It’s democracy Jim, but not as we know it
There’s a big vote this weekend for The Co-operative on its new structures, implementing changes proposed by the Board in response to the almighty cock-up that saw the enterprise brought to its knees. One could write an awful lot about these changes, and arguments have been going back and forth. Some deem them to have enough democratic input so as to remain co-operative, others think they take the enterprise to a place where it can no longer meaningfully be said to be a co-operative.
As ever, the debate is characterised by a fair degree of wishful thinking. Half the problem is that the group has been such a rubbish co-op in many respects that it’s rather hard to say that it would be less co-operative after these changes; it’ll be a less than first class co-op in different ways after this, and one has to come to a conclusion as to whether the new ways we’re not going to be very co-operative are better than the old ways in which we weren’t.
My view for what it’s worth (which, in accordance with the Group’s Burkean constitution, is bugger all) is that the inability to control the purpose and rules of the organisation is a killer function of democratic member control, and we won’t have it. Under these rules, members and the council can propose rule changes to be voted on by members, but the Board can veto them; nothing gets before members without the Board being in favour of it first. Which is to say nothing gets before those members which they don’t agree with.
As a general rule, political systems in which the people with a vested interest in things not changing can stop things changing tend not to change. It was, of course, true under our old system and it’ll be even more true in our new system, but with the twist that it’ll be practically impossible to change, as opposed to simply being hard to envisage how it might change.
So why is this on the cards? Part of it is that there is a hunger for reform, and partly the Board have pulled out all the stops. For months now, there have been warnings of dire implications of voting against, as the banks to whom it owes billions want to see these changes agreed. It’s a fair enough point, but it does rather beg the question as to whether the UK banking sector is in a suitable position to lecture anyone else about corporate governance.
There’s also a lingering suspicion that the members of Regional Boards voting for things might be influenced by the fact that they’ll all be grandfathered across to be members of the new Council; one hates to be cynical, but there’s not been a serious change made in decades without a whiff that the people voting for it stood to personally gain in some way, and so it rather comes with the territory.
The elected members — around 600 people up and down the country — would also be divided, but what we don’t know is how they flop. They sit on Atea Committees, who then elect the Regional Boards, who decide how to cast the vote for that region. The 600 have been asked to give their views, but in no way is this a plebiscite, as Regional Boards can’t be mandated. There would appear to be a clear majority amongst those expressing views against the changes, which isn’t being reflected in the views of those charged with actually having a vote that counts. It is a situation familiar to anyone who has mandated a representative to a trade union conference, or a Council or even an MP; one finds that despite the rhetoric of member empowerment and participation, it’s a Burkean situation in which representatives are elected to make decisions.
That’s not to say this doens’t make it democratic, but the quality of the actual democracy depends on the quality of the electoral process which chooses these representatives. In this regard, the Co-operative Group ceases to have any meaningful connection with democracy; members receive 400-word statements from candidates who are not able to say even that they are candidates,lest this count as campaigning. Those elected members serving on the Area Committees then elect some of their number to the Regional Board to actually have a modicum of power, but under exactly the same strictures: candidates make a brief statement, with no questions possible, and no campaigning in advance of the vote by any candidates. (This problem goes all the way to the top, and was a significant element of the collapse in 2013; the Board didn’t really know what executives were doing, and the people electing the Board didn’t know what the Board weren’t doing, and the people electing the people who elected the Board didn’t know what the people electing the people who elected the Board weren’t doing. It led to a corporate governance clusterfuck. Who knew!)
What you have instead is democratic centralism. Views are sought, but one must know one’s place. If you aren’t in the exalted position of actually having a say, then be grateful for having a say, however much or little it matters, and don’t presume to know. All will be revealed in the fullness of time and all that. You might wonder then how on earth this system passed for being compliant with the notion of Member Democratic Control, the 3rd Rochdale Principle and one of the most important in the way co-operatives have been defined and how they themselves state their differences to ‘normal’ companies. This is a much bigger question, which gets to the heart of the notion of co-operative identity.
The world of co-ops likes to see the principles as a much tougher rubric than the much more fluid notions that cohere other ‘movements’, such as social enterprise. It gives a hard edge and rigour that unites the lowliest rural co-op in Africa with the longest established co-op in the UK and so on. These principles get reiterated every now and again (more ‘again’ than ‘now’, it must be said) and as is the way with all legal systems, the transhistorical truths (constitutions, holy books, principles) don’t change but are reiterated (statutes, canon law) with more reference to way things happen to be now, rather than when the transhistorical text was first written down. These are further refined and reinterpreted (guidance, precedents, promulgations, fatwas) according to a mixture of both the views of the caste with the power to reinterpret and their views on whether the gap between current realities and previous guidance calls for the guidance to change, or to sand firm in the face of those new realities.
But one principle which doesn’t get addressed or re-interpreted in co-op so much is the one on democracy. This is because it’s taken as so axiomatic as to not need interrogating, but in reality, there’s no such thing. Take a religion which enjoined one to love God: does that mean loving her in a selfless, quiet way, or loving her through killing unbelievers?
Instead, in the absence of guidance, it’s performative, and co-operative democracy is whatever democracy in co-operatives happens to be (in the same way that Herbert Morrison said socialism was whatever a Labour Government ended up doing). The managers and leading activists of the larger enterprises are — in my experience — deeply suspicious of democracy (the iron law of oligarchy and all that) and so this performative notion of what Principle 3 means tends to have a direction of travel away from more vital conceptions of what participation could be which are found in worker co-operatives, for example.
This obscures the deep differences in what democracy means to different co-ops. Some are very much in the Burkean tradition, in which members have the right to control things, which is operated through a structure which assumes that this would actually be a pretty bad thing all told, and puts lots of hurdles in the way. Others are committed to more consensus-driven approaches in which participation has to be real rather than theoretical, subscribing more the Paine’s approach to bottom-up democracy. The possibilities for collaboration at previously-unimaginable scale are inspiring the concept of ‘open co-ops’ based around the protocols and practice of open source software.
All of this is fine and dandy, since as long as you can point to members at the bottom having some formal involvement in the governance, however weak or limited, then you can make a decent fist of arguing you’re a co-op. Because so many organisations have been allowed in the gang with such weak democratic structures, it makes it ever harder to hold any sort of line in favour of better and more democracy.
This isn’t some doctrinal debate though of little interest beyond the geeks like me. If there’s one thing that makes co-ops fascinating to be part of is the concentration on democracy as an important and vital part, not just as a moral right for any citizen or member, but because it really makes things better. It’s where neoliberalism can get met head on, because neoliberalism abhors democracy; things other than its contorted mean-ends rationality get used to make decisions; things like dignity, integrity, love, compassion, values and ethics.
As Judge Brandeis said, “we may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Co-operatives’ ability to mobilise democracy in the service of economics makes it a powerful weapon for our times, and one which the co-operative movement itself has been happy to be seen in this way.
There the danger is that there is a way of speaking about democracy that is often at odds with its practice in society, and many co-operatives are as guilty. If the language of bottom-up, participation, control and influence maps onto an reality so radically different, then co-operatives will come to be more of the problem than the solution. That’s bad for co-ops, who could be so much more, and bd for those opposed to neoliberalism, because our task will have been much that much harder.
