I see the need for three types of meetings, with the meeting type determining the overall focus of what is covered. These types are operational, short term goals, and long term goals.
Operational meetings are as they sound, handling issues with day-to-day operations including bookkeeping...Any grievances (with each other, with other cooperatives or with particularly annoying customers and/or E-mailers) are covered at these meetings. These meetings can cover business and social issues, i.e. handling returns, scheduling work activities, dealing with cash flow issues, discussing a proposal for a joint project with another coop, anarchist web site, etc. if one comes to us or we want to launch one, organizing people who E-mail us saying they want to get involved in a coop or some other project, etc. What the guiding thought of these meetings is is to cover practical day-to-day working concerns, solving problems or improving the way we are doing something if it is somehow problematic.
Short term goals meetings focus on assessing operational decisions and the business aspect of the cooperative. Such questions as: Are we growing at the rate we want? (income, sales, number of cooperative in catalog, number of hits, etc.) and why or why not? Is making a proposed retraction or expansion better now or later due to effect on our taxes? Is there something we can do more efficiently (less money and/or less work)? How are we progressing in marketing efforts to get on more and more types of sites? In summary, the issues that capitalist businesses focus on to the exclusion of everything else we would handle in short term goal meetings.
Long term goals meetings focus mainly on social issues, the desires that inspired us to undertake the project in the first place. Here we self evaluate on how we are doing with questions such as: Are we really showing by example that people really can live and work productively and orderly without bosses and rulers telling them what to do? Is this reaching as many people as we hoped and are we communicating? How can we do better? (as after all real life examples are the best way to take all the wind out of the sails of the dominant ideology constantly blasted at us all). Are we following sufficiently helping others organize into cooperatives and other anti-capitalist organizations?
As a common link between many different cooperatives, are we assisting them with marketing information and customer contacts and putting them in contact with each other to assist those that are more isolated? Are we inspiring workers in more hierarchical cooperatives to challenge the assumptions (if a large, complex coop) and chip away at hierarchical organization when possible to do this?
I am suggesting separate short term goal and long term goal meetings because I believe it wise to have meetings to specifically focus on the business and others to specifically focus on fighting the public belief in the legitimacy of current society. This is because fighting capitalism by being in business, especially retail sales, creates a real paradox at a fundamental level. I believe setting aside time to focus on one set of issues and then later focusing on the other is a good strategy to keep the paradox unscrambled and prevent it from becoming contradiction. The paradox is this. I want to live without a boss, have my share of influence of the world I live in, have genuine social connections, and in general just not get completely screwed. A workers' cooperative is the best thing I can do right now in the world as it is to both improve my own life in the present and exert influence in the direction of a sane, humanistic world. Workers' cooperatives have to function within capitalism and appear capitalistic (with the aid of dominant ideology defining freedom = capitalism, which we all know is complete bullshit) to someone on the outside looking in. A workers' cooperative that embraces hierarchy does in fact support the overall capitalist system even if it is not purely capitalist organization. How this will play out in reality is this:
We have to make money to be a visable argument against capitalist myth as a matter of plain fact for people to see, and we have to make money to even exist.
We can't simply focus on making money to be a visable argument against capitalist myth as a matter of plain fact for people to see and we can't simply focus on making money to even exist.
I believe making time for meetings to cover one half of the paradox and then the other will keep us conscious of both and hopefully in balance. I know of no formula to make sure we balance everything, but with both parts discussed, I believe we can use our innate wisdom and will know what to do to maintain balance.
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