I often wonder what will come of my cooperative experiences. There are relatively few jobs, or so far as I've noticed, for individuals who seek to create alternatives to hegemonic and dominating managerial structures. It's not surprising really and possibly comforting. If there aren't jobs for exactly what I want to do, it means that there is work to be done, a world to be reformed. It means that I wouldn't have any work to do.
Instead, I'm somewhat comforted at the thought. In the meantime, I must work to develop a strategy, one that accounts for the present state of capitalism in a way that few others have up to this point done. And then, I must find the right place for its application, all of which are pressures found within our cooperative, the BSC. Often, as an executive, I have to improvise. Operating with a vague sense of what was just and right and becoming as knowledgeable as possible on the structure as it is existed, I moved forward and staunchly worked out my principles. In the end, I accomplished numerous things too, given the unique opportunity to manage such a large enterprise.
This fact about the coops is also what is somewhat unique to and most noteworthy about them. 'We' give students the opportunity to create the world they will come to inhabit, providing opportunities for political discussion, decision making, research and directive management. So, too, is incumbent upon them to responsibly take this mandate and steer the organization into whatever kind of future they create. It is deeply anti-ageist in this sense and even hopeful of the fact that other, alternative structures are possible, in any place. Similarly, the form encourages students to be critical, to welcome creative and imaginative thinking about alternative modes of organization but most often maintains a tempered state of activity that retains important relationships with bodies outside of the Berkeley Student Cooperative. In other words, we keep ourselves from becoming too critical or alternative that we can no longer operate with other organizations. Maintaining this middle ground is key and what continually reshapes and reforms the organization.
Leaving the cooperative is a challenge, though. As each one of us leaves, we see a world that is radically different, governed by different rules, structures of management, various kinds of marginalization, oppression and unfairness, and it becomes difficult to come to terms with this. I personally have dealt with this. As I took on a tutoring job, I noticed how unfairly the organization expected individuals to accept sub-standard pay, strictly prevent individuals from exercising their own kind of agency in different places and, for the most part, discouraged dissent, which is often the case. As orthodox management theory stipulates (and this is something I hope to study in more detail later), a hierarchy should predominate, one in which the most 'seasoned' (whatever this may mean) individuals reign supreme. They decide how to pay. They decide what is paid. They decide the conditions of work and play. They decide how the organization produces its service and engages with outside entities. This relationship between management and worker could be easily reduced to a marxist interpretation of exploitation, but I think it is far more complicated and such an explanation even does it injustice. Organizations should be more open to including, hearing and acting on criticisms; as many of them have become so ossified that only a few are able to actually affect any change, while so many suffer the consequences of existing under rules, procedures and practices (constituent parts of working conditions) over which they have no control. Lukacs, I think, called this reification.
It plays out in real form everywhere today, and it is so common place that it seems acceptable. But the coops, just in their very existence and operation intend to show how peculiar, strange and unnatural such management structures really are. They endeavor to show, and we endeavor to teach, by virtue of our participation in the coops, that other worlds are possible, or even something more tempered; we can create organizations that include more opinions, that are informed by more perspectives, whether they be of the 'seasoned' management or of the workers who actually have to live by that seasoning.
Issues of pay feature prominently here, too, but I do not want to delve into them too much, as the matter is clichedly overwrought, as simple as it is. People are not paid for what they contribute but for what management unilaterally decides is fair. As most affected individuals are not included in these decisions, and the decisions are made for them, the problem discloses itself. A lack of representation means marginalization, means pay that is questionable and out of tune with the self-perceived value of the workers themselves, not to mention others that may be participating. Again, managers defend themselves with data, but the choice of data is telling, and the mere fact of it being a relatively private and closed forum is problematic enough for any to take issue with it. Here again, we seem room for a fight in this world.
There is much to be done, and there is much more to be said, but I will hold for now, for your sake and mine.
