‘One Worker, One Vote:'
US Steelworkers to Experiment with Factory Ownership, Mondragon Style

By Carl Davidson
http://www.SolidarityEconomy.net

Oct. 27, 2009--The United Steel Workers Union, North America's largest industrial trade union, announced a new collaboration with the world's largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon International, based in the Basque region of Spain.

News of the announcement spread rapidly throughout the communities of global justice activists, trade union militants, economic democracy and socialist organizers, green entrepreneurs and cooperative practitioners of all sorts. More than a few raised an eyebrow, but the overwhelming response was, "Terrific! How can we help?"
The vision behind the agreement is job creation, but with a new twist. Since government efforts were being stifled by the greed of financial speculators and private capital was more interested in cheap labor abroad, unions will take matters into their own hands, find willing partners, and create jobs themselves, but in sustainable businesses owned by the workers.

"We see today's agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada," said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. "Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities."

"This is a wonderful idea," said Rick Kimbrough, a retired steelworker from Aliquippa, Pa, and a 37-year-veteran of Jones and Laughlin Steel. "Ever since they shut down our mill, I've always thought, 'why shouldn't we own them?' If we did, they wouldn't be running away." J&L's Aliquippa Works was once one of the largest steel mills in the world, but is now shutdown and largely dismantled. Much of the production moved to Brazil.

The USW partnership with Mondragon was a bold stroke. While hardly a household word in the U.S and little known in the mass media, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) has been the mother lode of fresh ideas on economic democracy and social entrepreneurship worldwide for 50 years. Started in 1956 with five workers in a small shop making kerosene stoves, MCC today has over 100,000 worker-owners in some 260 enterprises in 40 countries. Annual sales are pegged at more than 16 billion Euros with a wide range of products--high tech machine tools, motor buses, household appliances and a chain of supermarkets. MCC also maintains its own banks, health clinics, welfare system, schools and the 4000 student Mondragon University--all worker-owned coops.

Over the past decade, there have been a handful of efforts to apply the model and methods of MCC to projects in the United States. Almost all are on a small scale--several bakeries in the Bay Area, some bookstores, and most recently, an industrial laundry and solar panel enterprise in Cleveland. In Chicago, Austin Polytechnical Academy, a new public high school in a low-income neighborhood, was inspired, in part, by Mondragon, and a group of its students recently took part in a study tour of MCC in the Basque region.

But the USW initiative, and the potential clout behind it, puts the Mondragon vision on wider terrain. An integrated chain of worker-owned enterprises that might promote a green restructuring of the U.S. economy, for instance, would not only be a powerful force in its own right. It would also have a ripple effect, likely to spur other government and private efforts to both supplement and compete with it.

The USW is proceeding cautiously. "We've made a commitment here," said Rob Witherell during a recent interview at his Organizing Department's offices in the USW Pittsburgh headquarters. "But for that reason, we want to make sure we get it right, even if it means starting slowly and on a modest scale."

What this means at the moment, Witherell explained is that the USW is looking for viable small businesses in appropriate sectors where the current owners are interested in cashing out. The union is also searching for financial institutions with a focus on productive investment, such as cooperative banks and credit unions.

"It can get complicated," Witherell continued. "Not only do you have to fund the buyout, but you also have to figure out how to lend workers the money to buy-in, so they can repay it at a reasonable rate over a period of time, and still make a decent living."

The core Mondragon model was developed in the 1950s by a Roman Catholic priest, Father Jose Maria Arizmendi. It starts with a school, a credit union and a shop--all owned by workers who each had an equal share and vote. The three-in-one combination allows the cooperative to rely on its own resources for finance and training. The worker-owners cannot be fired. In regular assemblies, they hire and fire their managers, as well as set the general policies and direction of the firm. The workers themselves decide on the income spread between the lowest paid worker and the highest paid manager, which currently averages about 4.5 to one. (Compared with more than 400 to one in the U.S.) As the worker-owners accumulate resources, they can encourage the formation of new coops, indirectly through their bank and directly through their firms, and bring them into the overall structures of MCC governance. This is how they grew from one small shop to 260 enterprises in the past 50 years. Finally, if a worker-owner retires, he or she can 'cash out,' but the share cannot be sold. It is only available for purchase by a new worker-owner at that firm.

