For the Transformation of the World: Worker Cooperatives and Faith Communities

Joerg Rieger

October 8, 2020

In the midst of the many challenges of our time, the ability to shape your own communities and to do your own thing is rare but not impossible. Worker cooperatives and their growing networks can make it happen. Take, for example the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, co-founded by Benny Overton and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, who are no strangers to contemporary political and economic challenges. Worker cooperatives, Benny and Rosemarie have discovered, not only provide people with the opportunity to exercise economic and political agency they were previously denied; they also help lay the foundations for increased political and economic power. In the process, other areas of life are being transformed as well, including culture and even religion. A long but forgotten history of worker cooperatives, often embodied in minority communities (as described by other contributors in this series of Interventions), confirms the tremendous potential for the transformation of the world. 

Imagine being able to do work that provides for a living and having control over how your work is organized, performed, and managed. Imagine further that this work is less affected by coercion and the constant pressure to do more for less, with more opportunities for collaboration, participation, and the ability decisions about things that really matter. This was once the dream of professionals and others in the middle class, but much of that dream has long been displaced by the pressures of the neoliberal economy, and this has provided the rationale even for lawyers and doctors to organize unions. There are few places left where people’s needs and concerns are balanced with the need for profit and efficiency. Even academics and teachers are forced to produce ever greater results, measured by the growing demands of “outcomes evaluations.”

What does any of this have to do with faith communities and religion? Some might argue that the world’s religions can provide relief from the everyday rat race that determines the lives of the 99 percent who have to work for a living, but religion itself has been dragged into this race for the most part. Religious leaders, too, are feeling the pressure to produce more and faster, including the expectation to grow bigger budgets and larger membership rolls. 

Yet while religion has too often served to sanctify the status quo and offered its support to the dominant powers of the ages, it also contains records of resistance and tales of alternatives that might be inspiring even today. That some of these alternatives are now embodied in worker cooperatives is no accident, and this is where faith communities might find some of the inspiration that they often lack. 

The tradition of the Hebrew prophets, shared in common by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, provides some insight into the problems that can be addressed by worker cooperatives. In a famous speech, the prophet Samuel channels the voice of God pushing back against the “elders of Israel,” who demand a king. Such a king, Samuel contends, will 

“take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves” (1 Samuel 8: 12-17). 

This is not merely a political story about past monarchies—it is an economic one as well, and in a strange way it foreshadows the dynamics of the neoliberal economy where “winner takes all” and where corporations take substantially more than one-tenth of people’s production. 

This and other ancient traditions can serve as reminders that the everyday rat race is neither a matter of necessity nor the way the world necessarily works, but that it is imposed on the many by the few. Today, the monarchies of old have for the most part been replaced by the even more effective neoliberal mandate that the profits of corporations are produced for the benefits of the shareholders and not the workers. No matter how much neoliberal economists assure us that the economy is not a “zero-sum game,” the pressures on working people keep increasing just as wages and benefits keep decreasing and profits keep rising. In this world, worker cooperatives not only create some relief but provide genuine alternatives that have not yet reached broad public awareness, even though the cooperative movement and its networks are growing, in the United States and elsewhere. The largest and most famous conglomerate of worker cooperatives is Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain, founded by Roman Catholic Priest José Arizmendiarrieta, in 1956.

While many believe that religion and politics or religion and economics do not mix, keep in mind that religion is actively at work in the economic realm, often in support of the status quo. Religious charities like soup kitchens, clothes closets, and homeless ministries are taken for granted in a climate where corporations are not required to pay their fair share of taxes. Nevertheless, charity does little to challenge the “winner-take-all” system. More radical religious efforts have preached more equal distribution of wealth or even the redistribution of some of it. Ever since the book of Acts in the New Testament (4:44-45; 4:32-37), there have been Christian voices demanding the sharing wealth. What is still often missing, however, is a sense of how wealth is produced in the first place. 

Taking a leaf from the Hebrew prophets and from Jesus, the Abrahamic traditions can help us to understand the production of wealth better and to reclaim it. As God’s judgment is pronounced on those who exploit and abuse the people by prophets like Amos and others, God makes this promise: 

“I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,  and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God” (Amos 9:14-15).

