ProducerCooperatives,EducationandtheDialecticalLogicof Organization

ProducerCooperatives,EducationandtheDialecticalLogicofOrganization

byMichaelL.Rosen

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1/1987,pages:111124,onwww.ceeol.com.

POLITICAL ANALYSIS

PRODUCER COOPERATIVES, EDUCATION AND THE DIALECTICAL LOGIC OF ORGANIZATION

by Michael L. Rosen

Introduction While the formal structure and governance processes within employee owned, cooperatively controlled enterprises have been increasingly explored in the academic literature,1 the specific role of education in this form of organization has received relatively less attention. This neglect belies the fact that most who study participatory organizations neglect the need for continuously recreating the conditions necessary for democracy within the social relations of organization members. Instead, most researchers concentrate on the structural, morphological aspects of such organizations. In opposition, this work focuses on one aspect of the democratic project, the role of a technically oriented and substantively critical workplace education program, in establishing the conditions for realizing democratic relations in cooperative organizations. Recreating the conditions necessary for democracy is problematic within any sociohistoric context. In the industrialized West, however, the forces of contradiction within the capitalist mode of production particularly hinder the possibility of industrial and economic democracy. It is within this context that education may be utilized for undistorted human discourse. Education, akin on a social level to psychoanalysis of the individual, enables the critique, and potentially the negation, of organizational forces leading to bureaucratization. Education may thus be a form of permanent revolution, allowing for an ongoing transcendence of the degeneration of democratic relations. This possibility is illustrated through examples of workplace cooperative education, most noticeably from the early experiences of the Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise (PACE) project with an employee owned and operated (O & O) group of supermarkets in Philadelphia. Praxis against Bureaucracy Markovic2 notes that at critical moments practitioners and academics alike may realize the contradictions of dominating structures, and consciously seek to transcend these. Such transcendence is a moment in praxis, an overcoming of alienating forms in a merging of theory and liberating action.3 In contrast to such liberation, it is clear that at this point in history the social structure of bureaucracy functions as a form of managerial control,

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inhibiting the abolition of domination and alienation. In bureaucratized relations freedom is denied and domination reproduced primarily upon ideational grounds. The mediating role of organizational culture in the reproduction of capitalist hegemony is paramount, where consent, or the internationalization of bureaucratic consciousness, results through the continuous interaction of symbolic action and power relations particular to bureaucracy.4 Culture is the bulwark of bureaucratic control. Hence, it is not until resistance and/or struggle are elevated through critique to the realm of the ideational consequently when capitalist hegemony is demystified that elite domination is threatened. Without such critique even the perception of politics and law within bureaucracy is characterized by an extreme formalism as an expression of the reification of political and legal consciousness.5 The basic tendency of bureaucratic thought is to turn any political question into one of administration. Thus, the consciousness of one affected by bureaucratic logic is obscured, and one is not aware that behind every law that has been made lie the socially fashioned interests and the Weltanschauungen of a specific social group.6 Alienation, then, is endemic to bureaucracy. This organizational form institutionalizes discrepancies between labors capabilities, the striving to realize these, and the specialized and stratified nature of bureaucratically arranged tasks. The consciousness influenced by bureaucratic rationality is also alienated and alienating, blunting the development of a more critical, or substantive, rationality. Such consciousness is part of the legitimation of uncreative and repetitive work. It leads to an uncritical concentration on the production of ever more goods and services, with a dulled questioning of the social significance of their production and distribution, and the meaning of their consumption. Beyond this, however, such consciousness leads to the perpetuation of relations of social domination and exploitation, with work deskilled and value appropriated from its producers. Praxis, therefore, lies in theorizing and acting to transcend the consciousness and social relations which reproduce such exploitation. Beyond Bureaucracy The worker owned, controlled, and operated production cooperative, based on the one-worker/one-share/one-vote democratized governance model7 stands as one alternative to bureaucracy and the bureaucratic consciousness. It represents a change in the forces of production in response to the bureaucratic relations of and in production. While different possibilities exist to realize democratic-based change, the cooperative structure is proposed as consciously and practically addressing the aspects of domination exercised through bureaucracy, and relatedly, through the capitalist relations of production within which cooperatives are embedded. This point concerning capitalist relations of production is fundamental, for alternative work organizations of any type are embedded within the socio-economic present, and are thus,

