These Radicals Are Trying to Change Democracy By Working for the People! But What About the Rich?
But Guyz Corporate Democrats Can Still Win by Leading with their Values.
How Rojava-inspired women's councils have spread across Europe
Could this little-known system provide a way forward for real democracy - from the bottom up - in our failing neoliberal political systems?
Every time I speak at public meetings in Britain about the gender equality and direct democracy experiment being carried out in Rojava, Northern Syria, I am invariably asked by an inspired audience what we can learn from there - and how can we implement it here.
Given the growing consensus in the west about the importance of equal pay and equal representation of the sexes at all levels of employment, one of the basic tenets of the Rojava revolution, co-presidentship - where every institution is headed up by a man and a woman - should not be too much of a hard sell.
Yet even co-presidentship cannot be easily replicated within a system like ours which, driven by profit rather that values, might simply discard the idea as untenable on the grounds of cost and over-staffing. After all, the state is being rolled back everywhere; NGOs are scrabbling for cash; and jobshares are simply not the same thing.
So, until I attended the recent Challenging Capitalist Modernity conference in Hamburg - and met Hatice Kaya, co-president of the Hamburg Women’s Council, an organisation modelled on the women’s councils in Rojava to ensure that a feminist perspective shapes all policies - I was always stuck for an answer to those audience questions.
This was a massive three-day conference, attended by more than 1200 people, and organised by Kurdish activists and their German allies. Its organisation also reflected its focus, on what a post-capitalist society might look: It was free to attend, with participants who could afford to invited to make donations; local Kurdish families provided free accommodation; and vegetarian lunches were provided by a radical anarchist collective, with voluntary donations put towards conference costs.
Demand for free accommodation had boomed this year, for the third biennial conference in a row, from 30 to more than 300 people. But no one was left homeless as a result of the generosity of Kurdish families who opened up their homes. Kaya was one of them, hosting five participants.
A political activist originally from south-east Turkey, Kaya works in catering in Hamburg and has been elected co-president of the women’s council (which has 30-40 members) for two terms, each lasting one year.
Previously, she served two terms as co-president of the Hamburg People’s Council (70 members), where there is a minimum quota of 40% for each sex while 20% is up for grabs depending on who puts themselves forward for election. The women’s council is a parallel autonomous structure tilting political power towards women, who have been identified as the drivers of this revolution.
People’s Councils began to be set up in areas with sizeable Kurdish communities in 2005, be they in Europe, south-east Turkey or northern Syria, when Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, introduced the concept of democratic confederalism - essentially self-governing communities in a bottom-up democratic structure.
In Rojava - recently renamed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria - these councils are totally responsible for the running of society and all its functions from the economy to health, education and self-defence, even setting up the most successful forces in Syria in the fight against ISIS so far.
The success of the Rojava model has, in turn, reinforced the importance of self-organisation in Kurdish communities across Europe.
In Hamburg, women's councils were set up in 2009. There is also a fledgling Roj Women’s council in London.
In Bakur - the predominantly Kurdish south-eastern region of Turkey - this attempt at self-administration has been brutally quashed by Erdogan with bombing, killing, homes burned down and the arrests of elected co-mayors of various towns (then replaced by officials from the ruling AKP party).
In European cities, this system gives the Kurdish community a cohesive and united voice: to continue its political education, strengthen solidarity with the Kurdish struggle, gain practical lessons from the exercise of democracy and provide services where the state fails to do so.
Dilar Dirik, a Kurdish activist, who translated my interview with Kaya, said: “The motivation is to organise oneself wherever one lives."
Dirik explained: "Because the struggle for self-determination is not just a territorial one, it is about being able to organise one's life with minimal reliance on the state and its structures.”
The Kurdish community in Hamburg have divided the area nominally into nine regions where Kurds congregate. They aim to set up a people’s council and a women’s council in each region but so far they have managed to set up only three women’s councils and three people’s councils.
Each council has committees to deal with political mobilisation, culture, education, community support, peace and conflict resolution and public relations. The work of most of these committees is relatively self-evident. I was particularly curious about the peace and conflict resolution committee which, apart from dealing with disputes between neighbours and within families, deals with domestic violence.
