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About 40 years ago, a right-wing codger named Eddie Chiles became a momentary political celebrity in my state by buying airtime on hundreds of radio stations to broadcast his daily political rants. Having made a fortune in the Texas oil fields, he pitched himself as a rags-to-riches, self-made success story. "I'm Mad Eddie," as he was known, repeatedly proclaimed that he was "mad" about big government -- particularly federal programs that taxed him to help poor people, who should help themselves by becoming oil entrepreneurs like him. It's simple, he instructed in the tagline to his tirades: "If you don't own an oil well, get one."
Well, maybe you can't afford an oil well, but what if you could own something even bigger -- an entire electric utility? What if you were to control an energy business that's also an economic development engine and a grassroots force for advancing social justice? You wouldn't own it all by yourself, but you would indeed be a full-fledged owner, with a voice on everything from hiring to setting rates, from green energy to community investment.
This empowering populist possibility has quietly existed for millions of Americans since 1937, when then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal helped people create a vast network of member-owned and member-run rural electric cooperatives, or RECs. While the barons of corporate-owned utilities serviced densely populated, easy-to-wire cities, they ignored rural areas as unprofitable, leaving families, businesses, schools and communities literally in the dark. Co-op ownership offered a bridge across this rural gap in our country's vital infrastructure -- and the people rushed to cross it. Before the New Deal, some 90% of farm families had no electricity. By 1953, just 16 years later, more than 90% of them were wired, opening rural America to a world of new economic, social and cultural opportunities.
Co-op electricity has transformed rural America, but the co-ops offer something even more electrifying: democratic power.
By law, every household that uses the electricity is a member and can vote for a board that has actual decision-making authority to control resources including cash flow, good jobs, a customer base, facilities and financial acumen. Moreover, unlike the corporate ethic of shareholder supremacy (in which maximizing profits of investor elites reigns supreme), these decentralized, grassroots utilities were guided by an egalitarian ethic formulated in 1937: the seven Rochdale Principles of cooperative organization:
With such a potent combination of power and principles -- later expanded to include anti-discrimination, financial fairness and other components -- RECs can be a mighty force for helping rural Americans make broad-based social progress. Indeed, in the past 30 years, some RECs have formally expanded their official purpose from simply providing electricity to also investing in such community needs as solar power, high-speed internet and financing for conservation retrofits.
Despite the strength and popular appeal of the co-op approach, RECs in regions where they are large and numerous (the South, Midwest and Plains) have hardly been models of dynamic progress. Even when they face stagnant economies and widespread poverty, many co-ops charge exorbitant rates and cling to a toxic legacy of coal-fired power plants spewing pollutants.
What happened? In effect, these co-ops got taken over by closed networks of entrenched rural power (bankers, real estate developers, ag-biz execs, old money families, trusted political retainers, et al.). These interests have steadily tightened their grip on these valuable utilities by using their financial power, social standing and legal cunning to dominate board elections.
Once in, these boards throw Rochdale principles out the window. Professional managers slide the decision-making and co-op books behind closed doors. In co-ops like these, the term "member" has effectively been shriveled to mean powerless consumer. Thus, shut out of the governing circle, members lose the will to participate, leaving the co-op a hollowed-out shell of its big democratic idea. A 2016 survey by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that 72% of America's REC board directors were elected by less than 10% of members.
But as a co-op member, you do have a voice. The good folks at the New Economy Coalition recently released their Rural Electric Cooperative Toolkit with resources for member-owners seeking to reassert the democratic principles on which their co-ops were founded. The NEC works for an economy "that meets human needs, enhances the quality of life, and allows us to live in balance with nature." Doesn't that sound good? Check them out: neweconomy.net.
I'm a retired public school teacher living in Des Moines.
I grew up here close to the city limits, with an easy escape to the countryside that was once dotted with miles and miles of small family farms. The sight and even the smells of those small farms were a welcome respite from the congested and busy neighborhood life I was growing up around.
