Cooperation is a radical model that could fundamentally reorient our economy toward democracy.
“Co-ops have been an important tool of social justice movements and the left.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Nathan Schneider. Schneider is a journalist and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. His book is Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Nathan Schneider: We are living through a long crisis of accountability. Ten years ago, when the financial markets crashed, investor-owned financial institutions and their allies in government chose to bail out those investors, not the millions of people who would lose their homes and jobs, in this country alone. We still have not taken any steps to fundamentally address the roots of the crisis or its aftermath. Instead, people around the world have elected leaders with authoritarian tendencies who lash out against failed institutions but offer little but themselves in their place.
Everything for Everyone is about a kind of economy with accountability baked into its core: cooperative business. Co-ops are businesses owned and governed by the people they serve—workers, customers, small businesses, and more. This tradition has been undergoing a revival in the decade since the crisis. Co-ops have been an important tool of social justice movements and the left, but at the same time they are a vital part of rural communities in the U.S. generally aligned with the Republican Party. Recent advocates range from Paul Ryan to Maxine Waters.
On the one hand, cooperation is a radical model that could fundamentally reorient our economy toward democracy.On the other hand, it is more mainstream already than many people realize, thanks to brands from Land O'Lakes to Ace Hardware to the Associated Press. These can seem like some of the dullest companies imaginable, but they have in them at least the germ of a revolution within reach.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Gandhi used to say that the vast majority of his work was actually not the direct, famous acts of resistance, but what he called the “constructive program”—the alternative economies that built strength and culture in his movement. While writing this book, I realized just how true that has been for successful movements throughout US history as well. Meeting with Civil Rights and Black Power elders down South, I heard story after story about how essential—and unsung—cooperatives were in making possible all that they accomplished. In the early labor movement, almost up until World War II, national unions like the Knights of Labor used co-ops as a vital part of their organizing model. We see these legacies returning again today, from the Cooperation Jackson movement in Mississippi to the many labor unions turning back to co-ops, now that their postwar business model has run aground.
Today there's a lot of talk of authoritarian populism. But more than a century ago, there was a different kind of populism—powerful enough that it nearly took power directly across the country, and within decades many of its core aims had been won, such as social security and women's suffrage. That was a more progressive populism, and the reason, I think, was that it had roots in the cooperative businesses formed among farmers and urban workers. These people rejected elite privilege not on the basis of some false nostalgia but out of the experience of realizing that they could shape their own future. It was a populism of hope, not of resentment. If we want to build hopeful movements, helping people discover their own power through cooperative economies is a fearsome way to start.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Many people give capitalism too much credit—whether they like it or not. Since the Cold War the reigning ideology in the United States has been that capitalism is the primary engine of our everyday economic lives. But when we learn to see the cooperative tradition, we realize that a lot of the best things of our world—the small businesses holding their own against big boxes, the communities thriving against all odds, the rise of more ecologically sustainable practices—owe a great deal to a kind of business that Wall Street doesn't control.
When we realize how powerful cooperative economies have already been in our world, it becomes easier to imagine a world with far more of them and far less investor-obsessed capitalism.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I gained so many new heroes while working on this. Some were people I had already known, like WEB Du Bois, who documented and supported Black co-ops throughout his career, or Edward Filene, the department store magnate who did much to build the US credit union system. Fannie Lou Hamer and Martin Luther King, Jr., are famous for their resistance, but they supported it by helping to organize co-ops. Then there were people I was astonished I had never been taught about before.
Consider two Catholic priests. José María Arizmendiarrieta, for instance, was the founder of the Mondragon co-op system in the Basque Country, the largest worker co-op network in the world. He was a half-blind spiritual and economic genius, perhaps even a saint. His writings, which have barely been translated into English, convey a rare wisdom about how economic life forms the kind of moral beings we become. Another priest, Albert J. McKnight, was a Pan-Africanist visionary and master fundraiser who helped develop the Southern Cooperative Development Fund and other institutions that enabled Black farmers to own and control their own land.
There are so many more. It is simply appalling how much we lionize the entrepreneurs who make rich people even richer but forget and ignore the entrepreneurs who build businesses that truly serve their communities.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
Cooperation is a tradition, as the old churchy saying goes, that is in but not of this world. It points toward a world of radical democracy, yet it begins by meeting us where we are, in the midst of capitalism, and it can be just as screwed up as we the people are.
I think this tradition is particularly important when we consider some of the critical crises of accountability in our current economy—the financial system, for one, and the ever more powerful online platforms. These sectors seem to claim that there can be no other way than profiteering and extraction, and that in fact such things are good for us. The cooperative tradition demonstrates that this is not the case. But of course it cannot be enough to simply turn Facebook into the Associated Press. We need to push these models, these strategies, these movements forward. Democracy doesn’t work when it is static and staid. We must always be learning and challenging ourselves. The stories in this book are largely stories of people doing just that.
Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He is co-author, with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong, of the new book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
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