Salvation is not pie-in-the-sky or another system of domination (no matter how well-meaning) but people reaping the benefits of what they produce, for the well-being of all. Jesus continues in this tradition when he preaches “good news to the poor” (Matt. 11:5 and Luke 4:18). Such good news cannot be limited to charity or the receiving of alms, but contains the promise of the reign of God on earth (Luke 6:20) where people have power (not only political but also economic), have enough to eat, and are liberated from their increasing indebtedness to the elites (Matt 6:9-13). This is where worker cooperatives pick up: those who produce are the ones who decide what gets produced, how things get produced, and who gets the profit. Another world is possible.

Transforming Capital into a Servant of Justice

Gilda Haas

October 8, 2020

Assuming that deep democracy appeals to us — assuming that we not only have the motivation, but also the means and opportunity to govern, create, and experiment, I offer here a story about a small (but very promising and growing) experiment that is dedicated to building a democratic and sustainable and non-extractive practice of development and finance that can, to paraphrase James Gordon Bennett, (editor and founder of the New York Herald), redistribute ownership by investing “in the industry of the people of L.A.” It is the story of the L.A. Co-op Lab collective of which I am a member and which itself is a member of a larger network of peers that support each other and comprise Seed Commons, our shared financial cooperative.

The purpose of the L.A. Co-op Lab is to redistribute ownership in L.A. by supporting the development of worker cooperatives—businesses that are democratically owned and controlled by the people that work there. It is one intervention among many to push back against the forces of inequality, exclusion, and extraction. It is intended as a counter to gentrification and displacement and for this reason, our resources are dedicated to people and communities who have been historically excluded from fully benefitting from the economy as a function of the racial divide and discrimination.

Right around the time that we started, I was invited to an early convening that was hosted by The Working World, a radical lending organization that started about 15 years ago in Argentina to help finance and develop the cooperatives that were being formed out of the recuperated factory movement, where workers were taking over the means of production in plants that had been abandoned by their owners. After some years in Argentina, The Working World set up shop to support workers in Nicaragua, and then, upon returning to the U.S. devised a similar method of non-extractive financing for our particular context. One of their best known and successful investment and support ventures is New Era Windows in Chicago, a windows manufacturing company that was taken over by the workers after various occupations against the owners’ plans to shut the place down, as similar to the Argentina experience that you might find here.

What was compelling about this first meeting was the proposition, that rather than setting up offices or franchises around the country to spread their mission of non-extractive lending for democratic ownership, they looked around for where local people were doing interesting and committed work in that wheelhouse and invited them into a conversation about becoming a national learning community of local peers that could share values, mutual support, and together, create a shared instrument of non-extractive finance and development. The premise was to recapture some of the wealth that was stolen from Black and Brown communities—through social investors, philanthropy, and any other available means—and repurpose it through a financial cooperative, now called Seed Commons, to cultivate our potential for locally-based sustainable economies, across many differences, experiments, and contexts.

One touchstone that binds our efforts is a set of shared principles, the most important of which, along with Non-Extraction, is the principle of Radical Inclusion. Radical Inclusion defines who the system that we are building is for. This requires us both as a local project and as a national network to prioritize lending and accompanying support to people and communities who have been historically excluded from finance, whose potential has been diminished by the racial divide, and whose communities and families have suffered the brunt of every extractive mechanism our society has yet to offer. This changes what our loan applications look like, which is different from the “3 C’s” standard of a typical bank which stands for:

• credit history—our folks don’t have that;

• collateral—they don’t have that either, and even when they do, it would be counter to our purpose to take an asset that was neither a function of our labor or investment;

• “character”—our folks have plenty of that, but the traditional meaning here would exclude the undocumented, returning citizens, people who suffered evictions, and others whose lives have been marred by exclusion. This too would be counter to our purpose.

Similarly, our principles of non-extraction, productive sustainability, and democratic ownership necessarily redefine and then still consider common financial measures such as risk, value, and return on investment.

As we take multiple paths to build a regenerative counter to the extractive economy which has mismanaged resources so that climate has become an existential threat, housing a precious commodity, and employment a series of precarious engagements, the principle of Radical Inclusion will bode us well. As Movement Generation says, “transition is inevitable. Justice is not.”

That ball lies firmly in our court.