There were cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and usually lots of cats. Barns were exciting and full of life. It's an idyllic memory many Iowans still relish today.
In contrast, pig production now happens inside gigantic industrial buildings warehousing thousands of animals subjected to a rectangular cubicle for life. They're left to eat and drink in these confined spaces, and in about five months they're slaughtered.
The stench from millions of gallons of manure percolating under their feet and spread on fields travels across our countryside and is toxic and nauseating to breathe.
Iowa is now close to being decimated for the sake of massive profits for a few giant corporations like Smithfield, Iowa Select, Prestage Farms, Hormel, and Tyson Foods.
For 40 years, my biggest worries focused on my middle school students: Were there enough new grammar books? Could they get to school in the snow? Did they have enough to eat at home? But eventually, I started worrying if they, or any of us, should be drinking or cooking with the water coming out of our facets, or swimming or fishing in the water in our countryside.
Those small family farms in the countryside have given way to an explosion of more than 7,000 factory hog sites. Iowa is now close to being decimated for the sake of massive profits for a few giant corporations like Smithfield, Iowa Select, Prestage Farms, Hormel, and Tyson Foods.
These concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are practically unregulated and unmonitored. Our state's factory farm inspectors can't even begin to keep track of what happens at thousands of sites.
Tons and tons of manure laden with nitrate, phosphorus, antibiotics, and other chemicals soak into the ground or run off fields and flow into the Des Moines water system. Both of our rivers, the Des Moines River and Raccoon River, are polluted regularly with high levels of nitrate. Iowa taxpayers and water customers have shelled out millions of dollars to clean the poisoned water.
Less discussed are the people who work in these factories and the slaughterhouses where the animals are butchered. Thousands of immigrants fill these brutal and dangerous jobs.
For decades, politicians spread nasty lies about these workers that have wormed their way into the public mythology in Iowa: that immigrants are taking our jobs, driving up our medical costs, or overcrowding our schools.
We know these families. They go to church with us, we pass them in the grocery aisles and at the post office, and sit next to them at the grandkids' soccer games. No one should believe these lies, but they've seeped into our community like the factory farm manure that poisons our rivers.
It's in the best interest of the factory farm, slaughterhouse, and feedlot owners--and the politicians they support--to keep us at each other's throats. They pit us against each other and make us fear each other. Imagine what would happen if all all of Iowa's struggling rural families and workers cooperated and worked together?
We'd fight wage theft, and demand higher wages and better conditions in the slaughterhouses. We'd crack down on hog factories and clean up our waterways. We'd give more money to our schools so everyone has a great education. We'd fight to get profits out of health care and have Medicare For All.
Iowans, and people in other rural states, were fooled once. I hope we won't be fooled again -- and certainly not pitted against each other. Take it from this retired schoolteacher: we've learned our lesson.
As capitalism drives itself into ever-greater inequality, instability and injustice, its critics multiply. Worried defenders react in two ways. Many dismiss the criticisms. After all, capitalism has been around a long time and weathered ups and downs before. They presume or hope that criticism will fade as little really changes despite the critics, and frustrations set in. It's just losers who complain. The winners will surely carry the system forward. Some defenders insist that there simply is no alternative to capitalism, so criticism becomes pointless.
A second sort of defenders takes a different approach. They place adjectives in front of the word capitalism and argue for some and against other such adjectives. Thus we get criticisms of statist or state-interventionist capitalism in favor of "free-market" capitalism and of "regressive" capitalism in favor of "progressive" capitalism. Greedy capitalism, we are told, must give way to "sharing" capitalism. Similarly it is said that "Crony" capitalism or capitalism without a social conscience should be dissolved.
Capitalism's defenders of both types clearly want the basic system to continue. But exactly what is the system? It turns out that its defenders are neither agreed nor clear about the definition of what they are defending. So to get at what the real debate here is requires a short detour through the thicket of un-worked-out definitions.
"Modern society's systemic problem is capitalism, not this or that kind of capitalism."