This last crucial point was developed by Arizmendi during the course of deep study of Catholic social theory as well as the works of Karl Marx and the English cooperativist Robert Owen. A worker-owner's ability to sell his or her share to anyone was a flaw in Owen's approach, Arizmendi decided, since it enabled outsiders to buy the more successful coops, turning their workers back into wage-labor, while starving the other less successful coops of resources. With Arizmendi's new approach, only four out of the several hundred MCC coop ventures have failed during the half century since Mondragon began.

The difference between worker-owned coops Mondragon-style, and ESOPs, or Employee Stock Ownership Programs more prevalent in the U.S., has to do with legal structure and control. In an ESOP, a portion of the companies stock, ranging from a large minority bloc to 100 percent, is owned by workers but held in a trust. Its value fluctuates with the stock market and workers can get dividends as they are paid, buy more stock, or "cash out" when they retire. If they do "cash out," they pay taxes on the closing amount, unless they roll it over into an IRA. By and large, ESOPs are financial instruments and do not automatically lead to worker control over the workplace or a role in shaping the firm's capital strategies. Managers are hired by the firm's board of directors, in turn, connected to the trust.

"We have lots of experience with ESOPs," said Gerard, "but we have found that it doesn't take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control. We see Mondragon's cooperative model with 'one worker, one vote' ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street."

The USW, however, will insist on at least one modification of the Mondragon model: the worker-owners will be organized into trade unions, and will sign collective bargaining agreements with the management team. This sets up a unique situation whereby unionized workers reach an agreement with themselves as a workers' assembly and with the management team they hire.

This is not as big of a problem as it may sound. "’This is not heaven and we are not angels’ is a common phrase heard by visitors to Mondragon," said Michael Peck, MCC's North American delegate. Within the structure of each MCC enterprise is a 'social committee' of the workers, which looks to their broader social concerns. But, it has also come to play the role of settling day-to-day disputes with the management team, thus serving as a de facto union. Class struggle surely continues, even in a modified form in a worker cooperative.

There are also other features unique to MCC that may or may not apply to its replication in the U.S. Father Arizmendi developed his plan as a community-based survival mechanism following the devastation of the Spanish Civil War and World War Two. He was imprisoned under Franco. The Basque region, a center of anti-Franco resistance, was not only in economic ruin, but was also punished by the Franco government by being denied resources. MCC evolved through self-reliance.

Under Spanish law, because the MCC worker-owners are not technically wage-labor, but get their income from a share of the profits, they are excluded from much of the country's social welfare safety net pertaining to workers. MCC responded by organizing and funding it's own 'second degree' cooperatives--health care clinics, retirement plans, schools and other social services, all cooperatively owned with their own worker assemblies. Much of this integrated second-degree structure may not be required in the U.S. Here, it may make more sense for worker-owned enterprises to form local or regional collaboratives and stakeholder arrangements with county government, credit unions, community colleges and technical high schools, and other nonprofit agencies.

What's in the partnership for Mondragon? Josu Ugarte, President of Mondragron Internacional declared: "What we are announcing today represents a historic first--combining the world's largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world's most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America. We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first."

Along with its core values and unique ownership structure, MCC is still a business producing goods and providing services in markets, anchored in Spain but reaching across the globe. It seeks to sustain itself and grow, although it is not driven by the same 'expand or die' compulsion of traditional corporate or privately owned firms. Adding more worker-owners simply gives each worker a smaller slice of a bigger pie. There's no removed batch of nonproducing stockholders raking in superprofits, or trading their stock speculatively as it rises or falls.

MCC firms still compete with traditional rivals for customers in the marketplace, and thus are always seeking a competitive edge. MCC enterprises, for example, are mainly known for high quality products. But when this is combined with a fact of self-management, that they have far fewer supervisory layers on the payroll, the higher quality products hit the marketplaces with a lower price. This puts MCC on the leading edge of Spain's economy.

MCC also looks for other advantages, such as horizontal integration and securing competitive sources of supply. This is why it has cautiously been expanding abroad, buying up supply firms or other complimentary businesses, and seeking to reshape them into the MCC cooperative structure. Often, however, they run into difficulties, where another country's laws treat cooperatives with disadvantages.

That is not the case in the U.S., where even though industrial coops are not common, there are few undue restrictions on their formation. "As we look for firms to purchase," said Witherell, "MCC is not just interested in buying up companies and having the workers as employees. It's the MCC rep that's always pushing on how readily we can convert to worker ownership."

