10 years since the financial crash we’ve learned that there exists in the US not just one economy, but many, as well as many kinds of economic actors. From platform cooperatives to cryptocurrency, people are continuously building economic alternatives. So says Nathan Schneider, crusader for collective ownership and author of “Everything for Everyone: the Radical Tradition That Is Shaping The Next Economy.” Plus, professor and author Virginia Eubanks on how government and corporations are erasing social services through unequal digital practices.

Photo by Lukyclover

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Robert Raymond: Lying a few miles south of Marin County and just across the bay from San Francisco, the city of Richmond, California, is situated within two of the wealthiest regions of the United States. Richmond, however, does not share in this wealth. Its downtown has been largely abandoned and its northern periphery is on the front lines of the Chevron Richmond Refinery, processing over 240,000 barrels of crude oil every single day and creating a toxic environment to those living in the surrounding vicinity. It’s an example of what we know as a “sacrifice zone” — a community that has been largely incapacitated by environmental damage and economic neglect.

But in the shadow of the looming refinery, and within the spaces between boarded up storefronts and abandoned lots, something is stirring in Richmond. Residents, organizers, and activists have come together to create an incubation hub for community revitalization and resilience. They call themselves Cooperation Richmond, and their aim is to empower the marginalized and exploited residents of this city to build community-controlled wealth and wellbeing.

Founded in October of 2017, Cooperation Richmond is plugged into a broader national movement that includes similar initiatives like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. These initiatives have largely been inspired by the Mondragon cooperatives, a highly integrated network of cooperatives that form a self-supporting ecosystem in the Basque region of northern Spain. Like these other initiatives, Cooperation Richmond’s mission is to build a cooperative economy that puts people and planet before profit. It does this through providing education, coaching, and both credit and capital development to cooperative businesses in Richmond.

Robert Raymond spoke with Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni of Cooperation Richmond about their work and the importance of the growing cooperative movement in Richmond and beyond.

Robert Raymond: There’s been a buzz around a new book recently written by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” I actually found out about Cooperation Richmond when I heard that one of your board members, Najari Smith, was going to be interviewing Kali Akuno during a book tour stop in Oakland. Can you tell us about Cooperation Richmond, what you see as your mission, and how you are connected to a broader cooperative ecosystem that includes, among others, Cooperation Jackson?

Gopal Dayaneni: Cooperation Richmond is a really good example of what we call trans-local organizing — autonomist, place-based organizing with a unifying vision, shared strategies, and common frames. We are connected with many other organizations who are doing or supporting cooperative development and who are all connected by a common vision. It’s a movement that is trying to build meaningful infrastructure for economic democracy in order to build a new kind of political power. We want to actually transform the very nature of the economy and of governance in our communities — that’s what we’re engaged in.

And so Cooperation Richmond is an organization that we have developed for the purpose of supporting worker-owned and community-owned cooperatives in Richmond, California, which is one of the poorest parts of the Bay Area — a majority people of color community. We provide coaching, connections, and capital. We’re focused on folks who are most excluded from the dominant economy, folks who we think should be the foundation of building the next economy.

Doria Robinson: The idea behind Cooperation Richmond is that we’re taking somebody from a place where they’re just getting started, somebody at the point where they really want to make an impact, and they want to take charge of their lives, but need some help making it happen. Maybe they have an idea for a business, but they don’t have much more than that idea. We’ve structured Cooperation Richmond to basically take it from there, to help them take it to the next stage.

You launched Cooperation Richmond less than a year ago, but you’ve already played an important role in fostering cooperative workplaces and community engagement in Richmond. Can you tell us about your first initiative?

Doria Robinson: Our pilot project was Rich City Rides, a bike and skate shop. It’s a really powerful story. It’s a small bike and skateboard shop in Richmond, a place that had no real bike shop. Before Rich City Rides, if you wanted to do any repairs to your bike, you had to go to Walmart or Target, which are not exactly bike repair places. That was it.

You know oftentimes bikes are associated with gentrification, or kind of an elitist kind of thing you do on the weekends. In Richmond, it’s really different. People can’t afford cars. Not a lot of people in low income communities have cars, or if they do, their car is constantly breaking down. So they’ll default to riding a bike just to get to work or just to get to the store, just to go get around. So people actually really needed to have a good place to be able to fix their bike. And so people mostly just threw out their bike if they got a flat — they would literally throw their bike out. It was painful to see. Or it would just sit in the garage once it had something wrong with it, and that was it. There was no access to any kind of bike tools or anything like that — people literally had no way to fix their bikes.

