Katarina Spasic analyses recent research that indicates cooperatives manage resources just as efficiently
For a year, from 1934-35, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist, worked at a factory as a manual laborer to deepen her understanding of the working class. In the aftermath of this experience, she wrote in her biography, “That contact with affliction had killed my youth.” Weil found that the tragedy of the worker was that she is treated as means to an end. Not only is the worker is humiliated, shamed and generally dehumanized; the worker is an object of the oppression that is to be found in the way production is organized. The very process that underpins making of goods and services, as it does the whole economy, is perpetuating a disenfranchised working class.