The collapse of…socialism?

More bad economic news arrived today. Nevermind that it refers to last year; it is still pretty bad and makes me wonder what has happened since then. The overall national median income dropped by nearly 4%. And worse, still, income gaps increased substantially between 2007 and 2008. That was 2008, the good old days, when there was still debate about whether we were even in a recession.

In light of all that, I have to wonder what’s up with yesterday’s New York Times article about “the specter of socialism’s slow collapse.” 

It says:

Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, involving a breakdown of the financial system due to “irrational exuberance,” greed and the weakness of regulatory systems, European Socialist parties and their left-wing cousins have not found a compelling response, let alone taken advantage of the right’s failures.

Ouch.

This is absurd. We are living through financial crisis that couldn’t have been better designed in the wildest dreams of bolshevik propagandists. There are six people chasing every open job, foreclosures and homelessness are spiraling out of control, and furloughs are becoming almost normal. It seems like socialists have their work cut out for them. Where are your pitchforks, comrades?

Of course, the article isn’t really about revolutionary socialism, so much as the electoral kind that just got trounced in Germany. Is this just an electoral quirk, brought on by conservative parties co-opting the socialist platform of government economic control?

Before I go on, I have to make a couple of side comments. First, it may be tempting to blame Obama for the wave of  ”socialism” sweeping America, but the Bush administration really got the ball rolling in its current direction. Second, I’m also including the Democrats in my concept of conservative, as one of the deep flaws of that party is that it is approximately as tied to big capitalist business as are the Republicans.

Ultimately, socialism’s problem is that it has already been tried. I’ll grant that there are many variations on the theme (Russia, China and Yugoslavia all had major differences, notwithstanding our paranoid belief that “The Reds” were coming to get us) and some of them have not fully played out yet (Cuba actually has some good bits, and might be a lot better if it weren’t so severely isolated). But in general, there is a perception that socialism didn’t/doesn’t work. 

Personally, my big beef with state socialism is that it is compulsory. Aside from offending my generally libertarian values (and please don’t confuse that with the values of the Libertarian Party), it doesn’t seem like that is a viable arrangement. People – at least those raised under capitalism – apparently have some need for rewards tied to performance. We also seem to need some sense of buy-in – a choice of joining or not.

But the question of why socialism isn’t making a roaring comeback during capitalism’s most embarrassing failure leads to another question: now what?

If socialism has failed, capitalism is failing. The decline in income may turn around, but the income gap appears to be permanent and worsening and directly tied to capitalism’s practice of rewarding wealth and power with more wealth and power (this is the basic structure of corporate governance, which is based on one vote per share).

That scheme obviously can’t go on forever. There have previously been periodic socialist revolutions whenever wealth concentration gets too far out of hand. These serve to reset the system, but that fail-safe seems to be missing this time. So, again, now what?

If neither of the great economic ideologies work, then what the heck are we supposed to do?

It should come as no big surprise to my regular readers that I see a solution in cooperatives. These are businesses that give one vote per member, and which generally distribute profit based on use of the business (through profit sharing or patronage dividends). They are also a global movement involving perhaps a billion people worldwide.

Co-ops have been around for more than 160 years in their modern form, and at times they have been dominant players in national and regional economies. So far none have fully transformed a society, but they are still a work in progress. There are a growing number of models for how cooperatives can work on a gigantic scale, including two large federations in Italy (Confcooperative, and Legacoop), and The Co-operative Group in the UK – each with millions of members).

The most advanced and integrated, however, is perhaps Mondragon, which employs over 100,000 people in a system of worker ownership. In a half-century these cooperatives have effectively taken over many functions usually considered the work of government, including healthcare, social security, and education. They have one of Spain’s largest banks and its largest domestically-owned grocery store chain – jointly owned with consumers. They have created a new economic system within the free market, which controls no territory beyond the real estate that it has purchased. No territory has ever been conquered, no land or property has been forcibly collectivized, and no one has been killed or captured in its name. It is a great answer to the stalemate between capitalism and socialism.

I will be in Mondragon in under two weeks, and I am looking forward to that in a way that can’t really be described. 