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regardless of desire, influenced by the capitalist mode of production. Consequently, a central goal of cooperative organization must be to maximally maintain a democratic governance structure and democratic processes in opposition to market forces. These forces channel a technocratic rationalization of work activity, according to the Taylorist direction of the division and routinization of labor tasks and the appropriation of value from its producers. Heydebrand8 implicitly warns of this pressure towards the degeneration of cooperative democracy, arguing that in all current cooperative efforts a tendency towards internal contradiction arises between control structures and the market necessitated force to technocratically rationalize the work process. In other words, as work activity is technocratically rationalized the resulting structure of authority relations, the control structure, is likely to become an incrementally closer reproduction of bureaucracy. This possibility is illustrated by Stryjan,9 where, in the case of the Israeli kibbutz, work department administration is often no longer democratically rotating, but is relatively permanently assigned to expert managers, work branch membership is relatively permanently assigned, outside labor is often hired for low status tasks, and so on. These changes lead to a stratification of the workforce and a movement away from a weak to a strong hierarchy,10 where power is made invisible as it is embedded in an increasingly bureaucratized organization structure. Production and Reproduction of a Democratic Consciousness Basing his conclusions on the plywood cooperatives of the United States Pacific Northwest, Greenberg11 argues that participation in a cooperative does not lead to the development of a class consciousness, one aspect of which is an awareness of the particular contradiction between social forces which promote liberation and human development, and the forces within bureaucratic organization which impede the realization of such possibilities. Here, however, Greenberg overlooks the difference between organizational form and content, between its external appearance and its internal nature. Hence, the lack of an explicit program fostering workplace democratic processes within cooperatively owned organizations may set the stage for incremental bureaucratization. Faced with market pressures either through the need to change production arrangements in the face of adversity, or the need to reinvest capital resulting from market success and not possessing the substantive means to promote democratic organization, individuals may be likely to revert to the bureacratized social arrangements that surround them and from which they emerged. Therefore, an ongoing cooperative education program, one both technical and substantive, is critical in maintaining the conditions for democracy. The cooperative ownership structure alone, designed to overcome the mechanisms known to generate the alienation of labor in bureaucracy, is not itself a sufficient safeguard against the pressures of bureaucratization. It is important to stress that if those in cooperatives ignore the need for a radical emphasis on education, thus inhibiting the accumulation of a working knowledge sufficient

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for participation in democratic coordination structures and for understanding the substantive nature of democracy, and if they ignore collective interests beyond specific workplace interests, then the pressure towards degeneration will be more acute, in accordance with the surrounding and dominant mode of production. Given this pressure, arising from the contradiction between the cooperative forces of production in a democratic organization and the market induced need to technocratically rationalize the relations of production, a possibility to avoid degeneration lies within a dialectical logic in which contradiction itself becomes the conscious driving force for maintaining and expanding participation. Such a possibility arises when a workplace education program makes contradictions visible through a process of radical critique, through establishing the defining characteristics of a system. Once recognized, contradictions become a guide for future action,12 giving individuals the tools to consciously intervene in the making of their history.13 It is fundamental to the reproduction of cooperatives, therefore, that its citizens are conscious of social process and are themselves empowered. This is in contradistinction to the role of the citizen in advanced capitalist society, which is recreated upon the docility of its members. Passivity is encouraged, further enabling capital to accumulate and dominate. Lenhardt addresses this recreation of passivity within the formal educational realm, proposing that a primary function of the traditional education system is to prevent the development of
possible needs and capabilities of youth which might oppose the existing society. Their development is not constrained by the inculcation of particular value systems through the school system. The emergence of deviant motives and deviant subcultures is instead deprived of its foundations through the bureaucratic control of communication. Communication in schools is expropriated from students and is subjected to a bureaucracy over which the students have no control.14

For example, traditional school students, like members of other bureaucratic organizations, do not participate in decision making, be it the setting of goals or the selection of means, but are instead relegated to execution.15 Similarly, Bowles and Gintis16 write that a goal of capital in its intervention in the educational process is precisely the preparation of students to be future workers on the various levels in the hierarchy of capitalist production. This occurs through legitimation of the rationality of the capitalist relations of production, and through communication of the technical knowledge necessary for the reproduction of these relations.17 Similarly, as the content and form of traditional education is fundamental in institutionalizing the dominant relations of production, the content and form of education in the cooperative workplace is fundamental in reproducing the conditions which enable democracy. To be efficacious, therefore, education in the cooperative must be radical, intensive, and continuing, focusing on both the technical and substantive levels. Achieving this type of education is all the more problematic in light of the formal education previously experienced by