The Mondragon initiative is not the first innovative project of the Steelworkers seeking wider allies. With the encouragement of International President Leo Gerard, following on the anti-WTO street battles in Seattle in the 1990s, the USW helped found the Blue-Green Alliance together with the Sierra Club and other environmentalists. It has worked closely with Van Jones and 'Green for All's jobs initiatives and the union plays a major role in the ongoing annual 'Good Jobs, Green Jobs' conferences. Most recently, the USW was a major participant in the week-long series of events making the oppositional case at the G20 events in Pittsburgh.

For Gerard and the USW, these alliances are matters of utmost practicality and survival. Gerard points out that 40,000 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. have closed since the onset of the 2007 economic crisis, throwing 2 million people out of work. His answer is structural reform in the economy along the lines of a 'green industrial revolution' and to fund it with a tax of speculative capital's financial transfers, known as the 'Tobin Tax.'

"Americans going green--manufacturing windmills and solar cells--would benefit both the economy and environment," said Gerard in a Campaign for America's Future article. "As the Wall Street debacle that pushed this country into the Great Recession last year showed, the United States cannot depend on trading in obscure financial products to support its economy. To survive, America must be able to manufacture products of intrinsic value that can be traded here and internationally." He often notes that there are 200 tons of steel and 8000 moving parts in every large wind turbine--a concept that is never lost on the unemployed and under-employed manufacturing workers that hear it.

The same point is not lost on small and medium-sized businesses looking for orders from new endeavors. This is where green entrepreneurs can form alliances with worker-owned cooperatives, trade unions, living wage job advocates and the global justice movement. The key question is whether the political will and organizational skill can be brought together to make it all happen in a way that most enhances the strength and livelihood of the working class.

Here is where the ball returns to the court of left organizers and solidarity economy activists. Lending a helping hand to the new initiative entails a good deal of investigation into the state of local businesses and conditions, plus building alliances, generating publicity, and contributing educational work among all those concerned. It’s not crowded, and there’s a lot to be done.

[i]Carl Davidson writes for Beaver County Blue and SolidarityEconomy.Net. He is a national board member of the Solidarity Economy Network and a national co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6982498

Great invention, the joint stock company.

And how, again, are Democrats and Republicans different? That thread could be at Republicans Aboveground....

translates into "green manufacturing", but I like this idea a lot. Of course, the US government will think of some way to quash this - I mean, Wall Street won't stand for this unless they get a majority cut.

And the part about the Spanish workers not being eligible for some of the social "safety net" because of their altered status won't be a problem in this country, because there is no social safety net for anyone.

So what do you see as the pluses and minuses of this process in this country, just on its face?

I think that is how you have to approach something like this. Mondragon is not really all that. (And we've discussed the reason why before..Robert Owen..)

The fact that its in the United States does put a surprising spin on things

I didn't have the heart to highlight the part of the article that talks about how it will be run just like any other business only with the advantage that there isn't as much middle management overhead. That's great but..

"worker-owned" is probably the best we could hope for. With Bobby Owen in mind, it doesn't matter who the "Owner" is, if it isn't the society as a whole. Shifting ownership from one group to another within the current social system is essentially meaningless; that being said, I much prefer "worker-owned" to any other configuration (within the current system).

Where, I wonder, will the Unions get the capital? Do you think they have it "on hand"? Or will they have to "go to Wall Street"?

so I will sub for in him and simply ask: once they've managed to build a (relatively) prosperous company do they carry the torch and fight for worker's power or..do they fight to solidify and cement what they've already got..?

In Michael Moore's Capitalism, I kept thinking during the part about the worker's co-op that it sounds great, but what happens when business takes a dip and somebody has to be canned? Its not as though there's a magic formula to simply ignore or supercede the Bottom Line.

How to build and maintain socialism in a capitalist world? So far, it seems that the bastards have been able to wear our side down. Say what you will, Trotsky had a point seemingly proven by history. And though his 'solution' might have been ridiculous we are still left with the problem. I dunno.

When I was out in Washington I heard an amazing story from a grower. His grandmother had started the orchard and when the Depression hit made a decision - everyone would eat and everyone would work - not just on their farm but in the whole area. She printed her own money and paid workers with it and got everyone to accept it. One "orchard dollar" equaled one hour of work, any kind of work. Things they had been buying from outside of the county they started making right there. For things they had to have and couldn't make, they set up caravans and took apples to the city and sold them on the street and then bought supplies. No one was out of work, and no one went hungry.

