Cooperative Subjects: Toward a Post-Fantasmatic Enjoyment of the Economy

Abstract

Abstract This piece explores practices within some cooperative firms as attempts to foster a subject who has a particular relationship with work and with the community economy. We call this relationship identifying or working in the gap: deriving satisfaction from engaging with the various antagonisms, conflicts, and contingencies that attend the cooperative and its relationship with the community in which it is constituted. Drawing on complementary strains of poststructuralist Marxian theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic thought, we speculate that such subjects are post-fantasmatic in relation to the economy—not in the sense that they no longer have narratives that explain their working lives, but that these narratives do not revolve around capitalocentric economic fantasy and its various symptoms and resentments. We offer a few brief examples of worker coop members working in and identifying with the gap, attempting to keep the negativity of communal production intact through the different phases of collective economic activity. Keywords: CooperativismSubjectivityCapitalocentrismCommunity Economy Notes 1Our involvement in different action research projects brought us into contact with many of the people who were the basis for these caricatures. One such project attempted to document sustainability initiatives undertaken by enterprises, municipalities, and educational institutions in our area. We made contacts by going to local functions that dealt with sustainability and business initiatives. Perhaps because we weren't wholly invested in the project, we were in a good position to study the affective dynamics in the meetings. One of the people on whom Stanley Grimm is based had an authoritative self-presentation and zeal that made his colleagues cringe visibly when he was speaking. It seemed that his every effort at pursuing his goals alienated the very people disposed to ally with him, which reinforced his fantasy that he was the only person really “walking the talk.” This experience has been repeated in a number of different settings. 2We should point out that these caricatures are presented here as full and fully defined subjects, almost wholly without identity beyond their resentment and frustration. Our commitment to an overdeterminist understanding of subjectivity (acknowledging that subjects are complex, multiple, contradictory, and changing) and of effectivity (accepting that the political outcomes of any particular action or subjective position are also c omplex, multiple, contradictory, and changing) does not preclude us here from fixing these characters, for the moment, to tell a particular story, the telling of which we hope will have certain positive outcomes. If you recognize yourself in these characters’ attachment to fantasy, or identify with our frustrations with them, then one such positive effect may have already occurred. 2In addition, at this point it is fair to inquire about the fantasies of the authors. There are at least three responses to this inquiry that come to mind: (1) to deny that we have a fantasy about the economy, because we have overcome fantasy and replaced it with something more like true knowledge; (2) to argue that we have replaced one fantasy with another, better fantasy, one that leads us to a better place and one that if widely shared would produce a better society; and (3) to suggest that if one can never be outside fantasy, one can at least develop a different relationship to it, predicated on acknowledging the structure of fantasy and the Utopian impulse. 2Taking this third approach, we acknowledge that Hilton, Grimm, and Bellow are the symptoms of our particular fantasy; we recognize our desire to believe that without subjects like them, without leftist subjectivity built around resentment, our particular vision of a future society would be realizable. 3As people who identify with the Marxian tradition, we recognize that there is a vast literature from this perspective that addresses the connection between subjectivity and economy, and the role of desire, fantasy, and consciousness from a variety of perspectives. Since this discussion stretches from Marx through Lenin and Lukács to Althusser and Žižek, it would be exceedingly difficult to chart our agreements with and divergences from this tradition. 3What we wish to distance ourselves from here is a certain strain within the Marxist tradition that is enmeshed in the fantasy of an unalienated individual or an economy freed from conflict and contradiction. This wish places us at odds with fantastic versions of Marxism and with those within the Marxist tradition that attempt to restore an “integral wholeness” to the economic subject. Fantasy is defined here for us by the existence of the frustrating symptom that permits desire to remain in play by constantly throwing up obstacles to its “realization.” Many have observed that Soviet orthodoxy under Stalin evoked and continually deferred socialist paradise by pointing to threats both internal and external (Žižek Citation2001). In a different way, the notion of “false consciousness,” the idea that there is some technique of analysis or performance that allows oneself or one's “class” to arrive at their true self-interest, can be understood as another type of fantasy. 3One particularly useful approach squarely within the Marxist tradition, which does not view the issue through the lens of psychoanalysis, is that taken by Amariglio and Callari (Citation1989), who argue that Marx's very formulation of the terms “commodity fetishism” and “value” contain within them Marx's rejection of economic determinism and express his understanding of subjectivity as overdetermined. “The key to the concept of value lies not in any universal law of value,” they write “but in the historical conjunctures which reproduce that objectification of human relations which is the content of bourgeois consciousness and which Marx began to theorize with the concept of commodity fetishism. Far from being proof of the closure of Marx's discourse at the level of the economy, the concept of commodity fetishism is Marx's way of overturning the discursive privilege of the economy” (1989, 44). 