Will Seed Commons and the L.A. Co-op Lab slay the extraction beast? Not by a long shot, or, at least, not for a long time. And, there are many more noble experiments with which we are aligned towards that end. But as more and more of us productively put our principles into practice we are gaining a much stronger muscle for democratic governance, a greater collective self-confidence, and experiencing living examples of what is possible when capital is transformed into a servant of justice.

At this moment there are several variations of what to call the goal in a manner that amounts to more than the sum of its parts. We use the term “non-extractive” to define our lending, but as negative construct, it is a word-in-progress. Movement Generation and others use the more affirmative “regenerative,” which borrows from the wisdom of nature and the framework of a “just transition,” which, perhaps, best describes this moment, that it is one concerned with justice and open to change of various stripes of “right.” Right to the City and others use “development without displacement”—which again, involves the “not.” As a movement we have not yet landed on a common term. We use them all.

We use some. I am ok with this because we too are in transition. The words will change, the words will come, and the words will change again. I really like how the idea of this moment is captured in Octavia’s Brood, an anthology that conflates science fiction with organizing and social change, a proposition that makes perfect sense to me. There is an essay at the end of the book by science fiction author Tananarive Due, who describes the coming-of-age of the book’s namesake, Octavia Butler, a black woman who was the first science fiction writer to ever win a MacArthur award:

Octavia was dyslexic, the only child of a housekeeper, whose father died when she was a baby. She grew up in poverty. Seeking escape from the constraints of her life when she was 12, Octavia started watching a movie called Devil Girl from Mars and she had the epiphany that so many of us have experienced: “Hell, I can write better than that.”

And therein lies our motivation. I am confident that we have the means and opportunity. We can all write a better story than extraction. We can do that together. We can all start that project now.

Today, the unprecedented Movement for Black Lives and the Covid-19 pandemic moment are conjoined, laying bare the structural roots and immorality of racial and economic inequality for more to see. In many quarters, with this reveal comes a growing sense of responsibility to resist the desire to “return to normal” and the reproduction of wrongs that would entail—and to instead begin the necessary work of repair, renewal, and redistribution.

With respect to that endeavor, the L.A. Co-op Lab and Seed Commons financial cooperative are committed to the task of building cooperative, democratic ownership within communities—to push back against the tide of increasing inequality by moving resources to democratically owned and controlled enterprises that are embedded in the neighborhoods. This ensures that the economic benefits are more widely distributed to more people, that the people who own a community’s assets live and work there, and that the responsibilities of ownership also include attention to community needs and community care. 

There are many ways that faith communities can join this project. Here are three:  

1. Start with Learning:  A first step is to simply learn more about worker cooperatives within the communities that you have already built. Congregations and organizations of faith may form a study group—a simple start might be to watch the short videos that comprise L.A. Co-op Lab’s free mini-course, Discover Worker Co-ops, which takes around an hour to complete. You can then bring your questions and ideas to one of our free office hours. This forum is also a great place to start learning, along with the work of the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development’s project, “Transforming Churches and Communities: Cooperative Developments in a World of Growing Inequality.”

2. Organize within:  In light of recent events, there are likely members of your community that need work and are looking for better ways to work. Your congregation or organization can support them by building connections between people around common interests so that they may consider cooperatives as a way to build new livelihoods, together. Alternatively, members of your community who are business owners that are approaching retirement age may not know that converting or selling their business to their employees is even an option. They may find inspiration through the examples of other business owners who have taken that path presented on the Democracy at Work Institute’s Becoming Employee Owned website.

3. Advocate for policies that support worker-ownership:  Members of your faith community may already be involved in public policy discussions related to the local economy and may be well-situated to advance worker cooperatives as a solution. One example is the 2014 report, Worker Cooperatives for New York City: A Vision for Addressing Income Inequality, published by the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, which was influential in generating the municipal support of worker cooperatives and cooperative development organizations in New York City today.

A version of this piece was originally published in as “Housing Justice in Unequal Cities” published by the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

Economic Justice as a necessary component of Racial Justice

Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D.

Who am I? I am Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College of City University of New York. And Director of the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement program. I am a political economist with a Ph.D. in economics. I study community economic development, cooperative and solidarity economics, racial wealth inequality, Black Political Economy and African American history, and community-based approaches to justice. But I am also an activist scholar involved in the US worker-coop and solidarity economy movements.  I come from a family of social activists and scholars. We believe that knowledge needs to be applied to making the world better, and that it is the obligation of a scholar to not just excel in the field and conduct rigorous scholarship and create new knowledge, but also to share and apply knowledge to help others and to make positive change.