Women from minority communities in Western Europe, and particularly Britain - such as those represented by organisations like Southall Black Sisters and One Law for All - have spent much of their political energy trying to weaken community mechanisms of mediation where the aim is to persuade women to remain married even where there is violence, looking to the state for solutions instead. Could a community influenced by the progressive ideas of Öcalan and implemented by feminists across the Kurdish diaspora offer a different, possibly more radical, option?
Kaya cites the case of a woman who wanted to separate from her violent husband. The woman asked the women's council to help get rid of him as he refused to leave. The conflict resolution committee met with both of them separately and then together. They successfully persuaded the husband that the wife had the right to stay in the house as she was looking after the children. The wife started divorce proceedings in the German courts; the women’s council supported her through the legal process as she was not familiar with the system. They monitored the husband’s movements and ensure that he stayed away from the family home.
Kaya was at pains to explain that while they were wholly behind the woman, they were also keen “not to exclude the man altogether but to explain to him that a woman is not his property, why violence is bad, to give examples from the Kurdish resistance and tell him that the institution of marriage is not sacred, that even if at some point this woman had decided to marry him, she doesn’t have to live with him if she doesn’t want to.”
Kaya added: “We don’t want him to go away because he’s been forced to but because he understands what he’s doing is wrong. Ultimately he is a member of the community and we want to transform his thinking.”
Why is this community mechanism better than the state mechanism in responding to cases of domestic violence?
Kaya says that the state may hand out legal solutions, but it does not attempt to transform male mentality. Peer pressure is also an effective part of transformation; men in cases like these lose face in front of members of their community. This is different, though related, to the dynamic in conservative communities, where it is women who lose face as violence is often justified on the grounds that the wife had strayed or not performed her duties.
Of course, there is no compulsion to use the women’s councils, women come of their own free will, said Kaya. Often, they turn to the councils after they have been failed by the state.
To my anxieties that the state was being let off the hook, Kaya responded: “While we have our own autonomous systems, like language classes, doing work with our own youth, our own community, we also make demands of the state because ultimately we live in this state, our children are born here, grow up here, go to school here. We must make demands for legal changes.”
Here then are the beginnings of a way forward for the implementation of real democracy, from the ground up, in a failing neoliberal political system.
We do not have to build communities based on ethnicity; these could arise out of shared interests or shared locality. We already have groups of people who come together to prevent a library from closing or to demand better services from local hospitals. If such movements were structured around the ideas of democratic confederalism, a non-state social paradigm with race and gender equality at the heart of it, exercising our democratic muscles in this sustained manner would not just build a more engaged citizenry - it would also contain the potential to transform society and the state altogether.
How Rojava-inspired women's councils have spread across Europe
Meet the Radical Workers’ Cooperative Growing in the Heart of the Deep South
Cooperation Jackson is trying to build an alternative economy for the city’s majority-black residents.
On November 9, people across the left woke up and wondered, “What do I do now? Under total Republican control, how does one fight for progressive change?”
Kali Akuno, the co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, a workers’ cooperative in Jackson, Mississippi, has been grappling with that question for years, and believes his organization provides a good model for progressives who still want to effect change under President Trump. When Donald Trump was elected, Akuno felt like he could tell the rest of the country: “Welcome to Mississippi.”
Jackson is located in one of the most conservative states in the country, with a legislature that seems actively hostile to the poor. Over the past few years, the state has passed some of the largest tax breaks in Mississippi history, leaving agencies that serve the poor, including schools, with even less money to help their constituents. And last year, a Republican state legislator hatched a plan to take over Jackson-either through a Detroit-style emergency management bill that would give the governor’s office near-complete control over the city, or piece by piece, starting with its municipal airport.
Mississippi also has the unfortunate distinction of having the highest rate of poverty in the United States, with a median income of just under $40,000 a year per household. The city of Jackson is worse off still: Its median household income is $33,000 per year. And the situation is even more dire for the city’s people of color, who make up the majority of the city’s residents: While the white population has a poverty rate of 14 percent, 34 percent of black Jackson residents are poor.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, Jackson has been a battleground for civil rights for decades. Many of the most famous protests of the civil-rights movements took place here. So did some of the era’s greatest tragedies, including the murder of Medgar Evers. Nonetheless, it’s rarely been a center of black political power-until a few years ago. That’s when longtime black radical activist, Chokwe Lumumba, was elected mayor of the city. He took office in 2013 with a mission to institute an ambitious plan to help elect black, progressive leaders throughout Jackson, and help foster a new, black-centered economy in the city. Unfortunately, he died less than a year into his mayoralty.