I’m not sure when I first learned of Mondragon, but it has been at least a decade. During that time I’ve gushed repeatedly about it; at times I’m sure I’ve misstated or exaggerated certain things. This trip will probably reveal more of these little errors (hopefully none in print!), and I am ready to be humbled in that way. Something that big and complex is impossible to fully grasp, especially from afar. Even ten days up close is just scratching the surface.

I know that Mondragon is not perfect, and some of their recent directions are a bit troubling to me. But the Basques have created a model that the whole world should be considering, finding its pros and cons, looking for ways to apply its lessons in our own communities. Capitalism and socialism are not going away, so we need to get to work organizing in their shadows, finding ways to achieve the best ideals of both while avoiding their pitfalls.

Addressing the Climate Threat

Climate change is a big deal. Everyone (except for those who still believe it isn’t really happening, and perhaps still smoke for health reasons) wants to seem like they are doing something about it. The UN just launched an effort to mobilize support for an aggressive deal at the December summit in Copenhagen. Even the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh made some noises about encouraging nations to make their own stuff instead of importing it from the US. It’s a baby step, but good attitude, G20!

Even some whose business models demand that they keep acting in ways that destroy the climate balance – oil companies, for instance – are pretending that they are actually preventing climate change. Concern about climate change is really pretty mainstream, it is an essential marketing technique, it is profitable. And it should be.

The UN’s approach “provides a framework for business leaders to advance practical solutions and help shape public policy and attitudes.” That is, it relies on business to clean up its own mess. I’m skeptical of this approach, but it might turn out that business realizes it they will be less able to profit in a devastated world, and is collectively willing to forgo some short-term profits.  That’s good. I hope I’m wrong.

Unfortunately, there is a fundamental problem that is generally overlooked: Capitalism is hard-wired to make increasing profits, and that is essentially in conflict with the need to consume less and generate less atmospheric carbon. It is possible to be efficient and design things in less harmful ways, but the investor-owned corporation has a genetic problem with conservation in that it always seeks to increase the bottom line. Capitalism has the growth logic of a cancer, which causes cells of one sort to invade the spaces of others.

On the other hand, cooperatives at least have a fundamental structure that is based on meeting the needs of members. This does not solve all the problems, and many co-ops have fallen prey to the siren song of growth for its own sake. More disturbing, some electric co-ops (including one that used to count me as a member) are still dragging their feet on the transition to green sources of energy, even as their national association is moving in the right direction. But at least decisions are made in a democratic way.

More generally, Cooperatives Europe has just launched its own coordinated initiative, Cooperatives Addressing the Climate Threat. The site acknowledges that co-ops are already doing great work, and seeks to coordinate that effort. One of their first goals is to cut emissions by 10% in 2010. That is a breath of fresh air when most plans aim to make changes by the time our grandchildren are all dead.

The project is led by Bob Burlson, the CEO of Britain’s the Co-operative Group. Burlson has the bona-fides, as he has led his massive co-op to launch a host of ambitious ecological projects. When I met him last year, he said that the co-op has not only decided to become carbon neutral in present operations; they have apparently set a goal of eventually offsetting all the carbon they’ve consumed in their160+ year history. I wish I could find more about that, but for now you’ll have to take my word for it.

Really addressing climate change won’t be easy since there is a large gap between global current consumption and sustainable levels of consumption. So if we are going to mitigate or reverse climate change, it will hurt in other ways. But as long as we allow decisions to be made by people who already control an unfair portion of the world’s resources, there’s little chance of a humane and just downshift in our consumption.

In contrast, cooperative structure means that the decision-makers are supposed to wear two hats; both the interest of the enterprise, and the interest of the communities in which it operates. It’s not for nothing that concern for community is one of the seven cooperative principles. We face a future of challenging decisions about how to allocate resources, and the more equality is involved throughout the global community, the better it is likely to turn out.

Euskal Herria, ho!

Three weeks from tomorrow, I will be flying to Bilbao, Spain. That will be my long-awaited arrival in the Basque Homeland, Euskal Herria, and my gateway to Mondragon.

I don’t remember when I first heard of these co-ops, but it was probably early in my career as a co-op geek. It’s amazing stuff: tens of thousands of people have built a democratic economic system out of the ashes of two wars, despite being an oppressed minority living under Franco’s dictatorship for much of that time.

