In his new book, Ed Mayo brings together this rich story for the first time in A short history of co-operation and mutuality.

Covering everything from the Commons to lending circles to labourer societies, this is a fresh take on the origins of co-operation form a leading voice in the global co-operative movement.

“A very thoughtful, deeply researched and original history of cooperation and mutual aid.” Frank Trentmann, Professor of History

Chapters

• Preface         1844 – The birth of co-operation
• Chapter 1      Co-operation and the human story
• Chapter 2      An ancient way of getting things done
• Chapter 3      Craft and co-operation in Europe
• Chapter 4      Traditions of co-operation
• Chapter 5      A friendly turn
• Chapter 6      From friendship to resistance
• Chapter 7      Freedom and repression
• Chapter 8      Out of Rochdale
• Chapter 9      After 1844: Plymouth and Finland
• Chapter 10    Self-help and state sponsorship in the twentieth century
• Chapter 11    The co-operative sector today
• Chapter 12    Co-operation and mutuality over time: a conclusion

Download the English version

Download the Spanish version

Take a look at the slide deck on the 12 early co-ops herePhoto by dkantoro

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Photo by Nick Kenrick..

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Yesterday, we talked for a long time about the video above. It’s worth watching. Sinek’s thesis is that the culture of adherence “hooks” us, creating real addiction, because receiving “likes,” retweets, and silly chat messages from friends makes us release dopamine. Immediate satisfaction. Dependence. And inevitably, a mechanism substitution is produced: in any difficult situation, just like someone who relieved stress with alcohol during adolescence says as an adult “I need a drink,” the adherence addict looks at their cellphone, disconnects from the immediate surroundings, and seeks approval in the form of little hearts. Whether they are venting online or not, they disconnect from interpersonal relationships. The correlation between depression and use of Facebook beyond a certain number of hours seems to show that he’s right.

What Sinek points out about the generation born since 1984 is that this substitution has a disastrous cultural effect: in the first place, friends stop being a community, people you lean on, and become people you have fun with. If there’s a better option, they’ll toss you aside. Nobody gets too involved. Deep interpersonal relationships are not developed. Secondly, work inevitably becomes frustrating, because work or professional experiences cannot be gratifying and create meaning if you don’t feel that you’re building, and that building is a communal activity. The result is unhappiness. According to Sinek, “millenials” are running into two “inescable” obstacles: moments in which deep personal relationships are needed, and work.

Platform cooperativism

When we created the term “platform cooperativism” a few years before it became fashionable in the English-speaking world, we were seeking quick solutions to the crisis at a time when unemployment was beginning to take off in more and more countries. The idea of a platform that took advantage of the possibilities of automation to aggregate the services of independent freelancers was appealing to us as a fast and simple tool capable of bolstering the economic situation of those who were weakly situated in the market.

But we weren’t fooling ourselves: “platform cooperativism” basically means cooperativism without community, and therefore without learning, without knowledge shared and developed in common. A “cooperativism without touching,” without even meeting, that lost all meaning of worker cooperativism, and which only was interesting in the framework of a cataclysmic wave of unemployment in which any tool had to be considered good. It didn’t occur to us that anyone would turn it into the banner of “a new cooperative movement” with pretensions of “overtaking” traditional cooperativism.

But if we connect the dots, the result is obvious: “platform cooperativism” is a way to overcome the “obstacle” that the logic of belonging and commitment presents to the culture of adherence. Instead of learning to make community, rather than finding what the Adlerians call “the courage to belong” and enjoy fraternity, it redefines work with the logic of the books of faces to make it “easy,” so there’s no need to get involved, make contact, be appreciated, commit to others…

If cooperativism has value, it’s precisely because it isn’t emotionally “low cost”; because it requires us to learn to discuss, to disagree, to be appreciated, to come to consensus. It has value because isn’t a sugar-frosted or truncated experience. It’s powerful, it’s personal, it’s full of life. If we want conquer work to reconquer life we  must not fear life and try to protect ourselves from it, but embrace it.