That was at least part of the impetus for the Cultural Revolution and why Cultural Revolutions at periodic intervals (almost impossible to maintain on an ongoing basis) would have been required. Everyone bitches about the Cultural Revolution, but the only problem I see with it is that it was not successful enough and needed to be renewed after a couple of years, but was not (that's a different discussion).

Workers coops may be the best workers can ask for within the confines of a capitalist system, but then the workers become the capitalists and the class struggle continues. The owner class is the owner class; who the individuals are within that class is immaterial...

For what it's worth Carl Davidson was/is a "Progressive for Obama" kind of guy. Knew him a little bit back in the old SDS days, but recently he's taken a pretty liberal line. Search for: carl davidson "paul street" (with the quotes) for his attacks on Street during the '08 elections.

In Latin America, the co-op movement has suffered greatly from the kind of things you've all mentioned: trying to compete with capitalist firms, funding for expansion, etc. The most successful have been those that are able to trade with each other, even establishing formal networks of different kinds of firms, and those that have invested the profits in diverse community service projects.

Zanon (now FaSinPat) in Argentina has developed health clinics, food stores, educational facilities and more, that diversify the income sources and labor pool.
They get funding from public and private sources in addition to that from selling tile.

I think that the only way a worker owned firm can survive, is to be firmly rooted in the community. As part of social movements, that recognize the leadership of labor, and are truly too important to fail.

...So how do companies like Hypertherm avoid handing out pink slips? How do they remain competitive and financially successful with a no-layoff policy? For Dick Couch and other CEOs who have implemented similar initiatives, the answer lies in a management philosophy that includes treating employees as an important investment, taking a cautious, well-thought-out approach to hiring new people and developing a flexible, highly responsive workforce by training people to handle a variety of jobs within the organization.

For Peggy Laplante and others like her who know how it feels both to be laid off and to be a survivor of a major workforce reduction, Hypertherm’s promise of job security is the most important company benefit of all. In exchange for that peace of mind, she and her 510 associates at the Hanover, New Hampshire, plant gladly contribute to improving business processes and reducing the firm’s manufacturing costs. Unlike many companies, Hypertherm implements most employee ideas, which reinforces motivation.

Last year, ideas from Hypertherm’s Continuous Improvement Activity program saved the company more than $2 million. As Couch explains, they tend to be small initiatives that a work group can implement quickly, by themselves, without any capital investment--such as reducing the amount of time it takes to complete a process or shipping products more efficiently. "Our team used to machine a part where the scraps from that process were simply thrown away," says Brenda Blair, human resources director. "One of our associates realized that this ‘waste’ was the perfect size for making another part which we bought from outside. That simple idea eliminated the need to buy-in materials, which saved us at least $50,000 every year."

She and Couch caution those who might be considering a no-layoff initiative to take stock and plan before they do. Such a policy can’t just be bolted on to an old way of doing things or operated in a vacuum, they say. It must be an outgrowth of what the company stands for, a genuine expression of an organization’s regard for its people.

Xilinx, an award-winning Silicon Valley semiconductor company frequently found on the Fortune Best Companies to Work For lists, doesn’t have an official no-layoff policy. But it has never discharged an employee for "no fault" in its 17-year history and says workforce reductions are always "a last resort."

http://www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/23/47/45/index.html

Ithaca Hours.

http://www.ithacahours.com/f-eighth.jpg
http://www.ithacahours.com/

... won a contract to get union reps on the boards of several major corporations under the theory of getting at all the "secret information", in the spirit of our "conspiracy researchers". Guess who got to announce layoffs first?

Full-blown State Capitalism dates from around 1900. Co-ops, workers' ownership, council communism... really?

Don't get me wrong. They can serve a political purpose or aid simple survival - like the co-ops based on confiscated estates in Alentjo in the 1970s - but, as a "solution"?

Fogeddaboudit...

and this is probably as good a time as any, with your segue to Trotsky and Dhal's Cultural Revolution interest. Here is one of Marx's most cited lectures about "Permanent Revolution"

Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League 1850 Marxs/Engels

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm

The end is pretty interesting:


We have seen how the next upsurge will bring the democrats to power and how they will be forced to propose more or less socialistic measures. it will be asked what measures the workers are to propose in reply. At the beginning, of course, the workers cannot propose any directly communist measures. But the following courses of action are possible:

1. They can force the democrats to make inroads into as many areas of the existing social order as possible, so as to disturb its regular functioning and so that the petty-bourgeois democrats compromise themselves; furthermore, the workers can force the concentration of as many productive forces as possible – means of transport, factories, railways, etc. – in the hands of the state.