In half a century, they’ve created a model for the world, including their own educational system, social security and healthcare, R&D, and finance. They also co-own Eroski, one of Spain’s largest grocery store chains, which is developing a joint worker-consumer ownership.

I’ll be writing much more about the cooperatives over the next month, but at the moment I’m preoccupied by the Basques themselves. They are different that the rest of Europeans, and not just in the way that Spaniards are different from Frenchfolk.

The Basques have been a distinct people since at least Roman times, wedged between the Atlantic and the Pyrenees. They were seafaring folk, with ancient trade relations as distant as Iceland. They did a lot of mining and made a lot of weapons, and it seems that people mostly left them alone as empires ebbed and flowed and invaders roamed what is now France and Spain. Think about it, would you rather sack Madrid/Paris or climb over the mountains to tangle with a bunch of unintelligible weapon-makers?

What really has me intrigued is their language, Euskara. It was banned during the Franco years, but is now making a comeback. Spanish is more common, but about 20% of Basques use Euskara at home. And it is a matter of cultural identity and national pride.

I’m fully expecting to have a hard time understanding anything. Heck, I’ll be doing great if I even grasp a fraction of their dialect/accent of Castellano (which itself apparently sounds way different than espanol de California!) I know that everyone in the world speaks English now, and people won’t necesarily see me as an oppressor if I ask them donde esta el bano, so I’ll probably be able to communicate with most people (especially after I’ve had a couple of drinks and lose my linguistic inhibition). Nevertheless, I want to at least learn a few phrases of the local tongue, to have made an effort, y’know?

Problem is, the language is  not even in the Indo-European family. That is to say, Persian, Russian and Hindi are all more closely related to Spanish than any of them are related to Euskara). There is even scholarly debate about whether Euskara is actually related to the Caucasian/Dene language family (and yes, it’s THAT Dene, like the North American first nation). Remnant indigenous cultures speaking languages that are related even though they’ve got all of Europe, Asia, and an ocean between them. How cool is that? How can I not try to learn some Basque?

Here’s my first problem: “No” is pronounced “ess” and that just sounds affirmative to my poor little anglophone brain. On the bright side “yes” is pronounced “bai” and that doesn’t really sound like anything except  “bye” (pronounced “agur”) or “hi” which Basques pronounce “eup” which sort of sounds affirmative and brings me back in a befuddled circle.

Nevertheless, I want to learn some Euskara. Just looking at the written stuff is doing nothing for me. Therefore, I went looking for some sort of audio to get me started, and this is what I’m up against.

But all is not lost. I found a little online guide with audio, which will give me the vocabulary of a two-year old. Unfortunately, it takes twelve syllables to ask, ”Do you speak English?” and I can’t make heads or tails of it.

Wish me luck.

Me and the Daily Kos (DTR)

Please pardon my recent silence. The past two weeks have been a wild combination of school starting up, taking a little vacation to my previous residence of Olympia, and several days incommunicado while on a road trip to the Western Worker Co-op Conference, hosted at an off-the-grid worker-owned resort called Breitenbush Hot Springs. No phone or email is lovely, until it ends.

I have also been procrastinating, because this is an awkward post to write: A few months ago, I started cross-posting at the Daily Kos, in response to a high concentration of inaccurate statements by bloggers there, on the subject of healthcare co-ops. My WordPress blog is fine, but doesn’t seem to get much traffic, and certainly not any vigorous exchanges of comments.

At first, my Daily Kos posts were pretty focused on the co-op controversy in health care reform, but I gradually started including some of my other posts about my pet topic of how people are collectively improving their situations. All seemed to be well until a comment in response to my most recent post informed me that I was actually off-topic.

It turns out I had been laboring under the impression (from the “about” link) that the site is simply

the premier online political community with 2.5 million unique visitors per month and 215,000 registered users. It is at once a news organization, community, and activist hub.

I can totally get behind that, and offered my posts in the spirit of sharing news, building community and fostering activism. However, it turns out the site is also

a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory.