PS. When “platform cooperativism” is not proposed as a form of work, but as a way of economically sustaining and distributing the eventual benefits from a service in the so-called “sharing economy,” there is a different critique, which we have made many times. In the first place, for every centralized service in the “sharing economy” a free (in both senses) and distributed alternative can be created that does not need a hired bureaucracy. We have demonstrated this with functional and useful code. So, what sense does it make to maintain a centralized structure? The answer is obvious: to create a bureaucracy that “mediates” between the “members” by taking a cut to pay for wages and infrastructure. It’s a way of “inventing” unnecessary jobs by creating scarcity artificially.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

Photo by zimpenfish

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As the familiar features of consumer society recede, new institutionalized forms of cooperativism can help to ease some of the disruption and foreseeable hardship.

This is the first of a series of posts on post-consumerism. It was authored by Maurie J. Cohen and originally published at TruthOut:

By famously implementing the $5 per day wage in 1914, Henry Ford was the first industrialist to recognize that a consumer society can only function when workers have access to ample income to finance discretionary purchases. During the 1930s, under the tutelage of John Maynard Keynes, this understanding became a key tenet of macroeconomic policy in many parts of the world. However, by the 1970s, high inflation, obstinate unemployment and other sources of economic instability called this strategy into question and unleashed during the following decades a wave of neoliberal reforms.

Ensuing years brought forth a protracted period of stagnating wages and increasing income inequality, and consumer society was perpetuated, as is today widely recognized, by deregulation of the banking sector and a deluge of easily available credit. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and subsequent Great Recession exposed the fallacies of such policies, and uncertainty has resurfaced about the durability of consumerism as an economic engine.

Consumer society as a system of social organization appears to be in jeopardy on a number of fronts. First, populations across North America, Europe and most of Asia are ageing, and demographic change is shifting preferences away from lifestyles premised on material accumulation. In addition, millennials continue to face extremely precarious job prospects. The resultant consequence of these dual trends is evident in faltering rates of home ownership and declining levels of personal automobile use in a number of countries.

Second, rising income inequality is fracturing the middle class that has for more than half a century been the flywheel of consumer society and solidifying a two-tier, hourglass-shaped social structure.

Third, private consumption is dependent on complementary public procurement, and austerity policies over the past decade are emblematic of declining political wherewithal to make requisite investments to renew the social and physical infrastructure on which consumer society relies.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, consumerist lifestyles have long been predicated on waged employment and the willingness of workers to spend relatively reliable income streams on goods and services. Steady work that compensates employees on a salaried or hourly basis and provides modest benefits are disappearing, and less regularized, contingent work is becoming commonplace. Some analysts have disingenuously characterized the proliferation of Uber-type jobs as “sharing,” when this trend actually demonstrates how workers are finding it increasingly necessary to string together freelance assignments to make ends meet.

At the same time that we are beginning to transition away from consumer society, a new wave of digital technologies premised on artificial intelligence is set to unsettle a large number of economic sectors — from health care to engineering. One upshot of this disruption will be that short-term tasks will become an entirely normal feature of the employment landscape.

In response to these developments, several governments have begun to evince interest in providing workers with a non-labor source of income. These proposals come in several varieties and include a universal basic income (UBI), a citizen’s dividend and broad-based stock ownership in corporations. Particularly notable is Finland’s recently announced program to test the viability of a UBI scheme that will pay all eligible recipients approximately €800 per month. Other countries are actively debating similar initiatives.

Unfortunately, extreme political fractiousness in the United States and Europe makes it improbable that these ideas will promptly receive wider legislative endorsement. In the meantime, what are struggling households to do as theorganizational pillars of consumer society collapse and the most readily apparent alternative resembles a 21st century version of feudalism?

We seem to be at a juncture where we need to rediscover the lessons of mutual assistance. One option entails building on novel modes of cooperativism that meld production and consumption into a single organization.