2. They must drive the proposals of the democrats to their logical extreme (the democrats will in any case act in a reformist and not a revolutionary manner) and transform these proposals into direct attacks on private property. If, for instance, the petty bourgeoisie propose the purchase of the railways and factories, the workers must demand that these railways and factories simply be confiscated by the state without compensation as the property of reactionaries. If the democrats propose a proportional tax, then the workers must demand a progressive tax; if the democrats themselves propose a moderate progressive tax, then the workers must insist on a tax whose rates rise so steeply that big capital is ruined by it; if the democrats demand the regulation of the state debt, then the workers must demand national bankruptcy. The demands of the workers will thus have to be adjusted according to the measures and concessions of the democrats.

Although the German workers cannot come to power and achieve the realization of their class interests without passing through a protracted revolutionary development, this time they can at least be certain that the first act of the approaching revolutionary drama will coincide with the direct victory of their own class in France and will thereby be accelerated. But they themselves must contribute most to their final victory, by informing themselves of their own class interests, by taking up their independent political position as soon as possible, by not allowing themselves to be misled by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie into doubting for one minute the necessity of an independently organized party of the proletariat. Their battle-cry must be: The Permanent Revolution.

Why? Because state enterprises are political by nature, unlike "private enterprise"... because making a maximum profit can never be the sine qua non of a politics which claims "the general welfare" as it's objective, even as a figure of speech. This is yet another form of the contradiction we have been talking about.

It is not for nothing that reactionaries, if they stand for nothing else, stand for privatization.

The objective has never been to "share" the benefits of labor, let alone to achieve "workplace democracy" or any other fevered nightmare of the liberals. The objective is to eliminate buying and selling... the buying and selling of humans first and foremost.

Don't give a shit about your profits, your efficiency, or your economics... ya fuckin' vampires.

No layoffs becuase they're optimizing performance and "reinforcing motivations" because all of their employees are merrily singing "off to work we go" every morning?

La-dee-fucking-da

In downturns, workers have accepted abbreviated shifts and taken over previously outsourced tasks like lawn care and janitorial work in order that no one be left out of a job.

I thought that was an interesting perspective, putting actual humans first and bottom line second...ain't no cure-all, but ain't altogether worth dismissing as a scene from a bad musical...

by taking over otherwise "outsourced" tasks. Workers owning the factory is better than a non-worker owner, but just. If slaves became slave-owners would that be "good"? I understand that within the frame work of this society maybe worker-owned factories or companies is the best that can be had, but who makes up the owner class is not a very big deal, it is the class that is the big deal, right?

since it worker "ownership" is really a contradiction in terms and, secondly, worker ownership != worker control besides.

If its just someting to get warm and fuzzy about as Pinko is suggesting, thats rather thin ice.

The question is always how a collective activity advances workers power. I think Curt is onto something with the "integrated into the communities" angle. Still not sure how far that gets us (if it gets us anywhere), but at least it isn't the same old rut we're belaboring here

The objective has never been to "share" the benefits of labor, let alone to achieve "workplace democracy" or any other fevered nightmare of the liberals.

The objective is to eliminate buying and selling... the buying and selling of humans first and foremost.

The conservatives and liberals are always talking about how "we" can't afford to take care of people. (They inadvertently betray their bourgeoisie allegiance with their use of the word "we" there.) "Just not enough to go around, you lose."

When you imagine or experiment with ideas that eliminate the vampires from the loop it becomes easier for people to see that they, the people in their community, are producing more than enough to take care of everyone in the community, and that the wealth is being sucked off by someone.

Worker "ownership" is a contradiction in terms, as you say. It is as ridiculous as saying that there could have been slave owners of plantations. Huh?

If you are an owner you are an owner. Ownership is the problem, not who is an owner.

This is producing striking insights -- remarkable for their clarity and their simplicity.

It is yet another one of those "obvious" things that gets lost in the shuffle, no?

