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In this way, money as a store of value and money as a means of exchange become increasingly entangled with one another.

A new bill in California is a step toward recognizing worker cooperatives as a solution to the state’s growing income inequality and worsening prospects for low- and middle-income people.

Imagine that it’s 2025 and the world of work has changed. Today, we do labour out of passion, not obligation. Nobody has a low-paid job or has to balance multiple jobs just to make rent. Work gives us meaning and direction, but it does not define who we are.

There is no doubt that “economy” is a keyword in contemporary life, yet what constitutes economy is increasingly contested terrain. Interested in building “other worlds,” J. K. Gibson-Graham have argued that the economy is not only diverse but also open to experimentations that foreground the well-being of humans and nonhumans alike.

This is a story about the revolutionaries next door. If you live in a place hard hit by recent economic decline, chances are you’ve got a few on your block. Don’t worry: You’re not going to catch these revolutionaries hatching a plot to topple the government or skulking around a factory to foment worker insurrection.

When Blake Jones heard shares in a certain West Bridgewater company would be available, he jumped at the chance to invest.

This was not some hot tech stock, or a community bank likely to be gobbled up in a few years.

Guzzardi said the bill would replace the state’s current and “archaic” cooperative law, which is a century old. By updating the definition of this business model in the books, entrepreneurs would have more licensing options. Finding the appropriate business license is a hurdle for Illinoisans interested in pursing the model.

As you may know, the phrase “the new economy” emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s and it is by no means “new” at this point, but rather points us toward an economy that has decidedly moved from Fordist arrangements of labor and production to what has been referred to as “post-Fordist”, relying on “flexible” or causalized labor and “just in time” production.

The cooperative movement often frames itself as an effort to regain local and democratic control over key community resources. Food, as a necessity of life, is mostly certainly a “key community resource”, control over which has been depleted by corporate consolidation in the food system, commodity speculation, and again, poverty.

1. Steal a good idea from the British and turn it against them

Modern cooperativism arrived in Kenya during the colonial period, as a means of organizing British rule. At that time, black Africans were not allowed to be members of official cooperatives.

We’ve dedicated our lives to cooperatives, but our retirement funds to Wall Street. That has to change, and I recently decided to figure out how it might be done. While not simple, it’s possible, and suggests a way that the community of co-op supporters might mobilize substantial capital for the growth of our movement.

When I visit Transition groups around the world, I hear many of the same questions over and over.  "How do we engage a wider cross-section of our community?"/"how do we make a living out of this stuff?"/"how do we build stronger bridges to the local council and local businesses?"  

We started Just Coffee to work with Zapatista coffee farmers in Chiapas, MX when coffee prices were at an all time low. After meeting and getting close to some radical farm families, it was plain to see that the coffee market was doing them wrong.