Dan Clore <clore@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:5hl2j0F3l64qnU1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> brique wrote:
> > *Anarcissie* <anarcissie@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> > news:1186116498.790523.234240@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >> On Aug 3, 12:26 am, "brique" <briquen...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >>> Dan Clore <cl...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
> >>> ...
> >>>> "Given the new ground that ROC-NY is trying to cover -- the
creation
> > of
> >>>> a worker cooperative-type restaurant -- it's hardly surprising that
> >>>> there's conflict among the members of the co-op as this very
difficult
> >>>> model begins to take shape," Carroll said. "It's unfortunate that
> >>>> litigation has to be the consequence of these unresolved conflicts,
> >>>> because of the promise of what it's about . . . carving out a new
> >>>> definition of who's an employer -- an employer who is an owner but
> > also
> >>>> a worker, and there's a little bit of chaos inherent," he said.
> >>> Maybe they should have done a bit of research. In the UK the
Industrial
> >>> Common Owner****p Movement has several decades of experience in this
> > field,
> >>> along with model constitutions, rules, etc. all of which have been
put
> > into
> >>> practice with varying degrees of business success. And if anyone is
> > worried
> >>> about such awful socialist liberalism..... the legislation was
passed
> > under
> >>> Thatchers rule, the sponsoring MP being none other than Norman
> > Tebbit.......
>
> >> Americans are pretty carefully kept from knowing anything
> >> about anything but traditional authoritarian capitalist business
> >> models by both the schools and the media. You can see this
> >> on Usenet, where over the years dozens of people have
> >> informed me that there are no viable, functioning communes
> >> or coops. That may be changing now that anyone can look
> >> them up on the Internet, but it's changing pretty slowly.
> >> Consequently every cooperative effort starts from square 1,
> >> if not square zero.
> >>
> > True, the best way to stop people looking for an alternative is to
first
> > convince them that none exist....
>
> And there are two main ways of doing that: (1) simply ignore the
> alternative, as the mainstream media, schools, etc., generally do, so
> that people never hear about it in the first place; (2) misrepresent the
> alternative, so that people will believe untrue, negative things about
> it, and therefore consider it too unattractive to be a real alternative
> -- as we see here on Usenet, where efforts to form workers cooperatives
> like the above misrepresented as attempts at totalitarian
state-communism.
My experience of worker-co-ops ( formed under the ICOM rules I mentioned
above) was that a surprising number of the participants ended up behaving
like any 'normal' management structure. Oddly, or perhaps not, this did
reflect the social background of the group, with those from middle-class
backgrounds seemingly more willing to adopt labour division and
specialisation, guess who considered themselves best suited to
'co-ordination' and 'office' duties, whilst those from working class
backgrounds found themselves often ignored when discussing finances,
future
plans, etc. Also noticable was a fairly strict, and over several years,
growing, shopfloor/office demarcation, on one occasion enforced by
complaints about 'grubby shoes' messing up the new office carpeting
leading
to an effective ban on shopfloor workers even entering them.
The regular 'managment meetings' revealed a surprising number of
stitch-ups,
policies already discussed and decided upon by the 'office' side,
presented
as pretty much done and dusted to the shopfloor side. This probably
reflected the ease they had in discussing matters and access to the
relevant
information, etc whilst the shopfloor was so noisy ( it was a printroom)
lip-reading was the norm for communication.
Far from leading to 'mass-murdering socialist totalitarianism' my view was
that the impetus was towards behaving like any run of-the-mill business,
it
was just the shareholder structure that was unusual.
Is this inevitable? No, but it did seem to be the 'easiest' course for
some,
merely adopting the same strategies for workplace advancement and
power-games and applying them in that work environment.
>
> --
> Dan Clore
>
> My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
> http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/1587154838/ref=nosim/thedanclorenecro
> Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
> http://www.geocities.com/clorebeast/
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
> immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
> -- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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