Italian cooperatives

[nancylebov]

Over at Making Light, there's a link to "The False Gospel of Work"--a piece about how the free market economy doesn't produce good lives for a lot of the people who are active in it.

While I think the article was somewhat overdone and disproportionate (the standard free market is better than a lot of the alternatives), there was an interesting bit about Emilia-Romagna, a region of Italy with a lot of communes. Still, it's got a reasonable point about the common idea that work is good in itself rather than work being subordinate to people's lives.

Here's a more detailed article. The region has thousands of cooperatives (with a history going back to the 1860s, though with a gap when the Fascists did what they could to break the cooperatives) of a wide range of sizes, purposes (production, social services, banking....) and the ability to cooperate for large projects.

I found a little more here and here with the latter having the plausible suggestion that societies with well-developed, varied social networks are likely to do better even if they've suffered a period of dictatorship.

If Emilia-Romagna is as good as it sounds, I'm angry I haven't heard about it before (though admittedly I pay more attention to right libertarian than left-libertarian sources) and that there's so little about it online, though perhaps most of it is in Italian. Still, shouldn't there be more interest in an undramatic way of living which works better than most? Well, I'm doing my bit by posting about it here.

I favor a free market, but it's been obvious to me that the conventional version doesn't do a good job of solving the pointy-haired boss problem.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

It's a pure straw-man argument, against the "a semi-theological dogma, that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer."

Put any semi-theological, non-contextual position into someone else's mouth, and it's easy to show that the reasonable position which is thereby being caricatured must be ridiculous.

What capitalism values is productive labor through free contracts. This has nothing to do with slavery. The Nazi death camps didn't even have anything to do with productive labor, even if they used the word "Arbeit" on their gates. Torturing and killing people doesn't make them productive and wasn't intended to.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I didn't link to it because I thoroughly agreed with it, I linked to it because I thought it was interesting that it appeared in an otherwise generally conservative Christian magazine.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I didn't think you necessarily agreed with it, though I'm interested in the details of your opinion.

In any case, I wanted to say a little about what I did and didn't like about it.

[zenlizard]

The main problem with a "free market" economy is thta there's no such thing as a "free" market.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

It seems to me self-evident that any market with pretensions of freeosity would include the freedom to form, you know, collectives and communes and such at will.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Of course, but that being said, I'm interested in how well various voluntary structures do or don't work.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the link, Nancy.

IMO a genuine free market economy, without any government subsidies to accumulation and concentration of capital or to the inefficiency costs of large size, would look a lot like Emilia-Romagna. The tendency of government intervention in the U.S. is to encourage large corporate size, capital-intensive forms of production, deskilling, etc., far beyond what would occur in a free market. My guess is that a market economy would look a lot more like the stuff Kirkpatrick Sale talks about in the economics chapter of *Human Scale*: small-scale factories of at most a few dozen workers, producing for local markets, and using general-purpose production machinery for short production runs.

Kevin Carson

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Greenbelt, MD has co-op housing, and co-op businesses, including a restaurant, a dry cleaner, and a grocery store.

I'd guess that would be true to some degree also of the other WPA towns: Greenhill, OH, and Greendale, WI, even though they were not as thoroughly developped as Greenbelt.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Oops, Resettlement Administration, not WPA. My bad.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

That would be Emilia-Romagna, and yes, it is as good as it sounds. By no means a no-problems land, but probably hands-down the place in Italy with the higher standard of living. Good education (excellent nursery schools, world-famous), good (free) health care, and amazingly enough, one of the Italian regions where health spending is under control.

Wonderful food and slutty women, too. I am *not* kidding.

Why you haven't heard about it? Because they're communists. They went red back in the days when they were part of the Church's secular domains (they are not too keen on the Church either), and stayed defiantly red to this day. There's a reason the first university in the world was started in Bologna.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've corrected the spelling.

Is it famous in Europe? Is there any obvious reason why the cooperative movement hasn't spread across Italy? Or why Italy got nice communists instead of nasty communists?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the comment--I was hoping you'd show up in this thread as the person on my flist who's most likely to know something about the subject.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Is it famous in Europe - for the beaches and the food, yes. It seems like half the population of MittelEuropa moves down to Rimini in summer. I don't think they know or care that the people are dirtygodlessred, to use the words of a friend of mine (Tuscan, btw). They do, however, appreciate the friendlines, which is partly good nature an part shrewd buisness sense. And the food. Don't forget the food.

But while Emilia Romagna has a more structured social network than most places, the ideals are far from being uncommon in Europe. So it would be less earth-shattering here.

The cooperative movement is active throughout Italy, although it is particulary successful in Emilia. Why Italy got the nice communists? A lot of communists were nice. A lot of them of course were wiped out by Stalin. (One of them was Antonio Gramsci, who died in prison partly because of the determination of the Soviet authorities not to ask for his realease when they could have obtained it - they did not think, and rightly, that Gramsci would have been easily manouvred). It helps if communism flourishes among people who are pragmatic, down to earth, and incurable hedonists.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm seeing Emilio-Montagna and Emilia-Montagna rather than Emilia-Romagna in your post.

Interesting. I hadn't heard about it before either. This (http://www.gnn.tv/articles/2384/A_Market_Without_Capitalists) is by someone who visited in May, and is linked to and from the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emilia-Romagna).

This article (http://dept.kent.edu/oeoc/oeoclibrary/EmiliaRomagnaShort.htm) has some interesting stuff on the laws and the types of cooperatives. It says coops employ 10% of the workforce, so it's not like most people are working for them. Apparently the government was promoting small businesses, which seems surprising from communists. It also mentions laws that restricts distribution of coops "indivisible reserves", which should make dissolving them less attractive. But it wasn't clear exactly what they are allowed to do with those reserves.

On an unrelated note, I must point out the research lab in the 16th century castle, in that last article.

Caspian

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for the links and the spelling correction.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Wonderful food and slutty women, too.

Right, I know where to plan my first Italian vacation, then.