Category Archives: Cooperatives

Cooperatives: now, a famously right-wing ex-editor of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator emerges as an advocate of true sharing in the ownership of companies …

. 4th Estate moves, Cooperatives . ,

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Joining Pope Francis, the influential, left-leaning author of Postcapitalism, Paul Mason, and the rap emperor Jay Z in proposing cooperatives as the most rational economic structure and best weapon against economic inequality, here is Charles Moore — a Margaret Thatcher biographer, right-wing journalist, and former editor of The Spectator and Daily Telegraph. He is so conservative that he converted to Roman Catholicism after the Church of England decided to permit the ordination of women priests. Where did he proclaim his love of a style of ownership that has led to muttering diagnoses of ill-advised Marxist tendencies in nearly everyone else who has — from the charismatic pontiff to the most undeniably obscure bloggers? In last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, no less, in a riveting argument quoting Karl himself — approvingly. Sections worthy of special note:

…There is clearly an unmet need for a politics that goes beyond mere grievance-peddling to develop a new way of thinking about what makes a society free and secure at the same time. If this were easy, we would have heard more of it by now, and I won’t pretend to have the answers. But certain basic principles seem like the proper foundation…

Take ownership much more seriously.

Why are so few companies owned by the people who work for them, and why do both liberal and conservative political parties not offer greater incentives, such as tax advantages, for this to change? It is extraordinary that the joint stock company, the foundation of modern commercial and industrial wealth, is still so little influenced by the views of shareholders.

This is perhaps most evident in the preposterous salaries paid, particularly in the U.S. and Britain, to top executives of public companies. If the owners of these companies truly exercised authority over what is theirs, this wouldn’t happen. If these enterprises had grown over the last 20 years at the same rate as pay for the men who run them (it usually still is men), no one would be talking of a crisis of capitalism.

Ownership of housing, stocks and pensions is an area where creativity has died. This failing of our consumer society may owe something to the baby boomers’ desire to “have it now,” but another part of the problem is that people are correctly no longer confident that what they save now will be available to them later. Savings need more long-term government protection than they receive in most Western societies. A business culture based on deals and bonuses means that the best business minds are not interested in saving.

The ideal of ownership also needs to apply more fully to civil society. It might be a good idea, for example, if citizens could establish ownership rights over their local school by becoming “members.” Under the existing arrangements, how much can parents and communities creatively affect what happens in schools? The charter-school movement in the U.S. and “academies” and “free schools” in Britain are working in the right direction but remain a long way from something citizens can feel they own.

These rights would give people a voice when things go wrong, rather as some congregations have a say in their churches. In Britain, there is an admirable and long-standing body called the Wine Society, wholly owned by its members with the sole purpose of getting them good wine at good prices. There could be some bold ideas about applying this principle to things so important that they can’t be bottled, such as health.

The Victorians were more imaginative than we are about principles of mutuality—credit unions, building societies, the cooperative movement. Such organizations feel creakier in an age when people want larger sums, faster. But is it really beyond the skill of our great modern business brains to develop these concepts and adapt them to modernity? Financial creativity, unfortunately, really has become the preserve of the few, for the few.

Science, religion, and a curious note from history: the sad, small Maharaja of Chhatarpur meets a founder of the cooperative movement and is impressed

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An early and influential English thinker about the theoretical underpinnings of the cooperative movement, Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), is better known for her unique marriage to a fellow socialist and social reformer, Sidney Webb. She was born rich and beautiful, an eccentric daughter — with eight sisters — of an industrial magnate. Sidney was an undistinguished-looking member of the middle class and, when they met, working as an obscure government bureaucrat.

Theirs was a childless partnership, but her inheritance and their exceptional intellectual fusion created an unparalleled record for translating ideas into action. One editor of a selection of entries from the diaries they wrote together over several decades (archived here), Niraja Gopal Jayal, has listed among their ‘brainchildren’: the Welfare State, the Labour Party, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the New Statesman.

Discussions of cooperatives and founding cooperatives of various stripes — a subject of special interest on our blog — are inevitable, whenever there is acute, widespread worry about social inequality and have-nots faring badly in capitalism, as in the early 20th century, and today. Perhaps because the Webbs were as effective on the practical plane as in refining abstractions, their diaries also contain the most lapidary delineation of what distinguishes science from religion that we at post-Gutenberg have ever read.

