On being the right size (1928)

ehh, I can't find anything about this other than the following article from last year:

"While the UAW continues to represent Detroit’s Big Three manufacturers, it has all but completely failed to gain representation rights for the so-called transplant lines now run by virtually all the major foreign-owned automakers, from BMW to Toyota to Volkswagen. "

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/foreign-automakers-stubbornl...

There seems to be a chunk missing in the third paragraph: Or it can compress its body and stretch out its [???] these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle

Cool, that's certainly important. I probably disagree that 1 or 2 decisions a year counts as "real jobs that do real work", though.

It is an argument against a very specific form of socialism as implemented by marxist-leninists. Already by the end of the 1800's there was a wide schism between left communists/liberalist marxists, anarchist communists, Luxembourgist/Spartakists and a number of other anti-authoritarian communist ideologies on one hand, and Leninists on the other about the role of the state in the socialist transition phase, where the left communists and liberalist marxists have consistently been against the idea of a vanguard party (the leninist party model) and against the idea of a strong state.

"Left communism" is generally defined by being "to the left of Leninism" (EDIT: And many left communists does not consider Leninism a socialist ideology at all), though it is worth pointing out that Leninism in itself is not necessarily authoritarian. The left communist criticism of Leninism initially focused on the (as it turned out) well founded risk that having a vanguard party following a nearly military discipline and that was not intended to include regular people in the party decision making provided a massive potential threat if it were to be abused (as it of course ended up being - it was the ultimate cultist echo-chamber combined with a fair number of power hungry people mixed in with the idealists).

Most socialists have always been against this model, and most communists were arguably also against the leninist model until at least 1920 or so. After the April 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks was a small-ish minority group even in Russia, next to the Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, most of whome were left communists, other forms of socialist revolutionaries, and some reformists.

After the Bolshevik coup (the October Revolution - I don't like calling it a revolution, as it only had the support of a relatively small minority - it succeeded only because the Bolshevik support was largely concentrated in a few of the big cities, giving them the ability to cease control of the still weakened government apparatus), the Leninist model gained a lot of undeserved support, and cemented its position thanks to the combination of the perceived successes of the Bolsheviks (even some fairly right wing writers came back from the Soviet Union impressed with progress in things like electrification and got caught up in it), the civil war and the capitalist countries support for the Whites, which made it easy for the Bolsheviks to excuse pretty much anything they wanted to do by claiming they were fighting foreign funded anti-Russian/anti-Soviet counter-revolutionaries, and where the anti-Bolshevik fervour in the Western press made it impossible for socialists to trust them - even when they were right about the later excesses especially under Stalin.

Left communism was still widespread enough by 1920, with left communist groups in several instances still participating in demonstrations and small scale attempted revolts and armed attacks, to make Lenin publish a pamphlet ridiculing it ("Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder"). A number of prominent left communists who had tried to remain with the Bolsheviks and try to influence the party, and many more outside it, eventually lost their lives over it as especially Stalin dialled up the terror to get full control and left communism was seen as a considerable threat.

Also note that while Haldane later became skeptical about the Soviet Union, when he wrote this article, he was well on his way to becoming a Marxist-Leninist, arguably a Stalinist. As late as 1962 he reiterated his admiration for Stalin....

Anyway, though we agree that the Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist idea of socialism was fundamentally broken, what you describe is a specific type of socialism that is quite far from the mainstream today. Most socialists are social democrats. Within social democratic parties you do find some support for co-ops, but as limited tendencies (e.g. in the UK, the Co-operative Party is in permanent alliance of some sort with the Labour Party). Within most revolutionary socialist organisations finding support for the coop movement is relatively rare, as it is seen as too limited. You do find quite a lot (to the extent you can talk of "a lot" in organisations of this size...) of support for left communist ideologies like council communism and market communism though, which share characteristics similar to those you describe.

You're describing syndicalism; it's not true that it was never implemented by the communists. The Soviet Union had a very serious go at it, allowing the artel as an economic unit (essentially a kind of co-op), and allowing people to freely sell products of their own labor. Within months, this led to a renewed stratification of society, the emergence of a nouveau rich class, and something approaching a return to capitalism (some people's labor is more profitable than others'). In the case of the Soviet Union, this led to a crackdown on the labor market. They also made attempts to organize along trade union lines instead - which reduces the stratification problem somewhat since a trade is not a single economic unit - but having the electricians and the mechanics within a factory report to different management was not practicable. The USSR came to its system of government-run conglomerates because it was the only way they found to combine socialism with getting at least something done; it was not their initial intention to have everything run by the government, if only because the didn't really want the management burden.

In other cases, the evolution towards capitalism just ran its course. Israel stumbled into syndicalism by default - its labor unions and cooperatives predate the state. In virtually all cases, the cooperatives did not grant new members the same rights as the founding members. E.g. the bus cooperative - which started out as a free association of owner-drivers - now relies on hired labor for most of the actual driving, with wages the same as any other driving job in the capitalist free market. The final stop for this kind of developments is in the unionized ports, where they have full union members making tens of thousands of dollars a month for sinecure jobs, with a lot of the gruntwork being done by minimum-wage hired labor with no rights. It's nice to talk about how "the workers" will not vote for this or that, but when it comes to voting members - of anything - voting themselves more rights than the people asking to join, they have, they did, and they will vote for that.