Editorial

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkRemembering the Cooperatives as War Returns to Eastern Europe

Elias Crim

First, with an eye on the tragic scenes in Ukraine, let’s note that NCBA / CLUSA is standing in solidarity with the co-op sector in that country. Partnering with the National Co+op Grocers (NCG) and the Cooperative Development Foundation, the organization has created a Disaster Recovery Fund to enable direct donations to these businesses.

Ukraine’s co-op sector includes an estimated 15,000 enterprises, 3,000 restaurants, seven hotels, 300 manufacturing businesses and shops, and 300 markets throughout Ukraine, all attempting to maintain operations so member-owners can continue to rely on co-op goods and services.

The NCG is further offering a 100% match on donations of up to $100,000 made by the food co-op retail system.

Second, for those co-op history buffs among our readers, an update to the snippet of Russian history from the 1980s in last issue’s editorial, when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was boosting independent, legally-recognized cooperatives as part of his vision of perestroika (economic restructuring).

Instead, events overtook Gorby, who was ousted amidst the political earthquake that ended the U.S.S.R. as a state and replaced it with Boris Yeltsin’s free-market jamboree of asset-stripping. The ensuing catastrophe was the backdrop for the arrival of former KGB Col. Vladimir Putin in 2000, elected partly because he promised to restore at least some of the collapsed social safety net.

Turns out there’s a bit more to this story of a lost opening for economic democracy. An important figure in the U.S. co-op scene was the late John Logue, a political science professor at Kent State University and a co-founder of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center, who died tragically of cancer in 2009.

With inspiration and assistance from Logue, the OEOC pioneered the employee ownership transition process and created the coalition behind the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland.

Logue’s obituary notes one other detail about the OEOC’s outreach:

Kent State and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center hosted international visitors and collaborated on international exchanges to further the work in employee ownership. In 1991, a technical exchange agreement was established between Kent State University and leaders of Russia’s economic reform initiative to adapt the U.S. experience to their privatization efforts, which eventually supported business development centers at state universities in several regions of Russia.

The International Labor Organization estimates (there are no official figures from the Russian government) that as much as one-third the population in Russia today belongs to a cooperative of some kind.

In which case, we may be mistaken in saying Russian cooperativism was “a road not taken.” We will inquire further. 

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkThe Four Paths to Employee Ownership

A Conversation with Vermont Employee Ownership Center’s Matt Cropp

Elias Crim

Matt is the executive director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, which he joined in 2014. With deep expertise in employee ownership models, he coordinates the Center’s work with a national network of employee ownership practitioners and providers. Matt received his M.A. in History from the University of Vermont in 2011 and is a self-described “renegade credit union historian.”

Books

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkHow to Disarticulate the State

Michael Menser’s We Decide! Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy (2018)

Elias Crim

Way back in 2009, my skepticism about meaningful change in my adopted city of Chicago was disrupted when I read that an alderman, Joe Moore, had become the first public official in the U.S. to use a participatory budgeting (or PB) process to allocate public money.

Inspired by the example of citizens in Porto Alegre, Brazil, residents of the 49th Ward worked together to decide how to spend $1 million of Moore’s annual discretionary capital budget — the aldermanic “menu money.” Residents identified hundreds of project ideas, developed dozens of these ideas into full proposals, and then voted to fund street and sidewalk repairs, bike lanes, playground and park improvements, street lights, new trees, murals, and many more community projects.

Participatory budgeting — now a feature of civic life in 2,700 governments at various levels worldwide — is a key pillar in Michael Menser’s valuable guide to the remarkable practices (and the theories) of participatory democracy (PD).

Menser, who teaches at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, explains that he has written a book of philosophy and of action, placing a focus on power and equality (via collective determination) in contrast with approaches which focus on happiness, rights, or conventional politics. His motto: We must disarticulate the state!

My translation of the latter: we must shift key functions of the state, transferring them with appropriate funding to self-governing civil and social groups. (Another motto of Menser’s: Democracy is not about having a voice — it’s about sharing power!)

In his focus on PD and its related strategy of PB, the author does not take up universal solutions or endorse a single model. But his detailed case studies of PB in Brazil and New York City, cooperativism inside Mondragon Corporation, democratic social production in the Seikatsu Club women-led consumer co-op in Japan, and more, point toward a new vision of social relations emergent from these experiments.

His four scenarios in which PD could proliferate include: 1) a “checkerboard” strategy that remakes local jurisdictions and then inter-connects them; 2) economic crisis and major state policy change; 3) civil crisis and massive social movement action; and 4) the ecological crisis and a cross-sector multicultural climate justice movement. At the moment, I’m leaning toward #2.