Transcending Capitalism through Cooperative Practices

When Marx made the above comments in his first volume of

Capital

, he was referring to a capitalist class process and commodity production that often requires workers to act collectively. While he abhorred the capitalist mode of production, Marx clearly did espouse another, more equitable work organization, one built on cooperation and devoid of the

chains

that bind workers—whether imposed by a capitalist or by a central government. Capitalist production can and does exist in centrally planned “Communist”

1

economies (Mulder, 2015). This type of production is NOT what Marx envisioned as

the

answer to capitalist exploitation. He stated:

In its simple shape, as investigated so far, co-operation is a necessary concomitant of all production on a large scale, but it does

not

in itself represent a fixed form characteristic of a particular epoch in the development of the capitalist mode of production. (Ibid., 453; emphasis added)