4See also Diskin and Sandler (Citation1994) for a critique of the residual economic determinism in Radical Democratic theory. 5Özselçuk argues quite forcefully that the general treatment of the term “economy” by the Radical Democrats tends toward essentialism. She argues that this economic essentialism takes on different forms in Laclau's work. One essentialism is a sort of empiricist belief that the working class is a vestige, existing as a social identity only in certain enclaves (remnant mining communities, for example). Here he seems to be saying that those who identify as “working class” are too few in number to be the locus of political antagonism or a politics of resignification. According to Özselçuk, Laclau's second form of economic essentialism is far more pervasive. The economy is represented again and again as singularly capitalist—as an undifferentiated unity that is immune to resignification. This same essentialism is present in other Radical Democratic theorists. Stavrakakis maintains that “the economy” is a depoliticizing force in which a link between consumption and identity displaces the power of the identities that are the sites of constitutive antagonisms and democracy. As Gibson-Graham (Citation1996) argues, the economy becomes for the Radical Democrats a force that shapes the social without itself being in any way shaped. The critical point for Özselçuk is that “the economy” remains singular, undifferentiated, and presumed capitalist precisely because it is, a priori, theorized as such. 6We follow Resnick and Wolff (Citation1987) in defining a communal enterprise as one in which the workers who produce the wealth also collectively appropriate and distribute the surplus associated with their productive economic activity. Thus, in the worker-owned copy shop we talk about below, each productive member of the enterprise makes decisions that determine the wage levels, how much to spend on new equipment, whether to sub-out accounting or do it in house, how much to spend on advertising, and so on. There is a considerable range of decision-making processes governing the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus. For instance, in the Mondragon cooperatives a longstanding convention places 70 percent of the surplus (the portion of value of the total product that remains after the expense of wages, inputs, and nonproductive labor has been met) into individual worker accounts. The rationale behind this large allocation of surplus is to ensure that the cooperator remains identified with and committed to the success of the communal enterprise. The worker-owned copy shop whose members we have spent some time with have adopted this convention. However, other elements of what to do with the surplus—including establishing the value of labor power (wage levels)—are continually open to renegotiation. In still other communal firms there may be considerably more flexibility in terms of what is up for negotiation. 7Many people within the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA) have used class analysis to describe the various and variable forms of the enterprise (or other productive sites like households). For example, Norton (Citation2001) and Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff (Citation2001)Citation talk about how the distinction between necessary and surplus labor is one that can shift over time and in response to political struggle or ethical commitments within the enterprise. In relation to the collective copy shop, accounting was originally an “administrative duty” performed on a rotating basis by each collective member. Eventually, as the business became more successful, the task fell increasingly to the most competent individual within the group. When he eventually complained at a weekly meeting, it was decided that it would be more equitable simply to farm out this task to an accounting firm in town (to a self-employed accountant) rather than keep this activity internal to the cooperative firm. 8Of course, there is an enormous amount of unpaid labor producing goods and services outside firms (in households, for example), and these goods are not subject to market exchange (see the range of essays in Gibson-Graham, Resnick, and Wolff Citation2000; and Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff Citation1994). Household economic activity can be compelled and exploitative (as is the case with traditional feudal households) or households can be the sites of continual generosity (gift-giving that can extend well beyond the immediate family). Likewise, community sites like churches and social organizations can also engage in all kinds of productive activity or exchange that might potentially increase the well-being of communities, so that the economy becomes understood as a heterogeneous terrain. One person featured in Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis's documentary The Take (Citation2004) explains the success of the tile-making cooperative Zanon Ceramics factory (the “granddaddy” of the movement in Argentina) by saying that they have given back to community schools, hospitals, and other sites of community. This in turn has endeared Zanon to the community and that community has provided a wide degree of support as the cooperative has faced eviction notice after eviction notice. The success of Zanon as a communal enterprise in a sense depends on how they conjugate with nonmarket economic activities, mechanisms of exchange (gifts) and so forth. It is the process of conjugating these various elements of the diverse economy that we refer to as the constitution of a community economic space.