Economic Justice as a necessary component of Racial Justice.

African Americans, workers, women, immigrants, youth – all have histories of activism and rebellion, and attempts at practicing alternative economics. I want to focus on African American activism and rebellion for economic justice. Early on African Americans realized that without economic justice – without economic equality, independence and stability (if not also economic prosperity) – social and political rights were hollow, or actually not achievable. 

What is economic justice?  By Economic Democracy I mean a people-centered grassroots economic framework, based on solidarity and cooperation – often called a solidarity economy. The aim is to reduce hierarchy and dominance in economic relations, and give workers the largest voice in what they make, how they work together and what they get paid, etc. This includes Cooperative Economics – a democratic form of business ownership based on shared ownership, membership, and shared decision-making. Member-owned, member-led, and member-serving, values-based businesses owned by the people who use their services or make the products (member-owners). Created to satisfy a need – formed for a particular purpose to provide a quality good or service at an affordable price (that the market is not adequately providing). Co-ops practice democratic governance (1 person, 1 vote), with shared risk, and surplus/profit sharing (see Gordon Nembhard 2014). 

By Economic Justice I refer to economic exchanges and distributions that are fair and equitable – allowing the most number of people to benefit; eliminating exploitation and inequality, distributing abundance fairly; eliminating poverty, eliminating private monopoly and dominance by businesses that seek profit at the expense of human need and human dignity. Building economies based on humane values, the needs of society and ecological sustainability, in order to eliminate need and enable prosperity for all.

Why Political rights are hollow without economic democracy and economic justice?

1. The power brokers use economic retaliation when Blacks protest: examples: share croppers thrown off land they rent when involved in Civil Rights activity; people who help others register to vote are jailed and beaten, and can lose their jobs. Protestors are jailed and beaten, and can lose their jobs.

2. Then even when can vote, we often can’t feed our families, have no place to live, etc. Then voting and political rights don’t make much difference.

3. A few people in our group might get rich and leave the community, but that doesn’t help the whole community prosper. The rest of the community stays poor. That’s not economic justice.

4. Also, economics rules politics in terms of who can afford to run for office and who pays for their campaigns. Public officials are then beholden to the people who put in the money to elect them; so we rarely have real political democracy either. Its controlled by the rich.

5. Also, poverty and economic injustice divert our energy and activity – we spend all our time trying to feed ourselves and find decent lodging; and don’t have time or energy to do much else let alone fight for anything else. So poverty and economic struggles reduce our time and energy for activism.

6. We spend most of our waking hours at work in exploitative oppressive hierarchical relationships – if we don’t practice democracy daily, in our daily lives, in our economic activities; how can we learn and practice political democracy and social justice? We often don’t even know what real democracy is.

Therefore, we can not achieve social or political justice without economic justice.

We need economic democracy and economic justice in order to make true progress as human beings, to treat each other fairly, eliminate poverty, and increase prosperity; as well as helping to make it safe to have representation and voice in political and civic affairs.

If you look closely at African American history you find that even when we were discriminated against and oppressed at work, or couldn’t even find a job, we engaged in economic cooperation and solidarity on the side or instead in our own communities. This helped us to survive, but also to be independent, to engage in resistance as well as simply to feed and support our families.

Examples of Black Economic Cooperation:

Black people in the USA pooled resources to pay for services and things they needed but couldn’t get from their masters or from exploitative economic systems. Enslaved people created community gardens so they had some fresh food to eat, and shared what they grew. Throughout our history Black Americans created alternative businesses and economic activities, jointly owned and democratically governed to provide for themselves and their families; and to strengthen their own communities. This happened in every era of US history.

Mutual Aid Societies and beneficial societies, for example, provided joint purchasing and marketing, community-based revolving loan funds; and sickness, widow and orphan, and death benefits.  Often operated through Black religious organizations and schools; often informal, many were headed by Black women. Du Bois (1898) and Curl (1980), among others (including this author, Gordon Nembhard 2014: 31-33, 40-47), note that religious gatherings were also mutual-aid gatherings and often planning meetings for revolts and escapes. Woodson (1929) argues similarly:

“This tendency toward mutual helpfulness appeared even among the slaves. Wherever Negroes had their own churches benevolence developed as the handmaiden of religion. They looked out for the sick, provided them nourishment which the common fare of the plantation did not afford, and often nursed and treated such patients until they were reestablished in health. Free Negroes of the South were well known for their mutual helpfulness” (Woodson 1929, 202). 

