T.M. Thomas Isaac

I am Thomas Isaac, a two-time finance minister of Kerala. I am fundamentally an academic but have been fully engaged in politics for the last 25 years. I have also been deeply involved in local government work, decentralization, and cooperatives. We must apply cooperative principles to the digital and platform economies because these have become key instruments for the exploitation of workers and producers. Platforms connect small producers, linking them to the market, yet they are controlled by independent capitalist agencies which use this control to exploit both consumers and producers. Applying cooperative principles to the platform economy means that producers and consumers would control the platform, not an external party. This could be managed by a cooperative of producers, or the consumers might form a cooperative society to control it. It could also involve both types of cooperatives working together to manage the platform.

In this way, we can significantly reduce the middleman’s surplus and ensure better prices for producers, as well as higher quality and lower prices for consumers. However, this is a significant challenge. It is not as straightforward as it may seem, given the competition from high-tech companies, which are large international conglomerates with unmatched data and information. Therefore, given the importance of this transformation, applying cooperative principles to platform economies requires support from local and provincial governments to ensure essential information is freely available and certain legal institutional mechanisms are established. These actions will need to be taken by state governments. This is crucial in the context of Kerala’s economy, where we have decided to transform the economic and technological base of our economy into knowledge-intensive technologies that will significantly enhance productivity, moving our state economy from a low to a high productivity regime. It will also involve widespread use of digital networking to connect producers with consumers. Thus, developing an alternative to the existing digital platforms controlled by corporations becomes extremely important. We look forward to learning from this colloquium how this can best be achieved.