One of the problems with this kind of event is that I tend to not figure out what I would like to ask about until I have had some time to digest what was said. And that is what happened on the bus on the way home last night. So a comment there will have to do (but I might get to raise it at next Saturday’s larger conference in Maynooth).
I think the following is a fair summary of Olin-Wright’s key point: in the absence today of a game-breaking change towards egalitarian and democratic economic and social systems, one of the things we need to do it to use the opportunities that are there within the current systems to make that game-breaking change more possible. In particular, we need to work with capitalism where that helps our cause (the “symbiotic” strategy in his jargon), and we need to take the gaps in capitalism and expand them (the “interstitial” strategy in his jargon).
Co-ops, and worker-owned co-ops in particular, were given as an example of interstitial strategy at work. (I am not clear if Olin-Wright means it is the key singular interstitial strategy, or simply a very strong and feasible example.)
My question, then, arises from the following train of thought.
It is one thing for people to set up co-ops. In fact, one of the parallel sessions at Maynooth on 9 March will be by an activist trying to do that. I understand (or maybe misunderstand?) that his objective is to open a new mechanism for combating unemployment, and I do not know if he would see his work as part of an interstitial strategy of transformation. But even if he and others in co-ops do not see themselves as being part of an interstitial strategy (or even if they do not want to be), they could still be part of one.
However, my impression is that Olin-Wright is arguing that political activists need to engage with that kind of activity in some way, to help it form a part of a larger picture of creating the context in which fundamental social and economic structures can be changed.
He cited an example of an opportunity a situation that he sees arising with the baby-boomers moving into retirement. Many SMEs in the USA are owned by baby-boomers and have families that are not interested in taking over those businesses. A systematic plan to make it possible to turn those SMEs into worker-owned co-ops could help solve a problem facing the state: the firms would continue to produce and employ, while the sudden rise in the number of people with experience of worker-owned businesses could be a significant step in undermining the widespread assumption that the only way that businesses can work is as capitalist firms. A problem, though, is how those workers can get the capital needed to buy the businesses from the retiring owners. Capitalist banks are wary – or warier – of lending to co-op SMEs than to capitalist SMEs, and government could establish an investment bank for the specific purpose of supporting co-op SMEs.
Coming back to the broader point about using interstitial strategies, I think that there is a problem. On the one hand, political activists spend their time doing politics, and interstitial activists spend their time doing something that is not politics – setting up or running co-ops in the key example that Olin-Wright used as the key illustration.
And there is a key gap between them. In Ireland, it is actually legally harder to set up a co-op than it is to set up a company. But getting into the nitty gritty of law reform in the economy is not something political activists on the left are good at or do much of. For example, nobody on the left that I know of has identified the need for any of the banks in Ireland when they are “released” from government ownership to be returned to “the market” as a mutual. (Yes, I know that a mutual is not a co-op, but my point here is that even that minimum level of social ownership is not mentioned.)
And a second example is law reform for co-ops and companies. Again in Ireland, there have been two processes ongoing, and for a decade. Reforming the laws for companies has been a huge task (truly huge: I think the companies acts is the only Irish statute that is better summarized in kilograms than in numbers of pages). The heads of bill have been prepared, and the relevant minister has spoken a number of times about the bill being introduced soon. The parallel reform process for co-ops has not achieved anything like a similar output. And that should be a surprising disappointment: reform of the processes for co-ops was in at least one election manifesto, but nobody has given it any attention since the election.
From that I come to the question I would have asked if we’d suspended the forum to give me a few hours to get home and back again: Is here not a problem with the interstitial strategy as a process of transformation because it requires significant changes in what activists to do: those in the likes of the co-op movement would need to make their work more political, and political activists would need to start to master the details of on-the-ground economics and social systems rather than the high-level, abstract analyses that they are skilled at?