The cooperative turn - building the right kind of autonomy
Free-market ideas that were originally part of the Enlightenment’s attack on the landed absolutism of the 18th century have now been turned to defend the new corporate absolutism of today. Those institutions that more than 100 years of active politics put in place to contain and direct the force of a corporate market have one by one been dismantled as fetters to this force. It has been a dismantling undertaken in the name of freedom and efficiency. But the result has been the freedom of the few, and an efficiency that threatens to turn itself against its people and its planet.
Just as tornadoes, floods and firestorms sweep away all that is before them, all that is familiar – houses, roads, even threatening whole towns and cities – so the last 30 years has seen the erosion of the pillars that provided stability to 20th-century society. It is not just the ever-gathering attacks on the welfare state and its sense of social solidarity. It is the weakening of so much that once shaped values and identity and provided the norms for personal relationships. All these have become less rooted, more diverse, and provisional. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described it as a shift from solid to liquid modernity.
Just as tornadoes, floods and firestorms sweep away all that is before them, all that is familiar – houses, roads, even threatening whole towns and cities – so the last 30 years has seen the erosion of the pillars that provided stability to 20th-century society. It is not just the ever-gathering attacks on the welfare state and its sense of social solidarity. It is the weakening of so much that once shaped values and identity and provided the norms for personal relationships. All these have become less rooted, more diverse, and provisional. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described it as a shift from solid to liquid modernity.
Central to this shift has been an increasingly faster and more liquid economy. Money now moves round the world in milliseconds. Fashion cycles are shorter. The rise and fall of companies is more rapid, their location more fluid. In the labour market the part-timer, the temp and the short-term contract are the forms of employment of a new ‘precariat’, constantly on the move between jobs, between places, and increasingly between countries. Mobility is a marker. Today 300,000 passengers are in the air above the US at any one time. International passenger arrivals have just reached 1 billion annually.
This global fluidity has been promoted by what the Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi called “market utopianism” – a framework of thought that divorces the economy from society. As an ideology, like money it has become global and has come to dominate the way society is thought about and discussed. It has also become the primary shaper of social and economic policy... Read more:
