Marx addressed this question quite clearly in The International Workingmen's Association, 1866: Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council
"a) We acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperizing, and despotic system of the subordination of labor to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.
"(b) Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co- operative labor, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realized save by the transfer of the organized forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves."
This cannot be accomplished in Venezuela or elsewhere without those active in the struggle to transfer state power to the producers coming together in the type of organization Lenin fought for in What is to Be Done. to work out their strategy and coordinate their revolutionary work. This means uniting the more active and politically conscious cooperatives members, trade unionists, campesinos and intellectuals in a common, national organization, one which will actually implement Chavez' vision of a new socialist state.
Rosa Luxemburg developed Marx's statement, based on another 35 years of experience with cooperatives, in Reform or Revolution,(1900) where she deals with Eduard Bernstein's views on reforming capitalism into socialism. She pointed out that production cooperatives under capitalism, unlike consumer cooperatives, must obey and enforce the economic impositions of the competitive capitalist system or go under. Therefore, "Within the framework of present [capitalist] society, producers' co-operatives are limited to the role of simple annexes to consumers' co-operatives." Why?
"As a result of competition, the complete domination of the process of production by the interests of capital -- that is, pitiless exploitation -- becomes a condition for the survival of each enterprise [cooperative or not]". In other words, use is made of all methods that enable an enterprise to stand up against its competitors in the market. The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are " obliged to take toward themselves the role of capitalist entrepreneur -- a contradiction that accounts for the usual failure of production co-operatives which either become pure capitalist enterprises or, if the workers' interests continue to predominate, end by dissolving.
'Producers' co-operatives can survive within capitalist economy only " by removing themselves artificially from the influence of the laws of free competition. And they can succeed in doing the last only when they assure themselves beforehand of a constant circle of consumers, that is, when they assure themselves of a constant market.
'If it is true that the possibilities of existence of producers' co-operatives within capitalism are bound up with the possibilities of existence of consumers' co-operatives, then the scope of the former is limited, in the most favorable of cases, to the small local market and to the manufacture of articles serving immediate needs, especially food products. Consumers' and therefore producers' co-operatives, are excluded from the most important branches of capital production -- the textile, mining, metallurgical and petroleum industries, machine construction, locomotive and ship-building. For this reason alone, cooperatives in the field of production cannot be seriously considered as the instrument of a general social transformation."
Lenin held a unique position to elaborate on the role of cooperatives in socialism, given his five year leadership of the Russian producers having actually "transferred the organized forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves."
He declared that "Socialist society is one single cooperative" [1] ; that building socialism meant "the whole of the Soviet Republic"will become one great cooperative of working people." [2]
Prior to the revolution, Lenin elaborated on Marx's above statement at the International Socialist Conference in Copenhagen (1910) against those in the Second International Lenin referred to as catering to "bourgeois reformers." In his The Question of Co-Operative Societies at the International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen Lenin explained that Jaures' view that cooperatives "help the workers to prepare the democratization and socialization of the means of production and distribution" (a view similar to Harnecker's et al) was nebulous and "entirely acceptable to the ideologists of the petty proprietor and the theoreticians of bourgeois reformism." [3]
In one of his last works, On Co-operation , Lenin, as if responding to Harnecker et al. on transitioning to socialism by forming cooperatives, added to the statements of Marx and Luxemburg:
"There is a lot of fantasy in the dreams of the old cooperators". Why were the plans of the old cooperators, from Robert Owen onwards, fantastic? Because they dreamed of peacefully remodeling contemporary society into socialism without taking account of such fundamental questions as the class struggle, the capture of political power by the working-class, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiting class.
'....people do not understand the fundamental, the rock-bottom significance of the working-class political struggle for the overthrow of the rule of the exploiters. We have overthrown the rule of the exploiters, and much that was fantastic, even romantic, even banal in the dreams of the old cooperators is now becoming unvarnished reality.
"Indeed, since political power is in the hands of the working-class, since this political power owns all the means of production, the only task, indeed, that remains for us is to organize the population in cooperative societies".
"Indeed, the power of the state over all large-scale means of production, political power in the hands of the proletariat, the alliance of this proletariat with the many millions of small and very small peasants, the assured proletarian leadership of the peasantry, etc. -- is this not all that is necessary to build a complete socialist society out of cooperatives, out of cooperatives alone, which we formerly ridiculed as huckstering...?" [4]
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