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coop members, combined with the lack of other nondemocratic experiences these workers have from pre-coop days. Education and Reflection In form and content the role played by critical education is similar to that played by psychoanalysis of the individual. Both are dedicated to demystifying a distorted consciousness through a form of depth hermeneutics.18 On the social level, reflection and critique may be utilized in structured and spontaneous settings to uncover previously obscured interrelations between power and ideology in social process. As in psychoanalysis, thought must consistently be turned inwards to achieve clarification, and through clarification, to achieve liberating change. Through placing the study of substantive concerns the relations between power and ideology in a prominant position in the day-to-day activities of the organization, those in cooperatives may achieve a transformative critique of contradicting forces. The need for a life-long recurrent exploration of the issues of substantive rationality is not overstated here. Institutionalized power relations, like individual neuroses, are bound up in forms of behavior largely unconscious, and thus largely removed from criticism. Motives for action are repressed and redirected into substitute channels, which legitimate the dominant power relations. Institutions of power are thus fundamentally mystified, and are reproduced through a distorted consciousness.19 Critique may clarify such distortion, and consequently enable the transcendence of domination. So conceived, transcendence is a task of relating theory to action, involving, in a Gramscian sense, the establishment of a counter-hegemony,20 a basis to counter the hegemony of mystified and institutionalized power relations. As in psychoanalysis, achieving an undistorted understanding not only enables, but is part of, the process of liberation. Habermas21 thus proposes that the distorted and mystified relations of power and domination described above may not only be illuminated through critique, but in the end insight can coincide with emancipation from unrecognized dependencies. Therefore the relation of theory to therapy is just as constitutive for Freudian theory is the relation of theory to praxis is for Marxian theory.22 Education and Transcendence Just as the traditional rationalization of the labor process according to the capitalist relations of production reproduces alienation, transcending these relations implies the possibility of emancipation. The notion of emancipation, as Marx23 notes however, is at least divisible between two forms, human emancipation and political emancipation.24 According to Marx,
political emancipation is . . . a dissolution of the old society, upon which the sovereign power, the alienated political life of the people rests. Political revolution is a revolution of civil society.25

Strictly taken then, political emancipation is primarily morphological, with

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political relations as a manifestation of social structure. Human emancipation, on the other hand, denotes not separation from a former dominating structure and a polarization of humans as egoistic individuals,26 but an internailization within the individual of the citizen role. According to Marx,
human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed in himself the abstract citizen, when as an individual man, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a social being, and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers, and consequently no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.27

This distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation is thus analogous, in the realm of cooperative organizations, to establishing a formal participatory structure, and imbuing this structure with democratizing social relations, relations which conscientize the participant as a citizen. It is possible that, as a result of the transformation of immediate political relations, people may be situated within a structure appearing to allow fundamental participation, but without the means to transform political potential into actual democratization. When an organization possesses a formal democratic structure, an internal democratic governance structure, and a process for radical critique, the conditions of revolution are realized. Put differently, because revolution involves a transcendence of limiting social relations, replacing these with structures allowing further emancipation, transcending bureaucracy through establishing worker cooperatives is revolutionary. It is not necessary for revolution to be sudden, forceful, or even involve the transformation of a whole social system. Instead, as Markovic28 notes, the essential characteristic of revolution is a radical transcendence of the essential internal limit of a certain social formation. Nevertheless, establishing democratic enterprise, although revolutionary in its context, is only a stage in emancipation. One which will be wholly inadequate if not accompanied by an expanding process of democratization into other realms of activity, including the state and professional politics.29 The role of critique and praxis played by radical education in the cooperative workplace consequently enables this possibility of continuing liberation. It may thus be perceived as a phase and/or mechanism of permanent revolution. From the perspective of Parvus, later expanded by Trotsky,30 the theory of permanent revolution proposed that, within the context of the Russian Revolution, the bourgeois revolution would evolve into a socialist one, consequently propelling a domino effect in the West.31 As reinterpreted by Mao, however, the essence of the theory of permanent revolution lies in the attempt to avoid a degeneration of the liberating process through the conscious regeneration of transcendence.32 The theory of permanent revolution as the ongoing regeneration of transcendence as a conscious institutionalization of a praxis orientation is precisely the role described here for education in the cooperative. The establishment of an initial structure of emancipation is thus not a sufficient means to realize democratization. To