The largest worker-consumer cooperative in the world is the 800-store Eroski supermarket chain, a subsidiary of the venerable Mondragón cooperative headquartered in the Basque region of Spain. Smaller prototypes thrive in the United States in the form of the Weaver Street Market in North Carolina and the Black Star Co-op Pub and Brewery in Texas. There are also indications that the reticence that has traditionally marked the relationship between cooperatives and trade unions is giving way to a new spirit of collaboration supportive of this general idea.

History suggests that economic transitions are extremely painful and chaotic. This was the case as agrarian society gave way to industrial society during the second half of the 18th century. Similar forms of dislocation were widespread as the service economy in turn displaced manufacturing two centuries later. Even as this latter transformation is still playing out, a new era of expansive socio-technical change is starting to unfold. As the familiar features of consumer society recede, new institutionalized forms of cooperativism can help to ease some of the disruption and foreseeable hardship.

Maurie J. Cohen

Maurie J. Cohen is Professor and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and author of the forthcoming book The Future of Consumer Society: Prospects for Sustainability in the New Economy (Oxford University Press).

Photo by Community Photography ‘now & then’

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In July 2014 I met Margaret Meredith and Catalina Quiroz, organisers of a three-year project to develop education resources for the social economy at York St John University. Both of them had been travelling in South America for three months to learn about the solidarity economy. We first met at the FairShares Association Conference, then again at the Co-operative and Social Enterprise Summer School hosted by Sheffield Hallam University. After four days of discussion, they told me they wanted to include the FairShares Model in a handbook on new co-operativism. This got me thinking about what’s new and its relationship to old co-operativism.

The FairShares Model is a project of Social Enterprise Europe. In this agency, the board recognised that theearliest developments in social enterprise between 1976 to 1982 were rooted in commitments to co-operativevalues and principles: social finance at the Grameen Bank, Banglandesh (1976); social auditing at Beechwood College, Leeds, UK (1978); social co-operatives in Bologna, Italy (1978), and — the exception — social entrepreneurship at ASHOKA, USA (1982). Each initiative developed contributions to practice that we take for granted today. Importantly, they supported projects that combined member ownership with sustainable development goals and social impact measurement. Even the Chief Operating Officer of Unilever, Harish Manwani, argues there is an inexorable move towards a ‘responsible business’ model in which a licence to operate is only granted when an enterprise creates both economic and social value.

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The colony was set up with the participation of several CIC members with the aim of becoming a collectivist model for living and organizing the productive activities of a small local community based on the principles of self-management, ecological sustainability, free culture and technological sovereignty. At the same time, it represents an example of the form that former industrial villages could assume in a post-capitalist era.

Calafou’s post-apocalyptic aesthetics

The first thing one is struck by when visiting Calafou is the aesthetics of the space which gives the impression of a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic scene, as many of the buildings of the village remain abandoned and half-dilapidated. In reality, however, Calafou is anything but abandoned: at the moment, the colony accommodates a multitude of productive activities and community infrastructures, including a carpentry, a mechanical workshop, a botanical garden, a community kitchen, a biolab, a hacklab, a soap production lab, a professional music studio, a guest-house for visitors, a social centre with a free shop, as well as a plethora of other productive projects.

The Calafou hacklab

As far as its property regime is concerned, the village has been leased to Calafou members based on the following agreement: the “colonists” gave the owner a security deposit of seventy thousand euros and committed themselves to paying a monthly rent of an average of two and a half thousand euros (inclusive of the cost of utilities) for the next ten years. Presently, the colony, which has twenty-seven houses (of 60m² each), is inhabited by about thirty people. For the collective management of housing, Calafou members have set up a housing cooperative, which grants them as tenants only the right to use the space they inhabit. In that way, as tenants do not have the right to re-sell or lease their rights of use to others, the land and the houses of the village remain the unalienable property of the housing cooperative. Thus, based on the above agreement, tenants pay 175 euros per month for each house.

