Psyche, Science, and Society

Scientists cut-and-run from Pluto

Crooks and Liars has a hilarious Bill Maher skit on the scientists’ demoting Pluto from planethood.

Bill: “I say it’s time for the United States to sever it’s ties with science all together and withdrawal from the solar system”

Add comment August 26th, 2006

Worker cooperatives in Venezuela: New hope for participatory democracy?

The Los Angeles Times, via ZNet, has a very interesting article on worker cooperatives being established with state aid in Venezuela. These cooperatives give workers ownership rights and an involvement in decision-making in their enterprises. In many instances, these cooperatives involve only partial worker ownership, with the former owner also retaining partial rights.

A strength of cooperatives is that they pose a democratic alternative to a private market-driven system that gives most social resources and power to the wealthy, while at the same time forming a participatory democratic base that potentially can form an alternative to any centralist, dictatorial tendencies present in the Venezuelan system. [I am not commenting on the extent of such dictatorial tendencies as good information has been hard to obtain as all information providers have strong biases that color their reports on this issue. I am simply saying that such tendencies inevitably exist in any “socialist-leaning” state and need to be countered by participatory democratic forces and structures.]

One problem with cooperatives is that they then function in a market economy and are subject to all the perverse incentives characteristic of markets: profitability triumphs over human needs and markets apparently inevitably tend to increase inequality as profits flow to the successful who then have more capital to invest.

Thus, I am skeptical that a market-cooperative system can build a human society. But I would love to be proved wrong. As a libertarian socialist, I welcome all experiments at trying to increase the participatory democratic forces in society, especially in the workplace. So lets follow this experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.

As a psychologist/psychoanalyst, I would love to study the effects of workplace ownership and participation on the participants’ psychology. How do they cope with the responsibilities and tensions? Do the participatory democratic experiences at work translate into changes in other aspects of workers’ lives? Does the experience of participating in a cooperative lead to a sense of “we,” combating the pervasive individualism of modern capitalist societies? How are values affected by involvement in a cooperative? If anyone has information on these issues, I would love to receive it.

Excerpt from article:

“Before we had a boss. Now we are the bosses,” said Hermogenes Garcia, a longtime maintenance man at the Guaiqueri.

The hotel is among 100,000 cooperatives formed in Venezuela in the last two years that are the centerpiece of President Hugo Chavez’s new socialist model to create jobs and redistribute this oil-rich country’s wealth. They now employ 7% of the country’s workforce, a number that could grow to 30% in a few years, government officials say.

Chavez is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in oil and tax revenue on the cooperatives. Although there have been allegations of gross inefficiency and graft, cooperatives have become a powerful part of the economy and society.

More than 700,000 impoverished workers across the nation have suddenly become stakeholders, such as the 200 families in Bolivar state that were recently given the right to operate a toll road connecting state capital Ciudad Bolivar and Puerto Ordaz. Poor workers are now operating steel and textile factories, fisheries and dairy farms across Venezuela with the prospect of sharing in whatever profits the enterprises turn.

“Before this was just a job. Now you feel the hotel is yours,” said Robert Carreno, head of housecleaning at the 40-room Hotel Kamarata, another hotel on Margarita Island that recently converted to a cooperative. “I have to give much more of myself now.”

1 comment August 26th, 2006