The Temporary Nature of Cooperation

Rotation is the means to temporary authority, but the purpose of temporary authority is more than just prevention of usurpation or permanent hierarchical structures. Instead temporary also defines the length of the actual authority itself. Most collective actions should be temporary as a rule, self-eliminating when the need no longer exists. The best example that I have to support this would be the modern union. Collective bargaining is a necessity for workers in a capitalist society, & the workers need to negotiate directly with the corporation as a collective for the power to negotiate as equals with the corporate power. Even a few hundred workers need an individual or a committee to represent them in negotiations. What often begins as a grassroots, cooperative effort among the workers, becomes a stepping stone or a position to gain power & prestige by collectivists who seek to control others for their personal gain using the "good of the whole" mantra.

In the earliest efforts of union-building toward collective bargaining, the grassroots efforts had leaders & individuals who pressed the majority toward the necessary steps to make the collective bargaining effort possible. Again, let’s differentiate between collective action & collectivism. Getting together to watch a movie is a collective action. Workers joining together to demand better pay, working conditions, respect is a collective action. They are not collectivism necessarily. If the individuals get together & support what is ‘best for the whole group’ because they are told to do so, then willingly sacrifice some individuals to the whole, that is collectivism. If workers begin to offer up some members of the union as sacrifices for the good of the whole, say let’s give the corporation power to fire the older/younger workers so that the whole group gets a pay raise, this is collectivism.

This is the problem with the current unionism in this country. For the most part, the leaders tend to protect certain constituencies within the union that are either the most vocal or the largest in numbers. Unions become part of the hierarchy of the corporate world, standing between the workers & the corporate executives. This role, which appears as one of protection, becomes a place of power maintained by coercion & propaganda. The head of the union almost always doles out prized positions in the union structure that provide it with vocal supporters & useful idiots. Both protect & support the union leadership. The union leadership has to find justification for its existence when the collective bargaining process has ended. They generally get heavily into political efforts to elect candidates that they ‘evaluate’ as being ‘pro-union’ or ‘pro-worker’. They promote the union as benevolent & philanthropic. They provide the legal advice regarding due process & work to keep teachers from being fired unfairly or ‘not by the contract’. They also spend time promoting the union process to the membership, demonstrating why the union dues must be collected & why these dues are so important to the good of the whole. This occurs because workers within the union are led to believe that the union must be protected over everything else, that any attack on the union was an attack on them, & that they must be ready to sacrifice for the union.

I’m not well-educated on the history of the UFT, but I’m fully aware of the UNITY faction & its control of the union hierarchy. First let’s point out that every district representative & all the leadership of the UFT are members of the UNITY Faction. The faction gives out those positions as rewards for loyalty & productivity. This gives the UNITY leadership great power to wield & determines that those in positions below remain loyal to the collective. Delegate Assemblies are blatant examples of this, where any proposal not approved by the UNITY faction will be voted down in lock-step fashion. UNITY uses collective mentality that guarantees that some membership will be sacrificed for the the good of the whole. Let me be fair: no other faction in the UFT has a platform for cooperative, consensus-based organization either.

First, there is always some segment of the membership that has to be sacrificed, currently the ATRs are the sacrificial lambs to the UNITY collective. The most outspoken & active segment of the union, as well as the ones most capable of putting in the time for activity & speaking are the retirees. The retirees hold sway currently. This has not always been the case. Now however, as the baby-boomer generation retires, they represent the largest segment. Demographics is one reason for their larger position, but the other is perhaps the most insidious part of the NCLB/RTTT Common Core examinpolooza that the reform movement is perpetrating against teachers. With each of their efforts to quantify education, as if an annual test could possibly quantify the education & knowledge of anyone on any more than a snapshot, the reformers seek to discredit collective bargaining & due process. More to the point as these younger teachers are attacked, it is the retirement segment that sacrifices new teachers & allows such damage to our contract as changing the process to receive tenure & allowing certification to be called ‘professional’, hiding the fact that professional means a re-certification process every five (5) years. The old ‘permanent’ certificate meant much more even if it didn’t sound as economically viable as ‘professional’. The 3-year period where teachers can be let go without the level of due process that longer serving teachers escaped is another sacrifice. New teachers face increasingly difficult standards to teach & prepare students for the mindless testing process known as Common Core. These sacrifices lead to lower retention rates for new teachers. UNITY tells teachers that they want the testing challenge as a way to quantify good work. Again, a year's worth of effort to educate a child cannot be quantified by a high-stakes test.

As to the reformers, let me end the idea that Bill Gates & his foundation have any honest desire to improve education: Where, in any of the ideas presented by the reform movement, is it suggested that computer programming should be taught from kindergarten? If they really wanted to prepare the American children for competing in the 21st century, that would be common sense (especially from a software ‘genius’). They should probably also be learning Chinese or some foreign language from that age as well. Instead, the reformers promote more testing that numbs the minds of students beyond repair.