But the original ambition behind Lumumba’s election remains, in the form of a group of local black radicals who’ve organized under the banner of Cooperation Jackson.
Cooperation Jackson is a workers’ cooperative, started in 2013, that is striving to be a one-stop-shop for activism and economic development in the city. So far the co-op is small: a farm, a couple-dozen plots of land, a little over 100 dues-paying members, and a community center. But it’s aiming to be much more. The organization’s mission isn’t to just help Jackson residents, but to give them an entirely new, supportive economy in which to operate. The idea is essentially this: Since Jackson’s current economy isn’t working for its residents, and its current political system isn’t doing much to help, why not create a new economic and political system right alongside the old one?
“We want to become the dominant feature of our local economy,” Akuno told me over the phone. “It’s really about a localization of the economy, about maximum control in the community’s hands. These are the things we can do that protect us from the ravages of global capitalism.”
Co-ops of course aren’t a new idea, but Cooperation Jackson is unique in its comprehensiveness, its ambition, and its embrace of radical black politics. Akuno says he appreciates the work of other co-ops: There are plenty of examples of well-run economic alternatives to dominant economies, from a worker-run laundromat in Cleveland to the countless food co-ops throughout the United States. But many shy away from explicitly political goals. Cooperation Jackson, by contrast, wants to use worker-owned and -managed companies to create an economic alternative for black Jackson residents outside of capitalism, especially in an era of conservative political rule.
“We’ve learned how to implement and incite change without the support of most policy leaders,” Akuno says. “That’s a lesson the left is going to need to learn.”
As of now, Cooperation Jackson operates Freedom Farms, an urban-farming collaborative, and the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development, a community center and small-businesses incubator. The organization is currently building out a café, has a catering operation, and is buying up vacant lots to create a community land trust-a nonprofit organization that manages land to ensure that it remains affordable as prices of commercially owned land fluctuate. It currently owns 25 plots and hopes to purchase 50 more in order to create a village of sustainable housing for low-income residents. The goal is to “decommodify as much land as possible,” says Akuno, as Jackson, like so many cities, undergoes a round of gentrification. They’re also starting a fund-raising initiative to build a production and fabrication center-essentially a flexibly configured factory that can be used for small-time manufacturing. So far nearly all of this is being funded by donations.
If this all sounds incredibly ambitious, it is. But it’s not without precedent. One of Cooperation Jackson’s inspirations is Mondragon, in Spain, which runs 261 businesses, 101 of which are cooperatives, and has just under 75,000 employees. (Most of Mondragon’s products are niche and industrial, but if you’ve purchased camera equipment, you’ve probably encountered Mondragon’s Kide brand.) Mondragon is often held up as an example of what worker cooperatives can do. It is relatively competitive with more traditional capitalist ventures, yet its entry-level workers start at about $32,000 per year, according to a 2015 interview with Josu Ugarte, the company’s director of international operations, and its managers are not allowed to make more than six times the salary of a worker. But it’s not without its critics, most of whom point out that operating a cooperative business in a capitalist economy means that the co-ops eventually have to mimic more exploitative capitalist practices in order to survive in the marketplace. As the writer and philosopher Phil Gasper points out, Mondragon doesn’t rank any better than similar private corporations in worker satisfaction.
That’s why Akuno envisions an entire economy of co-ops working together, and running independently from the dominant economy-co-op farms selling to co-op restaurants, co-op dry cleaners taking out loans from co-op banks. His dream is to create a “sister network” of co-ops across the globe, all working with one another to create an economy parallel to the one we live in but governed by different rules.