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achieve this end, units of production must also be units of political and ideological organization, necessitating ongoing transcendence and education. A revolution without ongoing critique sustained by education, whether the revolution be sudden or gradual, bloody or bloodless, will likely fall victim to the entropy of administrative rationalization. The Structure and Content of Education Don Jose Maria Arizmendi-Arrieta, the ideological inspiration for and a founder of the Mondragon system of cooperatives in Spain among the largest system of cooperatives in the world was a strong proponent of education, both theoretical and practical. He believed that members of a cooperative should have a deep understanding of socio-economic realities, by which he meant such concepts as ownership, work, capital, salary, and the relationships between capital and labor.33 At the same time, however, he proposed that members must be educated in production, marketing, finance, and so on, that is, in the practical and technical concerns of enterprise.34 Technical knowledge is critical in cooperative education, because cooperation requires a body of participants capable of understanding and/or performing a broad range of task structures. This condition is the antithesis of that in bureaucracy. Possessing a broad skill base allows one to rotate through various positions, and equally important, to participate as a member of democratic governance groups. Most importantly, technical knowlege not only includes knowledge about tasks at the point of production, but a broad knowledge of administrative and financial issues. Achieving substantive knowledge through critique is a second and equally important aspect of cooperative education. The mystification of social relations is endemic to bureaucratic organization, where obscuring the production, appropriation, and realization of surplus value is requisite for control. Whereas the reproduction of capitalist organization precludes a demystification of this form, the reproduction of cooperative organization necessitates an ongoing critical examination of the relations of power, authority, and control among cooperators. Beyond curricular content, however, the form which education takes is fundamentally important in creating the conditions for cooperation. This may be seen by comparing the competitive form of education in traditional capitalist arenas with the form in which education is to be delivered in the cooperative realm. For example, the social relations of capitalist production and education are equally based on individual and group competition and external reward, where competition, rather than cooperation, governs the relations among participants, and an external reward system wages in the case of the economy, and grades in the case of schools holds sway.35 In opposition to this, the form of education in democratic organizations must communicate cooperative interaction based on the development of living labor, rather than capital, placing political/ideological concerns as primary. This necessitates democratic pedagogy, in which participants collectively learn from one

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another rather than solely or even primarily from a pedagogue.36 Such education, particularly as this concerns critique, must include the active participation of all involved. This approach is similar to the structure of Brechtian theatre, which negates the actor versus audience boundary. All within the arena of the drama are called upon to actively critique not only the particular set of circumstances played out on stage, but also to critique the larger set of social processes of which the play is symbolic. The aim of this approach is to demystify consciousness, and thus to promote transcendence. The Paterson Pageant of June 1913 serves as an historical example of radical education. This drama was staged by the striking silkmill workers of Paterson, New Jersey, who were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) labor union. Taking place in New York Citys Madison Square Garden, the Pageant was conceived as a publicity event to explain the workers reasons for their strike in the face of negative media attention, and if possible, to raise funds for the purchase of food, as the strikers stores were nearing depletion.37 It was staged as a one-tune performance, and involved approximately one thousand strikers acting as themselves and fifteen thousand people in the audience, who were drawn into active participation by the manner in which the event was staged. The drama was created as a mechanism to make the striking workers [and onlookers] conscious of their experiences as self-determining members of a class that shaped history,38 rather than as merely one set of workers striking against one set of owners/managers. The event was staged to raise consciousness through critique, and simultaneously, to act as an impetus in the transformation of relations between labor and capital. Anticipating Brechtian theatre, then, this historical instance, a form of democratic pedagogy, demanded active participation by all within the arena to enlighten consciousness concerning the social relations of exploitaticn experienced by workers, and to transform these as well. The ramifications of this particular instance and of radical theatre in general for substantive education within cooperative organizations are clear. This democratic model of education is based on the active confrontation and hopeful transcendence of a false consciousness recreated through the mechanisms eliciting consent to the capitalist relations of production. This critical mode of cooperative education is incorporated with the recognition that, as Habermas39 explains, the action-orienting power of education is no longer effectively conveyed through its traditional classroom form. It is instead efficaciously communicated on the politically relevant level at which technically exploitable knowledge is translatable into the context of our life world, which in this instance is at the point of work, accompanied by radical critique. The professional notion of education as something separate from the labor experience, packaged in academic wrappings, is consequently actively opposed in the cooperative organization.40 Critique is instead incorporated into the labor process, where education is understood as an essential component of the process of production. The precedent for this orientation already exists. Almquist41 documents the activities of the Swedish LO (national trade union confederation) where, for

