Cooperation, surplus appropriation, and the law's enjoyment

The announcement of a partnership between the United Steelworkers Union and the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, along with earlier news of a Mondragon-inspired, large-scale cooperative development in Cleveland, Ohio, sparked an exchange among members of the Rethinking Marxism community about the potential of worker cooperatives and the communal class process. Two divergent perspectives emerged. For some, the progressive potential of cooperatives lies in the internal symmetry of the communal class process: the collective production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus. For others, cooperatives are desirable because of their external relations with the larger society: worker-owners can choose to distribute surplus in ways that are socially progressive. Worker-cooperative members of an intercooperative organization, the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives, define membership in the organization as ongoing contributions of surplus to a capitalization fund that enables the organization to continue its mission. In this example, we have an instance where two perspectives coincide: worker-owners make a collective decision that affects how all cooperatives in the organization relate to the greater society. Viewed from the perspective of psychoanalytically inflected Marxian theory, VAWC supplies us with a third answer to the question as to why cooperatives are desirable: worker-owners are in a position to write their own law.