Anarchist firms

I've been thinking about utopian economic structures (because really, what's as fun as grooving out to utopian economic structures?) and their relationship to the world as it is. I call myself an anarchist but in all honesty, if we take the idea of immediate, spontaneous revolution off the table (and I don't really think it belongs there) this is a very vague assertion. It is a set of loose principles held together more by historical continuity or quasi-mystical intuition more than through any strict parameters, organizational coherence, or platform of particular doctrines and dogmas. As a political project it is grand and open, and demands the widest possible creativity in experimenting with new forms and models for living, or with adapting existing forms. How do we see to the needs and desires of the human organism, individually and collectively, without creating an abstracted power, without aping the models of disembodied transcendence built into Western culture and its organization of Power? What should our schools look like, should we have schools, what should our firms look like, should we have firms, etc etc. All very interesting.

I've been wondering what an ideal "firm" might look like, since I'm informally involved in the development of some unorthodox firms and am looking to cook up a few more. There is quite a bit of debate about this among anarchists, and I'm not really sure how I feel about it myself.

Let's say we're talking about responding to a need. Let's take bicycles. Someone wants a bicycle. They can either make one themselves or get one from someone else who makes them. That holds regardless of the overall economic system. Let's say they don't want to make one themselves. They get one from someone else, through barter, payment, gift, whatever. This creates a division between producer and consumer. Now, one of the broad principles of anarchism is to eliminate or reduce divisions between producer and consumer. So what do you do with a situation where you clearly have this type of division?

One approach is to stick with the idea of self-production by users, individually or collectively. That's a cool, wonderful approach. Keeping with the bicycle example, we could identify the Yellow Bike Project with this method. It's a damn good way of addressing the question, and the response then is to build open-access, community-oriented producer collectives, working for "free". We could imagine overlapping networks to this end. So we'd have, say, Yellow Bike Projects, community toolbanks, community gardens, home-building collectives, etc. I think this would be wonderful.

Are there other models worth pursuing? I think there have to be, because these models are too extreme to fit easily within the rhythms of day-to-day life for most people, if for no other reason than the price of land or health care. They form one apex, one ideal-limit, and so we should keep creating them and preserving them. And because of their nature, because they are open-access and volunteer-based and useful and catalyze unalienated, communal work, they are powerful anchors for the sort of communitarian passions necessary to create anything worthwhile in this world. But we still need an array of projects able to sustain a population driven by world capitalism, by the price of bread and a month's rent and a tooth exam.

The in-between organizations are cooperatives, but we must be careful here. It is easy for a cooperative to feel like a regular firm, so we must take pains to make the difference real, lived. There is tremendous disagreement among anarchists as to which types of cooperatives are worth building. There are a few basic types:
*Consumer cooperatives- the cooperative members are consumers and elect a representative Board
*Worker cooperatives- the cooperative members are workers and elect their Board or operate through democratic assembly
*Artisans' cooperatives- independent craftspeople share some resources, marketing, and clients to gain the savings advantages of larger associations without loss in working autonomy

The real argument is over worker and consumer cooperatives. Anarchism comes out of left ideologies traditionally associated with workers' movements, and anarchist tend to promote worker cooperatives over consumer. It is also very rare to find an anarchist giving some form of "consumerism" positive meaning. Consumerism of any sort is generally damned from the get-go.

On the other hand, if we look at anarchist proposals for a reorganized world, there is always a place for consumer representation alongside worker representation. In many systems this takes the form of consumer councils communicating with workers' councils. So while there is an abstract recognition that the two facets of engaging with constructed things must be considered, an academic understanding, this does not often seem to translate into an interest in consumer ownership of the means of production and control over labor.

I would suggest that ideally we want to create firms that prefigure the society we hope to create, and that if we accept a place for consumption of a product (which it seems we must) we should make a place in the firm for consumer participation and ownership. This isn't just a question of equity in the exchange. It runs a little deeper. In a conventional firm, the consumer participates by choosing to purchase a preconceived good or service. Their participation is purely after-the-fact, as an after-effect of the process of production itself. A consumer is always already alienated from a made thing.

If we have consumer participation in the production of a good or service, if the consumer actually mixes their desire and effort in the midst of a thing's creation, then they aren't just a consumer anymore. They're something more, something a little less alienated from the things that populate their lives. There is a radical existential possibility here, one worth pursuing. In some sense, the consumer involved in the labor process becomes a low-intensity worker while being a user.

To me then an ideal model might consist of some mixture between worker and consumer empowerment, with a heavy tilt in the workers' direction (after all, at the end of the day full-time workers will always carry the brunt of the embodied knowledge of a producing system). How we implement this varies with the situation.

However, even this is lacking something. The real problem of any institution under the state/capitalist regime, or under any society in which authoritarian models dominate the organization of most institutions, lies in their inherent "closure." This is a deeper problem, one based in the nature of agency and will. Dedicated participation in any set of practices or institutions tends to create a sort of tunnel-vision for the participants, based in their constant reference to the norms, requirements and guidelines of their organizations. They aren't "open" structures, contributing to the world that sustains them. They aren't "giving back" so to speak.

How do firms normally relate to the outside in a noninstrumental way? Taxation. Maybe this reveals something about the way the state and capitalism intertwine on an existential level- a firm eliminates or restricts its noninstrumental relationships with beings outside the firm, while the state consolidates and coordinates those open relationships that remain, by regulation and taxation. A right hook followed by a left hook. A firm must remain closed to nonsintrumental external relationships except those congealed into the functions we call the State.

Ok, enough moody theory, what does this mean? We should determine some other way for our model firms to contribute to the commons that generates them, besides and beyond taxation. What would this look like? I think it would be simply a dedicated investment in the community regardless of how that investment benefited the firm. An bicycle co-operative might promote bike lanes and safety training. A bookstore might facilitate decentralized book-lending among patrons. A food co-op might promote gardening and urban farms. A software firm might open its code.

So these three elements- worker empowerment, consumer participation, and giving back to the commons that forms the sustaining milieu of the firm- combined would make a viable general model for an "anarchist" firm.

Combine the two themes and we begin to see real possibilities for social reinvention. We see replacement models for our two great adversaries begin to emerge- the hybrid cooperative against the conventional capitalist corporation, and communitarian DIY infrastructure against the bureaucratic state.