The most striking secret of emergent radical economic structures like worker ownership is that they aren\u2019t radical at all. They\u2019re not even new. As Jessica Gordon Nembhard\u00a0 has chronicled<\/a>\u00a0in the case of African-American cooperative economic structures over the past 300 years, and as John Curl\u00a0 encyclopedically laid out<\/a>\u00a0for U.S. history as a whole, material cooperation, either in opposition to capitalism or quietly alongside it, is an integral part of the American narrative.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a history that free market think tanks and corporate propagandists don\u2019t want us to know. The idea that people can produce, distribute, share and scale our economic needs without investors, shareholders and large profit margins threatens their vision of America, a vision more hierarchical and less democratic than that envisioned by Nembhard, Curl and a collection of other writers including, most recently, Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado.<\/p>\n

Occupy readers may be familiar with Schneider\u2019s earlier book,\u00a0Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse<\/a><\/em>, a narrative account of the beginnings and key moments of the Occupy movement of 2011. His new book,\u00a0Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the New Economy<\/a><\/em>, acknowledges the integral role cooperative economics have played in America\u2019s history, but also begins with the premise that the non-cooperative part of the American economy has actually ruined the economy for most Americans. A carefully engineered lack of wage growth and weakening of organized labor, endless financial scandals and an asymmetric prioritization of shareholder needs over the needs of workers and community stakeholders, have created unprecedented economic insecurity and tanked public confidence in American institutions.<\/p>\n

When I talked to Schneider a few weeks ago, he was busy organizing\u00a0 a conference<\/a>\u00a0on cooperative economics in Boulder, called the Colorado Shared Ownership Summit. While the title of the summit’s conference series is \u201cConscious Capitalism,\u201d one gets the feeling that Schneider isn\u2019t particularly concerned about saving the C word. \u201cSome of the best things around us,\u201d he told me, \u201care actually possible not through ruthless competition and investor control, but through various forms of shared ownership.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if Schneider isn\u2019t a fan of rehabilitating capitalism, he isn\u2019t fixated on the word \u201csocialism\u201d either. \u201cWe have this opportunity to build a real power base for these models in some surprising ways,\u201d he said, which are reminiscent of both the radicalism and the traditionalism of the past. In writing\u00a0Everything for Everyone<\/em>, Schneider knew that authors like Nembhard and Curl had carefully chronicled that history; he wanted to focus on the characters and stories, animating the world of cooperative economics, so that in reading the stories we might learn to \u201crecognize the possibility of our own agency in shaping a more cooperative economy,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n

One of those characters is Schneider\u2019s own grandfather, who directed a national hardware purchasing cooperative. That fact also brought home for Schneider that cooperativists are not radical bomb-throwers, but have been farmers, crafters, small proprietors, factory workers and sometimes very influential figures, such as African-American priest Father Albert McKnight, one of the developers of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which enabled black farmers in the South to have ownership over their land; and Murray Lincoln, second president of the National Cooperative Business Association, who pioneered mutual insurance and rural electric cooperatives and was a major advisor to FDR.<\/p>\n

The characters of today, Schneider maintains, are just as busy. Leaders and residents in Jackson, Mississippi, are building a non-capitalist cooperative city. Taxi cooperatives are building conscious alternatives to Uber. Rogue tech nerds are creating egalitarian versions of Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0presence of tech workers<\/a>\u00a0in the cooperative movement is significant because we normally think of those professionals as materially and educationally privileged, and therefore more tempted by the big rewards of capitalism than the sustainability of cooperative and democratic ownership. But tech professionals are also part of the vanguard of cooperativism. \u201cToday,\u201d he said, \u201ca lot of my work is with a new generation of people coming into the cooperative movement, especially in the tech economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Silicon Valley plays into cooperativism in another way, too. A few years ago, some creative tech thinkers began talking about a \u201csharing economy\u201d made possible through the development of apps that would bypass traditional production and distribution gatekeepers \u2013 and often regulations as well \u2013 to bring products and services right to consumers\u2019 hands, often at a fraction of the traditional cost. Much of this was made possible by allowing people to directly \u201cshare\u201d their possessions, such as cars (Uber, Lyft), and homes (Airbnb).<\/p>\n