For Du Bois (see 1898 and 1907) religious comradery was the basis for Black economic cooperation. Church, secret societies and mutual aid societies among enslaved and free alike created the beginnings of economic cooperation -and this continued on into the 21st century (also see Gordon Nembhard 2014). Many of the first Black-owned credit unions were started by Black congregations, and we have examples of Black religious institutions (Black Churches and the Nation of Islam for example) helping to start buying clubs and co-op grocery stores. Black religious institutions are places where people already are comfortable contributing financially and sharing resources; and have already built a sense of solidarity of mission and trust among the members. Those are essential to participating in a cooperative. 

Early labor union advocacy in the 1880s argued and practiced worker control that included development of cooperatives - worker, consumer and producer, such as cooperatively owned mills, factories, craft production, and retail stores. In the late 1880s and early 1890s the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union, for example, established cooperative stores to buy goods & supplies in bulk at reduced prices and share equipment; created lending exchanges to secure loans to get fair mortgages to buy land and access to affordable credit; and engaged in co-op marketing and distribution. This connection between labor, Black Populism and cooperative development became severed with the rise of Jim Crow segregation and white supremacist terrorism by the early 20th century; but is experiencing a resurgence in the late 20th and early 21st century (Gordon Nembhard 2014).

Consumers Cooperative Trading Society in Gary Indiana in the 1930s-40s during the great depression, provides another example. Black citizens came together to study community problems and lack of banks and grocery stores in their neighborhood. They established their first co-op grocery store in 1935. By 1936 it was considered the largest grocery business operated by African Americans in U.S. -total sales of $160,000, annual dividends of 2%. Within another year they added a credit union, a gas station, and a 2nd grocery store (Gordon Nembhard 2014). 

These assertions of economic democracy and Black economic self-determination supported the Civil Rights movement. Cooperatives and solidarity economics often allowed politically active people a way to keep earning a living even when whites wouldn’t hire them because they were activists. Specific examples include the Black Panther Party, and Freedom Quilting Bee.

Freedom Quilting Bee is a sewing cooperative started in 1967 by sharecropping women to sell their quilts for extra income. They used some of their first revenues to buy 23 acres of land and build a sewing plant. Once they were not working from home, they found they needed to provide other services for their families and in the community. They developed a child care center, and after school programs on their property. This enabled them to help other families as well. But also, because they owned land free and clear they were able to help other sharecroppers, some who were evicted for registering to vote. They sold some lots and leased others to help fellow farmers to own their own land and gain economic independence. In addition, by 1992 Freedom Quilting Bee was the largest employer in town (Gordon Nembhard 2014).

The Black Panther Party, begun in 1966 in Oakland, organized a host of “Inter-communalist” (Curl 1980) "survival programs pending political revolution."  They engaged in community organizing as part of their first line of defense against state violence. They used cooperatives and collectives to distribute free shoes, clothing, food, health care (free health clinics), plumbing repair, pest control,  transportation for the aged, and free breakfast programs for children with an education program. They engaged in communal and cooperative housing, cooperative bakeries, and ran a cooperative newspaper.

Cooperative Home Care Associates, in the South Bronx, since 1987 employs unskilled Latina and African American women member-owners (often who were on public assistance) in high quality work. CHCA established an extensive, high quality training program for worker-owners, and provides employment benefits in an industry that usually provides low wages and contingent work. CHCA leads the industry in above average wages, benefits, career ladder opportunities, leadership training, and low turnover in the workforce; and is unionized. In addition, early on they used policy advocacy and created city and state-wide coalitions to demand increased Medicare allocations for home care workers to raise average wages. This increased the quality of all home care work, and kept the co-op’s living wages competitive with other wages. The co-op also helps members build wealth with a banking, savings and retirement program; in addition to distributing generous annual patronage dividends. CHCA is currently the largest worker co-op in the U.S. – with over 1000 worker-owners (Gordon Nembhard 2014). 

What lessons have been learned for our current period?

