Monday, April 14, 2008 Editorial: Idiotization of cooperatives
OUR harsh commentaries could generate collective anger amongst the present crop of cooperative leaders and functionaries. We are glad if it would!
Anger, as in the classic Benhur movie, has a liberating element. We are so sure that, as collective anger eventually explodes into a heated public debate, the city's cooperative movement would be liberated from the stranglehold of social contortionists, posturing as cooperative advocates.
Really, the social beehive should be made to burst in wild abandon, now. The City Government is footing a tremendous amount of public energy and resources for the gigantic national summit of cooperative leaders by October, this year. We should not allow these resources to go to waste.
Rough commentaries serve as painful stings that help people arrive at an important realization. We can only hope that this realization could put an end to the ongoing idiotization of cooperative principles in the city.
The sprouting of company-based cooperatives as a dominant trend in the cooperative movement is not, at all, perplexing. Ours are annoying only because they are wholly isolationists.
Theoretically, when they do not work in alliance with the toiling masses, company-based cooperatives worsen the imbalance among key social forces, which the cooperative movement is supposed to correct.
This inequity is further worsened by the total absence of sustainable cooperatives involving forces of production in our basic communities. The usury, comprador or middlemen system that plunges our basic communities into the brink of abject poverty is yet to be confronted.
In some workplaces, in Dolefil for instance, cooperatives are used as union-busting instruments; thus, swaying the power pendulum in favor of management. One cooperative is even used to scheme against the ancestral lands of the Lumads in Barangays Sinawal and San Jose, at the expense of the environment and their rich cultural heritage.
These cooperatives also act, at the same time, as labor agencies that serve as "middlepersons" for the workers' sweat and blood.
This is a travesty of cooperative principle. When the artisanship of human hands caused the creation of goods, the workers invested part of their beings in such goods and, so, they cease to be purely material. On such goods, the workers had built their dreams; from them they breathe and within them lurks their very souls.
Lastly, this is the most alarming trend in the cooperative movement: the forces of corporate capital also organize themselves into cooperatives to avail of statutory tax privileges granted to cooperatives for the purpose of amassing huge profits.
Again, this makes a mockery of the cooperative movement because it promotes the evil that it wants to annihilate.
We hope that the forthcoming national cooperative summit could pierce the last nail into the coffin of pseudo-cooperatives.
