I am interested in cooperativising architectural firms. Platforms may or may not facilitate in cooperativisation, but I want to see if they can. But as the last blog indicates, I am also interested in co-ops as a form of government, not just as exceptional pockets in a larger economic-political system. I am interested, in other words, in anarcho-syndicalism (anarcho = not state or party run; syndicate = worker-run organisations, including councils, soviets, and cooperatives). How anarcho-syndicalism combines with architecture and/or with platforms is not completely understood by me, but this blog and the next will try to figure this out.

Anarchic-syndicalism and its embrace of cooperatives is an obvious decentralised alternative to statism. Because a governance based on coops is ground-up and because it coalesces around worker identity, it avoids the limitation of a seeming socialist state offering benevolent handouts, and the vagaries of market-driven liberalism. It also has consistently invited ideological conflict, often in the minds of those who initially agree or disagree with it.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the so-called father of anarchism, believed that the small producer co-ops of Europe could usher in the revolution: 'This role [of workers’ companies] will above all consist in the management of the great instruments of labor and of certain tasks, which ‘demand’ both a great division of functions and a great collective force.'[1] He admitted at the end of his life, however, that the cooperative movement had not developed as he had hoped.

Mikhail Bakunin picked up on Proudhon’s campaign and led the anarchist faction of the International Working Men’s Association. At the 1872 Hague Congress, Bakunin argued for the replacement of the state by federations of self-governing communes against Marx who argued for the sole role of the state to bring about socialism. Marx wrote that the commune supporters, 'the socialist bourgeoise, want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements.'[2]

Lenin weighs in strongly, writing in 1921:

The ideas at the bottom of [Bakunin’s producer coops] are radically wrong in theory…. First, the concept 'producer' combines proletarians with semi-proletarians and small commodity producers, thus radically departing from the fundamental concept of the class struggle and from the fundamental demand that a precise distinction be drawn between classes…. Secondly, the bidding for or flirtation with the non-Party masses, which is expressed in the above-quoted thesis, is an equally radical departure from Marxism.[3]

By 1923, however, Lenin saw cooperatives, 'when assisted by the state,' as essential tools for educating Russian peasants on trading power post-revolution. He identified them as the best regime to establish a real and proper socialist order.[4]

Rosa Luxemburg goes for it as well:

The workers forming a co-operative in the field of production are…faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism. They 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.[5]

But the most intriguing struggles for the success of cooperatives/councils/soviets play out in Italy, intriguing because the dance between strict Marxism and syndico-Marxism is so convoluted and extended. Antonio Gramsci's syndicalism was formed in the context of his non-Marxist, non-materialist belief in a more organic, 'counter-hegemonic' strategy, one more activist than the socialist party which was paralysed, he felt, by its fatalistic waiting for the appearance of 'ripe' objective conditions.[6] It was also formed in the context of the spontaneous large strikes in northern Italy in 1919 and 1920 known as Bienno Rosso. In Turin and Milan, in the name of factory councils, Gramsci led numerous – 1,663 industrial strikes involving more than one million industrial workers – factory occupations. He was driven by his belief that councils (equivalent to Russia’s soviets) could form the fundamental cells through which to build toward revolution.

The proletarian dictatorship can be made flesh in a type of organisation which is specific to the particular activity of producers and not of wage-earners, slaves of capital. The factory council is the first cell of this organisation. Since in the council all the branches of labour are represented, proportionally to the contribution each trade and each branch of labour makes to the development of the object which the factory produces for the collective, the institution is of a class, it is social. Its reason for being is in labour.[7]

He believed that his position was in keeping with Lenin's policy of 'All power to the Soviets' and that the Italian councils were not just one organ of political struggle against the bourgeoisie but a true communist construct. (Lenin disagreed.) Initially there was support for this view from other Italian leftists, but by the defeat of the Turin metal workers at the Fiat factories in the spring 1920, Gramsci was almost alone in his defence of the councils. Eventually, then, the failure of the workers' councils to develop into a national movement convinced Gramsci that a Communist Party in the Leninist, state-controlled sense was indeed needed, even as Gramsci insisted that the party should be nothing more than the expression of proletarian consensus at any given historical moment.

