During my research I have encountered several sources which have mentioned the work of the Catalan Integral Cooperative and its philosophy of “Open Cooperativism”. Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation especially promote this organization and its approach, and even helped to fund and publish an in-depth study of it, authored by George Dafermos in October 2017. Dafermos spent several months working alongside members of the CIC and conducting interviews with members. The aim of this report, “The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative”, which is the main source I am drawing from, was to answer the questions “What is the CIC?” and “How does it work?”. As I will show, the answers to both of these questions are rather more complex than you might think, and after reading the report, left me with more questions than I started with.

What Is It?

To understand the CIC and what supposedly makes it a “post-capitalist” cooperative in more than ambition, Dafermos says that the “revolutionary activist” character of the cooperative is essential, as is an understanding of its “Open Cooperativism” philosophy, which distinguishes it from both conventional businesses and mainstream cooperatives. According to Dafermos, “the main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life.”(Dafermos, 2017). This mission is what, in my opinion, has lead to the complex organizational structure of various committees, self-employed members, exchange networks and autonomous initiatives, as members experiment with different facets of the economic and social transition from capitalism.

A traditional business-oriented worker cooperative would look at a market, search for a good or service that they could provide and build their business up from there, eventually expanding into other markets if possible. This is the “lean-startup” approach which currently dominates entrepreneurial circles in North America and elsewhere. The CIC takes this supposedly conventional wisdom, and does something entirely different, instead rapidly prototyping and supporting multiple, often wildly dissimilar business models (from hackerspaces to organic farms) and projects at the same time, with the goal of experimenting with and disrupting as many industries as possible and promoting open cooperativism within their sphere of influence.

The main work of the CIC core membership is to facilitate and fund the expansion of these projects through the system of democratic committees and assemblies the CIC uses to govern itself via consensus processes. These committees are

• Coordination – General administration and internal organization of CIC. Closest thing you’re going to find to an “executive” anything with the CIC
• Reception – Onboarding and training of new members
• Communication – outgoing comms, promotion, handling information requests, inter-cooperative networking
• IT – manages CIC servers, website and software development & support for all members
• Common Spaces – Facilities management for the AureaSocial building in Barcelona which CIC uses as its headquarters
• Productive Projects – facilitates connecting members to jobs and promoting cooperative projects
• Economic Management – provides support to self-employed members as well as manages the finances of CIC as a whole.
• Legal – Legal support to the CIC committees and its many at-large members
• Catalan Supply Center – a regional food and craft industry distribution network made up of “rebosts” or local pantries managed autonomously by various groups. The committee mostly focuses on managing the supply chain for this network as a cooperative public service.
• Network of Science, Technique and Technology (XCTIT) – develops, prototypes and licenses machines and softwares use by CIC projects and affiliated cooperatives.

Basic Income

The members of these committees, according to Dafermos, see themselves less as business-owners and more as activists. So that they have adequate free time to effectively participate, the cooperative supports members financially with a limited “basic-income” salary, paid both in Euros and a local electronic currency called “ecos”. The basic income is meant to be distributed on a basis of need for members to participate fully, and is adjusted accordingly. The highest reported amount for a member’s basic income was 765 Euros + 135 ecos per month. I did not find in the report a breakdown of how many members receive basic income, but based on the participant numbers for each committee, as of late 2017 at least 45 people recieve a good deal of their income through the program. And that is just for management. Many more people are supported by the cooperative’s many projects and programs, either in self-employment or one of many “Autonomous Projects of Collective Initiative”. The basic income program was launched after the start of CIC. Previously all members were volunteers.

Auto-Ocupados

Being self-employed, operating a private practice or a small business in Spain can be prohibitively expensive or otherwise unavailable to those without legal status or financial means to pay the fees on registration and invoicing (the minimum fee is 250 Euros per month). One of CIC’s main services is to manage legal entities that self-employed individuals and collective autonomos in Catalonia can use to surmount these barriers. All of their invoices are processed through the cooperative system, which uses membership fees of 75 Euros (adjusted for income) every three months to sustain itself. There are around 600 self-employed members, but few of them choose to be closely involved with the organizational work of CIC.

Territorial Economic Network

This component of the CIC includes some 2,500 members engaged in various kinds of work connected to the economic system managed by the CIC. The primary unit of this network is the local exchange network and its various nodes, including the consumer-run rebosts (pantries) of the Catalan Supply Center, assemblies who manage the production and distribution of ecos digital currency and the “autonomous projects of collective initiative”, independent projects and businesses that the CIC is involved in through active membership, collaboration and financial/material/legal support. These include

• A cooperative office building, AureaSocial used by CIC as its headquarters and shared with various other cooperative ventures within the CIC’s network
• CASX, a financial cooperative dedicated to providing support and interest-free financing to cooperative ventures, and ultimately aimed at attracting widespread consumer investment through a cooperative savings program
• SOM Pujarnol, a rural bed-and-breakfast and housing cooperative
• Calafou, a settlement occupying an abandoned industrial village which now produces machine fabrication, professional music recording, handmade soap, lodging and software and event hosting for concerts, festivals and conferences
• MaCUS, a collaborative machine shop which supports artists, traditional and modern craftspeople and livelihoods by allowing access to a wide range of industrial machines, including everything from a woodshop to a music studio and 3-D printers.

