The Venezuela worker cooperative sector has been boom and bust since 2000, catalyzed by the 2001 Special Law of Cooperatives, and fading as the government shifted its support to a more communal form, empresas de producción social.
Oscar Bastidas offered an early warning that the surge of registered cooperatives lacked values, principles, and economic foundations, and more recently remarked that the country set world records with both the most cooperatives registered (from fewer than 1,000 in 1998 to over 400,000 by 2014) and the largest graveyard of cooperatives with only 20,000 surviving in 2022. Other early reviews accepted a certain level of fraud and failure alongside the ideals of the larger revolutionary effort in economic development.
- Bastidas – El Cooperativismo en Venezuela (2003)
- Celis – Movimiento cooperativista venezolano: reactivación y generación de empleo (2004)
- Osta et al – La actividad cooperativa en Venezuela (2005)
- Marquez – State-Financed Experiments in Venezuela’s Solidarity Economy (2005)
- Piñeiro – The New Cooperative Movement In Venezuela’s Bolivarian Process (2005)
- Bowman and Stone – Venezuela’s Cooperative Revolution (2006)
- Fox – Venezuela’s Co-op Boom (2007)
- Robertson – Worker-Run Factories Spread in Venezuela (2012)
- Maheshvarananda – The Silent Success Of Cooperatives In The Bolivarian Revolution (2014)
Dario Azzelini and Oliver Ressler looked at the shop floor level to understand worker’s experience in a documentary profiling five worker controlled factories:
- Azzellini y Ressler – 5 Fábricas: Control Obrero en Venezuela (2006) video
- Azzellini and Ressler – 5 Factories: Worker Control in Venezuela (2006)
- Lin – Five Worker-controlled Factories in Venezuela (2006)
- Dario Azzellini interview – Venezuelan Cooperatives (2022) video
By Hugo Chavez’ second presidential term more writers were starting to question the effectiveness of the cooperative strategy, including Camila Piñeiro Harnecker who found the companies were struggling to operate profitably and were not well connected to each other.
- Harnecker – Workplace Democracy and Collective Consciousness: An Empirical Study of Venezuelan Cooperatives (2007)
- Harnacker – Principales Desafíos de las Cooperativas en Venezuela (2008)
- Harnecker – Main Challenges for Cooperatives in Venezuela (2008)
- El Libertario – The myth of ‘co-management’ in Venezuela (2007)
Over time individual cooperative experience was often overshadowed by larger questions of state strategy and the role of unions.
- Lucena et al Cooperativas, Empresas, Estado y Sindicatos: Una vinculación necesaria (2007)
- Fernández – La protección social de los trabajadores asociados en cooperativas en Venezuela (2008)
- Malleson – Cooperatives and the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela (2010)
- Centro Cultural – El Cooperativismo en Venezuela (2011)
- Laroulandie – El modelo cooperativo venezolano en preguntas. Una puesta a prueba de la realidad: las paradojas de la institucionalización (2012)
In more recent years with state support largely gone, some cooperative success stories have been profiled, including some that started before 2000 and have weathered dramatic economic changes.
- Matute – Las conversiones empresariales: Las cooperativas de trabajo asociado (2020)
- Gilbert and Marquina – A Factory without Bosses: Voices from Indorca (2022)
- Bastidas – Las Cooperativas en Venezuela, Presente y Futuro (2022) video
- Comunas – Celebran en Lara encuentro de experiencias cooperativas en sus distintas dimensiones (2024)