"class". We all (myself maybe the most) often fall into the trap of thinking "class" when we are actually talking "status". Workers can attain the "status" of part-owners of a factory or company, but within the confines of capitalism, that status means very little if they have not moved from the exploited class to the exploiting class (which is all but impossible to do). Workers who own a particular company or factory are in essence exploiting themselves and other workers within the society. As long as they are being exploited (it doesn't matter by whom) then their class remains the same. Their statuses as a group and and as individuals may change, but not their class. That is why a good many working class members who make ridiculous amounts of money think of themselves (and we do to, sometimes) as members of the ownership class, when, in fact, they are not. They are just sell-outs to the owners (at least the ones who misidentify themselves). The class struggle is really quite simple, it only becomes complicated when we start trying to add things to it or think of one thing as another. Historically "status hierarchies" or "status orders" have been socially problematic - especially for historians looking back. The confusion of status with class happens all the time. And status orders have proved to be problems for communist societies, as well; think China in the 1960s and 1970s...

I think he says that 1 in 3,000 are capitalists. Now that ratio has likely gone DOWN as capital has become concentrated but even so it still works out to only 2 million capitalists in 6 billion people

of the capitalist "fellow-travelers" and "wannabees" (you know conservatives, liberals, and progressives).

And this "status/class" confusion is particularly evident in historical works where class analysis (even recognition) is so lacking. An example would be in ancient Rome where so often you read historians talk about the "Senatorial class" and the Knights or Equine class. These families were actually members of the same class - the propertied, land owning class. Now it is true that Senators/knights were also members of the aristocracy which in itself was tied to land ownership, but "Senator" and Knight" were statuses within the same social class and not distinct classes themselves.

Sorry for the trip down history lane, it just seemed pertinent to me, right about now...

We are talking about perverted and destructive social relationships. That can be found at all levels of society.

In the end, it's all about money. In a way, the Senatorial class was subsumed in a manner similar to that of the Western European aristocracy, by money from below, again showing the dominance of the economic.

[div class="excerpt"] Differentiation of the senatorial order

In its narrowest sense, the term ordo senatorius encompassed only sitting senators, whose number was held at around 600 by the founder of the Principate, Augustus (sole rule 30 BC-AD 14) and his successors. Senators' sons and further descendants technically retained equestrian rank unless and until they won a seat in the Senate. But Talbert argues that Augustus established the existing senatorial elite as a separate and superior order to the equites for the first time.[101] The evidence for this includes:

Augustus for the first time set a minimum property requirement for admission to the Senate (of 250,000 denarii, two and a half times the 100,000 denarii that he set for admission to the equestrian order.[102] (This was 10 times the old 10,000 drachmae threshold for the First Property Class in Republican times. For comparison, a legionary's gross annual salary was ca. 225 denarii at this time).[103]

Senators' sons followed a separate cursus honorum (career path) to other equites before entering the Senate: first an appointment as one of the vigintiviri ("Committee of Twenty", a body that included officials with a variety of minor administrative functions), or as an augur (priest), followed by at least a year in the military as tribunus militum laticlavius (deputy commander) of a legion.

A marriage law of 18 BC (the lex Julia) seems to define not only senators but also their descendants unto the third generation (in the male line) as a distinct group.[105] There was thus established a group of men with senatorial rank (senatorii) wider than just sitting senators (senatores).

The ordo equester under Augustus

As regards the equestrian order, Augustus apparently abolished the rank of equo privato, placing all the order's members in the same rank, equo publico. In addition, Augustus organised the order in a quasi-military fashion, with members enrolled into one of 6 constituent turmae (notional cavalry squadrons). The order's governing body were the seviri ("Committee of Six"), made up of the "commanders" of the turmae. In a bid to foster the knights' esprit de corps, Augustus revived a quinquennial ceremony called the recognitio equitum ("inspection of the equestrians"), in which the order would parade, leading their horses before the consuls (the ceremony had been discontinued during the late Republic.[106]. At some stage during the early Principate, knights acquired the right to style themselves vir egregius ("distinguished gentleman" - senators were styled clarissimus, "most distinguished").[107]

The equestrian order, although hereditary in the male line (i.e. rank could only be inherited from the father, not the mother), was not closed to new recruits. Augustus' legislation permitted any Roman citizen who was assessed in an official census as meeting the property requirement to use the title of eques and wear the special toga and gold ring. But such "property-qualified equites" were not members of the ordo equester itself, but simply enjoyed equestrian status. Only a minority of them were enrolled in the order, those who were granted an equus publicus by the emperor. The imperial equites thus were a two-tiered group, with a large number of rich Italians and provincials of equestrian status (estimated at 25,000 in the 2nd century) and a much smaller number of mainly Italian equites equo publico who were members of the order and were eligible to hold the public offices reserved for the knightly order.[108][109]

