That points to where the real basis of the workers' struggle, today, resides. In the same way that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the struggle of the bourgeoisie, backed by the petty-bourgeoise and proletariat was for political democracy and freedom, the struggle of the working-class, today, is a struggle for industrial democracy, as the necessary condition for their real freedom. The bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie, in the 18th and 19th century, did not have to wage a struggle for control over their property. Within each enterprise, they exercised such full control already, on the basis of existing laws of private property. Rather, the struggle was one for political freedom and democracy, so as to reflect their position in society, as ruling class, and, thereby, to remove all of the fetters on the expansion of bourgeois production, in general.
The petty-bourgeoisie, and small private industrial capitalists, today, continue to exercise control over their private property, but, today, the limitation of that is precisely that they are subordinated, in the market, to the power of the mammoth socialised capitals. Their freedom and control is, ultimately, as much a delusion as is the political sovereignty of small nation states, in a world of huge imperialist powers. It illustrates why the demands of the petty-bourgeois nationalists for the right of national self-determination are an even greater reactionary delusion, today, than they were a century ago, when Lenin wrote,
“As the party of the proletariat, the Social-Democratic Party considers it to be its positive and principal task to further the self-determination of the proletariat in each nationality rather than that of peoples or nations. We must always and unreservedly work for the very closest unity of the proletariat of all nationalities, and it is only in isolated and exceptional cases that we can advance and actively support demands conducive to the establishment of a new class state or to the substitution of a looser federal unity, etc., for the complete political unity of a state.”
The petty-bourgeois nationalists demand to “Take Back Control”, as, for example, put forward by the Brexiters and Lexiters, was soon exposed for the reactionary delusion it is. The Brexit negotiations showed just how little “control” even an imperialist nation state like Britain has, when it comes to its relations with other, much larger, imperialist states and blocs of states. But, the fact that, for much of the last 70 years, the socialist movement has been dominated by that kind of delusional, petty-bourgeois nationalism, when it comes to acting as cheerleaders for one petty-bourgeois nationalist movement or another, on the basis of their “anti-imperialism”, paved the way for that delusion, when it came to Brexit, just as it does with Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.
Like the petty-bourgeoisie, and small private capitalists, the workers in the worker cooperatives, also, exercise control over their property, but face the same reality that this freedom and control is extremely limited, because they must compete, in the market, usually against much bigger capitals.
The important role of the worker cooperative, today, therefore, remains in the form that Marx posed it, in 1864.
“The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labour need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the labouring man himself; and that, like slave labour, like serf labour, hired labour is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. In England, the seeds of the co-operative system were sown by Robert Owen; the workingmen’s experiments tried on the Continent were, in fact, the practical upshot of the theories, not invented, but loudly proclaimed, in 1848.”
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