For All the People

For All the People

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22534

September 08, 2009
By John Curl

John Curl, author of For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden
History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in
America (PM Press, 2009) interviewed by Gabriel Kuhn. (September 2009)
--

Internationally, US society is often associated with rampant
individualism. Your book portrays an impressive number of cooperative
and communal projects throughout the country's history. Can you sum
up the most important chapters of this legacy?

The collectivity of North American Indians remains our deepest
legacy, followed by the cooperative settlements and structures of the
early colonists, and of every wave of immigrants to America from
around the world. Communalism played an important role in the
movement for social equity that arose in response to the industrial
revolution, and also in the Abolitionist movement that ended slavery.
Worker cooperatives were a key element in early labor unions, and
grew into a national movement in the later 19th century. Between 1865
and 1888, there were at least 529 worker cooperatives in the US, in
almost every region coast to coast. The Knights of Labor, the
greatest American worker organization of the time, organized a chain
of approximately 200 worker cooperatives that they planned to form
the structure of an alternative economic system they called the
Cooperative Commonwealth, based on workplace democracy, where they
would abolish what they called "wage slavery." The Knights at their
peak approached a million members, making them the largest worker
organization in the world. At the same time, small farmers were
organizing an infrastructure of cooperatives through the Grange and
later the Farmers Alliance. An historian called the Farmers Alliance
cooperatives "the most ambitious counter-institutions ever undertaken
by an American protest movement." The Farmers Alliance had over 5
million members, including one and a quarter million African
Americans. The Knights and the Farmers Alliance worked together.
Decades later in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the
Self-Help movement organized mutual aid and barter outside the failed
financial system, involving over half a million people in different
parts of the country. In the 1960s and '70s a new generation
reinvented collectivity, communalism, and worker cooperatives and
called them the counterculture, which was a spontaneous grassroots
movement involving millions of people. The current revival forms the
latest and hopefully the most important chapter.

How do these experiments relate to US individualism? Are we looking
at two distinct historical trajectories here, or is there less of a
contradiction than many might think?

When you join a cooperative or an intentional community you don't
surrender your individuality. On the contrary, cooperatives by their
democratic nature empower individuals and strengthen their ability to
pursue individual creativity. American small farmers have always been
highly individualistic, yet in many parts of the US typically also
belong to several cooperatives. Worker cooperative members are their
own boss, and the economic independence this brings is the staff of
individualism. Cooperatives are based on people power, which empowers
each member individually. As the old Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW) anthem said, "the union makes us strong." Capitalist propaganda
tries to link that economic system with the concepts of freedom,
democracy, and individualism, but in truth capitalism is about
funnelling wealth and power into the hands of a small elite, and
disempowering everyone else. The official historians of capitalism
glorify the entrepreneur-the businessman-and claim that the greatest
community benefits derive from this. But the wage system is actually
geared to making the community weak, and thereby less
individualistic. The personification of the myth of the rugged
American individual is the ruthless "robber baron" of the 19th
century, who amasses his wealth from the blood of factory workers and
later poses as a philanthropist dispensing gifts and largesse to
charities and cultural institutions. In contrast, the historical
trajectory of the American working people is paved with cooperation
and collectivity, which for generations formed the material base for
movements opposing the domination of capital and increasing freedom
and democracy. It is through this activist opposition and their
cooperative institutions that working peoples' individualism expressed itself.

How do you distinguish cooperation from communalism? From a radical
perspective, is one more important than the other?

Cooperatives are integrally intertwined in their larger communities.
Communalism is the form of cooperation that includes residence, and
therefore often involves an element of separation. Cooperatives are
everywhere in civil society, which has its base in free association.
Cooperatives are democratic associations organized to manage
particular jobs or functions. Their ubiquity gives cooperatives
greater power than intentional communities in terms of their
potential as levers for broad radical social change. It is primarily
worker cooperatives and related social enterprises that are at the
core of this radical potential. They challenge the wage system, since
cooperative members own and manage their businesses. People are
integral to the cooperative, and not just labor that can be replaced
by a machine or a different employee.

