by Joe Waters

Today we launch a new occasional series at Capita in which we will present syllabi to tell the stories of particular issues through curated and annotated lists of books, articles, and art. These syllabi will invite you to join us in deeper study of issues and complete new stories built on the expertise, perspective, and struggles of those who have come before. In our first installment, we read about the history, legacy, and twenty-first century possibilities for the cooperative movement, which we believe can provide a blueprint for building a more just, humane, and resilient economy, particularly in historically low-wage sectors like child care.

Introduction

Building on Foundations for Flourishing Futures: A Look Ahead for Young Children and Families—and with new motivation provoked by the “crisis of care” accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—Capita is currently exploring three interlocking questions as we examine the future of caregiving:

How might stakeholders reexamine the role of caregiving in society, setting up systems, structures, and narratives that reflect its true value?
How might stakeholders involve a wide range of people, particularly those who have historically been marginalized, in tackling major caregiving challenges?
How might stakeholders embrace intergenerational relationships and consider a range of care needs when developing future caregiving solutions?

Draft syllabus of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Social Philosophy course at Morehouse College, 1962.

Cooperatives—businesses in which ownership and governance are shared by staff or clients—have a long history in the United States and around the globe yet only the tiniest footprint in early childhood. The democratic ownership and governance structure of cooperatives is designed to advance the social, cultural, and economic interests of their members and as a result, has significant potential to better support the development and aspirations of workers in historically underpaid sectors such as child care.

Cooperative Foundations and Future Possibilities

Nathan Schneider. Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy. New York: Nation Books, 2018.

Because of its positive outlook on the prospects for building a new, more humane economy, this book, more than any other, set me on the path to becoming an enthusiastic champion of cooperation as something utterly necessary and absolutely vital for building a more humane economy and reinvigorating our democracy. A professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, Schneider has focused on both social movements and resurrecting neglected radical traditions. In Everything for Everyone, he maps the “cooperative commonwealth” around the world and explores the expansion of its frontiers in ways that are responsive to the particular technologies and economic realities of the twenty-first century.

John Curl. For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America. Oakland: PM Press, 1992.

Cooperation is admittedly a minority, prophetic economic tradition that supports the self-sufficiency and self-determination of people the market would otherwise leave behind. Cooperation also functions as a creative and constructive resource for building up a more humane and just economy in the ruins of financialized capitalism and among those whom it would otherwise be tempted to discard. Curl’s book is a history for the general reader. It provides an opportunity for readers to acquaint themselves with the full swath of cooperation’s history in America, its connection to similar movements, and the values that motivate those who cooperate to build economic spaces that provide more support for human flourishing than corporate capital allows.

Race Matthew. Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society. Irving, Texas: The Distributist Review Press, 2009.

Since the end of the Cold War, the communist economic alternative has been thoroughly discredited the world over, but capitalism has never produced a system that totally ensures the dignity and freedom of the human person. Race Matthews, a former Australian Labour politician, proposes a “third way” between state ownership and the ultimate preeminence of capital. Calling upon the deep traditions of economic distributism, he proposes an authentic third way between communism and capitalism that focuses on the wide distribution of ownership in the economy (in contrast to communism’s state ownership or capitalism’s concentration of extreme wealth among the few). It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the death of capitalism, but providing us an alternative rooted in deep economic traditions, Matthews allows us to do just that.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard. Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.

In John Curl’s words, this is “the most complete history to date of the cooperative economic struggles of African Americans.” African Americans have long known that certain markets do not serve them well and racial discrimination is as much economic as it is social or political. In response, Black Americans have long relied on cooperatives both for “economic defense” and to promote their “collective well-being.” In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard documents cooperative and mutual aid organizations that supported Black economic self-sufficiency and allowed “Blacks to serve the common good rather than be slaves to market forces” (W.E.B. Du Bois). Nembhard does not simply retell the history of African American cooperative practice; she operates out of a long-established Black “activist scholar” tradition that proposes the philosophy and practice of Black cooperation as a Black-led solution to the “challenges of capitalism, marginalization in labor, capital, and product markets, and the lack of adequate, affordable, quality services.”

Harlan County, USA, 1976.

Picket Line at the Brookside Mine Company, Harlan County, Kentucky.

This Academy Award-winning documentary isn’t about cooperatives, but it is about worker power. Covering the events surrounding the unionization of mine workers in Harlan County, Kentucky, this film by Barbara Kopple documents the poor living and working conditions of the miners and their families, their efforts to join the United Mine Workers, and their strike against Duke Power in the summer of 1973. It is a trenchant portrait of the harsh treatment and, indeed, violence perpetrated against workers acting on their fundamental right to unionize.

Sanctuary of the Renunciation. Assisi, Italy. Virtual tour.

For Christians and non-Christians alike, and across the generations since he lived in the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi has served as an inspiration for those concerned to build a culture of peace, fraternity, environmental stewardship, and interfaith dialogue and harmony. In recent years, Pope Francis has also invited people of goodwill to see Francis as herald of a more just and humane economy that places the human person and the care of creation at its center.

Assisi. Photo by Sara Bertoni on Unsplash

The Sanctuary of the Renunciation in Assisi marks the place in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore where Francis, heeding the deep inner call to live a life of poverty, stripped himself of his fine clothes and, symbolically, his merchant father’s wealth. Pope Francis has invited us all to reconsider our own relationship with money and material goods and to consider Francis’s extreme gesture of renunciation from the point of view of an alternative economy. This gesture, and this sanctuary that commemorates it, invites us to consider how our economic decisions exploit or degrade others. What do I need to be stripped or divested of so that others might have more? Am I so fixated on money and material wealth that I cannot build an economy that gives life and promotes freedom and opportunity for all people? For me, this sanctuary is the spiritual center of a new, more just and humane economy.

ICA Group. Covid-19 Exacerbates a Looming Crisis in Child Care.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the fragility of the child care sector, which is one of the most important sectors supporting others in getting our economy back up and running. President Biden has indicated a strong willingness to invest in the sector to help it recover, but it remains to be seen if such investment will be worker centered. ICA Group, a Northampton, Massachusetts-based organization “collaborating with workers to define a truly entrepreneurial, democratic, and community-minded economy,” committed early in the pandemic to help owners and workers to rebuild the child care sector through employee ownership.

Syllabus: Cooperation