Abstract
In this book, Carl Ratner addresses forms of cooperation and co-ops, and the politics that shape them. The author has written it in his hard-hitting and polemic style. He does not eschew a fierce debate about the issues of this book.
Ratner’s analysis derives from his book Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind (2012), in which he elucidates “macro cultural psychology” as a radical shift in conceptualizing psychological phenomena and the discipline that studies and treats these. His theory breaks down the traditional isolation of psychology from culture and politics. Notably relevant for the readers of this sociological journal, the author refers to sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Lester Ward in order to illustrate the need, felt long ago by prominent sociologists, to renew the discipline of psychology. This renewal being necessary because of the deep interrelations between the domains of the individual mind, consciousness, and the social domain. The author views his new theoretical framework as a “seismic” paradigm shift. It conceptualizes psychology as including culture, and culture as including psychology. If psychology is removed from culture, culture vanishes because its subjective side is eliminated, and if culture is removed from psychology, psychology vanishes because its objective basis and character are removed.
Ratner applies his macro cultural psychology to (mainly) American co-ops, viewed as specified forms of cooperation. His basic assumption is that cooperation, like all social behavior, rests upon cultural politics. He problematizes co-ops as a form of social organization or governance, in a Foucauldian sense. Following Foucault and his ideas about governance, Ratner emphasizes that the way of thinking about issues – in this case co-ops – tacitly rests upon and promulgates political concerns, a political rationality, a political logic, or a political a priori. The politics of the way cooperation is conceptualized and practiced in co-ops is the key point of this book. Understanding and changing particular forms of cooperation and co-ops requires, according to Ratner, understanding and changing the underlying political rationalities that are rooted in political economy. The politics of cooperation and co-ops are powerful indicators of their capacity to achieve genuine cooperation and co-ops.
I would like to focus this review on three issues: first, the potentialities and explanatory power of Ratner’s conceptual framework, second, the complexities and difficulties of the framework, and third, some critical remarks about the style and editing of this book.
First, Ratner’s macro cultural psychology is (mainly, but not exclusively) grounded in the historical materialist, dialectic thinking of Karl Marx, in the Marxian inspired, historical, sociocultural psychological thinking of Lev Vygotsky, and the theorizing about “governmentality” of Michel Foucault. Drawing upon these intellectual giants offers fruitful theoretical perspectives to deepen and broaden thus-far developed critical approaches to phenomena like cooperation and co-ops. For instance, although firmly embedded in the main ontological and epistemological tenets of Marxian thinking, Ratner criticizes Marx for having overlooked the cultural psychology of commodification and being too focused on the worker as a producer, the psychology of the producer, thereby neglecting the psychology of the consumer. Notably his interpretation of Vygotsky’s psychological work and, in this case, regarding the presence of culture in human thinking, can be valued as an important contribution to critical thinking about cooperation and co-ops. In my view, Ratner’s attempts at building a conceptual framework based upon a synergy of key insights of Marx, Foucault and Vygotsky, offer a fruitful perspective to pursue a critical inquiry into what may be called the subjective aspects of the development of the working class under monopoly capitalism, as Paul Sweezy wrote in his foreword to the original edition of Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974), or, in other words, to theoretically “fill the gap” left by Braverman, meaning the so-called “missing subject” debate in labor process theory, as Paul Thompson and Steve Vincent (2010) point at in their article about labor process theory and critical realism. His political philosophy of the mind bears the potential to substantially contribute to the longstanding debate about the agency of labor in the capital–labor relations of our times.
Second, I would point at the complexities and difficulties of his conceptual framework, with regard to how Ratner applies this to American co-ops and the politics that shape them. Despite his copious conceptual and empirical writing on macro cultural psychology, it is, in my view, difficult to translate his approach into a clear-cut research design. A macro cultural psychological approach encompasses numerous factors, to be addressed in a trans- or multi-disciplinary way. Macro cultural psychological research, apart from cultural psychology, of course, draws on several disciplines, for instance, political economy, history, sociology, political science, geography, and anthropology. Ratner’s radical rethinking of psychology also requires a new, non-positivistic, qualitative methodology to research principles of macro cultural psychology. This means that a researcher has to be very sensitive and creative in concretely elaborating the theoretical set of explanatory constructs of this new approach. The complexity of this framework can be linked to the work of its intellectual founding fathers: Marx, Vygotsky, and Foucault. These brilliant thinkers were also very complex scholars, often misunderstood, and not always because of a hostile, biased reading of their works.
For whatever reason, there are numerous and widely varying interpretations and consequently many (deep) controversies in this field; for instance, debates regarding issues like the role and function of the State, markets, planning. Ratner, in his praiseworthy and correct attempt to avoid pitfalls like scientism, objectivism or subjectivism, and in his attempt to develop an encompassing theoretical framework, pays a price for this. That price is its complexity. It makes applying his approach a difficult, challenging scientific endeavor. His macro cultural psychological theory is promising and demanding, as well. Terminology is an important case in point. In using key terms like culture, capitalist, socialist, and populist, Ratner enters a minefield of linguistic confusion. If not clearly and precisely defined, these terms remain buzz words, useless in theoretical work. Being well aware of this pitfall, in earlier publications the author took great pains at explaining in detail the parsimonious concepts building his theoretical construct. His work is in refining and expanding Marx’s analysis of capital, Vygotsky’s ideas about sociocultural psychology, and the Foucauldian understanding of governance. Ratner’s book on the politics of cooperation and co-ops demonstrates the value of his admittedly complex framework. His philosophically and historically underpinned critical approach is sorely needed in these days of corporate universities and an intellectual landscape dominated by deeply flawed, reductionist social theory, usually ignoring critical realist, historical materialist, and cultural approaches to, for instance, cooperation and co-ops.
Let me illustrate this with the case of the Dutch Rabobank, a prominent member of the cooperative movement, closely linked to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA). A recently published book (De Heer, 2016) on this cooperative bank sketches a tarnishing picture of this former cooperative icon and model in the Netherlands (and abroad). The author of the book is very clear about the cooperative principles of Rabobank: they are completely abandoned (De Heer, 2016, p. 28). Although being very critical, and pessimistic about the future of Rabobank, this author’s analysis remains within the mainstream theoretical, economic framework, thereby missing the conceptual apparatus to critically address the contradictions and systemic flaws of the political economic philosophy underpinning the practices of this paradigmatic cooperative bank. In my view, Ratner’s macro cultural conceptual framework offers a broader, deeper and above all critical perspective, enabling us to analyze the problems of cooperation and co-ops, as social behavior, resting upon cultural politics. His political analysis unmasks the widespread self-concept of cooperative “models” like Rabobank, premised on a self-concept of being a genuine alternative to the (capitalist) status quo. Ratner’s analysis reveals Rabobank being actually part and parcel of a financialized capitalist system, thereby showing that these “co-ops” have lost any transformational capacity for substantially changing the political economic status quo.
Third, some final remarks on the style and editing of this book. Ratner has a combative, hard-hitting and polemic style of writing. This style doesn’t need (so many) exclamation marks. The text speaks for itself, as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, the book is marred by too many inaccuracies that could distract from the content of it. That valuable content deserves a more careful editing.