Linking Opposition & Alternatives

Cooperative development is the most important social change work that a person can do.

New community ownership tools, although still nascent, are gaining in prominence. Whether structured as diversified funds or direct ownership of retail space, they share a common thread of using local ownership to build wealth and shape local development.

The paper explores the organisational dynamics and production processes of worker cooperatives to analyse their potential as non-exploitative spaces of production within the capitalist economy. Drawing on qualitative data collected from five worker cooperatives in the United Kingdom, the paper argues that there are two major organisational tensions experienced by worker-members:
the tension between democratic governing and surplus production, and the tension between empowerment and (self) discipline. Theorised as manifestations of broader contradictions stemming from the capitalist relations of production, the tensions are inevitable. Nevertheless, as the research suggests, the intensity and form of these tensions vary depending on the governance
structure, division of labour, and nature of operations. Given this, worker-members are often able to collectively address and alleviate some of the pressures of production within capitalism through experimentation and organisational adaptation.

Soleil Ho shared candid insights and hard-learned lessons for the cooperative-curious with IIJ leader Shernay Williams, and discussed their career as a food journalist.

Bookchin’s works on direct democracy and social ecology seem to directly resonate with the practices of countless contemporary social movements worldwide: from political initiatives directly or indirectly referring him or his concepts, to social media memes like the infamous “Google Murray Bookchin.”

Ramsey Nassar, Gwen Pasquarello, and Andy Wallace at EMMA Technology Cooperative have spent five years as a worker-owned co-op building software and hardware for video games, theater, public installation, and media arts. And theme parks. And custom programming languages. And a nonprofit arcade collective. They're thriving.

This week, workers and community supporters launched the Pittsburgh Progress, “a cooperative news organization, owned and democratically run by its workers and members… dedicated to looking out for, and telling the stories of, the working-class people who form the heart and soul of our diverse communities.”

workerowned.info is a free, searchable marketplace that indexes products from worker-owned businesses and puts them in one place.

In this episode of How (Not) To Do Business, Chris King sits down with Cherry Haynes and Siôn Whellens of Calverts, the East London design and print co-operative.

Housing advocates in Eugene, Oregon, are seeking to create a legislative framework that would allow tenants to collectively acquire multifamily buildings when a building comes up for sale.