The struggle of Italian anarcho-syndicalism continues in interesting ways – one, political, leading to the success of an entire cooperative region in Italy (a cooperativism beyond urbanism!); the other, ideological, producing proto-platforms. Politically, the strikes of Bienno Rosso helped usher in Mussolini’s rise – he was from the neighbouring region of Emilia Romagna, a strong hold of Gramscian anarchism. In turn, this northern region became a centre of Fascist resistance. Because German military presence was particularly strong and the disruption of everyday life felt by its citizens most acutely, and because there the Italian state was nearly completely absent, local antifascist communist partisans stepped in. They were the only ones willing and able to defend the local populations and provide them with food, law and order. By war's end, the Italian Communist Party had an elaborate web of local activists, organisers, and community leaders which would endure from the 1940s to the modern day and which formed the world’s largest and most coherent network of cooperatives. Ironically or not (given the former communist/cooperative divide). In Emilia Romagna, a region with nearly 4.5 million people, nearly two out of every three inhabitants are co-op members, together producing around 30 percent of the region’s GDP.

The ideological development happened in the 70’s in the same northern factories that were the site of Bienno Rosso. With the influx of southern peasants to northern factories, factory strikes and walkouts were rampant. Supported for these strikes the Italian left to break with standard Marxism and its traditional analysis of capitalist exploitation. Italian Workerists supporting the strikers proposed that it isn’t, as per Marx, capitalist exploitation that makes work alienating; it is the reduction of life to work. 'Workerists' didn’t advocate for taking over the means of production but, rather, advocated the refusal of work all together. The main figures of the movement, Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri, separated political from social power and viewed the uninitiated workers in these northern factories as agitators more than political actors. In contrast, a fellow Workerist who was employed in the Fiat and Olivetti factories, Romano Alquati, offered a more subtle reading of what constituted the political identity of the 'new' factory labourers. The 'newness' was not just the politically uninitiated southern labourers but the nature of factory production itself. Taylorist, with the gloss of 'enlightened capitalism.' Fiat was owned by the suave, fashion icon Giovanni 'Gianni' Agnelli (1921-2003) who sought to gain the love and esteem of his workers by showing a personal interest in their well-being, who developed strong ties with the trade unions, and who was best friends with the PCI/socialist party head, Enrico Berlinguer… until he broke the biggest strike at his factory by marching in 4,000 scab workers to his factory.[8] Adriano Olivetti, more interestingly, aspired to make his company and its town, Ivrea, an actual working 'soviet'. He wanted his factory town to be run by the workers , who were to be given classes, modern homes, lunch-time performances, free day-care, and substantial pensions – just not control of the factory itself. It was, in other words, an example of capitalist take-over of soviet/cooperative thinking, justifying the socialist concern for the complicity of councils with capitalism.

Alquati, in all of this, recognised that the new factory workers didn’t just struggle with the boringness of machine-dictated repetitive work but with ideas. Indeed, the new work was based on a 'Plan,' a managed division of labour that relied not on skill but 'expertise'. On the one hand, expertise came with a 'mystical' sense of what the lower-levels of workers didn’t have – the knowledge available to those in the levels above. On the other hand, the workers were learning precisely the importance of their ideas because their tasks involved numerous bits of information – measurements, evaluations, micro-decisions – which made the new workers conscious of their 'immaterial labour,' its manipulation, and their power to thwart its exploitation. Alquati noted the particular role that information played in class solidarity:

Information is the most important thing [l’essenziale] about labour-power: it is what the worker, by means of constant capital, transmits to the means of production upon the basis of evaluations, measures, elaborations, in order to work [operare] upon the object of labour all those changes in form that give it the use value required. The ‘disposability’ of the worker leads him to be a qualitative indice of socially necessary labour time, by which the ‘product’ is valued as the ‘recipient’ of a certain quantity of ‘information’.