But in reality, writes Schneider, sharing apps are \u201cmaking it possible again for people to share resources such as cars, homes, and time \u2013 bringing us together, for a price. Capitalism\u2019s creative destruction may have ravaged our communities for centuries with salvos of individualism, but now it [is] ready to sell the benefits of community back to us on our smartphones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as genuine worker ownership is enjoying a boost, a few entrepreneur-activists are trying to build sharing into the business models of companies themselves, creating something not-quite-capitalist, but still partially motivated by producer innovation and consumer choice.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t just a theoretical debate.\u00a0Everything for Everyone<\/em>\u00a0recounts how, after Denver International Airport began allowing app-based rideshare programs like Uber and Lyft to begin bidding for rider fares, those app-based drivers \u201cwere more likely to be white\u201d than the taxicab drivers. Stuck in a competitive market economy, the taxi drivers were forced to \u201cfight among themselves\u201d under vague rules, suspicious that there had been a shady deal made between the new driving companies and DIA rulemakers. The taxi drivers fought back and formed a huge cooperative, but it wasn\u2019t easy. Schneider isn\u2019t a cheerleader as he tells this story, but provides readers with the tough details that illustrate why worker democracy is as difficult as it is promising.<\/p>\n

My biggest concern about current efforts to build the capacity of cooperative economics, radical intentional communities and other non-capitalist structures is that many people in the Commons and alternative economics movements assume that we can build cooperative structures that will either bypass capitalism or co-exist alongside it. Some even believe that capitalism and cooperativism will complement each other, like a yin-and-yang.<\/p>\n

But that can\u2019t happen because capitalism\u2019s paradigm of endless growth cannot be tamed, and when profits begin to fall or shareholders grow more demanding, cooperatives and common spaces will suddenly find themselves under attack by privatization and propaganda.<\/p>\n

Notwithstanding my skepticism, Schneider believes that people of different ideologies might come to adopt cooperative models in different ways. He pointed out to me that in 2016, both the GOP and Democratic Party national platforms embraced worker ownership of businesses \u2013 Republicans emphasizing personal responsibility, Democrats emphasizing worker control.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s easy to see those platforms through divisive prisms, Schneider believes they also open doors. The great moments of cooperative history in the United States have followed the passage of legislation that allowed cooperatives onto the playing field, from enabling their formation to exempting them from anti-trust laws. If it were up to Schneider, we would extend these antitrust exemptions because when cooperatives build large-scale enterprises, they do so in a way that includes and rewards all participants, rather than crushing competitors.<\/p>\n

Schneider said when he\u2019s feeling overwhelmed about the challenges of building and rebuilding cooperative economics, \u201cI think about the $128 billion agricultural [cooperative] bank sitting below me down in Denver. It\u2019s a reminder that when people organize and build policy and power, when there’s democracy built into the core of it, you can build that infrastructure, you can build the tools to make this stuff scalable and significant and have it really shape the world we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can buy Nathan Schneider\u2019s new book,\u00a0Everything for Everyone<\/em>,\u00a0here<\/a>. Listen to Matt Stannard’s interview with Nathan Schneider\u00a0 here<\/a>.
\nMatt Stannard is the Director of\u00a0Solidarity House<\/a>, a worker-owned media, policy research and music cooperative in Laramie, Wyoming. He has worked with Commonomics USA, the Public Banking Institute and Farm Commons. He writes and produces podcasts on cooperative economics, law and farming.<\/em><\/p>\n

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THU, 11\/15\/2018 – BY\u00a0MATT STANNARD\u00a0(occupy.com) The most striking secret of emergent radical economic structures like worker ownership is that they aren\u2019t radical at all. They\u2019re not even new. As Jessica Gordon Nembhard\u00a0has chronicled\u00a0in the case of African-American cooperative economic structures over the past 300 years, and as John Curl\u00a0encyclopedically laid… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}