Another factor is that cooperatives are easier to join than
intentional communities, since to become a member a person does not
have to change residence, habits or behavior beyond the limited
parameters of the cooperative. Mass society today is of course based
on the single-family unit. If mass society were tribal, then
intentional communities would be indistinguishable from the dominant
social fabric. A cooperative on the other hand can be almost any
association, business, organization providing goods or services, a
music group, a neighborhood watch, a preschool play group, or any of
millions of other possibilities. Many cooperatives have a low public
profile, which can be seen as a weakness, but which also gives them
power in that they are often flying entirely below the radar and
wearing a cloak of invisibility.

Communalism and cooperation both offer microcosmic utopian visions
that demonstrate the viability of the concepts. They embody critiques
of society. Yet as a strategy of social transformation, communalism
has demonstrated more fatal flaws than cooperatives. Back in the
1820s, 1840s, and 1960s, communal movements tried to transform
society by attempting to organize networks of intentional cooperative
communities. The idea that mass society could be transformed by
everybody dropping out of it and into the new world quickly revealed
its limitations. Only a comparatively small number ever joined an
intentional community, while in some periods almost the entire
population of a region belonged to cooperatives.

Have the cooperative and communal traditions in the US ever posed a
serious threat to the dominant political order and to capitalism?
Were they met with strong political repression?

That happened several times.

The first time was in the late 19th century, and it changed the
course of American history. The counter-institutions of the Knights
of Labor and Farmers Alliance, which I already mentioned, were
destroyed by the reaction of the old system. The Knights cooperatives
were put out of business during the nationwide crackdown in the wake
of the organization's involvement in the May Day national strike for
the 8-hour day in 1886 that ended in the Haymarket police riot. The
destruction of the Knights and their cooperatives marked the triumph
of industrial capitalism in the US. As an historian wrote, "American
industrial relations and labor politics are exceptional because in
1886 and 1887 employers won the class struggle." The Farmers Alliance
cooperatives were destroyed economically a few years later by a
combination of bankers and financiers, and that pushed the FA into
organizing the Populist Party, which staged the most serious assault
on the two-party electoral system in American history. The Populist
Party was violently attacked by racists and vigilantes in many parts
of the South.

In the early 20th century the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
took up the cause to create a new cooperative economic system, but
instead of organizing worker cooperatives like the fallen Knights,
they planned to take over the existing industries through industrial
unionism. The IWW was destroyed by police repression focused around
their opposition to World War I.

The Self-Help Movement of the 1930s was destroyed by the government
but not by government repression. It was undercut by New Deal work
programs like the WPA, which offered a cash income to almost anybody
at a time when the money system was stopped, while the co-ops offered
only barter. The Roosevelt administration starved the Self-Help
co-ops to death by refusing to qualify work in them as WPA work, and
refusing any financial help to co-ops which sold the products they
produced rather than barter them or make them for self use. The New
Deal helped numerous rural cooperatives of different types, but few
urban co-ops, and drew the line at worker cooperatives, which
threatened the wage system.

The Peoples Food Systems of San Francisco and Minneapolis of the
1970s were victims of the last chapter of government repression-or I
should say probably victims, because government guilt has never been
definitively proven. In those cities and in others around the
country, food-related cooperatives and collectives came together to
try to set up an alternative system. The Food Systems could be seen
as the culmination of the spontaneous movement known as the '60s
counterculture. As they became larger and more successful, they met
the fate of many progressive groups in that period: they were
disrupted and destabilized by individuals and small groups within
their system. Although it has never been proven that the Food Systems
were victims of government agents such as the Nixon administration's
Cointelpro which destroyed numerous progressive groups, many
participants, particularly in San Francisco, were convinced that was the case.