A bird’s-eye view of the village

According to some of its members, one of Calafou’s most significant accomplishments is its consensus-oriented assembly, which is held every Sunday for the purpose of making decisions as well as for the coordination of daily tasks like cleaning up common spaces, which – like everything else that needs to be done – are self-selected on a voluntary basis by “Calafou-ers”. The assembly character is however not always the same, as its thematology alternates between “political” (for discussion of political issues), “managerial” (for management issues) and “monographic” based on presentations made by Calafou’s working groups.[1]

For its economic sustainability, Calafou depends on three main sources of income: first, the revenues of the housing cooperative (based on the rent paid by residents); second, the contributions made by Calafou’s productive projects [2]; and third, the income generated by the various cultural events taking place at the village (like conferences, concerts and festivals).

Notes

[1] Although Calafou has quite a few working groups, all of which have direct input into the assembly process, the presentations at “monographic” assemblies are made only by the four most important ones (i.e. the working groups on economics, on communication, on renovation-restoration and on productive projects).

[2] Productive projects have to pay a monthly rent of one euro for every square metre of space they occupy at Calafou.

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Can the co-op movement take advantage of crisis, too? Often, it has. The Great Depression, for instance, was a time when the U.S. government actively pursued cooperative development, establishing rural electric companies and farmer co-ops, in order to provide services where the capital markets had failed. After Argentina’s economy collapsed in 2001, workers occupied their factories and kept them running (which Naomi Klein reported on before her landmark book on disaster capitalism). And we don’t have to wait for disasters of that scale; capital fails at all sorts of things all the time—especially Internet startups, of which about 90 percent fail. This, I think, presents an opportunity for platform cooperativism.

There are two basic strategies for cooperative development, which seem to me to be also the two basic strategies for platform cooperativism:

1. Startups: Companies that are born as cooperatives, with cooperative principles deep in their DNA, growing and evolving through democratic processes
2. Conversions: Companies that begin in non-cooperative forms, and that transition to cooperative ownership, governance, and culture by desire or necessity

We tend to put a lot of our attention on startups. Some conversions happen because the company’s owners think it’s a noble idea, and others because it fits well with the company’s business model. For platforms that have already had some success, conversion means that a broad stakeholder community doesn’t have to share the high risk of the startup stage; once the platform takes off a bit, it can switch to a more appropriate stakeholder structure. And this approach can be aided by keeping an eye out for crisis.

I’ve sometimes advocated that we should try cooperativizing the huge platforms like Facebook and Uber and Google, which have become public utilities and have no business being investor-owned. But doing so without simply confiscating a lot of capitalist property would be hugely expensive, possibly impossible. Much more plausible would be to attempt a conversion of a platform that capitalism has failed—that is rapidly losing value, or that hasn’t yet taken off. In some cases, co-op conversion might be precisely what a supposedly failing platform needs in order to solidify its user community, attract patient investment, and thrive.

In the past, declining tech companies—like Netscape-turned-Mozilla—have opted for an afterlife as foundation-directed, open-source projects; can we instead resurrect them as co-ops?

In order to do so, we need infrastructure—anti-private equity for platform cooperativism. Organizations like the National Center for Employee Ownership already specialize in converting existing businesses to more democratic ownership structures, and turning capitalist failures into democratic successes. This process involves financing, technical assistance, consulting, and culture. We need organizations with the special skills needed to do this work in tech, that have the tools to create successful turnarounds and the know-how to look for opportunity in the tech industry’s plentiful emergency rooms.

What’s already out there that we can draw from, and what needs to be created? Where do we begin?

Photo by darkday.

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Over and over, this is what happens with the most promising new technologies. From the telegraph to radio and television, early adopters imagine a coming reign of freedom and democracy. But then investors buy in and monopolies rise up, extracting profits above all and suppressing the next generations of innovators, at least until the next ‘disruption.’