The context for that definition, for which Sidney credits only Beatrice, is just as unforgettable.

They were travelling in India, on an expedition that stretched out over several months. On the 14th of February in 1912, they visited the five foot-tall Maharaja of Chhatarpur in central India – described in the diary entry for that day as ‘a rather pathetic figure … sickly and weak, who had been married at 16 to the young daughter of a neighbouring little Maharaja like himself, who had borne him no children …’. He is depressed. ‘Without children, without anyone to talk philosophy to, without friends, without faith, he had (we were told and he almost confessed to S.W.) taken to sexual malpractices, and was profoundly unhappy and unable, as he said, to “find peace”.’

Then, the entry continues,

B.W. captivated him by explaining the difference between science and religion — the one demanding a perpetual striving after making our order of thought correspond with the order of things; the other supplying the purpose of life to be gained by aspiration or communion or prayer, whereby our order of thought, in the realm of purpose, is brought into harmony with a higher order of thought, the great spiritual force that we hope and trust is above and behind all the worlds.

That is remarkable enough in itself, and more so when you consider that B.W. had had to educate herself — because, as Niraja Jayal explains, ‘even a girl with a lively intellectual curiosity was, in Beatrice’s time, denied access to formal education.’

Sidney (1859-1947), on the other hand, had studied law at London University, and was called to the Bar at the age of twenty-six. This was how Beatrice characterised their peculiar mind-meld — in a masterpiece of self-deprecation:

We are both of us second-rate minds; but we are curiously combined. I am the investigator and he the executant; between us we have a wide and varied experience of men and affairs.

Her Wikipedia entry describes this autodidact as a sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer.

Of course the Webbs would have got nowhere without what she described as their ‘unearned salary,’ and — as Jayal says — her upbringing in a household ‘visited not only by the captains of industry but also by politicians, pastors and philosophers’.

Still, how many other well-placed not-exactly-trustafarians put their stipends and connections in service to such ideals?

 

A New York Times reporter uses the dreaded ‘c’ (for cooperative)-word and finds his enthusiasm premature, just like post-Gutenberg’s … in 2010-11

. Cooperatives, Culture after Gutenberg, The future of publishing . , , , , , ,

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[ a curious WordPress software bug appears to be interfering with linking to some earlier post-Gutenberg entries. Follow the asterisks to the bottom of this post for those missing links ]

Well done, New York Times, at last … for letting one of your sharpest technology reporters advocate turning Reddit into a ‘user’-owned cooperative to end the fight about the news-aggregator site’s comment moderation policies. We had yet to come across Farhad Manjoo’s missionary zeal for this possibility when we made the same suggestion two posts ago: ‘The media ownership structure that dare not speak its name? Or is it the writing on the wall that new media, too, are deciphering too slowly?’. We could scarcely believe our eyes when we did.

Think of our last post in 2011, ‘Will 2012 be the year of a great leap forward into media’s future — even at The New York Times?’*. It contained this passage:

My personal high-water mark for the media establishment’s resistance to the new dates from the spring of 2010, when I emailed a question to an editor near the top of The New York Times.

The press has been critical to the success of democracy as a form of government; how is it responding to its own democratisation, and how far would it be prepared to go on that road — voluntarily? If you could recommend the right person at the paper for these questions, I’d be immensely grateful.

Zzzzzzzzzing! … the editor’s reply came fast enough to set heads spinning:

I don’t know that anyone would have a specific opinion on this, at least not one that represented the Times in general. You might look to see if an editorial has ever been written about it. If not, I suspect your question doesn’t have an answer. [my ital.]

No search engine brings up any such NYT editorial. What that response was surely supposed to impress on me was that ‘our’ never having addressed the question meant that it was inherently unanswerable.

Which is patently untrue …

Still, that was a gracious and munificent response, certainly by comparison with The Guardian’s — which had banned a suggestion along the same lines, a few weeks earlier. We reprinted the censored comment in a 7 November 2011 post, ‘Why is The Guardian censoring debate about press reform and ignoring the Lord Chief Justice’s endorsement of citizen journalism?’** Here is what the axed comment said, in part (see that archived blog entry for the complete version ):

‘postgutenberg‘s comment 29 September 2011 9:34PM

This comment has been removed by a moderator.’