People engaged in cooperative economics learn skills about democracy, leadership and transparency that spill over into their personal and civic lives. They become more active in their communities because they have stable economic conditions and because they practice true democracy at work (Gordon Nembhard 2014).

Challenges during this pandemic include: high job loss and joblessness or forced work under unsafe conditions; social isolation; lack of affordable health care and health insurance; disinvestment and business closures. These are all issues that mutual aid, solidarity economics, and economic cooperation address and have addressed in the past. 

In addition, police brutality continues to be a pressing issue and has recently been highlighted again with the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.  The Black Panther Party had a strategy to address police brutality partly through community organizing and cooperative development. Similarly today, the Movement for Black Lives Platform connects the fight against police brutality and the Prison Industrial Complex with economic justice. 

• We demand economic justice for all and a reconstruction of the economy to ensure Black communities have collective ownership, not merely access. 

• A right to restored land, clean air, clean water and housing, and an end to the exploitative privatization of natural resources. 

• We support the development of cooperative or social economy networks.  

• We demand financial support of Black alternative institutions, such as cooperatives, land trusts, and culturally responsive health infrastructures that serve the collective needs of our communities.( https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/economic-justice/ )

Again the connection between civil rights, human right and economic rights are made. We find that to address all of our social ills from health threats to physical threats, collective action and control over our own economics in ways that provide voice and prosperity for all, are essential. We have living examples of how to make these important changes politically and economically.

The Black co-op movement has been a silent but persistent partner in the long civil rights movement; as leaders and activists recognized throughout history that racial justice could not be fully achieved without economic justice. Economic cooperation and economic democracy are often the missing piece in the struggle to eliminate anti-black oppression and institutional racism.

References:

Curl, John. 1980. “History of Worker Cooperation in America.” Homeward Press. [Also www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html, retrieved 3-6-2003.]

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1898. Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment. Atlanta: Atlanta University Press.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1907. Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans. Atlanta: Atlanta University Press.

Gordon Nembhard, Jessica. 2014. Collective Courage:  A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Gordon Nembhard, Jessica. 2018. ”Foreword.” In The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-Based Markets, edited by Caroline Shenaz Hossein, pp. ix-xiv. New York: Palgrave McMillan.

Woodson, Carter G. 1929. "Insurance Business Among Negroes." Journal of Negro History 14 (2, April): 202-206. 

Parts of this piece were originally published in Gordon Nembhard 2014 and Gordon Nembhard 2018

“We need to reinvent the co-op”

Nathan Schneider

October 20, 2020

When I discovered that the hardware company my grandfather ran at the end of his career was a cooperative, my uncle sent me an email with a single image: the New York Times photo of President-elect Donald Trump marching through the Carrier factory, flanked by Mike Pence, executives, and, in the distance, workers. This was the mental image he had of his father’s business milieu, co-op or not: a world whose sole protagonists were White men, acting tough and doing stuff.

My grandfather’s co-op was far from the only one that looks like this. This is what I’ve seen, by and large, in rooms populated by leaders of the major credit unions, electric co-ops, and purchasing co-ops. (The worker co-op scene today is quite different, but it also holds vastly less wealth.) Even in diverse communities, the co-ops often have all-White co-op boards. Much of the institutional heft that the cooperative commonwealth has achieved is not crossing the United States’s brutal racial wealth gap—or is outright widening it.

In 2018, YES! Magazine executive editor Zenobia Jeffries Warfield argued that, despite her publication’s history of promoting cooperative efforts, “co-ops and community farms can’t close the racial wealth gap”—even if their leadership were more inclusive. Since these institutions are based on pooling and sharing community wealth, communities that have experienced systematic deprivation will wind up with less wealth in their co-ops, and less land for their gardens, than other communities do. As Warfield puts it, “Capital can’t concentrate in areas where capital doesn’t exist.” For those of us in some kind of love with the co-op movement and working to support it, as I have been, this is a problem.

I keep being haunted by a passage from the writings of Fr. Albert McKnight, a Catholic priest and Pan-Africanist who helped found many Black-led cooperatives in the South: “What we need to do is reinvent the cooperative idea,” he wrote before his death in 2016. “If ever the cooperative approach was needed, it is today. It’s still a disgrace to Black folks that no place in the country do Blacks control economically.”