Aerial View of Barcelona

Inside one of the workshops of Calafou

Monthly transactions within the alternative economic network

Cooperative Public System

The CIC ultimately aims to promote the development of a “Cooperative Public System” outside the official control of the Spanish and Catalan governments as well as the capitalist market. It seeks to transition systems such as Food, R&D, Education, Housing, Health Transportation and more to a commons-based management and ownership system. Currently, the Catalan Supply Center and XCTIT are the most fully-realized aspects of this goal.

There is No Catalan Integral Cooperative

One of the most interesting facts that turned up in Dafermos’ report is the fact that although the CIC has developed a highly diverse network of legal entities to aid its projects, the CIC itself has no legal status and does not officially exist. Dafermos claims the reason for this is so that the core members have more flexibility when it comes to dealing with the state and its various bureaucratic requirements.

How Does It Work?

According to the Dafermos report, the rough financial breakdown goes like so:

Income Sources

• Member fees (50%)
• Tax refunds from self-employment loophole (50%)
• Donations (minimal)
• Revenue (Unclear in the report how much this accounts for)

Expenses

• Basic Income to CIC members
• Funding for various projects

Most of the economic activity is carried out in a decentralized fashion by the CIC’s various projects and legal entities it manages, leaving an extremely minimal financial burden for the cooperative itself, which may explain why it is able to sustain itself while supporting so many other projects. It relies on reciprocal support and benefits from the diverse cooperative institutions it collaborates with to reproduce itself. As a cooperative, it emphasizes the need for “cooperation among cooperatives” and proves that with a robust enough network, highly experimental forms can be developed into viable organizations.

Decisions are arrived at within the committees through consensus-based democratic processes, and the general membership is organized through assemblies for coordination, which operate on similar principles. Assemblies are organized for individual projects, as well as for coordination between projects. Some committees and assemblies have limited authority over others, such as the financial committee and CASX, which make decisions about funding and have a direct say in each other’s operations, while others are completely autonomous from the main cooperative.

Why Does the CIC Work?

By most conventional standards among cooperative businesses, it shouldn’t. And yet it does, and even appears to be growing through its own organizing and support from the governments of Barcelona and Catalonia. Why is the CIC succeeding where many other politically-motivated cooperatives have failed?

Open Cooperativism

The CIC is founded on the principle of Open Cooperativism, which states that in order to counter isomorphic tendencies (isolation, commodification and protection of intellectual property, exploitation of non-members and the environment) in cooperatives bound to the market system Co-ops must agree to

• “work for the common good” rather than just their membership
• Utilize multi-stakeholder governance
• Use and produce “commons”-based goods in their production and licensing (rather than proprietary means of production)
• Collaborate globally with the intention of leading an economic transition away from capitalism while focusing on local production and development.

Without this framework, it would be hard to imagine an organization like the CIC existing. Intense focus on collaboration and inter-cooperative reciprocity is what keeps something as decentralized as the CIC afloat.

Clever Exploitation of Tax Loopholes

Apparently, a significant portion of the income comes from tax refunds earned through the self-employment program on each member’s invoices when processed by the state.This is part of the CIC’s larger principal of Economic Disobedience. One of the CIC’s founding members, Enric Duran, became famous for taking out nearly a half-million euros in collateral-free loans from 39 banks and giving it all away in donations to anti-capitalist organizations. After announcing what he had done, Duran fled the country and went on to found FairCoop, an organization based on open cooperativism that focused on promoting global initiatives through legal, financial and technological tools.

Organizing the Self-Employed

Many have talked about organizing the self-employed and so-called independent contractors, but few have succeeded. CIC’s model proves that an extremely broad cross-industrial cooperativism may have some important updates to older models of industrial unionism, which have had a very difficult time organizing the increasing numbers of precariously employed workers in formal and informal jobs.

Diversity of Institutions

The strength of CIC comes from its widely diverse reciprocal networks of exchange. By not relying on any single income source tied to revenue, they are able to exist and experiment with relative freedom compared to more business-oriented cooperatives. Many post-capitalist and mainstream economic transition theories assume that a shift towards less and less formal employment is likely, and a further decentralization of formal employment is already occurring with video-conferencing and telecommuting becoming popular. Many worker cooperatives and labor unions are struggling to adapt to this new paradigm of labor atomization. The CIC’s response is to optimize the countervailing tendency to labor atomization, which is the general growth of the social network across industrial and shop-floor bonds and using that as its primary tool for developing the forms of a future fair and sustainable economy.