What the censored comment said:

postgutenberg

29 September 2011 9:34PM

[…]

Addressing Whealie‘s point, what if the Guardian were to try out an experiment in which commenters become part-owners of a section of the online newspaper and helped to decide on policies, including moderation?

More details here: Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders.***

The lapse of four years has not made much of a difference. The cringing reaction to the idea of co-ownership today, of many ordinary people — not just of famous newspapers like the NYT and Guardian – was in the tweets replying to @fmanjoo’s advertisement of his piece on Twitter. A sample, not necessarily in the right chronological order – from tweeters who sound pessimistic even when they believe in the dream of democratised management and shareholding:

Jul 14

Michael Moeschler ‏@moesch

@fmanjoo baguettaboutit

Jul 14

Arlo Gilbert ‏@arlogilbert

@fmanjoo @nytimes the phrase “herding cats” comes to mind.

Jul 14

LornaGarey ‏@LornaGarey

@fmanjoo @nytimes Commie.

Jul 14

Jonathan Harrop ‏@harropj @fmanjoo Most redditors ALREADY think the site should bend to their whims and turn on a dime. This would be a terrible shit show.

Jul 15

Mark Devlin ‏@sparkzilla

@fmanjoo @nytimes But no mention of ethical issue of companies making millions/billions from the free work of contributors.

Jul 15

Mark Devlin ‏@sparkzilla

@fmanjoo @nytimes In the same vein: http://newslines.org/blog/reddit-and-wikipedia-share-the-same-disease/ …

All that will have been déja-vu for readers with excellent memories. The first post-Gutenberg.com entry, on 5 September 2011 — ‘Wanted: a brave newspaper, for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders’*** — offered this anatomisation of objections to publishing enterprises co-owned with ‘reader-commenters’ (‘users’, for @fmanjoo).

In January of last year, I outlined a scheme that a newspaper could run as an experiment in sharing ownership of a part of its site with reader-commenters. […] There were, broadly, five reasons for their reluctance to try it out:

  • ‘Too new’ – the scheme diverges too far from their ideas about the future evolution of media.
  • Protectionism. The mistaken belief that the scheme would entail paying commenters at the same rates as professional writers and journalists. That is not what the proposal says at all. The idea is that the arrangement would work very broadly in the way insurance does: people contributing more or less equal sums into a pool of money from which disbursements would be made in accordance with merit and need.
  • Semantics. Interpreting the scheme as ‘socialism’. There is no precise counterpart for the proposed arrangement – certainly not in publishing, as far as I know. But to convey the idea of shared ownership I used the word ‘cooperative’—which unfortunately spells ‘hippie’ utopianism or bankrupt socialist idealism to many people. It says something else entirely to me. For nearly 20 years, I have been a member of a rural electricity cooperative founded 75 years ago by a group of farmers – after the local power company refused to put them on its network. This organisation runs so beautifully that my electricity bills have always been a small fraction of sums I have paid for the identical usage patterns in other places.
  • Fear of losing power. Most publishers of the print era cannot give up the idea of journalists and editors performing on a stage for readers – the audience down in the pit, which is where they would like them to stay. They cannot accept that technology has made it realistic for readers to want – indeed, expect – to share the stage with them, even if only in walk-on parts, in most cases, at the start.
  • Pessimism. Publishers cannot conceive of making a bigger pie – that is, expanding revenue, and even earning profits, with luck – through sharing ownership with reader-commenters. They can only imagine being forced to accept smaller slices of an unchanged or shrunken pie.