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example, study circles are institutionalized as a part of normal working hour processes. Similarly, the PACE (Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise) group, responsible for the establishment of an increasing number of worker cooperatives in the Philadelphia region of the U.S., emphasizes the need not only for an initial phase of technical and substantive workplace education, but also for an ongoing commitment to cooperative education. The members of the PACE consulting group participate with the cooperators as partners in these projects.42 For example, PACEs most extensive commitment to date has been towards the continuing establishment of worker owned and operated supermarkets, generally located in poor and minority neighbourhoods. Before the first O & O stores named after their owned and operated structure began operation, over 600 prospective worker-owners participated in an extensive and intensive education program. This was designed to facilitate an understanding of the cooperative form, and to transmit relevant administrative and technical skills.43 The education program in this initial O & O project is explored here as an illustration of how education in producer cooperatives might be organized. The O&O Experience As Kleiner44 writes, the O & O project was marked by the first intensive pre-start-up worker education process among the employee ownership efforts of the twentieth century. There were three primary goals in this program:
To provide information to prospective worker owners on the fundamentals of worker cooperative structure and operation and the rudiments of supermarket business planning and operations. To train prospective worker owners in processes which would permit them to most effectively utilize structures permitting considerable worker participation (loosely dubbed democratic process training). To assist prospective worker owners in developing and selecting specific structures and processes in defining their enterprise, within the parameters of worker cooperatives, as they had been defined by the Mondragon group in Spain, as they have been defined historically in the United States, and as they are defined by the Internal Revenue Code Subchapter T.45

During the first week of March, 1982, the PACE consultants began a series of sessions for the prospective worker-owners, introducing them to the concept of cooperative organization. As the spring of 1982 progressed the cooperators divided into nine committees, each dealing with a particular area of organization, and a twelve member steering committee. The steering committee consisted of one member elected from each of the nine functional groups, together with three union staff members from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1357, the union representing the supermarket workers in the Philadelphia area. The individual groups, though formally performing technical functions, also functioned as units for the development of a democratic awareness. As

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Kreiner46 notes, group decision making skills were consciously being developed along with the transmission of substantive [technical] information. The education program continued for more than nine months. In its initial phases it required a minimum of ten hours of participation per week, and as the supermarkets neared opening this increased to forty hours per week.47 Throughout, the education program continued to focus on both technical and substantive issues. Both were understood to be equally necessary for establishing the conditions for cooperation. In accordance with this logic, PACE understood its educational role as necessarily continuing beyond the point the cooperatives began public operation. The PACE educational program, then, provided the first comprehensive effort in the United States not merely to create the potential for meaningful worker participation and control, but to create the capacity to understand and effectively utilize that potential.48 A holistic approach to establishing cooperatives was adopted by the PACE consultants, focusing both on the formal organization structure and on crafting democratic social relations. This was done in recognition that for workers to meaningfully participate in and control employee owned enterprises, not only must the formal corporate structure be put in place, but workers must be given the capacity to exercise that control, or the potential will remain unfulfilled.49 Particularly in the United States, programs to institutionalize this capacity to exercise control have been dramatically lacking in the cooperative movement. For example, while numerous employee owned organizations have structurally accounted for worker participation and control, they have largely neglected the need for establishing worker expertise in technical and substantive matters. Thus, with the exception of the O & O enterprises, spearheaded by their worker education program, there has been little effort in U.S. cooperatives to realize the potential for participation and control by developing the capacity for that participation and control. Workers participation in corporate governance in many situations remains relatively low. It is delegated to union leadership or union controlled board appointees, rather than directly exercised by the worker-owners themselves.50 Those at PACE consciously structured the O & O education program with the hope that this would provide a model for a new direction in cooperative enterprises, thus improving the quality of corporate decisions, increase workers commitment to their jobs, and develop human potential in a manner lacking within a traditional corporate structure.51 It is of particular note that the PACE group considers the most important failing of their original educational program to stem from a substantive issue, an identification of the origin of rights. When introducing the notion of cooperative organization to the prospective cooperators, the PACE team presented the basic point of departure between traditional organization and the cooperative as one revolving around ownership. In cooperatives, economic and legal ownership and thus operational control is limited to and equally distributed among the immediate producers. Ownership was a point of focus because in bureaucracy and in the model of