• Dafermos, George.The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative. P2P Foundation, 2017. http://commonstransition.org/the-catalan-integral-cooperative-an-organizational-study-of-a-post-capitalist-cooperative/
• Catalan Integral Cooperative (website) https://cooperativa.cat/en
• International Cooperative Alliance Co-operative identity, values & principles. https://ica.coop/en/whats-co-op/co-operative-identity-values-principles
• Kassam, Ashifa Spain’s ‘Robin Hood’ swindled banks to help fight capitalism. The Guardian, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/20/spain-robin-hood-banks-capitalism-enric-duran
• FairCoop (Website) https://fair.coop/
• Faber, Sebastiaan and Seguín, Bécquer. Welcome to Sunny Barcelona, Where the Government Is Embracing Coops, Citizen Activism, and Solar Energy.
  The Nation, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/welcome-to-sunny-barcelona-where-the-government-is-embracing-coops-citizen-activism-and-solar-energy/

Photo by debora elyasy

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The ICH logo

ICH was born in 2015 through two local networking initiatives with an activist bent. On the one hand, the Platform for Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Equality, an intiative of people from the milieu of Autonomy, had been preparing the ground since 2013, propagandizing and agitating for the networking of productive projects on the basis of a framework of values inspired by the ideological principles of the CIC. During the same period, another networking initiative had begun to germinate in the bosom of the local movement of the Commons (dating back to the 1^st Festival of the Commons in 2013), which was also influenced by the cooperative model of the CIC.

Τhe two networking initiatives came close through a CommonsFest event in April 2015: in the context of this event, three core members of the CIC came to Crete for a week of workshops and meetings with local projects, which gave a strong impetus to the idea of creating a local ‘integral cooperative’. The arrival a few months later of the self-exiled charismatic leader of the CIC (who is now the driving force behind FairCoop), Enric Duran, pushed in the same direction. A visionary himself, Duran showed great zeal in propagandizing the reproduction of the CIC model in Crete. And so, the ICH emerged through the processes (in the milieu of local projects) triggered by the visit of the CIC members to the island, which resulted in the informal founding of the ICH at an open assembly in Heraklion at the end of the summer of 2015.

CommonsFest workshop by CIC members in April 2015

From the moment of its launch two years ago, the ICH has been closely integrated with the local exchange network in Heraklion, the so-called ‘Kouki’, which the ICH set up with the aim of covering the daily needs of the community. As in the case of the CIC in Catalonia, the local exchange network is a structure embedded in the operation of the Integral Cooperative and one of the main ‘tools’ it offers its members. More specifically, through the ‘kouki’ the ICH provides its members with a marketplace where they can exchange products and services by using the alternative currency of the local exchange network.

In practice, the exchange network constitutes a self-organized marketplace for the local community in which its members can buy and sell locally-available products and services. The payment can take the form of barter exchange or if that is not possible, it can be made by means of the alternative currency of the exchange network. From a technical point of view, keeping track of transactions and of members’ credit and debit balances is done through the Integral CES online platform (which, though originally developed by the CIC for its own needs, provides a plethora of local exchange networks around the world with the ‘technological infrastructure’ required for their operation); to put it simply, it is the ‘tool’ that members of local exchange networks use to manage their accounts.

Some of the stalls at the 1st ‘autonomous public market’ in April 2016

One of the most important things ICH has done to increase its visibility is the autonomous public market, which it has been organizing (in collaboration with the local exchange group) since April 2016. At this public market, which takes place once a month at Georgiadis Park in the centre of the city, members can set up their stalls and exchange products with alternative currency. In parallel, various events – such as talks by ICH members – serve the purpose of spreading the principles of the ICH and mobilizing visitors. As a true cooperatively-organized project, there is an open assembly at the end of every autonomous public market, with the aim of coordinating the tasks required for the organization of the next one after a month.

Presentation about the CIC at the 1st ‘autonomous public market’ in April 2016

The reason why this public market is called ‘autonomous’ is because it has consciously chosen to operate without the relevant license from the authorities: in that way it demonstrates in practice its autonomy from the structures of the state and exemplifies the principle of ‘economic disobedience’, that is, the conscious refusal to strengthen the state by paying taxes.

After two years of hard work, ICH believes that the time has come to scale-up its activities. Its immediate plans for the future include the development of ‘common infrastructures’ (like the cauldron ICH members could use this autumn to distil alcohol) and the provision of support for ‘partner projects’ like the retail outlet for the products made available through the local exchange network that some ICH members plan to open in the city in the coming months. Another important goal of ICH for the future is the organization of the autonomous public market on a more frequent basis and its expansion outside the city, helping thus the ICH reach out to the agrarian population in the countryside.

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