On Solidarity and Political Emancipation

Many people make it extremely clear that the government could be playing a stronger role today to support co-ops! Consider this: today we have different kinds of state and federal support for low-income people in the form of vouchers, subsidies, or cash support. But we should be thinking about public money as belonging to us. We should be able to put it toward supporting co-ops and solidarity economy endeavors among low-income people especially.

For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, the New Deal had a self-help co-op division in the Department of Commerce that would actually give money to unemployed people to help them start co-ops. Also some municipalities put money into helping people convert their apartment buildings into limited equity housing co-ops.

We could also think of reparations money as a way to help people develop co-ops— to support both nonextractive co-op loan funds and education and training in cooperative economics.

Just because people don’t have money themselves doesn’t mean they don’t deserve or can’t participate in a co-op. In some ways, we don’t have the money or the assets because we’ve been stripped of our assets through racial capitalism. We’ve been denied access to capital through years of apartheid and economic discrimination.

So in lots of ways, the fact that we don’t have that initial capital to put into a co-op is a function of structural racism. Therefore, we should think about public money as belonging to us to address structural inequalities.

Q: So then, as we teeter into a recession, what takeaways can inform the socioeconomic resilience of communities— especially historically underserved communities— today?

Crises are when co-ops shine. Those of us who study co-ops know that co-ops get created during times of crisis ad enable communities to survive those crises. The Great Depression i the 1930s is the time we saw the most cooperation among African American communities. And these co-ops in turn turn enabled other Black organizations to flourish.

Then, during the Great Recession of 2007– 2010, we also saw more people looking for alternatives and starting co-ops. And since the Covid pandemic, mutual aid has proliferated. Now, people are more convinced that we can’t just patch up— we have to make change and think outside the box. And today we have organizations interested in and willing and able to keep the mutual aid and co-op movements going along with international support, which always helps.

Q: Let’s talk about movements. We’re talking to you at a moment of social unrest, when America is reckoning with its history of racial divides. Can you talk about the relationship between Black economic solidarity and Black Lives Matter?

Struggles against police brutality, a police state, and the Black Lives Matters movement are founded on a platform of economic justice. To achieve this, we need to fight for collective ownership and group economic solutions to our housing, food, and labor problems and for all aspects of state violence and institutional racism. We need to make structures that are nonexploitative.

In the 1960s, the Black Panthers emphasized the importance of economic justice. They weren’t just reacting to something; they were trying to build spaces, activities, connections for the long run for the largest number of people over time— and that includes our own self-determination and solidarity as a group process. This process continues today with the Movement for Black Lives’ platform on economic justice through solidarity and cooperative economics.

There are times in history when education about co-ops was more widely accessible and known. Today this is missing. We need to get the word out and make people more confident about co-ops as viable and strong economic alternatives.

And it’s important to point out that even among those co-ops that don’t necessarily last long, if they have strong social energy, they have an important lasting effect.

||| -Segal, Rafi, and Marisa Morán Jahn (2023)

See also: Our Universal Access – Community-level Interventions and Charters for Social Change