3 Reimagining Coöperation

In order to move forward, it is essential to leave behind these Cold War ideologies. The way to start is to return, briefly, to their genealogy as a way to identify where they went off track.

In the nineteenth century, the movement for worker coöperatives and workshops often pitted philanthropic entrepreneurs against communist or socialist thinkers.

The former were often social reformers who were interested, not so much in eliminating private property, as in relieving the misery of workers by sharing with them some of the profits of their work and providing for their social welfare. Many of the reformers imagined, and some built, utopian workshops, factories, and company towns, that were intended to provide for the welfare of workers. The Welsh industrialist, Robert Owen, who refashioned his textile factory at New Lanark and in 1825 created a social utopia at New Harmony in Indiana; the French merchant, Charles Fourier, who imagined and promoted the phalanstère and an entirely new circulation of desire; the French politician and historian, Louis Blanc, who advocated for government-sponsored worker coöperatives—these social visionaries focused on reorganizing industrial modes of production in order to center the interests of the workers and their families who toiled in the factories and workshops. Louis Blanc’s most important tract, in fact, was precisely called The Organization of Labor, published in 1839—one of the first texts to use the term “capitalist” in its modern meaning and to declare “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The emphasis was on reorganizing forms of production for the benefit of workers and their families, limiting the hours of labor, improving living conditions and education—not abolishing private property tout court.

The latter were more focused on overturning the regime of private property as a means of revolutionizing modes of production. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-proclaimed anarchist, championed the abolition of property and imagined workshops in which workers had full possession of the means of production. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously proposed the “expropriation of the expropriators” in The Communist Manifesto, inspiring generations of communists to embrace the conviction that change in society must pass through a revolution in the property regime and the abolition of private property. Socialist thinkers, such as Louis Auguste Blanqui and others, favored the expropriation of property as a means to enable either a commune or state ownership and organization of the means of production.

The long history of the twentieth century, however, should have taught us at least one lesson: property is never abolished, it is simply modified. What matters is not what we call it, but who reaps the benefits of its use, of its temporary possession, of the fruits of its product. Someone or some entity—whether it is one or more persons, a collective, a communist party, the state, or the general will—always has the final say on who gets to enjoy the advantages of material possessions and their fruits. There is no escaping the reality of a final decision-maker—and that person or entity inexorably allocates proprietary interests.

In effect, the abolition of property is an illusion: material goods, equipment, tools, machines, cars, land, real estate, in short, all material things are subject to competing claims to use and enjoyment, whether temporary or long-lasting. Those competing claims do not resolve by themselves. And whoever or whatever institution ultimately resolves them—whether a judge, a chief, the majority, an autocrat, or a party—they will be allocating proprietary interests. Whoever is allowed to glean dead timber, maintain a forest, build a shelter, consume the fruits, hunt, or simply walk through the land is exercising a proprietary claim, and someone will decide whether they are allowed to do so.

To think properly about property, one must return to the articulation of different proprietary interests—whether in Roman Law, borrowing concepts like usus, fructus, abusus, or in American Legal Realism with the notion of “bundles” in property law. One must understand that property is not a monolithic unitary thing that can be scrapped or allocated whole. It is a complex bundle of interests that are always separated and allocated in myriad ways and that never go away.²³³ And this is the most important thing: someone or some entity, ultimately and inexorably, gets to decide and have the final say on how those interests are distributed and who gets to enjoy them. That will never go away, even if we “abolish property.”

Thus, the challenge today can no longer be posed through a nineteenth century dichotomy of social utopianism versus communism, nor of worker welfare versus the abolition of property. The task is not to abolish property, which is no more than a quixotic phantasm. No, it must focus instead on the actual distribution of the enjoyment of material things. This requires a detailed analysis, dissection, and allocation of proprietary interests. And this leads directly to the question of who gets to reap or share the benefits of economic production, circulation, and consumption—whether it is the consumer, the worker, the merchant, the capital investor, the politician, the party member, etc.

This calls for a complete reimagination of the classic nineteenth century debates over worker workshops, communism, and socialism. Instead, we now, more than ever, need to engage in the intricate work of redesigning the distribution of proprietary interests associated with the production of wealth in society.

In order to achieve a just and equal distribution, coöperation must be reimagined for the twenty-first century, not as an abstract economic regime, but rather as a specific, concrete allocation and distribution of material interests. It is only in this way that coöperationism will be able to overcome the worn and now counterproductive debates between so-called capitalism on the one hand and communism or socialism on the other. One must analyze concrete distributions, not imagined ideal-types.

To make any progress, then, we need to focus on the actions that humans take. It has to be all about the verbs: possessing, using, improving, zoning, reaping the benefits of proprietary interests. The basic building block is not money, capital, or private property, but use, zoning, taking, improving, alienating goods, land, workshops, etc.

Specific concrete distributions are what matter. Before beginning to analyze the possible dimensions of proprietary interests, it is important first to articulate the panoply of subjects and objects—the different entities and forms associated with material possessions.