Ah, well … none of that would be in the least surprising to anyone who lived through the 15th-century transition from scrolls and illuminated hand-made manuscripts to the printed book. The scholar Andrew Pettegree’s The Book in the Renaissance is a richly detailed, gripping account of that revolution. Many fell by the wayside in the quest for a workable economic structure (‘business model’) by entrepreneurs keen to use Gutenberg’s press to replicate manuscripts by the hundred — for citizens just as eager to become readers and acquire libraries of their own:

The investment that a printer made in type, paper and wages was all directed towards a clear goal: the production of a finished artefact. But unless the edition was supported by a wealthy sponsor or patron, the costs could only be recouped once the books had been sold. For many printers this demanded skills for which experience in a workshop offered little help, and a network of commercial contacts they did not possess. The pool of potential purchasers was large, but often widely dispersed. The desire of many printers to publish eye-catching, luxurious or innovative publications accentuated this problem, since books like this were most difficult to sell to a clientele dispersed around Europe. Printers would often have to hold stock for a long time before the edition was sold out: this again, was a problem not anticipated by those familiar with the retail manuscript trade …

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* https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/12/30/will-2012-be-the-year-of-a-great-leap-forward-into-medias-future-even-at-the-new-york-times/

**https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/11/07/why-is-the-guardian-censoring-discussion-of-press-restructuring-and-ignoring-the-top-judges-support-for-citizen-journalism/

***https://post-gutenberg.com/2011/09/05/wanted-a-brave-newspaper-for-an-experiment-in-which-readers-become-stakeholders/

The media ownership structure that dare not speak its name? Or is it the writing on the wall that new media, too, are deciphering too slowly?

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-- postgutenberg[at]gmail.com

flower shadow circle

— postgutenberg [at] gmail.com

Readers sautéing themselves on a powdery white beach who missed the Reddit.com hullabaloo last week that led Ellen Pao, its chief executive, to resign can catch up below in excerpts from a New York Times opinion piece begging for an answer to the obvious question.

Why not turn Reddit into a cooperative?

This is not only the obvious solution screaming from the particular problems the authors describe. It is in line with the visions of a fast-expanding minority who grasp the dimensions and implications — for man, the social animal — of the profoundly anti-hierarchical internet revolution. On the Guardian site last Friday, in ‘The end of capitalism has begun’ — a blog post based on his just-published book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future — Paul Mason, economics editor of Britain’s Channel 4 News, showed why some new species of cooperative looms large, and not so far away:

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, … New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. … [F]ew have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself. … On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory. … But what is all this information worth? … A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world. … [W]e … cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self.

… And now here is the NYT lament by two lawyers, Brian Lynch and Courtnie Swearingen — also serving as unpaid Reddit site moderators — that leapt to mind as we sped through the Mason extract:

Why We Shut Down Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ Forum

We are moderators for the website reddit.com, a place where, on a typical day, millions of users read and share content in self-contained communities called “subreddits.” We volunteer our time to help manage the subsection called IAmA — a popular part of the site where thousands of interviews, known as “ask me anythings,” take place. It’s where Bill Gates has talked about the importance of vaccines, …

We work hard to maintain the forum for the roughly eight million readers who turn to it each month. But last week we purposely shut it down for 24 hours. We did this after the company abruptly terminated Victoria Taylor, a Reddit employee who worked extensively with us as well as with other moderator teams on facilitating A.M.A.s.

Our primary concern, and reason for taking the site down temporarily, is that Reddit’s management made critical changes to a very popular website without any apparent care for how those changes might affect their biggest resource: the community and the moderators that help tend the subreddits that constitute the site. Moderators commit their time to the site to foster engaging communities. Ms. Taylor’s sudden termination is just the most recent example of management’s making changes without thinking through what those changes might mean for the people who use the site on a daily basis.

The issue goes beyond Reddit. We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers — and whether they truly understand what makes an online community vibrant.

According to company numbers, IAmA hosts more than 8.5 million subscribers and between 20 and 30 million page views per month on its own. We started using Reddit as students, one of us around 2007 and the other around 2010, and now we are both attorneys. Reddit is not our job, but we have spent thousands of hours as a team answering questions, facilitating A.M.A.s, writing policy and helping people ask questions of their heroes. We moderate from the train or bus, on breaks from work and in between classes. We check on the subreddit while standing in line at the grocery store or waiting at the D.M.V.

We donate our time and talents to Reddit, a for-profit company, because we truly like building cool things on the Internet for others to enjoy

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The community on the whole has also spoken quite loudly: Pay attention to the user base. Users are not simply a screaming mob. They are actually asking for reasonable support, and as moderators, we are trying very hard to do what we can to make those changes happen.