Politics Of Cooperation And Co Ops

The current co-op movement in the U.S. seeks to be a structural alternative to capitalism; this book seriously questions whether the current movement can accomplish that task. Carl Ratner offers a rich and unique political analysis and critique that provides helpful insights into the practice and problems of the contemporary cooperative movement. Noting that co-operators tend to view their work as apolitical because the explicit influence of national political parties is absent, the author constructs a compelling argument that co-operators nonetheless operate unwittingly with implicit political conceptions of freedom, opportunity, human rights, social participation, decision-making, power, and governance that are shaped and limited by the capitalist economic system. Ratner demonstrates how a more radical, anti-capitalist, socialist form of cooperation and co-ops are needed to realise the fulfilling potential of cooperation and co-ops. For those wishing to understand and advance the cooperative movement, this book is essential reading.

Globalization pressures have made cooperation on a global scale both necessary and possible. But cooperation is not easy in a world dominated by individual, cultural, and national selfish interests. The opposition to cooperation means that cooperation is not natural, but must be instituted through an intellectual and social struggle against countervailing forces. This book discusses issues that are necessary to describe the nature of cooperation and how it can be promoted as a social and ethical ideal amidst a sea of competing interests. Dr. Ratner uses the framework of cooperativism, that is the system of social institutions, social philosophy, cultural psychology and politics that promotes cooperation, as a starting point. Elements of cooperativism are derived from a rigorous analysis of various sources, including the needs of tendencies of human culture and human psychology.

In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

The origins of the next radical economy is rooted in a tradition that has empowered people for centuries and is now making a comeback. A new feudalism is on the rise. While monopolistic corporations feed their spoils to the rich, more and more of us are expected to live gig to gig. But, as Nathan Schneider shows, an alternative to the robber-baron economy is hiding in plain sight; we just need to know where to look. Cooperatives are jointly owned, democratically controlled enterprises that advance the economic, social, and cultural interests of their members. They often emerge during moments of crisis not unlike our own, putting people in charge of the workplaces, credit unions, grocery stores, healthcare, and utilities they depend on. Everything for Everyone chronicles this revolution--from taxi cooperatives keeping Uber at bay, to an outspoken mayor transforming his city in the Deep South, to a fugitive building a fairer version of Bitcoin, to the rural electric co-op members who are propelling an aging system into the future. As these pioneers show, co-ops are helping us rediscover our capacity for creative, powerful, and fair democracy.

There are only two ways that humans work together: they cooperate with one another, or they coerce one another. And once you realize this fundamental fact, it will change how you see the world. In this myth-busting book, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan display the wisdom and talent for explaining complex topics that have attracted a devoted audience to their weekly podcast, Words & Numbers, and made them popular speakers around the country. By looking for cooperation and coercion in everyday life, they help make sense of a wide range of issues that dominate the public debate. You’ll come away from this book with a clear understanding of everything from the minimum wage to taxes, from gun control to government regulations, from the War on Terror to the War on Drugs to the War on Poverty. It turns out that coercion is necessary . . . sometimes. Even in a democracy, we all abide by rules, including plenty that we don’t agree with, in the name of getting along. But in the end, Davies and Harrigan show, cooperation without question is the key to human happiness and progress. The more we encourage it, the better off we all are. Cooperation & Coercion cuts through heated partisan debates to provide a refreshingly clear and comprehensive understanding of the way the world works.

This handbook investigates all types of 'member owned' organizations, whether consumer co-operatives, agricultural and producer co-operatives, or worker co-operatives among many others. The chapters reflect the latest academic research and thinking on each topic, as well as reporting the relevant policy debates.

The United Nations declared 2012 the year of cooperatives, emphasizing that there is an alternative to privately owned firms. While greed and mismanagement have caused world financial and economic crises, co-ops offer another type of business for economic activities that is less exposed to aggressive capitalism. This book provides a problem-oriented overview of the development of cooperatives over the last fifty years. The worldwide study addresses the major challenges cooperatives face, such as the organizational innovations introduced in order to acquire necessary risk-capital and implement growth-related strategies, the wave of demutualization in developed nations and their ability to construct an original consumer politics. The contributors to this volume discuss the successes and failures of the cooperatives and ask whether they are an outdated model of enterprise. They document a wave of foundations of new co-ops, new forms of collaboration between them, and a growing trend toward globalization. Generally speaking they show that this special kind of business will doubtless continue to thrive and to maintain an important position in a rapidly changing world economy.