I encourage Kos to post this part of the definition somewhere more prominent than the FAQ wiki but nevertheless will respect it since it has been called to my attention. It certainly explains a few things, and in retrospect, I’m surprised that I missed the deeply electoral focus of the featured blogs.

It may not seem like it from my main position (that the co-op plan is worth considering and the public plan is fundamentally flawed), but I have a reasonable political overlap with this crew. However, I’m not going to join the cause of electoral victory for its own sake.

I offer my explanation of why this is so in the spirit of dialogue. I respect people who have chosen to express politics through a party structure, but I don’t share that choice. I hope my thoughts here can help Democrats improve their work, which I hope includes creation of a more democratic society.

I would rather have the Democrats in power than the Republicans, but that’s not saying much; I’ve been deeply and repeatedly disappointed by the Dems’ conservatism, especially in the face of the recent economic crisis. I’ve never registered as a Democrat (or Republican). I would prefer a vibrant multi-party system that isn’t based on the cynical and divisive quest for 50% +1, and know that will only happen if we vote for what we really believe. My voting record has included Democrats, but more often Greens, Libertarians, and all sorts of independents.

I have generally steered clear of direct involvement in electoral politics, other than the occasional letter to Congress. I did work on a Democrat’s campaign once, but that she had previously run as a Green, and her platform included a plank against gun control (ahh, Alaska). Her opponent (who won) was particularly obnoxious and it was a small town, so I made an exception.

I’ve got two main reasons for steering clear of electoral politics. Each of these could use their own separate essay of support, and I’m not seeking to convince anyone in this post. Just trying to explain myself a bit.

First, my life’s work is in building a society in which the control of government is not very important. Co-ops thrive in both liberal and conservative communities; while I have a lot of issues with how conservative politics are expressed in this nation and time, I share the basic conservative desire to let people work things out instead of relying on government for solutions. On the other hand, conservatives generally fail to come up with a compelling idea of how social needs can be addressed with democracy and accountability (for example, through cooperatives).

Second, our political democracy as a whole is severely degraded. Unless we find ways to rebuild our democratic skills from the grassroots while confronting the concentration of wealth in society and politics (again, cooperatives can be very helpful), we’ll be doomed to choosing the lesser of evils and mostly settling for politicians who are beholden to corporate sponsors.

I am glad that there are folks like the Kossacks trying to improve the Democratic party. There is a lot of work to be done in getting our society back from the brink, and we all need to be toiling away at our respective stations, whether those are inside or outside of the political system.

So where does this leave me and the Daily Kos? Should I go with the broader definition of the Daily Kos as general hub for news/community/activism? In that case I would still keep my posts in line with electoral issues like health reform (where the co-op option is still on the table against all odds and my own expectations), and blog about other groovy cooperative things at WordPress. Or should I accept the partisan concept and leave it to the Democrats?

Since I’m a zealous democrat (if not a Democrat), I’m going to turn that over to y’all, with my first poll.

For my fellow non-Democrats reading this at WordPress, I encourage you to abstain from voting unless you are already a member of the Daily Kos, since I’m trying to get a reading on whether I’m welcome among the Kossacks. Thank you.

Best bike fix ever!(!!)

To begin, a confession: I do not take very good care of my bicycle. I tend to let problems go on way too long, figuring that as long as the thing still rolls, I might as well not get my hands dirty. As a result, my old beater has gotten more and more beaten.

But last weekend, I could not ignore my back tire any longer. The thing was totally bald, and totally coming apart on the sidewalls. There was no doubt that it would soon fail me, and possibly in a very dangerous way. I decided it was finally time to check out the Sacramento Bike Kitchen. 

I’ve known about this volunteer-run bike shop for a while now, and have been waiting for the right moment when I remember to go visit during their somewhat limited hours.

The kitchen’s goals “ include providing low-cost transportation, self-sufficiency through bicycle maintenance, and safety through education.” The kitchen is volunteer run, uses pretty much all used parts cannibalized from donated bikes. These are mosly stored in a huge old library card catalog with drawers labeled “front fork axles” and “bearings” and “rear suspension” and so on. They also have some new items, like patches, lubes, and bearings.

I have to say there was a bit of chaotic magic going on.

