The quiet revolution of cooperation

November 4th, 2009

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20237352@N00/4002179056

America is in the midst of a new revolution. But this revolution is quiet, incremental, nonviolent, and traveling beneath the mainstream media’s radar. The new American revolution challenges the current notions of dog-eat-dog capitalism—through the building of a parallel economic system that shares, cooperates, empowers, and benefits fellow workers and community members.

Over the past few decades, thousands of alternatives to the standard, top-down corporate model have sprouted up—worker-owned companies and cooperatives, neighborhood corporations and trusts, community-owned technology centers and municipally owned enterprises. In fact, today, involvement in these alternative models of business outnumber union membership as the means by which private-sector workers and community members are taking economics into their own hands.

Writes Maria Armoudian

It connects with the economics of happiness and a signifier that there is a movement away from the prescriptive ideology of how a mass consumer society sets out our lives from birth until death.

In conversation with Maria is the University of Maryland political scientist Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism. Alpperovitz points out that in the US currently,

There are also 120 million Americans who are members of cooperatives—a huge number, about a third of the population. About 20 percent or 22 percent of our energy is done under public utilities of one kind or another. There are another 4,000 or 5,000 neighborhood corporations, in which neighborhoods own productive wealth to benefit the neighborhood. Much of that is related to housing and land development, but also stores, businesses and factories. One estimate is that there are 4,500 of these. One, called Newark New Communities, does several million dollars a year in business and pours profits back into helping service the neighborhood—health care and nutrition, education and jobs.

So when you really begin to take the lid off of what is emerging in society, there are many forms of decentralized public ownership, social ownership or democratized wealth.

Maria points to the fact that, worker-owned cooperatives seem to be the most progressive and democratic models. Usually nonprofit making with profit circulating back to workers and communities, and coop practices democracy in the workplace—one person, one vote. And she asks, how would you compare this model with other models?

Alperovitz, explains that, ‘the one-person-one-vote worker cooperatives in the United States are the most democratic, advanced and ideal. But they number at about 500 maximum, maybe 1,000. These co-ops are on the cutting edge of the democratization process and where the learning will be taking place for the rest of the movements. People are experimenting with full democracy and full equality’.

He refers to the Mondragón region in Spain, and this is how it works, as explained by Dave Smith

Mondragón collective

The Mondragón cooperatives of Spain combine credit unions and service cooperatives such as grocery stores with industrial manufacturing cooperatives, research centers, and a university — all as one intergrated unit. As a cooperative corporation, they are “an association of persons rather than an association of capital.” That means one person, one vote rather than votes apportioned to the amount of capital invested. It also means that the individual workers own and control the company they work in. They are the largest worker-owned cooperative in the world, doing many billions of dollars in sales. They own and operate thousands of supermarkets, a travel agency with hundreds of units, and gas stations. They also manufacture automotive parts, domestic appliances, bicycles, and bus bodies.

Wikipedia explains

The company was founded in Arrasate, a town in Gipuzkoa known as Mondragón in Spanish. The town had suffered badly in the Spanish Civil War and there was mass unemployment. A young priest, Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, arrived in 1941 and decided to focus on the economic development of the town, settling upon co-operative methods to achieve his goals. Co-operatives and self-help organisations had a long tradition in the Basque Country but had died away after the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1943, Arizmendi set up a democratically-managed Polytechnic School. The school played a key role in the emergence and development of the co-operative movement. In 1956, five young graduates of the school set up the first co-operative enterprise, named ULGOR (now Fagor Electrodomésticos) after their surnames, which during its early years focused on the manufacture of petrol-based heaters and cookers. In 1959, they then set up the Caja Laboral Popular (“People’s Worker Bank”), a credit union that both allowed the co-operative members access to financial services and subsequently provided start-up funds for new co-operative ventures. New co-operative companies started up in the following years, including Fagor Electrónica, Fagor Ederlan and Danobat.

It has also extended by inviting other co-operatives to join the group and offering rescue for some failed companies on condition of co-operativization. The group companies give preference to fellow co-operatives. Co-operative workers manage their finances through Caja Laboral, hold health insurances and pension funds at Lagun Aro and have discounts at Eroski markets and on Fagor appliances. Eroski stores are furnished by co-operative trucks. Members may have studied at a group ikastola (college) and extended studies at the Mondragoón University while having a labor stage at a co-operative. The reference research centre is Ikerlan, which is focused on applied research since 1974.

In Supermarkets No-thanks Tom Moggach writes about the rise of the farmers markets and local collectives in the UK

The motivations are many: fears about food security; food inflation; the power of supermarkets; the bruised image of capitalism; a lost sense of community. Across Britain, food co-ops are sprouting up in school halls, community centres, farm sheds or even your neighbour’s front room – anywhere, in fact, where rent is free.

So, are cooperatives the way forward to challenge the current system in which we live? Alperovitz says that,

Ultimately there needs to be systemic change. But it is very important, and it’s one thing that can be contributed. At this point, two central principles are developing in these “schools of democracy”—they are changing who gets to own and benefit from capital, and they are changing the participatory process. And in addition to cooperatives, neighborhood corporations and organizations, cities and land trusts, state pension funds are being used in [socially responsible] ways.

The movement that is underway below the radar in the US, Alprovitz compares to the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement in the 1960′s, its a bold statement – but one that warrents attention

Other interesting things are happening in Virginia, the District of Columbia and Maryland where, like in the ’60s, people are meeting, reading, thinking and taking action from that. They are staging “action book clubs,” where they read a political book and discuss, “What can we do in the direction of building something for the long haul?” So if you don’t like capitalism or state socialism, what do you want? What is your vision, your knowledge and theory? It’s time for us to do that again.

Business is a social science, in Cleveland, one of the business schools is beginning to design a course based on social business and cooperation. We are seeing business schools working on “social enterprise,” and and these principals are being now adopted and taught at Yale and Harvard, as we yearn for and seek an alternative way of living.