Gleanings

Failure to understand and implement co-op values can lead to co-op failure. A 2016 study by Peter Couchman and Murray Fulton – When Big Co-ops Fail – indicates that co-ops which fail present similar early warning signs. These include falling silent on co-op identity and having managers with no interest or belief in the model.

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Can big co-ops live up to the movement’s values and principles?

Gutierrez was determined to spur economic change and, to that end, decided that her neighborhood needed more community-minded businesses in which workers shared management and ownership — in other words, it needed more worker cooperatives.

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Sparking a Mini-Movement of Worker Cooperatives in Southeast L.A.

The capitalist mode of production does not permit a socially efficient allocation of resources. Resource allocation is determined by the twin structural imperatives of having purchasing power (on the demand side) and of chasing profit (on the supply side). If one has a need but lacks the money to back up that need, as for example the billion children worldwide living in poverty do, one’s need will not be met by the market.

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Worker Cooperatives and Revolution

From Clans to Co-ops explores the social, political, and economic relations that enable the constitution of cooperatives operating on land confiscated from mafiosi in Sicily, a project that the state hails as arguably the greatest symbolic victory over the mafia in Italian history. Rakopoulos’s ethnographic focus is on access to resources, divisions of labor, ideologies of community and food, and the material changes that cooperatives bring to people’s lives in terms of kinship, work and land management.

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FROM CLANS TO CO-OPS

Members gathered together for our annual meeting on June 27. Members created strategic goals for the year that leverages our assets and programming to achieve our goals and act on opportunities...

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