Camila Piñeiro Harnecker (ed.), Cooperatives and Socialism: A View from Cuba, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 351 pp. ISBN: 978-1-137-27774-9 (hardback); 978-1-137-27775-6 (eBook).
Edited by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, Cooperatives and Socialism: A View from Cuba is a collection that examines the relationship between cooperativism, workers’ self-management, and socialism both theoretically and through experiences from different countries. The book was prepared at a time when a new cooperative movement was beginning to develop in Cuba and takes as its starting point the question of what role cooperatives can play in a socialist society. However, the work is not limited to Cuba; rather than treating cooperatives as a simple “third way” between the capitalist market and centralized state management, it discusses them in terms of the democratization of production and management.
In the book’s basic approach, the distinctive feature of a cooperative is not merely its form of ownership, but workers’ collective decision-making power over production and management. In a genuine producer cooperative, workers’ participation in strategic and administrative decisions is not a mechanism of “participation” left to the discretion of managers; it is a constitutive principle grounded in members’ rights and exercised through decision-making bodies created by the members themselves. The cooperative is therefore treated as a concrete form of self-management insofar as decisions concerning the use of the means of production are made by workers directly or through elected and accountable representatives, irrespective of who legally owns those means of production.
The theoretical sections of the collection address the contested place of cooperativism and self-management within socialist thought. Cooperativism and self-management in Marx, Engels, and Lenin; Lenin’s conception of socialist cooperativism; Che Guevara’s approach to socialist transition and cooperatives; and István Mészáros’s perspective on self-managed socialism are each examined in separate chapters. These discussions extend to fundamental questions such as whether state ownership alone amounts to social ownership, how enterprise autonomy can be reconciled with social interests, and how workplace self-management can be related to democratic planning. Through Mészáros in particular, the book emphasizes that self-management should not remain confined within the boundaries of the enterprise, but that production, distribution, and consumption should also be democratically coordinated at the social level.
The comparative section of the book brings together Mondragón, the FUCVAM housing cooperatives in Uruguay, the solidarity economy in Brazil, worker-recuperated enterprises in Argentina, and cooperatives and direct social property initiatives in Venezuela. These experiences show that cooperatives do not constitute a single and fixed organizational model, but develop different relationships with the state, the market, and surrounding communities. In the Argentine case, Andrés Ruggeri examines how recovered enterprises, unlike traditional cooperatives, place assemblies at the center of everyday decision-making, organize production without bosses, and confront tensions between democratic management and market pressures. The section on Brazil, meanwhile, clearly distinguishes democratic and solidarity-based cooperatives from “false cooperatives” that merely use cooperative legal status to reduce labour costs.
The collection also does not idealize cooperatives as flawless organizations capable of existing autonomously outside the capitalist market. Through the growth and internationalization of Mondragón, it discusses bureaucratization, the use of wage labour, and the pressures that economic competition can place on democratic and social objectives. In contrast, solidarity among cooperatives, common funds, federations, public support, and relations with communities are highlighted as mechanisms that can help counter the limits faced by individual enterprises. Within this framework, the book argues that cooperatives cannot overcome capitalist logic on their own, but that when they form part of a broader process of social transformation they can become important spaces in which the social relations of a future post-capitalist society are experienced in the present.
The final section of the book brings these debates back to Cuba and examines the tension between state ownership, cooperative autonomy, and democratic self-management through the experience of agricultural cooperatives. In discussing the CCS, CPA, and UBPC forms in Cuba, the book particularly emphasizes how direct state administrative control can restrict cooperatives’ real autonomy in decision-making. It argues that if cooperatives are to function not as extensions of state enterprises but as organizations democratically governed by their own members, they must possess a sufficient degree of autonomy.
In this respect, Cooperatives and Socialism is an important source that approaches cooperativism not merely as a model of enterprise or ownership, but through the relationships between workers’ self-management, social ownership, democratic planning, and socialist transformation. One of the book’s main contributions is that it reduces cooperatives neither to structures that automatically lead to socialism nor to initiatives inevitably destined to degenerate within capitalism. Instead, it highlights their capacities for democratic management, their relationships with the market and the state, and the degree to which they are integrated into broader social networks as decisive questions.