Fr. McKnight doesn’t offer a blueprint, but his provocation poses challenges enough. Cooperators love their cooperative principles—which, by the way, have changed quite a lot over the years—and their cooperative mythologies. But as a recent report on Indigenous cooperative development points out, the usual founding mythology about a group of 19th-century factory workers near Manchester effaces the generations of cooperative traditions in other societies. The cooperative idea has survived reinvention again and again.

My first ambition here is simply to let that provocation be heard again: If it is going to be of use in confronting our deepest fissures, the cooperative movement must reinvent itself.

My other ambition is a distant second: I would like to begin exploring some avenues for reinvention, some cooperative principles that may be ready for rewriting.

The first cooperative principle is “Voluntary and Open Membership.” In the 1840s, this meant that you couldn’t turn away Catholics or Protestants or Quakers. But a lot of young cooperators today go beyond that. For them, openness is less important than fostering safe, brave, anti-oppressive communities. Here in Colorado, Satya Yoga Cooperative calls itself “the first ever POC (People of Color) member-owned yoga cooperative.” A central part of its mission is helping people heal from the collective trauma of racism. In that light, openness to all comers doesn’t compute. Membership is a matter of intention and care.

The third principle is “Member Economic Participation,” which expects that members capitalize the co-op with their own resources. Where does this leave those communities with less to contribute? In the past, as W. Ralph Eubanks beautifully recalls, co-ops have been a means for channeling public resources to Black Americans—but not nearly enough. Perhaps we need to give up on the attachment to bootstraps and self-sufficiency so that cooperatives might be receptacles for massive wealth transfers, which have been long since owed to survivors of slavery, genocide, and segregation.

The seventh and final co-op principle is “Concern for Community.” It would be hard to imagine a weaker way to phrase that sentiment. The most common expression of it is through the tax-deductible donations that a co-op makes to nearby nonprofits—which might mean subsidizing the entertainment of the local elite by underwriting the symphony or outsourcing aid to the poorest by funding a homeless shelter. But what if this principle had teeth? What if it meant accountability to the community, such as by reserving board seats for the homeless or the street musicians? Community well-being should be built into the business, not an afterthought.

I think I still love the cooperative model, and I know I still love the cooperative movement. The reinventions I suggest are not mine, really, so much as they come from years of documenting the hopes that many new cooperators are already inscribing into the cooperative idea with their practice. Their example is a prophecy and demand upon the movement that needs them to inherit it.

Wrote Fr. McKnight, “If we risk nothing, we gain nothing. We’re lost. We need to reinvent the co-op.” And then he turned it into a prayer: “May we have the wisdom, the faith to reinvent the co-op.”

Democratic Time in Worker Cooperatives & the Church

Aaron Stauffer

October 20, 2020

Today, electoral politics is everything and we are growing numb from electoralitis. The ballot box and survey reign supreme. To be political in this context requires one to take up a pre-formed role in the political theater where scripts written by those with deep pockets and racialized, gendered, and heterosexist norms dominate. The political characters who take center stage are the authoritarian, the strong-man, and the tyrannical. It is hard to see a way forward for building political power that protects the rights and livelihood of all working people. Politics is everything and everything is political theater.

    The options also appear slim for Christians across the United States who feel moved to take political action. Give money to political campaigns; support organizations that advocate for your issue; or, for some, let the church and politics be—they are properly separate callings. As James Kloppenberg has recently written, we are experiencing a political moment that is the culmination of over 50 years of strategic moves by the economic and political elite. The burden of economic and political risk has shifted from the collective to the individual. Today we are reaping what Newt Gingrich made supreme in the early 1990s: a politics that is untrustworthy, corrupt, and corporate media saturated. Sheldon Wolin perceptively saw the beginnings of this during the Reagan and Thatcher era, naming it Economic Polity, or later, Inverted Totalitarianism. There are, of course, those figures who attempt to remind us that Christians are big-D Democrats, and that there is a vibrant “religious left.” The problem with these arguments, however, is that they focus on policy and only perpetuate the notion that the ballot box is politics in its pure form.

    Before I go any farther, let me be clear: I am not arguing against voting or democratically governed free and fair elections. The problem that I am attempting to address occurs when a specific kind of electoral politics dominates our political, economic, religious imaginations. 