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cooperative organization communicated by PACE to the prospective O & O cooperators, fundamental economic rights are seen to flow from capital investment. However, given this perspective, coupled with the economic exigencies the market pressures of desiring at times the labor of part-time workers, the advice of nonowners, and so on, the foundation exists for a division of the labor force into hierarchically and horizontally stratified groups, segmented by material and symbolic reward. The consequence of institutionalizing this traditional capitalist ownership orientation in the O & O cooperatives is thus to reproduce a capitalist labor process within ostensibly participatory organizations. In the majority of Western cooperatives full citizenship mandates some form of capital investment by workers. Wage rights are then seen to flow from ones labor, and ownerships rights from ones capital investment. But it is this capital investment that denotes ownership. In the Israeli kibbutz model, on the other hand, rights flow completely from labor, or more correctly, from the willingness to labor (if one is disabled she or he maintains full membership). Thus, kibbutz membership does not involve a capital investment, nor the keeping of individualized capital accounts. Instead, patronage is based on the assumption of labor responsibility, which is then generalized. Each member belongs and is rewarded equally. On the other hand, the flow of full citizenship rights in the O & O network of organizations, as in the Mondragon situation, is primarily based on a capital theory of ownership, rather than on a labor theory. This establishes a framework for the development of socially asymmetrical relations, and thus the potential for domination and exploitation, as in the traditional bureaucratic organization. Kreiner hence notes that while the legal aspects of private ownership must be addressed in cooperatives embedded in capitalist societies, rights derived from labor must also be emphasized. He writes that
the failure to counterbalance this legal perspective on ownership with the philosophical notion that, in a worker cooperative, rights fundamentally spring from ones labor participation, not ones capital contribution, was the greatest substantive flaw in the [PACE] educational design. Subsequent efforts need to take special care to focus on this distinction, both philosophically and operationally (i.e. non-owner workers institutionalized on boards of directors, grievance council, elimination of wage distinctions between owners and nonowners), or to structurally redesign the enterprises to eliminate the potential for such dichotomies (for example, by mandating that all employees be owners while establishing differential membership fees based on employment status).52

Conclusion Cooperative organization is a continuing process of becoming, a perpetual act of democratizing social relations which is not achievable merely through establishing a formal structure of participation. Knowledge arising through critique, and the utilization of this knowledge as a guide for ongoing social transformation, is concomittantly fundamental to the successful democratization of the labor process, and ultimately to the democratization of all

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economic, state, and professional political relations. As such, the commitment to education is a critical part of this process of critique, and ultimately, of praxis. In the cooperative realm critical education is simultaneously an outcome of and a moment in struggle, providing and at the same time stimulating the need to know, ultimately demystifying the acceptance of ignorance and complacency. Education stimulates aspirations, and then provides a mechanism to aid in fulfilling these.53 As Pateman54 states,
the desire to know may . . . only become established as people discover the possibility of changing the world in changing it, in the discovery of their own strength and the recognition of repressed desires. It is not knowledge that makes people feel free; it is more likely that struggling for freedom makes people want and need knowledge.55

In summary, the process of transcending the traditional mode of bureaucratic management towards cooperative administrative coordination is fundamentally complex. It necessitates not only a change in the formal structure of organizations, but also a change in the substantive rationality underlying the capitalist labor process. The democratic producer cooperative, therefore, requires not merely a formal structure of participatory governance, but also a labor force capable of reproducing democratized social relations. This in turn requires a labor force which not only has substantial technical capabilities, but one which also has a developed consciousness of democracy, in part created and perpetuated through education. Without the active communication of these aspects of knowledge, degeneration from participation to bureaucracy within the capitalist environment is more likely. Hence, the implementation of a pre- and post-opening educational program, both technical and substantively critical, is fundamental in enabling the realization of democratized relationships within the organization, and is part of a wider social process of liberation from domination.56
NOTES
1. See Stewart Perry and Hunt Davis, The Worker-Owned Firm: The Idea and Its Conceptual Limits, Economic and Industrial Democracy, Vol. 6, no. 3, August 1985, pp. 275--29S; and Keith Bradley and Alan Gelb, Cooperation at Work: The Mondragon Experience (London: Heinemann, 1983). Mihailo Markovi, From Affluence to Praxis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), p. 24. Wolf Heydebrand and Beverly Burris, The Limits of Praxis in Critical Theory, presented at Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, August 28, 1980. Abner Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). Ljubomir Tadic, BureaucracyReified Organization in Mihailo Markovi and Gajo Petrovic, eds., Praxis (Boston: Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), p. 293. Idem. See Henk Thomas and Chris Logan, Mondragon, An Economic Analysis (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1982) and Andrew Lamas, A Critical Theory of Ownership, working paper, Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise, 1986. Wolf Heydebrand, Organizational Contradiction in Public Bureaucracies: Toward a Marxian

