Alternative Organizing, Alienation and Wage Labour: Exploring the importance of democracy in UK Worker Cooperatives

Alienation is seen as endemic to the labour process and organisations. 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 eighteen-month ethnography with two worker cooperatives, addresses the question: To what extent are members of worker cooperatives, engaged in wage labour, able to resist the forces of alienation?