The International capitalist system in the twenty-first century has entered in a systemic and structural crisis, and it appears to have entered a depressed continuum with almost no hope of recovery (Meszaros 2010; Foster 2014). With the expansion of capital on a global scale and with the increased integration of the global economy, any crisis of capital takes the shape of a world crisis. There remains no significant space to dilute the impacts of the crisis by shifting it to any other parts of the world, as imperialist capital able to do before the current phase of globalisation. In these situations, it appears that the threefold contradictions of capital system, the contradiction between production and control, production and consumption, and production and circulation, cannot be any more reconciled (Foster 2014).
It is in this context the capitalist system is confronting a closing circle and appears to be touching its absolute limits. On the other hand, by nature, the expansion of capital is a never-ending process, a question of life and death for capital and capitalism. It is in these conditions we have entered into what is potentially the deadliest phase of imperialism (Meszaros 2010; Foster 2014). The fact that financial economy has swollen to more than three times the size of the real economy reflects the severity of the crisis (Meszaros 2010, p. 28).
The contradiction between the limitless expansion of capital on the one hand, and capitalist expansion confronting a closing circle on the other create conditions wherein capitalist expansion emerges as a most destructive and uncontrollable process. In these situations, the more capital unlocks the powers of productivity, the more it must unleash the powers of destruction; and the more it extends the volume of production, the more it must bury everything under mountains of suffocating waste (Foster 2014). There is a widening gulf between production genuinely dedicated to meeting human needs and production devoted to the self-reproduction of capital, and it is intensifying the destructive potential of capitalist expansion. The impacts are reflected in planetary ecological crisis on the one hand and mass unemployment and the fundamental precariousness of labour on the other (Richard Antunes 2010, pp. 15â16).
Ecological crisis, mass unemployment and worsening conditions of work are leading to growing discontent of the working classes across the globe. Capital, incapable of resolving these problems, is unleashing severe repression on the people. It is also moving towards new and more efficient extra-economic strategies of social control, for example, surveillance capitalism; propaganda targeted to misinformation, control on media to control information, racism, national chauvinism, and creating and projecting terrorism as a fake common enemy to divert mass attention from these problems.
It is in this background; there is a revival of discussions and initiatives on alternative economies and, especially, cooperatives. There are broadly two types of such initiatives. One such discourse limits it within the framework of capitalism. This perspective sees cooperatives as a safety valve of capitalism regarding its demonstrative effect for creating an illusion among the working classes that there are still some spaces left in capitalism for prosperity. These initiatives are of a purely economic nature and are focused on the economic interests of only those individuals included in the particular cooperatives.
This imperialist strategy gets its reflection in the United Nations program on solidarity economies launched in collaboration with DESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs), ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), ESCWA (Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), ILO (International Labour Organization ), OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), TDR (Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases), UN Women (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women), UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS), UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe), UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), UNESCO (United Nations Organization for Education Science and Culture), UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization), UN-NGLS (United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service), UNRISD (United Nations Research Institute for Social Development), WFP (World Food Programme) and WHO (World Health Organization) (TFSSE 2014).
There are scores of such initiatives at the ground level in various countries which are co-opted, supported and funded by the above institutions and various other imperialist funding agencies. On the national scale, this strategy is most widely practised in Brazil and, as a result, receives considerable space in the conceptual frameworks of the World Social Forum (Kerswell 2012). In India, the Self-Employed Womenâs Association (SEWA) is the most prominent example working on pro-capitalist cooperative strategies on a broader scale.
The primary objective of the United Nations solidarity economy program is a claim to help achieve the so-called millennium development goals (MDG). These include the transition from an informal sector to decent work, the greening of the economy and society, sustainable cities and human settlements, womenâs well-being and empowerment, local economic development, food security and smallholder empowerment, universal health coverage, and transformative finance (ibid). In practice, this strategy helps only a few individual workers to survive at a bare minimum level. However, this is widely propagated and projected as a viable alternative within a capitalist framework, for the sole motive of creating an illusion and watering down the growing discontents among the working class.
The alternative discourse targets the transcending of capital and capitalism. Such movements emerge as a political, economic, social and cultural movement rather than a purely economic movement. As Meszaros proposed in his book Beyond Capital, we can launch the fight against the logic of capital, and win famous battles âwithin the formal institutional domains of a capitalist society itself, making the actualization of revolutionary socialist politicsâa genuine movement toward socialismâstrategically viable within capitalist boundariesâ (Foster 2014). However, this can only work if there is âa wholesale struggle against all aspects of the capital relation and the progressive substitution of an alternative organic mode of social control within the pores of the current societyâ (MĂ©szĂĄros 1995; Foster 2014). Thus, the class struggle between labour and capital is being carried out in all spheres of life, and labour needs to pursue this goal consciously.