I arrived on a hot Saturday afternoon, and there were about 20 people there, some of whom had name tags and/or t-shirts with the kitchen’s logo. I lurked by the cash register until someone made eye contact, paid my $5 “tool fee” and quickly discovered that the line between volunteer and everyone else was really blurry. It took a little while to get through the awkwardness of not really knowing who to ask about things, but once I did, it was one of the best experiences I’ve had in a long while.

A new donation of tires had just come in, so I picked one that looked good and got to work. All the work stations were full and this was a basic swap. So I just flipped my bike over in the alley and got to it. But while I was at it, and there was all this bike-fixing energy swirling around, I figured I should ask someone about why my back wheel was a bit wiggly.

To make a long story short, my bearings were trashed. One thing led to another, and I wound up spending about three hours dissecting and cleaning out my axles, replacing the bearings, and learning a ton from my hero Ron, who spent at least an hour helping me just because I was there. He even re-did the thing when it turned out the first replacement axle was a little bent. We sort of jerry-rigged the whole thing together, but my old beater is noticeably better now. Who knew that having my bearings fixed would make such a difference?

But the real beauty of the experience was that I also got to help a couple of people. A woman was trying to remove a stuck nut, and asked for help because she didn’t have the wrist strength. An elderly man with a cane strapped to his bike frame somehow assumed that I knew what I was doing, and recruited me to help him attach his cargo rack. In the process, I noticed that his brake cable was on wrong, so I fixed that for him too. The organic flow of assistance and information was a beautiful glimpse into what mutual aid can accomplish.

I don’t know how many sisters the Bike Kitchen has. It looks like there are a bunch, scattered from  San Francisco to Bakersfield. I also know of the Davis Bike Collective (formerly Bike Church) But it’s a great idea, and it seems to be a movement, with echoes of the Depression-era self help cooperative movement. So far these DIY repair shops are only for bikes. But they have cousins in computer-repair shops like FreeGeek and there’s no real reason why it couldn’t be applied to appliances, clothing, camping gear, or whatever else hasn’t yet been computerized to the point that mere peasants can’t fix it.

Rather than sitting around without money to fix things, we can potentially recreate the old barter networks. It’s been done before, and we can do it again.

The sky is not (yet) falling

I need to clarify my previous post, on the cheery subject of banking industry shenanigans.

It seems that I was a little sloppy, apparently not putting enough energy into clearly making and stating my case. In particular, I failed to distinguish my writing from the “economic apocalypse” blog genre, and apparently came across as making a claim that the banking industry is about to collapse and take down the rest of the economy and we’re all going to die. And, by extension, that it is all Obama’s and/or Bush’s fault.

There’s a lot of such writing these days, and I wouldn’t rule out a pretty grim economic scenario. However, I don’t know enough about what tricks the Fed and its international banking conspiracy friends have up their sleeves to make any sort of informed prediction beyond observing that there is a pretty strong precedent set by the eventual collapse of every single empire in history. And we are all indeed going to die…eventually.

So why did I write that little rant? Why not just stick to my usual approach of focusing on the really cool ways that people are organizing cooperatively to lessen the impact of whatever negativity flows out of the banking industry and government?

The main reason is that it seems like the government is now firmly in the business of deciding which enterprises live, and which die. For that reason, it is important that it make good decisions.

However, the federal government has not been making decisions that look good to me (beyond the short term of avoiding a sudden economic collapse, which was important and good). Not only is it shoveling tax dollars at the people who made the mess, but it also seems to be shoveling tax dollars at people who are merrily making new messes. Unless government learns from its mistakes, I fear we may be in for more rough sledding.

So it is even more important that we take seriously our own responsibility to decide where our money goes, whether that means savings, investment, or spending. That’s why I ended with my little sales pitch about credit unions. I want to help spread the word that there are alternatives. They may not be perfect, but I think they’re our best chance at creating something new and better out of the smoking wreckage of “free market” banking.

Not only do financial cooperatives provide an opportunity to put our money where it is more likely to be put to good use (and we are more likely to have a say in defining “good”). But they create a venue in which we can build democratic and grassroots economic structures that are not based on hoping the government and banks make the right decisions.