Equestrians could in turn be elevated to senatorial rank (e.g. Pliny the Younger), but in practice this was much more difficult than elevation from commoner to equestrian rank. To join the upper order, not only was the candidate required to meet the minimum property requirement, but also had to be elected a member of the Senate. There were two routes for this, both controlled by the emperor:

Direct appointment by the emperor (adlectio), normally using the powers of censors during the 1st century but on their own authority thereafter. This was, however, rarely granted except when Senate numbers were severely depleted e.g. in the aftermath of the Civil War of 68-9, when Vespasian's censorship saw large-scale adlectiones.[110]

The normal route by which the ranks of the Senate were replenished was by way of election to the post of quaestor, 20 of whom were appointed each year. While senators' sons had the right to stand for election as quaestor, equestrians could only do so with the emperor's permission. Later in the Julio-Claudian period, the rule became established that all candidates required imperial leave. The election was conducted, from the time of Tiberius (r.AD 14-37) onwards, by the Senate itself, which inevitably favoured the sons of existing senators.[111] Nevertheless, an equestrian candidate who had received the emperor's implicit backing would be very likely to succeed through the votes of members eager to curry imperial favour.[112]

Because of the restrictions on membership of the Senate, equestrians greatly outnumbered men of senatorial rank. While the latter could not have numbered more than a couple of thousand, equites equo publico numbered many thousands.[113] Even so, together the two aristocratic orders were a tiny elite in a citizen body of ca. 6 million (in AD 47) and an empire with a total population of 60-70 million.[114][115] During the imperial period, the two orders on the whole cooperated smoothly in the administration of the empire, as they needed to, given their small combined numbers.[116]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrian_order#End_of_the_citizen_cavalry[/quote]

can and have deteriorated into classes, but if class is viewed in a purely (or near pure :) ) economic manner, then these various "statuses" within the social ranking have little direct impact on class struggle. There can be no class struggle between the Senatorial and equestrian orders - they are on the same side, as it were, of the same class. It is sometimes hard to keep the simple definition of "class" in mind when reading about these things - not least of all because historians misuse the terms so much.

I just had a memory-moment. I remember Carl Davidson, both politically and personally. He wrote for the Guardian newspaper in the 1970s: An old faction-fighter who was right maybe half the time (average hit rate in the 1970s). I remember this:

Left in Form, Right in Essence
A Critique of Contemporary Trotskyism
(1973)
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/guardian/index.htm

Same guy?

Shit... Two Americas had a theory which I am beginning to believe is correct. It was that all American progressives had been "Marxists" in the 1970s but were now underground, and afraid to tell each other what they really thought.

Shit man... same guys, different tee-shirts.

denounce Trotskyism?

Believe it or not, it wasn't a half-bad newspaper most of the time but when they went "off", they were gone for a long time.

They also hated EVERYBODY (you had to be there).

Now, many of the same people are talkin' about how Obama isn't really that bad. I guess I am not all that surprised, but...

It's the same guy. Always has been open about being a Marxist (of every stripe depending on the day). His main work, these days, is with The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (the CPUSA splinter) and, I think, United for Peace and Justice. He's from Chicago, and has been an Obama shill ever since I've heard of Obama. I had the same memory-moment in about 2002, when I read Davidson quoted as saying Obama was the next great anti-war pol.

Funny he surfaces at this time. No laughs involved in the "funny" though.

Who is this guy? Well most recently he has been all over the web as an Obama shill, being one of the "old school hard left" (hardly left?) who saw the light and understood that this candidacy was important to "make strides" blah, blah blah. I could go on maybe a thread in his honor?

Where I came to know Carl is through my very own Obama revelation, the revelation as described in detail and ad nauseum as to what a complete asshole and free marketer is the Man o' Change. Where Carl comes in is interesting to see. While scoping out article after article about Obama by the likes of Paul Street, Bruce Dixon, Margaret Kimberely and many others there was this character who followed these people around the web like fleas on a dog. If you go back and read some of the articles on Soc Indy Obama thread and take the time to look at the comments section you'll see Carl in many of those debates in total support of Obama. During the Obama campaign Davidson was one of the more strident cheerleaders in the left blogosphere, if you can utter such a thing without a strong sardonic note. Some of the discussions between Carl and Paul Street carried on for several lengthy exchanges but now poor Carl seems to have disappeared from the fray though now and again he'll peep his head up and sputter some weak tea into the mix.