The basic task of the working class movement is challenging and fighting the domination of capital in all spheres of life and projecting and creating socialist alternatives. Without setting alternative collective institutions in social, cultural, political and economic spheres and without the presence of a consistent struggle for these, it is hard to develop and retain a collective and socialist consciousness in the working classes (Kerswell and Pratap 2017). It is in this context that creating institutions which promote collective ways of living and working gain significance for the working class. These institutions also serve as social laboratories for devising democratic strategies providing better space towards resolving various social problems and social contradictions among working classes based on religion, gender and caste divisions.
The most all-out ideological offensive of capital in the present era of imperialism is the triumphalist view that âthere is no alternative to capitalismâ. The presence of alternatives creates hope, and the absence of alternatives creates pessimism among the working classes. It is in this light in the current era without a broad socialist bloc, the task of creating alternative collective institutions in the social, cultural, political and economic spheres gains added relevance for the working class movement. Highlighting the demonstrative significance of cooperatives, Marx said, âIts great merit is to practically show that the present pauperising and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the Republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producersâ (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 81).
This perspective is reflected in various initiatives of the working class movement across the globe in building collective and cooperative institutions as a strategy of working-class movement towards transcending the capital. The most prominent example is that of Venezuela which has been studied by Ciccariello-Maher (2016) in the book Building the Commune. In India, the most prominently discussed example is Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha which is a central subject of study in this book.
The present study critically analyses the transformative potential of various aspects of cooperative movements in India by situating them in the above conceptual framework. We base this study on interviews with workers and members and office bearers of trade unions, cooperatives and peoplesâ organisations. It centres on four social experiments: (a) the cooperative initiatives of Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh in and around Dalli-Rajhara, Chhattisgarh, (b) collective institutions created by a peopleâs initiative in Menda, Maharashtra, (c) an industrial workerâs cooperative run by the Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) in Kolkata, and (d) a construction workers cooperative run by SEWA in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
The study is the result of lengthy field work which took place in the summer of 2015. The researchers visited various sites in India conducting field observations and interviews, including Dalli-Rajhara and Raipur in Chhattisgarh, Kolkata in West Bengal, Ahmedabad and the Narmada district of Gujarat, and Gadchiroli in Maharashtra. In all, we interviewed over 200 workers, farmers, members and office bearers of unions, cooperatives, and peoples organisations, and political leaders as part of this study. Interview participants were selected via both purposive and snowball sampling. The researchers established contact with key leaders or informants within each movement and were able to gain access to a wider range of interviews as a result. As noted by Cresswell (2005, p. 203) âthe intent is not to generalize to a population, but to develop an in-depth exploration of a central phenomenonâ, in this case, the experience of being part of the cooperative movements of workers discussed in the various cases of this book. A random sampling approach would not be appropriate in this context. Rather than generalizing our results as a representative sample of each case, our goal was to learn as much as possible from those with vast experience with the movement, in other words, from people who were rich in information, and in particular from people who were key decision makers.
The overall purpose of this work is to consider what role if any cooperatives could play in transformative politics, particularly in countries like India which have significant labour surpluses and a large informal sector. This discussion necessitates a critical examination of the concept of the informal economy and its application in India. The first chapter, considering Indiaâs informal sector, is raising questions about the utilisation of this concept in the academic, activist and policy literature. We demystify the idea of the informal economy in India, revealing the multilayered existence of various groups of workers in vulnerable positions which are by no means inevitable or permanent but instead are the product of Indiaâs history and political economy.
Specific interventions, such as the formation of workers cooperatives, have the potential to transform the lives of Indiaâs unorganised workers, but any intervention would need to target the specific requirements of each group of unorganised workers. We argue that the concept and discourse of the informal sectors imply the permanence of unorganised, unregulated work. Conceptualising Indian labour in this way leads to a position that the state should provide support and welfare measures to help workers survive at a bare minimum level of subsistence, but also to a fundamental failure to address the structural and specific causes of vulnerabilities.
The subsequent chapters consider various aspects of the cooperative movement in India, primarily when the cooperative movement has had some interaction with the trade union movement in some form. The case studies selected represent different kinds of worker cooperatives with different histories and ideologies involved in their creation. They have been chosen to present a broad picture of the Indian cooperative workerâs movement and to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of particular strategies and tactics from the perspective of the working class.
Chapter 3 presents the historical emergence of Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM), ...