The popular slogan “People before Profit” adopted by worker co-operatives begs the question how people, in this case members of worker co-operatives, can trump profit in a profit-driven economy. The predictable response is that the democratic organization of co-operatives, where decisions are guided by the interests of the members and not exclusively by the imperatives of capital, amply validates the truth of the slogan.
Members of worker co-operatives necessarily live schizophrenic lives. On one hand, we must function as owners of small businesses and contend with all the insidious forces of capitalism – the anti-ethic of profits before people. At the same time we are members of an egalitarian corporate entity that most people can’t imagine existing, much less thriving.
This large collection of essays by Colin Ward ( Autonomy, Solidarity, Possibility: The Colin Ward Reader ) – his last publishing effort before he died last year at the age of 84 – affords those who know him only as the author of the ever-popular Anarchy in Action (now in print for almost 40 years!)
Industrialism, and what came to be referred to as capitalism, took shape as we all know in a tumultuous era marked by a struggle that encompassed social and intellectual upheavals. During these several centuries the opposition to the dominance of Capital took many forms; in the early period from the aristocracy to the peasants who fought the enclosures and the early mechanization of economic life to the later period the craftspeople and the workers in the new factories.