That goal might not be as far-fetched as it seems. A version of it already exists in Emilia Romagna, a region in Italy where several thousand interlinked manufacturing cooperatives have worked to support each other and turned the area into an industrial powerhouse. There’s also a deep history of cooperatives in the US going back to at least the early 1800s, including a black-led farmers’ cooperative in the South comprising 70 individual farming co-ops and currently representing 20,000 farming families. It has been operating for the last 40 years
All signs point to the co-op movement growing in the United States. According to one study, 60 percent of the 250 or so worker cooperatives currently operating in the country were formed after the year 2000. The biggest impediment to their future growth is that there’s not yet a way to ensure their sustainability; they have neither the size of Mondragon nor the government support of a place like Emilia Romagna, where the regional government has assisted in creating service centers to help keep each of the small manufacturing cooperatives up-to-date on product trends, pricing, and manufacturing techniques.
“You don’t have the closing of the loop,” says John Duda, the communications director for the Democracy Collaborative, an organization dedicated to supporting the development of co-ops and other vehicles of shared ownership. “You don’t have the economic activity to feed into the next generation.”
Akuno says the way to get there is to politicize co-ops so that they’re not just operating in a bubble, but as a cohesive system. That’s especially important under Trump, he adds.
“It’s not just about surviving,” he emphasizes. “We want to build a new economy, a new society. In order to do that, you have to survive, but you have to also grow and reach out and change people’s minds in the process.”
Akuno’s background is in politics and protest. He was part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a large, multi-city community organization that advocates for black liberation and the end of white supremacy. Four years ago, he helped elect Chokwe Lumumba as mayor of Jackson. He’s now hoping to bring that political experience into the cooperative world, to convince people that working together with shared responsibility isn’t just an economic task.
“People think running a business isn’t political,” Akuno says. “But business is the most political thing there is.”
Meet the Radical Workers’ Cooperative Growing in the Heart of the Deep South
The Next Generation of Democratic Socialists Has Started Winning Local Elections
Campaigning for economic and social justice, they are winning municipal races in states like Illinois and Georgia.
Democratic socialists have advised presidents and cabinet members; they have been elected as members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and as as state legislators, judges, sheriffs and school board members. But their primary service has been at the municipal level, as mayors and city council members-leading not just big cities such as Milwaukee but mid-sized cities like Reading, Pennsylvania, and small towns like Girard, Kansas.
So it is worth noting that, at a moment when democratic socialism is experiencing a surge of interest and enthusiasm nationwide, some of the first electoral victories are coming in small and medium-sized cities. The 2016 presidential campaign mounted by Bernie Sanders-who first came to prominence in the early 1980s as the democratic socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont-opened up the constrained American discourse and got millions of Americans thinking anew about an ideology that was deeply rooted in American history. Sanders struck a chord, especially with young working class activists, when he declared: “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.”
Since the 2016 race finished, Democratic Socialists of America-the group forged over many decades by Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dolores Huerta, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West and others to give voice to American democratic socialist vision-has experienced rapid growth in states across the country. And now DSA members are campaigning for and winning local races in states like Georgia and Illinois.
More than a dozen DSA members now serve in local posts across the country, and their numbers are growing.
Early this month, Quad Cities Democratic Socialists of America member Dylan Parker was elected to the city council in Rock Island, Illinois. A 28-year-old diesel mechanic who was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Parker came home and mounted a city council campaign in the city of 39,000. He focused on open government, citizen engagement and economic justice issues and he got specific. Steering attention to the role that an equitable approach to economic development could play in strengthening the whole community, he talked about providing universal high speed broadband internet access for residences and businesses and about expanding Rock Island’s publicly-owned hydroelectric power plant. The campaign resonated with voters. Parker won 68 percent of the vote on April 4.
Two weeks later, in South Fulton, Georgia, another DSA member, khalid kamau, won an equally striking victory. A #BlackLivesMatter and #FightFor15 organizer who was also one of the many young Sanders delegates to last year’s Democratic National Convention, kamau (who lower cases his name in the Yoruba African tradition that emphasizes the community over the individual), outlined an economic and social justice vision that proposed to make the newly incorporated community of South Fulton “the largest Progressive city in the South.” On April 18, we won 67 percent on the vote.
Declaring that “another world is possible,” DSA celebrated kamau’s victory, with DSA national director Maria Svart describing kamau’s win as “a tremendous victory for his community and a shot across the bow for politics as usual nationwide.”