Is capitalism a "market" system? If that means markets are the institutional mechanism whereby resources and products are distributed--by voluntary exchanges between owners of goods and services--then the problem is that capitalism is hardly the only "system" that utilizes markets. Slavery certainly did (think slaves and cotton in the US south). Feudal plantations often did too. And both Soviet and contemporary Chinese socialisms have made use of markets.
Is capitalism a "private enterprise" system versus a "state enterprise" system? Such a definition is also problematic. Slavery and feudalism exhibit co-existences of enterprises owned and operated by private individuals holding no position within any state apparatus alongside those owned and operated by state officials. There have been private and state enterprises within slave, feudal, and capitalist systems. The presence of state enterprises, like the presence of markets, is thus not system-specific. Few observers removed the label socialist from the USSR, PRC, etc., because private enterprises (collective farms, private plots, etc.) co-existed there with state enterprises.
In short, markets and private enterprises do not work as definitions because they inadequately differentiate among capitalism, slavery, feudalism, and socialism. Yet definitions' purpose is to enable clear discussion and debate.
An adequate definition exists that focuses on the organization of production and distribution within enterprises: the human relations governing their internal structures of authority and responsibility. Slavery is thus defined in terms of the master-slave organization of its workplaces. Workers there are the owned property of those who take the product. Feudalism names the quite different relationship of lord and serf (personal, mutually obligational, non-ownership of persons) inside workplaces. Serfs work and deliver one agreed portion of their product to the lord: the portion above what serfs get to keep for themselves.
Capitalism entails an altogether different workplace organization: instead of ownership of persons or personal obligation quid-pro-quo exchange. Employers buy the labor power of employees and combine it with other means of production owned by the employers. The product is divided among (1) wages paid to workers, (2) replacement of used up means of production, and (3) employers' net revenues. Capitalist enterprises can be owned and operated by private persons, state officials or both. Resources and products can be distributed via markets or non-market mechanisms such as planning.
This definition of capitalism dissolves notions of "socialism" into varieties of state capitalism when state enterprises--like their private counterparts--are organized around the employer-employee dichotomy. This definition of capitalism points clearly toward a system beyond the employer-employee dichotomy of capitalism (and likewise the other dualistic dichotomies).
What defines such a post-capitalist economic system is that employers and employees merge into one. Individually, each is an employee. Collectively, all employees comprise the employer. Each employee/employer has an equal voice in democratic business decisions governing what, how, and where production occurs and what is done with the net revenues.
Capitalism's basic problems are intrinsic. They comprise the employer-employee relationship at its core and that relationship's results for the broader economy, politics and culture. Modern society's systemic problem is capitalism, not this or that kind of capitalism. Reforms have replaced one kind of capitalism with another. Beside the problems that reforms could not solve, the reforms themselves proved temporary and insecure. Usually won by employees' long battles, the reforms get lost because capitalists have the incentives (profits) and resources (profits) to evade, weaken or repeal them. For example, progressive give way to regressive taxes, once-separated commercial investment banking are allowed to recombine, minimum wages are not adjusted to inflations, and so on. Struggles for reforms proposed today increasingly get the response: been there, done that.
Today's central political question: are contemporary capitalist societies ready to embark on transitions to genuinely non- or post-capitalist societies? Such transitions' central strategy is to displace the hierarchical, undemocratic, employer-employee organization of capitalist enterprises with democratized workplaces. Notions of economies built on workers' self-governing cooperatives existed throughout human history. They rise now again as small and medium-sized capitalists retire and realize that selling their businesses to their workers is their preferred next step. Building out its worker cooperatives made Spain's Mondragon Cooperative Corporation famous across the world. Sustaining a huge sector of worker coops brought exceptional economic well-being to Emilia-Romagna in Italy.
Other kinds of coops--those that buy, sell, or own collectively--can and should be way stations to democratizing the work itself. There are welcome signs that is happening. By democratizing our workplaces, we can do better than capitalism. One step in that process is getting on the same page about what capitalism is and what its alternatives were and are.