A different online economy is possible. Especially since the onset of the Great Recession, we’re living through a renaissance of solidarity economies in the United States and around the world. The flourishing of farmers markets, benefit corporations, credit unions, and fair trade demonstrates the longing for enterprise that serves the common good, rather than merely rolling in profits for the few. A bedrock of any solidarity economy is the old idea of cooperativism—sharing ownership among those affected by an enterprise and governing it democratically.

The tech industry, meanwhile, for all its talk of ‘sharing’ and ‘democratizing,’ has become addicted to a business model of massive early investment in exchange for massive short-term returns. Ordinary users are made to think that the platforms that they use every day are meant for them, and that they’re free, even as the personal information they share is sold off to pay investors. People working in Amazon’s warehouses, so-called crowd workers assembling a living out of on-demand fragments of jobs, and Uber’s increasingly precarious drivers are among those who shoulder the price as they see their rights and protections evaporate. This is not a bug, it’s the business model.

The solidarity economy is creative and energetic, spawning healthy attitudes toward work and more sustainable forms of financing. But this movement, perhaps because it prioritizes offline essentials like sustainable agriculture, local communities, and alternative energy, has yet to infiltrate the Internet as it should. Members of a food cooperative, for instance, may not notice the contradiction when they keep their files on Google Drive, process their payments with Square, and buy ads on Facebook. For now, these kinds of tools can seem unavoidable, though they need not be. The solidarity economy deserves a solidarity Internet.

This November, we are convening a two-day event at The New School in New York City about what we call ‘platform cooperativism.’ We’re operating on the hunch that many of the economic challenges we face—wealth inequality, job security, health coverage, pensions—can’t be addressed adequately without the reorganization of how online platforms are owned and governed. Platforms are already reorganizing our economy; let’s reorganize them first, putting solidarity at the center.

At the New School, we will be hearing from co-op developers alongside tech CEOs, city officials alongside low-wage workers, labor organizers alongside philosophers. What was initially supposed to be a small-scale gathering has met an explosion of interest from around the world. We realized that we are not alone in longing for an Internet where people share collective ownership, not just cute cat memes; where people can co-create bonds of solidarity rather than just blindly agreeing to corporate terms of service.

Over the past few months, we have been preparing a showcase of actually existing projects that have collective ownership at their core. We will hear, for instance, from the people behind Stocksy, an artist-owned stock-photography website, and Resonate, a cooperative music streaming platform. Backfeed, Swarm, and Consensys will show us the potential of the technology that made Bitcoin possible. We’ll learn about several new platforms that put labor markets under the control of workers themselves.

We realized that we are not alone in longing for an Internet where people share collective ownership, not just cute cat memes, where people can co-create bonds of solidarity rather than just blindly agreeing to corporate terms of service.

The history of the Internet itself is full of lessons and opportunities that the solidarity economy can learn from. Projects like Wikipedia and Debian—a variant of the open source operating system Linux—have established processes for self-governance online: for collaboration, decision-making, and accountability. They have shown that people spread across the world can work together. But for all the Internet has done to spread the spirit of sharing, this has too rarely extended to where it would matter most—sharing real ownership of platforms. Whoever owns these platforms will determine how we work, how we connect with each other, and what becomes of our personal data.

Platform cooperatives are not a simple, fix-all solution to all our problems. Already, they take many kinds of forms, and they raise new challenges in place of the ones they address. We are certainly not suggesting that technology can single-handedly democratize society. Rather, we are trying to bring together the existing cooperative movement, with its valuable offline experience, and those in tech culture who are looking for strategies for expanding ownership and governance online.