    So perhaps politics as we know it cannot be saved, and we should turn to other avenues to protect and fight for the people and things we care most about. It is here—at the moment when we seem to think that politics cannot be saved—that we should turn to the work of this forum’s panelists, especially Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s excellent historical analysis of how Black Americans used cooperatives to secure their political rights. As a people that have and continue to be marginalized, oppressed, enslaved, lynched, and plundered, the Black cooperative movements are understudied and under-appreciated as examples of how building economic power can be one way to revitalize and recuperate politics from political theater.

    The kind of democracy found in worker cooperatives, however, takes time. There are three main kinds of cooperatives: worker, producer, and consumer (the cooperative tradition is vast and multifaceted including mutual aid organizations —as Gordon-Nembhard recounts in this forum—but these broad categories may cover the whole tradition). Worker cooperatives, insofar as they prize worker agency, ownership and democratic control over their labor, are especially promising in addressing our political crisis. In a world that prizes speed and stock-holder profit, the kind of democracy that takes root in worker-owner cooperatives is out of sync with neoliberal racial capitalism. Its core values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity seem quaint and anti-rugged individualist. Cooperatives form and shape democratic individuality—where who and what we are can only take shape in particular kinds of relationships and sociality. Wolin dubbed his own sense of radical (as in rooted in relationships) democracy, a “fugitive democracy” of the demos. But Wolin was pessimistic that such radical democracy could be institutionalized. Fugitive democracy is fleeting and ephemeral. Any attempt to actualize this ideal of radical democracy in our norms and culture would only lead to ossification and corruption of such ideals, Wolin thought. 

    Wolin (as far as I can tell) never wrote about the cooperative movement, however. His vision of democracy was limited to archaic moves. And he never adequately wrestled with the power of how his economic polity failed to account for racial capitalism. It is not only democratic theorists, however, who have ignored the cooperative movement. Church leaders, scholars of all stripes, and those scholars in the rising field of political theology have missed this rich tradition of radical democracy that builds radically democratic economic power, all the while politics as we know it continues to be overrun with capital.

    The church would be wise to consider the cooperative movement in order to develop its mission in the world, because what it means to be the church is to be called to a specific task and work in the world. The church’s identity is deeply connected to its task: gathered by God and sent into the world. Worker cooperatives can exemplify forms of economic and political relationship that prize values held dear by the church.

    Being brought together by God’s Spirit, the life of Christians is distinct insofar as their lives and relational bonds are transformed in the Spirit’s grace and love. Insofar as God calls together and sends the church, the identity of the people of the God is best conceived as a task: to serve God and the world. The church is called to a particular work in the world, and that work involves much of what worker cooperatives stand for. The church is called to be concerned with the quality of relations formed in our political and economic life. Claiming that God calls us into particular kinds of relationships is a political and economic claim—a radically democratic claim enacted in particular kinds of economic relationships found in worker cooperatives, where workers democratically govern, own, and control their own labor. By joining and supporting worker cooperatives the church can learn more about itself, and can more deeply live into its identity as the church. Recognizing that our economic life impacts our religious life will help us redefine the church, religion, and religious practices themselves, something I’ve written about in other Interventions forums

    Worker cooperatives and the church are not perfect, and the cooperative movement alone cannot save our political life from neoliberal capitalism and neofascism. But if Christians are fundamentally concerned with who we are called to be and do in this world, then we have a lot to learn from worker cooperatives about economic and political radical democracy—and what it means to be the church. Radical democracy found in worker cooperatives takes time to build. It is messy. It often fails when we need it the most. But so does the church. Politics as we know it today cannot save itself. Electoral politics is too deeply entangled in what Wolin called economic polity. We need to take other routes.

    Building radically democratic economic power can help us form and shape democratic relationships that might revitalize a radically democratic politics. This is crucial to the church’s task. The work of building a radically democratic economy and polity means grounding such work in particular kinds of relationships and senses of self. Radically democratic economic power threatens the strangle-hold on our livelihood that racial capitalism has on all working people today. Worker Cooperatives and the Church that heeds God’s call to live into its liberationist identity seek to liberate the world from the idolatry of capitalist domination, neofascist authoritarianism, and Economic Polity. Doing so will take time, but we Christians need to take part in the movement of God’s Spirit that reforms and revitalizes our relationships into such radically democratic economic and political forms. This is the work of the church. This is the work of the cooperative movement.