Alternative organizing, alienation and wage labour: Exploring the importance of democracy in UK worker cooperatives
基于对两家英国工人合作社18个月的民族志研究，探讨在资本主义市场中使用雇佣劳动的合作社成员能在多大程度上抵抗异化力量。
Alienation is seen as endemic to the labour process and organizations. Put simply, if workers do not own the means, conditions and results of production they will remain alienated from their product, productive activity, species being and fellow human and non-human others. Some scholars have highlighted that, through their structures of democratic control and collective ownership of the means, conditions and results of labour, worker cooperatives reverse the capital-labour relationship to create a non-exploitative class process and therefore hold possibilities for ‘disalienation’. However, the idea that worker cooperatives can be ‘disalienating’ is by no means universally accepted, with others arguing that subsumption of labour to capital can only be partially addressed through a cooperative’s internal structure. Central to this debate is a worker cooperative’s position within the capitalist market, and we argue, their use of wage labour. This article, based on an 18-month ethnography with 2 worker cooperatives, addresses the question: To what extent are members of worker cooperatives, engaged in wage labour, able to resist the forces of alienation?