This may mean rethinking what a cooperative can look like. In an online economy where the line between users and producers is getting steadily more blurry, cooperative platforms won’t always sit comfortably within the traditional framework of cooperatives centered around workers, producers, or consumers. Will a cooperative social network need to elect a traditional board, or can members make decisions more dynamically with online polls? Can a platform with global reach distribute ordinary shares to all of its members, or will it need to rely on cryptocurrency tokens? Can the right kind of platforms make a flexible, gig-based career actually more secure and reliable than a 9-to-5 with a single employer? While extractive online monopolies—from Amazon and Facebook to Taskrabbit and Uber—have used the Internet’s gray zones to skirt labor law, cooperative platforms would allow us to invent the future of work on our own terms.

Enabling such enterprises to grow and thrive will be no small feat. Cooperative businesses require a different kind of ecosystem than what fuels today’s online monopolies. This means, for instance, forms of financing that allow the people most affected by platforms to retain ownership and control, while still reaching appropriate scale. We’ll need cooperative incubators, cooperative legal clinics, and federations that coordinate the open-source software development that co-ops need. Governments will need to enact policies that make it easier for cooperative enterprises to flourish in the context of markets stacked against them. Cooperative platforms will mean different approaches to interface design, to office life, to how we identify and support entrepreneurs. This is an opportunity, also, to foster a better kind of tech culture—one that is more inclusive, imaginative, and accountable than the brogrammer all-too-accurately lampooned on HBO’s Silicon Valley.

The same weekend as we convene Platform Cooperativism in New York (entrance is gratis, the public invited), the Silicon Valley elite will be gathering for O’Reilly Media’s Next: Economy conference to discuss the future of work. ‘No company, no job is immune to disruption,’ its website boasts, and for $3,500, you too can attend. But the future need not emanate from there. The same weekend, in Cincinnati, the much more modest Union Co-op Symposium will gather those who are organizing to disrupt the reigning elite with cooperatives. We hope to amplify the growing chorus seeking real ownership and control over the systems that determine the shape of our lives. It’s time to bring the solidarity economy online.

Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholz wrote this article for the Next System Project for New Economy Week, a collaboration between YES! Magazine, the New Economy Coalition, and other organizations that bring you the ideas and people helping build an inclusive economy—in their own words.

Photo by mripp

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Image: Buttons made for last year’s Campo de Cebada’s Summer University 

DIWO Co-op is a worker-owned co-op located in Madrid, Spain. Recently, they were featured on the Spanish TV program “La Aventura del Saber“. This program forms part of a larger project, “La Aventura de Aprender“, which analyses the ways in which communities learn from each other and give back to the Commons.

The following video will be both familiar and inspirational to anyone who has ever been involved in a cooperative enterprise. In the interview, two of DIWO’s worker-owners, Mamen Martín and Rosana Fernández, talk about cooperativism and different forms of collaboration contrasted with individualism, and the differences between traditional enterprises and co-ops. Don’t miss Martín’s tale about the financial advisor that urged them *not* to become a co-op because “they’d lose control of their company”, and their reaction.

The DIWO contingent misspoke twice during the interview, resulting in two small errors. The original 15 M march was in 2011, not 2012; they also flubbed a point at the end while talking about the role of the co-op’s general assembly. Those errors have been corrected in the subtitle track for the video, in the interest of clarity and accuracy. After the vid, we’ve included some of the info from their website.

Hit the “close captions” button at the bottom right to active our English subtitles for this video.

There are some very interesting plans coming up with DIWO for this fall, namely the launch of DIWOShop, in collaboration with Guerrilla Translation and Freepress Coop, to provide free translation and promotion services to a selection of ethical and environmentally-oriented enterprises.  (Disclaimer: I’m Guerrilla Translation’s founder).

The following is extracted from DIWO’s website:

DIWO/We are:

diwo coop is a worker owned co-op specializing in custom button/badge production and other kinds of merchandise for distribution. The co-op is made up of people with various professional backgrounds. We formed our project to help promote communications by and for groups, organizations and companies working for the common good and aimed at building more ethical and sustainable societies. We created diwo coop in 2012, building on and including our previous project, platypusLab, because we’re convinced that collaboration is the best way forward from the current situation of widespread precariousness.

DIWO/We do: 

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