Resisting erosion in a sea of capitalism: two case studies of anti-capitalist worker cooperatives in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is an exploration of the dialectical orientation of two worker cooperatives in Canada: Mondragon Coffeehouse in Winnipeg and The Sleepless Goat in Kingston. It explores the contradictions these two organizations must navigate within a pro-bureaucratic capitalist environment and how these contradictions have contributed to their development and, more specifically the development of the individual members. The analysis is based on the key theoretical concepts of worker cooperatives, democratic-collectivist organizations, revolutionary praxis, and solidarity. Beginning from the experience of individual cooperative members, this thesis makes the connection between the alternative organization's structural development and the self-changing of the individual. This reinforced Karl Marx's notion of revolutionary praxis which suggests a correlation between the changing of circumstances and individual change. Based on a comparative analysis between two worker cooperatives, using twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews the research revealed a number of key findings. The main finding was that despite beginning with similar structure and intent over a decade or so these two organizations developed in largely different directions. While Mondragon was able to maintain its political commitments and democratic-collectivist structure, The Sleepless Goat became more concerned with business practice and in the process allowed its political commitments and collectivist structure to fade. It was found that cross-movement solidarity, recruitment practice, and effective communication of goals and practices were all contributing factors in the maintenance or erosion of social movement goals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.047 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".