So three young men started to run a loosely associated collective bike shop out of different spaces that they could find. They worked out of a storage space for a while, they had a kind of pop-up bike shop going on for a while. They were finally able to get into a retail space across from the Richmond BART station, a space on the main street that had been boarded up for years. Rich City Rides was the first place that really started to revitalize the main street. I think it was one of the only places that’s locally owned on that block as well. But they were really running a pretty substantial business at that point with very little resources, and they needed capital. They also needed a facelift — the shop looked like somebody’s garage.

So we took them on and worked with them to create an action plan to strengthen the business. We got them their first loan and helped them incorporate as a California Cooperative. So now Rich City Rides is leading the effort to completely transform and revitalize the downtown, to create this opportunity for people to have healthy transportation; healthy in terms of environment and in terms of your own body. So yeah, it’s kind of an honor to just see them carry this vision forward.

And why is the cooperatives structure important? What role do they play in the broader mission of creating the next economy?

Gopal Dayaneni: Well there’s a few different pieces of that. So the first is that bosses just suck. You don’t need them. All wealth is generated through the work of the living world. Making money off the movement of money is just extraction of wealth from other people. So the idea of all of us being able to voluntarily co-participate and control our own labor to meet our needs — and the needs of our communities — is very important.

It’s also important to share that wealth. Creating commons of wealth and commons of resources is a necessary element of the transition that we need to be in. The dominant economy extracts wealth from the living world, and it begins with extracting wealth from our own work. And so in order to both confront that, but also to build a new kind of muscle memory, a knowledge of how to be in the world, to actually practice self-government on a daily basis, we need institutions and infrastructure that can do that.

The second part of it is really that cooperatives allow us to do things that the extractive economy won’t do. For example, we would never exclude folks because they were formerly incarcerated — because we don’t believe humans belong in cages. We would never exclude folks based on their their status as documented or undocumented because we recognize the border as an enclosure enforced through violence that fragments ecosystems and communities. So we are able through cooperation to actually live our values in a way that is foreclosed upon in the dominant economy, and particularly for those who are most excluded by the dominant economy.

Doria Robinson: I think that there’s some really vital things that being in a worker owned cooperative can provide. Democratization of the workplace is something that can’t be underestimated. In a worker cooperative, that’s really run through democracy, folks are voting through each owner having a say in the day to day decisions as well as the trajectory of the enterprise. That’s a really big deal, especially in communities like Richmond where power has really been taken out of the hands of the people. This transition of decision-making and profit-making back to the people — the transition of accountability and responsibility — is truly transformative.

If you take somebody who has never been in a place where what they do actually matters, where their whole livelihood actually depends on them completely showing up and making decisions — that’s transformative. And then once you start to get a taste of that it spreads and you don’t want to stop. As soon as people really get a taste of being in a position to make decisions that impact themselves and their community, it begins to extend out to other things. It doesn’t just stay within the realm of the workplace. You begin to realize that, for example, the city government impacts you. Or that decisions made around the streets impact you. You start to realize that you actually do have a voice in shaping the things that impact you, and that you can stand up and advocate for things. I think that is one of the most powerful and important reasons why we chose to focus on cooperatives. We want to thoroughly empower people in every place and in every way.

Gopal Dayaneni: Like I said earlier, Cooperation Richmond is part of a larger “just transition” vision and process taking place in Richmond but also in lots of other places in the United States and around the world. The idea is that for there to be meaningful political democracy, there has to be economic democracy. So the idea is not only about creating sustainable livelihoods in the workplace but also being able to reimagine the very nature of the work that we do and how we do it. So we could support worker-owned cooperatives that just do absolutely anything, or we could prioritize those that have ecological and social value. We do the latter. So Rich City Rides, for example, is not just a bike shop, it’s not just a bike shop run by folks who are normally excluded from the economy — you know, young men of color from Richmond — but it’s also an organized bike shop that supports community bike rides, transit justice, and bike safety. It’s really committed to a larger vision of reimagining our relationship to place, to home, and to the economy itself.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni by Robert Raymond/Shareable