Back to collectivism in unions, the leadership of any union will be controlled by a faction if it is allowed to become a permanent part of the community. The long-term goal should be to put those who put their work & effort into the production in control of the means of production. For that to happen, the workers would have to be cooperative & based completely on voluntary consent to the organizing of a collective bargaining union for negotiations. It won’t happen with the traditional hierarchical system that currently occupy unions.

As factions gain control, they work for the good of the individuals with the most clout. In the 1970s during the Brownsville/Ocean Hill conflict between the parent boards & the union, this became clear by the Jewish contingents ability to force the union to fight the will of the public & the parents. They took a very unpopular stance to protect something vital to the union (due process), but as a leadership they did it without consensus, without a process that demonstrated that the union leadership actually spoke as the whole union. It must have been a very difficult decision, one that shouldn’t have been made by a small committee. The committee might come up with the suggested decision, but ultimately the union should have to come to a consensus on what that decision would be. Perhaps they would have all recognized the good reason for standing against the parents, namely due process. Unfortunately the leadership made a decision which became a division between the union & the parents/public. This division still haunts the teaching profession, as hedge fund backed 'parent organizations'  exploit that divide. 

Ultimately in a consensus-based organization, the sharing with all members of the union might have brought out options that hadn’t been explored by the committee. Consensus unifies the individuals participating; they feel empowered. They feel informed, justified by the consensus of their peers, invested. These are reasons why consensus is preferable to democracy. While there is the ability to disagree with the majority in a democracy, it always creates riffs, riffs that allow those in charge to remain in charge (divide & conquer). Collectivism at work. Now if the union were temporary, only established when negotiations needed to occur, usurpation by collectivists would be less likely. In the case of cooperative-ownership (through the cooperative process) responsibilities & authorities would be rotated among the individuals & temporary by rotation. Again, a union doesn’t have to disappear in a cooperative, but until that is in place, it should disappear between contracts as an authority-wielding entity. The membership would need to be & would be informed & comprehending of the contract language (since they had given their consensus to the contract), so that advocacy (the bread & butter of the union hierarchy) remains at the individual level, only large violations require committees, which again can be filled by all individuals on a rotational basis. What this means is that a ‘permanent’ union becomes the cooperative of individuals actually owning the means of production. Until that happens by peaceful means, then the union must be a temporary union, brought together when necessary to negotiate or strike.

Temporary cooperative actions of a community would best serve the community. This is because the cooperative actions would have specific goals to reach or problems to solve. Once the problem has been solved or the goal reached, the need for the action disappears. In my previous post I mentioned the mythology of the barn raising cooperative efforts in the pioneering west. This is an example of a temporary cooperative action of a community. Once each member of the community had a barn, the organization would self-eliminate. As such, the need for cooperation would never be a permanent fixture like a union, a corporation, or a state. Instead, the cooperative process would simply be structured & modified to fit the temporary goal until the goal was met. Certainly the community could come together to evaluate the success & necessary improvements to the cooperative processes (evaluation being a part of the cooperative process). However few cooperatives need to be permanent. Individuals who cooperate to provide a service or product for the community might be permanent, but the leadership roles & responsibilities would be temporary. This means that the temporary nature of cooperation has two facets - temporary in goal orientation & temporary in responsibilities/authorities. 

Let me explain: the temporary goal orientation means that most cooperative actions don’t require a permanent or long term structure. Cooperative processes to reach a specific goal would be temporarily established to achieve the goal. Once the goal had been met, the need for the cooperative would be eliminated & therefore superfluous. This is one of the significant differences between cooperation & collectivism as I discussed in my previous blog post. So for instance if a cooperative community decided to establish more energy autonomy by installing solar panels onto all the roofs of the community, once the solar panels were installed, the need for the cooperative would vanish. Any necessary maintenance could be done by the self-reliant individuals who belong to the community. Since they had worked together to establish the solar panels, they would have received the necessary training to maintain the solar panels. If some permanent maintenance rotation needed to be established, this could be a cooperative of some of the individuals to provide that service, each individual sharing in the responsibilities & labor as well as the benefits of providing a service (i.e. charging a fee to those who are not part of the maintenance cooperative).

The argument is becoming stronger everyday that the local is going to be the way to get things done in this world. There is no simply occupying the current system: it’s crumbling. What we can do is stay out of the way of the ruin & survive the accompanying disaster, whether that disaster is war or just economic or environmental disaster. What will the future look like? I suppose that it will be much bleaker than today. I don’t have an especially positive attitude toward the future. In every direction I see strife & difficulties. As such I don’t know whether I’ll have a struggle with my fellow man or a struggle with nature. Neither will be pleasant, & both will not have great difficulties delivered randomly & meaninglessly. When does it begin? I hope that this continues to be a slow decline into epic fail, but I’m afraid that it won’t be like that.