no longer a member as the Labour Party now has little to do with socialism. I'm now a member of Left Unity and my reasons for joining are here: http://leftunity.org/labour-party-resignation-letter-joining-left-unity/ . During the 1990s I became interested in forms of struggle and direct action other than that through trade unions. Partly if was having to teach management at work which was awful and in desperation to retain some sanity and consistency with a Marxist analysis I became involved in the debates around critical management theory. I soon realised that they were heading for abstraction so thought we should explore the extent to which cooperatives and social movements could actually be seen as an alternative way of organising, owning and controlling value and its production. This led me to work with colleagues and comrades in the cooperative and green movement both in terms of research and political activity. I'm particularly interested in the issues involved with bringing the analysis of Marx and the green movement together both in theory and practice and have been working on the possibility that the concept of a transitional demand can have a parallel one of a transitional action and how the two may work together. See the first discussion piece.Ā
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