America elected thousands of local officials, and it is easy to neglect election results from small towns and small cities. But American democratic socialists have always recognized that big things can begin far from the economic and political power centers of New York and Washington. When a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, 36 years ago last month, that victory was viewed as an anomaly. In fact, the ripples from that 1981 municipal election in Burlington is still shaking up American politics.
The Next Generation of Democratic Socialists Has Started Winning Local Elections
How Rojava-inspired women's councils have spread across Europe
Could this little-known system provide a way forward for real democracy - from the bottom up - in our failing neoliberal political systems?
Every time I speak at public meetings in Britain about the gender equality and direct democracy experiment being carried out in Rojava, Northern Syria, I am invariably asked by an inspired audience what we can learn from there - and how can we implement it here.
Given the growing consensus in the west about the importance of equal pay and equal representation of the sexes at all levels of employment, one of the basic tenets of the Rojava revolution, co-presidentship - where every institution is headed up by a man and a woman - should not be too much of a hard sell.
Yet even co-presidentship cannot be easily replicated within a system like ours which, driven by profit rather that values, might simply discard the idea as untenable on the grounds of cost and over-staffing. After all, the state is being rolled back everywhere; NGOs are scrabbling for cash; and jobshares are simply not the same thing.
So, until I attended the recent Challenging Capitalist Modernity conference in Hamburg - and met Hatice Kaya, co-president of the Hamburg Women’s Council, an organisation modelled on the women’s councils in Rojava to ensure that a feminist perspective shapes all policies - I was always stuck for an answer to those audience questions.
This was a massive three-day conference, attended by more than 1200 people, and organised by Kurdish activists and their German allies. Its organisation also reflected its focus, on what a post-capitalist society might look: It was free to attend, with participants who could afford to invited to make donations; local Kurdish families provided free accommodation; and vegetarian lunches were provided by a radical anarchist collective, with voluntary donations put towards conference costs.
Demand for free accommodation had boomed this year, for the third biennial conference in a row, from 30 to more than 300 people. But no one was left homeless as a result of the generosity of Kurdish families who opened up their homes. Kaya was one of them, hosting five participants.
A political activist originally from south-east Turkey, Kaya works in catering in Hamburg and has been elected co-president of the women’s council (which has 30-40 members) for two terms, each lasting one year.
Previously, she served two terms as co-president of the Hamburg People’s Council (70 members), where there is a minimum quota of 40% for each sex while 20% is up for grabs depending on who puts themselves forward for election. The women’s council is a parallel autonomous structure tilting political power towards women, who have been identified as the drivers of this revolution.
People’s Councils began to be set up in areas with sizeable Kurdish communities in 2005, be they in Europe, south-east Turkey or northern Syria, when Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the Kurdish freedom movement, introduced the concept of democratic confederalism - essentially self-governing communities in a bottom-up democratic structure.
In Rojava - recently renamed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria - these councils are totally responsible for the running of society and all its functions from the economy to health, education and self-defence, even setting up the most successful forces in Syria in the fight against ISIS so far.
The success of the Rojava model has, in turn, reinforced the importance of self-organisation in Kurdish communities across Europe.
In Hamburg, women's councils were set up in 2009. There is also a fledgling Roj Women’s council in London.
In Bakur - the predominantly Kurdish south-eastern region of Turkey - this attempt at self-administration has been brutally quashed by Erdogan with bombing, killing, homes burned down and the arrests of elected co-mayors of various towns (then replaced by officials from the ruling AKP party).
In European cities, this system gives the Kurdish community a cohesive and united voice: to continue its political education, strengthen solidarity with the Kurdish struggle, gain practical lessons from the exercise of democracy and provide services where the state fails to do so.
Dilar Dirik, a Kurdish activist, who translated my interview with Kaya, said: “The motivation is to organise oneself wherever one lives."
Dirik explained: "Because the struggle for self-determination is not just a territorial one, it is about being able to organise one's life with minimal reliance on the state and its structures.”
The Kurdish community in Hamburg have divided the area nominally into nine regions where Kurds congregate. They aim to set up a people’s council and a women’s council in each region but so far they have managed to set up only three women’s councils and three people’s councils.
