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What makes communes and their advances so important? To explain their significance, one has to appeal to something that is not immediately visible: social relations and especially relations of production.

As World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. In Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City, Robert Fogelson, one of the nation’s foremost urban historians, tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later.

Chamois Holschuh tells the worker co-op conversion story of Austin Design Cooperative

Dru Oja Jay is joined by Kevin Harding, one of the organizers of a spirited hail-mary attempt to save Mountain Equipment Co-op from being sold off to a US private equity firm.

Many countries in the Global North use the term “social economy”—also known as the third sector—to describe economies run by citizens rather than by state or business actors. Over the years, many Black feminist scholars that we have worked with also share the view that the concept of the “social economy” is limited to a European understanding. It fails to acknowledge those actors in the third sector who are excluded from interacting with the government or private sector. There is an assumption that the social economy is “socially inclined” and that it is a sector able to “interact” with the state and capitalist firms. What happens when certain groups of people cannot interact with the state or private sectors due to systemic exclusion? We argue that to transform literature on the social economy, we must use the term solidarity economy. Rejecting the sanitized language of the social economy, we use critical discourse and case study analyses to show the worldwide use of the term solidarity. Our work draws on theories of community economy intentional community to argue that the solidarity economy is a site of contestation and a way to push for social change.

This is the 10 December 2022 phone bank and exchange between Americans and Rojava cooperator Kraker.

Allied Community and Co-operative Shared Services (ACCESS) is “a shared service nonprofit co-operative specifically formed to provide professional administrative back-office support for social purpose organizations”. The newly started nonprofit co-operative provides professional administrative back-office support for social purpose organizations, like co-ops and non-profits.

Solidaristic principles prove great in theory, but how do they hold up in practice? Specifically, in communities facing historical divestment and disenfranchisement, can mutualism and cooperativism serve as building blocks for crafting more equitable, sustainable economies and societies? 

Laura Flanders speaks to founder of the Community and Worker Ownership Project Rebecca Lurie, CEO of One Brooklyn Health LaRay Brown, and New York City Council Member Sandy Nurse about the recent enthusiasm surrounding worker cooperatives throughout the country, and what they can offer workers that traditional employment cannot.

Conflict, objections, and strong feelings can all represent tensions to steer by. Conflicts can come in all shapes and sizes. The driver formula can be applied to all different kinds of situations where tension arises, and change is needed.