The post How Cooperation Richmond is empowering marginalized communities to build an equitable economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Faced with a systemic crisis of the mainstream economy, there is an abundance of initiatives, but a systemic crisis can only be solved by equally systemic alternatives. How to fit them together in a fundamental transformative change, and which elements need to be combined to obtain vital synergies – this is the crucial aspect addressed in this important book.” » Michel Bauwens – Expert in Peer to Peer and Commons economy and Founder of The P2P Foundation

Emmanuel Mossay, the co-author of Shifting Economy, has written the following introductory text specially for the P2PF blog. It is followed by the book’s Preface, written by Mark Eyskens. You can download the book in PDF through this link: Shifting Economy

What is Shifting Economy?

Shifting Economy is a road book to start a new business, or redesign existing business, with the nature & human beings at the heart of the business models.

You will discover an alternative ocean to the blue and the red one. The green ocean is based on the cooperation.

Follow the 20 models & methodologies to become a “commoner”. These tools will show you some ways to:

• understand the cultural shifts of the new economy
• link macro future trends with your projects
• draw the sustainability journey for your organization
• define new business models
• build agile alliances with citizens, public and private stakeholders with 7 levels of shared values co-creation
• get ready for the arrival of AI and robots
• fine-tune the “speed” of your actions according to the complexity of your company
• learn how become bilingual old/new economy
• discover the growing industries
• find the money to convert expenses into sustainable investments

Please download, use, share, comment Shifting Economy.

Preface, by Mark Eyskens

Homo sapiens is now evolving into post economy. The New Economy must manage scarcity and affluence, a dual problem that is not integrated into the main classical economic theories. There will be an important shock between opulence, described by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in The Affluent Society, and scarcity on planet Earth. The only planet we have. There is no planet B.

The West grew strongly particularly at the beginning of industrialization, thanks to dualism, an old paradigm stemming from Plato. This logic of contradictions, was very useful because it forced the Westerners to make choices between “either/or”, between alternatives, between right or wrong in order to progress and to act. The steam engine is a good example, invented three centuries earlier in China as a piece of entertainment, but installed only in the eighteenth century at the heart of the industry in Europe by Westerners. Platonic dualism is at the core of creativity but was and still is at the origin of many conflicts and even wars which ranked the 20th century as the bloodiest of the human history.

Asian wisdom however teaches us another different basic paradigm: the Yin and Yang principle: the complementarity of dual oppositions which merge into a synthesis. In Chinese writing moreover, there is a single ideogram for the words « crisis » and « opportunity ».

This concept matches perfectly with the discovery of quantum physics that light is both a wave and a beam of particles, the photons. Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, summarized this insight by the Latin phrase “Contraria complementa sunt”, replacing the old “either/or” logic by the revolutionary “and/and” principle, that frees the way to cooperative solutions.

This awareness is progressively rising in Western thinking and will have far reaching consequences. It will lead us to a new holistic approach, exploring the hidden energies of diversity, divergence, oppositions and promoting synthesis and all kinds of creative compromises, in a world of interdependence, where national governments are too small for the big problems and too big for the small ones. Economic praxis has already adopted what is coined as: « Coopetition », when competition and cooperation are no longer exclusive along Darwinian principles but complementary, even inclusive according to quantum mechanical rules.

The rising of this inclusive, global approach is a challenge for political and economic leaders facing local populism emerging from fears and misunderstanding of what is going on in the global world of today and the world village of tomorrow. The nationalistic definition of “people” has become obsolete. The “people” has become a “population” with multicultural features in most countries. Nationalism and populism are perfectly understandable but they have become counterproductive because no longer future oriented. Protectionism is the economic and cultural translation of nationalism. To a certain extent protectionism existed already before economics and politics, even before human beings: the first membranes protecting living cells, stressed in our bodies. This selfish vitalism is still attractive but suicidal in a changed world as soon as ego nationalists propose to build walls instead of bridges.

