By Hillary Strobel

Most of the systems by which this modern, industrialized society has been organized are hierarchical and linear. They are designed to keep resources separated, and to keep people constantly working harder and harder, and often battling with their neighbors, for fewer returns. This is the case for political systems, as American democracy often takes direct action out of the political process. It is true of social and economic systems as well: families are increasingly living separated from each other in cookie cutter houses, with inequitable distribution of infrastructure development and taxes. A person’s income is intimately tied to their access to resources in every facet of life, although it is often distributed inequitably and is unequally taxed. Models for social and economic growth usually promote monocultures and rarely take into account anything beyond dollar value, especially the environment. Doing this ignores the fact that monoculture and poor environmental health will ultimately make scarce resources even harder to maintain. Meanwhile, hierarchical systems also mean a few people concentrate bigger shares of resources in order to maintain control and power.

Cooperatives are an answer to hierarchical political, social, and economic systems. They are much more democratic in daily activity than prevailing systems of politics and business management. They allow for much more equity in resource distribution, and live up to the adage of getting out of it what you put in. In all of their forms, co-ops are inclusive, empowering, and flexible. Co-ops offer the possibility of ownership to people who are likely shut out of that opportunity in prevailing society. Creativity and collaboration is possible in an environment of open communication and development, and co-ops are often places of incredible diversity, answering the problems of a monoculture. They are as close to a utopian ideal in a non-utopian universe as anything else. Belonging to and supporting collective governance is an amazing opportunity to cooperate for maximum resource benefit, and potentially influence policy development, as is the case with the Landless Worker’s Movement in Brazil. This group has instigated and gained great change in Brazilian agrarian reform.

What are cooperatives?

Cooperatives range from business models to living situations, therefore encompassing most of society’s major structures of political, social, and economic systems. In the case of business models, cooperatives include employee owned worker cooperatives such as Rainbow Grocery and Other Avenues Grocery, credit unions such as the Permaculture Credit Union, and purchasing cooperatives, in which groups of merchants employ economies of scale as large purchasing blocs in order to get discounts and pool marketing. Housing co-ops are one type of intentional community, which encourage cooperation amongst neighbors who have created small-scale living situations. Each member of a housing co-op owns a piece of a legal entity, which in turn owns real estate held in common. As such, each housing member belongs to an association, which usually elects a board of directors to develop and regulate occupancy agreements. This is distinct from condominium situations in which owners purchase real estate directly and therefore have little intimate engagement in communality.

The modern cooperative, the “organization owned by and operated for the benefit of those using its services,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, got its start in the mid 1800’s in Britain. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers created a set of rules and guidelines that are in wide use today, including open membership, democratic control, a lack of religious or political discrimination, sales at market prices, and earmarking earnings for education programs. Development of cooperatives in the United States was mainly a rural enterprise into the early twentieth century, in the forms of agricultural marketing and supply co-ops. Marketing co-ops provide a stage for marketing common commodities, promoting cooperation between farmers and buyers. Supply co-ops provide common access to farming inputs, such as fertilizers and seeds, which once again promotes cooperation for maximum resource distribution. Modern agricultural cooperatives are thriving, including Tillamook Creamery from Tillamook, Oregon. This cooperative of dairy farmers provides cheese, milk, and other dairy products to consumers at very decent prices, and allows each farmer to reap the benefits of collective governance in the dairy farming industry. The second half of the twentieth century in the United States has seen the emergence of cooperatives such as credit unions and housing co-ops in more urban contexts, with increasing influence over reigning political and economic models. That being said, it is a rural cooperative movement from Latin America that is demonstrating this increasing influence most successfully.

A Model for Cooperative-Initiated Reform: The Landless Worker’s Movement

The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), known in English as the Landless Worker’s Movement, is the largest social movement in Latin America. It is a highly organized answer to agrarian land reform in the country of Brazil, which has constitutional mandates for land use and yet has deep discrepancies in land ownership. Three percent of the population owns two thirds of Brazil’s arable land, which often goes unused despite a constitutional provision that states abandoned land will be seized by the government and given to those willing to farm it. According to the MST website, “Since 1985, the MST has peacefully occupied unused land where they have established cooperative farms, constructed houses, schools for children and adults and clinics, promoted indigenous cultures and a healthy and sustainable environment and gender equality. The MST has won land titles for more than 350,000 families in 2,000 settlements as a result of MST actions, and 180,000 encamped families currently await government recognition. Land occupations are rooted in the Brazilian Constitution, which says land that remains unproductive should be used for a ‘larger social function.’” The MST’s Commitments to the Earth and to Life encourages its collective members to “fight against latifundia for all that possess land, bread, studies and freedom.”

Much of the MST’s success in gaining title to unused land is due to its organizational abilities. Elements of the struggle that land reformers face are identified, and collectives are assigned to work on each element. These include production, cooperation, education, environment, gender, political education, health, culture, communications, human rights, and youth. Each sector works with international groups, the political left in Brazil, and the public sector to ensure maximum safety and success for the MST. While the MST has achieved massive success over its two decade struggle, members also face huge obstacles. Fierce battles in courts and private militias hired by land owners to harass and often brutalize squatters are but two of these, but the group continues. The MST counts many supporters around the world, mostly due to their exceptional organizational abilities, their dedication to equality, and their collaborative process of democracy. This particular movement is centered on agrarian reform; for both rural and urban contexts, there are any number of valuable lessons to be learned from the MST about collective governance influencing the highest levels of a hierarchy in order to ensure a shared living and dignity. If San Francisco’s small-scale cafés and restaurants belonged to buying co-ops and created business partnerships with farmers’ selling co-ops, a movement would be born and eventually influence how food is grown and distributed.

Indeed, there are already organizations working to encourage and promote cooperative business models. The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC) is one such group. According to their website, “NoBAWC (pronounced “no boss”) is dedicated to helping build the worker cooperative movement in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.” To realize this, NoBAWC provides support for members, including “maintaining and sharing information relevant to worker cooperatives, providing technical and organizational assistance, offering joint marketing and promotional services, developing group benefits, improving access to financial resources, strengthening ties between worker cooperatives and developing relationships with other segments of the cooperative/labor community. NoBAWC also helps develop new worker cooperatives by offering some technical assistance and referrals to those developing worker cooperatives and promotes worker cooperatives in our community.” Their member organizations include Arizmendi Bakery, Other Avenues Grocery, Rainbow Grocery, Box Dog Bikes, Woodshanti, New Leaf Paper, and the Lusty Lady, the world’s only worker-owned cooperative peep show. As this list shows, any field of business can be cooperative and governed collectively; as this model demonstrates, it is possible to create umbrella organizations that promote cooperatives in all forms, from agriculture to housing.

A Call to Cooperation

A cooperative can be as simple as a group of friends who pool money for shared rentals at the surf shop. It can be as complex as a credit union, with thousands of members and large sums of money floating around. It can be as evolutionary as the MST in Brazil. The idea is the same in all cases: people sharing resources in an equitable fashion for the greatest mutual benefit. Co-ops operate very well in capitalist and consumerist societies, because they are inclusive and flexible, and they offer the opportunity to create equitable systems that operate within these larger hierarchical systems. The multicultural nature of co-ops is a stand against the tenets of globalization and industrialization. Small scale collective governance, in the form of social, political, and economic cooperatives, is one very effective tool for controlling democratic processes directly and to influence overall social, political, and economic movements. This is true for any country in the world, and increasingly, for global interdependence.