Competition and cooperation
By Allen Myers
Australia has to be competitive internationally, we are continually told whenever governments want to lower wages or cut social security spending. Within Australia, businesses have to be competitive against each other, which also dictates that none of them can afford higher wages or improved conditions.
This competition is presented as both inevitable and desirable: inevitable because the rest of business/the world will compete against us even if we don't compete against them; desirable because competition guarantees the most efficient production and therefore lowest prices and best quality products.
However, capitalist society's attitude to competition isn't as straightforward as it seems. In fact, in an area where competition is most intense, capitalists try to pretend that it doesn't, or shouldn't, exist.
But there has never been capitalism anywhere without competition between workers and capitalists. In every company, there is competition between owners and workers over how the company's income is divided between wages and profits: the more that goes to one side, the less there is for the other.
Most company managements try to deny this. They tell workers to cooperate with them instead of competing; then the company will be successful in competing against other companies and there will be "more for everyone".
But if workers stop competing for a larger share of the company's income, it just makes it easier for the owners to take more — and they can be counted on to do it. There is certainly no guarantee (or even likelihood) that the successful owners, out of gratitude, will share their success with their workers.
Although the capitalists' pleas for cooperation with them shouldn't be taken seriously, we should consider why they use this particular argument — and why it often seems to be effective with many workers.
Most of us have a feeling that, in most things, cooperating with others is generally better than competing against them. That feeling is a sound one.
In big things and small, cooperation is so fundamental to the existence of society that we don't even think of it as cooperation: it seems simply "natural" behaviour.
Thus it is normal for two people to move to the left when passing on the footpath, normal to queue for admission to the theatre or sports ground, normal to hold the door open for the person entering behind you. Workers join unions because they realise that they are better off cooperating with workmates rather than competing against them.
And, except for the occasional shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe alone on an island, all forms of production of goods and services involve cooperation — often by people thousands of kilometres apart.
Capitalism also depends upon cooperation: the simplest factory couldn't operate without it. Historically, capitalism has greatly increased human cooperation by making production a national and international process.
But on top of this basis of cooperation, capitalism constructs a contradictory layer of competition. There is cooperation in the factory, but the factory competes against other factories in the same industry. If a single company controls an industry and imposes cooperation, it competes against producers overseas, and against other industries for resources, finance and higher profits.
So capitalist cooperation is always contradictory, and usually wasteful (duplication of efforts, destruction of losing competitors). It is also imposed from the top — not brought about by the free decision of those who do the cooperating.
Defenders of capitalist competition usually argue — or simply assume — that the only alternative is monopoly. This is the pretext for many privatisations: it is claimed that private competition is more "efficient" than government monopoly.
But monopoly is not an alternative to competition. It is the result of competition: as the big fish eat the little fish, the number of fish declines. For example, BHP didn't start out with a monopoly of Australian iron and steel production, but arrived there through competition. There were once hundreds of US car companies, but competition reduced them to only three with any significant market share.
The real alternative to both competition and capitalist monopoly is the freely decided cooperation of working people: cooperation to produce the needs of all human beings, not higher profits for a minority.