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

Theory of Organizations in Amitai Etzioni and Edward Lehman, eds., A Sociological Reader on Complex Organizations (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), p. 63 and p. 69. Yohanan Stryjan, Self-Management: The Case of the Kibbutz, Economic and Industrial Democracy Vol. 4, no. 2, 1983, pp. 243284. Branko Horvat Note on Participation, Hierarchy and Justice, Economic Analysis and Workers managemnt, 2, XIII, 1979. Edward Greenberg, Context and Cooperation: Systematic Variation in the Political Effects of Workplace Democracy, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 4, 2, 1983, pp. 191224. Heydebrand, op. cit., p. 69. Paulo Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1973). Gero Lenhardt, School and Wage Labor, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2,2, 1981, p. 207. Ibid., p. 202. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Education as a Site of Contradictions in the Production of the Capital-Labor Relationship: Second Thoughts on the Correspondence Principle, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2, 2, 1981, p. 225. Michael Apple and Louis Weis, Ideology and Practice in Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983). Jrgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon, 1971), p. 218. Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jrgen Habermas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), p 86. Martin Carnoy, Education, Industrial Democracy and the State, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2, 2, 1981, pp. 256. Jrgen Habermas, Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon, 1973), p. 9. Idem. Karl Marx, Zur Judenfrage, first published in Deutsche-Franzsische Jahrbcher, February, in MEGA, Vol. 1, 1, 1844, p. 596. Markovi, op. cit., p. 176. Marx, op cit., p. 596, cited in Markovi, op. cit., p. 176. Markovi, op. cit., p. 177. Marx, op. cit., p. 559, cited in Markovi, op. cit., p. 177. Markovi, op. cit., p. 191. Mihailo Markovi, Democratic Socialism: Theory and Practice (New York: St. Martins Press, 1982 , p.6. See Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism, Vol. 2, translated by P.S. Falla (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Kolakowski, op. cit., p. 408. See Mao Tse-Tung, Mao Tse-Tung: An Anthology of His Writings (New York: Mentor, 1954) and Charles Bettelheim, Cultural Revolution and Industrial Organization in China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). Thomas and Logan, op. cit., p. 54. Idem. Bowles and Gintis, op. cit., p. 225. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). Steve Golin, The Paterson Pageant: Success or Failure?, Socialist Review, 13, 3, 1983, pp. 4580, Linda Nochlin, The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913, Art in America, Vol. 52, MayJune 1974, p. 67. Jrgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon, 1970), p. 53. Robert Turner and Roger Count, Education for Industrial Democracy: An Evaluation of the Experimental Trade Union Studies Project, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2, 3, 1981, p. 391 A.C. Almquist, The Training of Workers Representatives for Participation in Decisions within Undertakings, a report to the International Labour Organization (Stockholm: Swedish Labour Office, 1977). Lamas, op. cit. Sherman Kreiner and Andrew Lamas, Worker Ownership: Keeping APACE, Win Magazine, 1983, p.5 Sherman Kreiner, Design of a Worker Cooperative Education Program: The O & O Project as a Case Study, working paper, Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise, 1983, p. 1.

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 18. Idem. Idem. Thomas Schuller, Common Discourse? The Language of Industrial Democracy, Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2, 2, 1981, p. 281. 54. T. Pateman, Language, Truth and Politics (Sussex: Jean Stroud, 1980). 55. Cited in Schuller, op. cit., p. 281. 56. I gratefully appreciate insightful comments from Andrew Lamas, Philadelphia Association for Cooperative Enterprise (PACE) and R. Kabaliswaran and J. R. Yune, New York University, for discussions of this work.