In times of growing complexity democracy is caught between web and spider. Some citizens are saying “We have a vote, but we do not have a voice”. This is a serious warning addressed to politicians. Societal problems are extremely complex and the decision making process is most opaque. Governments, authorities “they” decide, they rule, they legislate, they impose…

There is a far reaching “they-ification” of politics, which makes governing impersonal, abstract and looking like a non figurative painting. We need to reinvent democracy by introducing elements of participative decision making, by informing and explaining and replacing demagogues by pedagogues. Most important is to modify the democratic voting systems. One model could be the promoting of «point voting», an electoral system by which each voter would get a plural number of votes, for instance ten votes, which he could freely cast and spread over different parties and candidates according to the intensity of his preferences. This would lead to a fine tuning of the voters choices. Also at the micro-economic level of enterprises and companies democratic cooperation between all stakeholders, transcending their exclusive interests, is at stake in the post economic era. Still more Herculean is the task of organizing steadily ways and means of international, possibly worldwide economic and political government.

On a much larger scale the European institutions also suffer of several functional problems and have to cope with great challenges. A European Fiscal Community should be created according to the principle “no representation without taxation.” Today the EU Parliament has no taxation power, so it is difficult to implement new strategies and new legislation. We need also to simplify and clarify the taxation systems. Budgetary expenses with respect to defence, security, energy, development policy, integration of immigrants, research, digital communication… should be Europeanized. A strong European public budget is needed. The EU Institutions budget equals 1% versus 27% in the USA for the federal expenses.

The Euro-zone, in order to cope with distortions of competition among member states, has to impose severe measures of austerity implying the reduction of public spending, of wages, of all kinds of allowances. The management of exchange rates by individual countries is no longer possible inside a monetary zone. Austerity measures being considered as an “internal devaluation” make the European Union unpopular and may lead to economic deflation. Only an efficient budgetary policy conducted by the EU could stabilize the Euro-zone.

Europe should unite in front of the ongoing scientific and technological revolutions.

History of mankind has indeed been steered by discoveries and scientific innovations, starting with the discovery of fire, 300.000 year ago.

Today scientific inventions are overwhelming in all domains. The acronym B.I.N.C. is useful in summarizing the ongoing scientific revolutions:

• Biogenetics, fabulous progress of medicine, average life span of 100, 150, 200 years??
• Information technology (computer apps, AI, virtual reality and physical robots, 3-D printing). Emergence of the “robo sapiens”.
• Nanotechnology. Tomorrow, we will be able to speak to every citizen on earth in our own language, and understand all the worlds’ languages thanks to nano computers (wireless or implanted in our own body).
• Cognitive science, human brain research and manipulation. The socio-economic consequences of the tsunami of scientific and technological innovations will be overwhelming and dramatic for the world community and the members of mankind.

Digitalization and robotization will considerably reduce working time, wage earners will be replaced by independent employees, the existence of world markets will go hand in hand with home work, multinationals will compete but also cooperate in lot of domains, intellectual property will no longer be protected, interconnectivity will eliminate all kind of intermediaries on the markets, e-commerce will take over from shopping. AIRBNB, Uberisation, circular economy, pooling, personal manufacturing, on line open courses, worldwide universities will spread, cash payments will disappear.

The development of solar and nuclear fusion energy will completely change the worldwide economic and political power balance. Wealth will be transformed in welfare and the pursuit of happiness will become a societal goal. A post-economic era would emerge

Nevertheless a lot of shadows of progress will have to be dealt with: demography, aging, climate, food scarcity, AMR (antimicrobial resistance), weapons of mass destruction, the difficulty to transform multiculturality in interculturality …

It goes without saying that the ongoing tsunami of scientific and technological innovations will revolutionize the world community for better and for worse. As a consequence the ultimate question will be and is already the question of ethics. How to transform all these changes into human progress? How should we manage ethics in politics, in economy, in business? And what’s the “right ethic”? Who is deciding on those values? Which are the rules applicable for everyone? Do we stick and apply to the lowest common denominator?

Buddha, Jesus Christ, Kant and other moral leaders said: “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself”. But is this rule sufficient to improve human life on earth?

The guideline of SHIFTING ECONOMY is the quest of purpose in economy, the quest of ethics in business – with tools that can be used on the field. It is also an invitation to all decision-makers to imagine and implement new dreams to connect human beings, and transform the grief of the planetary village into human happiness.

Mark Eyskens
Professor Emeritus Economics and former Prime Minister of Belgium

Download Shifting Economy

Photo by bdsmith84

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