Each council has committees to deal with political mobilisation, culture, education, community support, peace and conflict resolution and public relations. The work of most of these committees is relatively self-evident. I was particularly curious about the peace and conflict resolution committee which, apart from dealing with disputes between neighbours and within families, deals with domestic violence.
Women from minority communities in Western Europe, and particularly Britain - such as those represented by organisations like Southall Black Sisters and One Law for All - have spent much of their political energy trying to weaken community mechanisms of mediation where the aim is to persuade women to remain married even where there is violence, looking to the state for solutions instead. Could a community influenced by the progressive ideas of Öcalan and implemented by feminists across the Kurdish diaspora offer a different, possibly more radical, option?
Kaya cites the case of a woman who wanted to separate from her violent husband. The woman asked the women's council to help get rid of him as he refused to leave. The conflict resolution committee met with both of them separately and then together. They successfully persuaded the husband that the wife had the right to stay in the house as she was looking after the children. The wife started divorce proceedings in the German courts; the women’s council supported her through the legal process as she was not familiar with the system. They monitored the husband’s movements and ensure that he stayed away from the family home.
Kaya was at pains to explain that while they were wholly behind the woman, they were also keen “not to exclude the man altogether but to explain to him that a woman is not his property, why violence is bad, to give examples from the Kurdish resistance and tell him that the institution of marriage is not sacred, that even if at some point this woman had decided to marry him, she doesn’t have to live with him if she doesn’t want to.”
Kaya added: “We don’t want him to go away because he’s been forced to but because he understands what he’s doing is wrong. Ultimately he is a member of the community and we want to transform his thinking.”
Why is this community mechanism better than the state mechanism in responding to cases of domestic violence?
Kaya says that the state may hand out legal solutions, but it does not attempt to transform male mentality. Peer pressure is also an effective part of transformation; men in cases like these lose face in front of members of their community. This is different, though related, to the dynamic in conservative communities, where it is women who lose face as violence is often justified on the grounds that the wife had strayed or not performed her duties.
Of course, there is no compulsion to use the women’s councils, women come of their own free will, said Kaya. Often, they turn to the councils after they have been failed by the state.
To my anxieties that the state was being let off the hook, Kaya responded: “While we have our own autonomous systems, like language classes, doing work with our own youth, our own community, we also make demands of the state because ultimately we live in this state, our children are born here, grow up here, go to school here. We must make demands for legal changes.”
Here then are the beginnings of a way forward for the implementation of real democracy, from the ground up, in a failing neoliberal political system.
We do not have to build communities based on ethnicity; these could arise out of shared interests or shared locality. We already have groups of people who come together to prevent a library from closing or to demand better services from local hospitals. If such movements were structured around the ideas of democratic confederalism, a non-state social paradigm with race and gender equality at the heart of it, exercising our democratic muscles in this sustained manner would not just build a more engaged citizenry - it would also contain the potential to transform society and the state altogether.
How Rojava-inspired women's councils have spread across Europe
Meet the Radical Workers’ Cooperative Growing in the Heart of the Deep South
Cooperation Jackson is trying to build an alternative economy for the city’s majority-black residents.
On November 9, people across the left woke up and wondered, “What do I do now? Under total Republican control, how does one fight for progressive change?”
Kali Akuno, the co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, a workers’ cooperative in Jackson, Mississippi, has been grappling with that question for years, and believes his organization provides a good model for progressives who still want to effect change under President Trump. When Donald Trump was elected, Akuno felt like he could tell the rest of the country: “Welcome to Mississippi.”
Jackson is located in one of the most conservative states in the country, with a legislature that seems actively hostile to the poor. Over the past few years, the state has passed some of the largest tax breaks in Mississippi history, leaving agencies that serve the poor, including schools, with even less money to help their constituents. And last year, a Republican state legislator hatched a plan to take over Jackson-either through a Detroit-style emergency management bill that would give the governor’s office near-complete control over the city, or piece by piece, starting with its municipal airport.