Alquati also saw that the 'class' that developed amongst the workers, despite the lack of political education, was based on their mutual recognition of the relationship between their social conditions and their work conditions. Their expression of struggle – walkouts – was not, as Negri and Tronti assumed, weak for bypassing strikes organised by socialist leaders but deeply productive of the formation of a class identity based on intellectual and informational affinities. In this way, Alquati’s insights link Workerist thought to contemporary discussions on platformism by illuminating the manner in which the aura of informational technology infiltrates our everyday acts, by demonstrating that a worker’s most fundamental power is the ability to withhold work, and by recognising that data control can become labour control.

Enter Trebor Scholtz who, with his 'platform cooperativism.'[9] In Uberworked and Underpaid, Scholz attacks the false 'sharing' claims of platforms like Uber and AirBnB, by proposing, in their stead, 'to build democratically governed service platforms and online marketplaces owned and operated by those who most rely on them.'[10] His ten principles of platform cooperatives – ownership, decent pay and income security, transparency and data portability, appreciation and acknowledgement, co-determined work, a protective legal framework, portable worker protection and benefits, protection against arbitrary behaviour, rejection of excessive work place surveillance, and the right to log off – seem to be the foundation for a digital worker’s anarchist cell.

Scholz wants many legislative things: updated legal frameworks to take account of gig-work services, protecting them as employees (minimum wage, appropriate holiday and sick pay…); proposals to tax social network providers based on the volume of data gathered from citizens; the removal of exploitative intermediaries; universal basic income. It is an impressive analysis of what is required to transcend gig-ness. As an architect interested in coops, who recognises that architects, except those in large offices, are essentially gig-works, and who hopes that platforms could facilitate systems of communication, sharing, or exchange, the appeal of Scholz’s platform cooperativism is strong. Architects indeed need to get up to speed with the organisational possibilities of digital platforms; not yet yoked to platforms that control our access to clients or suppliers, we might leap directly to the good part: purchasing coops that give better deals on consultants and insurance; marketing coops that allow us to promote shared expertise gathered from other member firms; coop networks that facilitate sharing of workers, spaces, expertise, and materials.

Or maybe not. Besides the shared use of the app, what is really new? What is really cooperative? As one lawyer reviewing the book noted, many of the goals regarding worker rights could be taken care of in a standard partnership agreement and other demands for legal frameworks to reduce precarity or unfair distribution of profits are already in the legislative process. And don’t we want to ensure that cooperativising isn’t just, as the socialist accused, playing well in a capitalist system? Scholz thinks that, 'in a political context that can’t deliver a better working context, our collective effort…can build political power for a social movement that will bring these ideas into existence',[11] and says that platform cooperativism 'disrupts the shareholder economy,' but how, without larger cross-industry political identities, can political power be built? If we are dedicated to the anarchist cause, we recognise that there must be something more. And it is this: that a cooperative model based merely, or even primarily on ownership, is conceptually mis-conceived. It is not only that ownership is a capitalist concept, but it by-passes the primary idea of membership in a community that is based on trust, shared identity, and agreed upon governance.

Enter the research of Elinor Ostrom, the anarcho-syndicalist, whose work on cooperatives and the commons identifies precisely these things.[12] Ostrom’s fundamental insights, based on her study of common pool resources, are simultaneously concrete and conceptual, practical and visionary. 1. In the absence of cooperation and trust, even a market-based economy will soon fall apart; no effort that appeals primarily to self-interest will likely survive. 2. Traditional economics and its formulation of 'economic man' overlooks the fact that people have diverse needs that go beyond material goods. 3. People are strongly motivated to try to solve common problems to enhance their own productivity over time, and this motivation can be scaled up. 4. Models of governance are stronger when they are based on problem solving (from below) than on imposed ideological frameworks. 5. Rules of membership matter more than ownership. And 6., self-determination of the community must be recognised by higher level authorities, i.e., it must be recognised as the government. In her acceptance speech for the Nobel prize Ostrom won for her contribution to economic theory entitled, 'Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems,' she reiterates her fundamental insights about coops forming a complete government. Here we are: an anti-statist cooperative, distributive government that takes account of our individual identities.

In the next blog, Ostrom’s work, which does not deal with a digital economy nor with architecture, will hopefully be linked to both. At least we have a trust as a guiding principle around which to organise those connections.