What is the situation today? Your book mentions how many
cooperatives have entered the mainstream. Do radical cooperative and
communal potentials remain?

The world is entering into a visionary period. People all over the
planet are creatively reinvisioning the world economic system. The
potential of radical cooperative and communal movements is greater
now than at any time in history. Because the world economic system
needs cooperatives to fill in the gaps, the movement is starting to
become mainstream in some places; but that also embodies a new threat
to the movement's integrity and ability to fulfil its mission.
Economic collapse, climate change, and population explosion have
jolted many people into the realization that the current economic
system is not geared to handle the upcoming crises of the 21st
century. Unless we change, by all predictions the near future will
include vast unemployment and marginalization, huge population
movements, and devastation of numerous local economies. Unless we
reinvent the world system, we will suffer catastrophes of a global
magnitude. That has already been recognized by the United Nations,
which in 2002 called on governments to form an alliance with the
cooperative movement to grow the worker cooperative sector in every
country to a magnitude where it can become a key mechanism in solving
the worldwide problems of unemployment and poverty. The cooperative
movement (which includes communalism) needs to cautiously welcome
that alliance with government. Welcome because government is a
counterweight to the private and corporate sector's ability to
generate resources, which the movement sorely needs. Most of the
world's wealth and resources, which embody the ability to shape the
world, have been privatized. The movement needs to accept access to
resources from government cautiously, without being dominated by it.
The movement must retain its independence to really affect social
change, because government will not do it. Government support
involves paternalism, and paternalism strangles and destroys mutual
aid. The movement must deal with governments from a position of
strength. Fortunately there is another counterbalance in civil
society: nonprofits, NGOs, community groups, spiritually-based
organizations, and similar institutions. There already is a growing
alliance between the cooperative movement and many of these
organizations, and they are increasingly including support of social
enterprises in their missions. The International Labour Organization
(ILO), representing the labor movements of the world, has joined the
coalition. While much of the labor movement in the last century was
hostile to worker cooperatives because they blur the line between
employer and employee, now the ILO is promoting worker cooperatives,
because labor unions as we have known them have been marginalized.
The overarching goal of the labor movement has always been to improve
the lives of the community of working people, but that has been
limited by a narrow focus on increasing their members' salaries and
benefits. By supporting worker cooperatives and other social
enterprises, labor unions are returning to their original mission of
struggling for broad social equity. As unions increasingly support
the larger working population, the community should in turn
increasingly support labor struggles, as they did in the 1930s.
Worker cooperatives are strong in small industries and businesses,
but organizing larger firms is out of reach of the meagre resources
that the movement can gather, so the union movement is integral to
the larger struggle for workplace democracy.

What is the future role of cooperative and communal projects in
radical politics? What are the prospects?

Radical politics is not defined by elections or demonstrations. It
involves innumerable everyday interactions. Governments and elections
make up only a small fraction of politics, which are part of all
human group activities. Politics are the processes by which groups
make decisions. The dominant political form of today's society is
hierarchy: authoritarian command structures of power elites.
Cooperation, collectivity, and communalism in contrast are based on
free association of equals in unhierarchical democratic structures.
They embody the opposition to the dominant paradigm, and mirror the
ends they're working toward. The internal structures and methods of
all truly radical organizations need to reflect their ends if they
ever really want to reach them. The idea that radical organizations
must take on hierarchical structures in order to effectively oppose
the hierarchy of society, is a sham and a delusion. Any apparent
success of such an organization is hollow and sets the real movement
back. The counter-institutions built through radical politics always
have to reflect the goals of social justice and equity. Cooperatives,
collectives, and intentional communities do this by extending
democracy to the economic sphere. They are a conscience to radical
politics, and help to keep it focused on its long-term mission
instead of getting sidetracked by short-term apparent gains. Radical
groups organized according to the structures of collective democracy
are cooperatives themselves. Radical politics by its very nature is a
cooperative project.

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