Mississippi also has the unfortunate distinction of having the highest rate of poverty in the United States, with a median income of just under $40,000 a year per household. The city of Jackson is worse off still: Its median household income is $33,000 per year. And the situation is even more dire for the city’s people of color, who make up the majority of the city’s residents: While the white population has a poverty rate of 14 percent, 34 percent of black Jackson residents are poor.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, Jackson has been a battleground for civil rights for decades. Many of the most famous protests of the civil-rights movements took place here. So did some of the era’s greatest tragedies, including the murder of Medgar Evers. Nonetheless, it’s rarely been a center of black political power-until a few years ago. That’s when longtime black radical activist, Chokwe Lumumba, was elected mayor of the city. He took office in 2013 with a mission to institute an ambitious plan to help elect black, progressive leaders throughout Jackson, and help foster a new, black-centered economy in the city. Unfortunately, he died less than a year into his mayoralty.
But the original ambition behind Lumumba’s election remains, in the form of a group of local black radicals who’ve organized under the banner of Cooperation Jackson.
Cooperation Jackson is a workers’ cooperative, started in 2013, that is striving to be a one-stop-shop for activism and economic development in the city. So far the co-op is small: a farm, a couple-dozen plots of land, a little over 100 dues-paying members, and a community center. But it’s aiming to be much more. The organization’s mission isn’t to just help Jackson residents, but to give them an entirely new, supportive economy in which to operate. The idea is essentially this: Since Jackson’s current economy isn’t working for its residents, and its current political system isn’t doing much to help, why not create a new economic and political system right alongside the old one?
“We want to become the dominant feature of our local economy,” Akuno told me over the phone. “It’s really about a localization of the economy, about maximum control in the community’s hands. These are the things we can do that protect us from the ravages of global capitalism.”
Co-ops of course aren’t a new idea, but Cooperation Jackson is unique in its comprehensiveness, its ambition, and its embrace of radical black politics. Akuno says he appreciates the work of other co-ops: There are plenty of examples of well-run economic alternatives to dominant economies, from a worker-run laundromat in Cleveland to the countless food co-ops throughout the United States. But many shy away from explicitly political goals. Cooperation Jackson, by contrast, wants to use worker-owned and -managed companies to create an economic alternative for black Jackson residents outside of capitalism, especially in an era of conservative political rule.
“We’ve learned how to implement and incite change without the support of most policy leaders,” Akuno says. “That’s a lesson the left is going to need to learn.”
As of now, Cooperation Jackson operates Freedom Farms, an urban-farming collaborative, and the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development, a community center and small-businesses incubator. The organization is currently building out a café, has a catering operation, and is buying up vacant lots to create a community land trust-a nonprofit organization that manages land to ensure that it remains affordable as prices of commercially owned land fluctuate. It currently owns 25 plots and hopes to purchase 50 more in order to create a village of sustainable housing for low-income residents. The goal is to “decommodify as much land as possible,” says Akuno, as Jackson, like so many cities, undergoes a round of gentrification. They’re also starting a fund-raising initiative to build a production and fabrication center-essentially a flexibly configured factory that can be used for small-time manufacturing. So far nearly all of this is being funded by donations.
If this all sounds incredibly ambitious, it is. But it’s not without precedent. One of Cooperation Jackson’s inspirations is Mondragon, in Spain, which runs 261 businesses, 101 of which are cooperatives, and has just under 75,000 employees. (Most of Mondragon’s products are niche and industrial, but if you’ve purchased camera equipment, you’ve probably encountered Mondragon’s Kide brand.) Mondragon is often held up as an example of what worker cooperatives can do. It is relatively competitive with more traditional capitalist ventures, yet its entry-level workers start at about $32,000 per year, according to a 2015 interview with Josu Ugarte, the company’s director of international operations, and its managers are not allowed to make more than six times the salary of a worker. But it’s not without its critics, most of whom point out that operating a cooperative business in a capitalist economy means that the co-ops eventually have to mimic more exploitative capitalist practices in order to survive in the marketplace. As the writer and philosopher Phil Gasper points out, Mondragon doesn’t rank any better than similar private corporations in worker satisfaction.
That’s why Akuno envisions an entire economy of co-ops working together, and running independently from the dominant economy-co-op farms selling to co-op restaurants, co-op dry cleaners taking out loans from co-op banks. His dream is to create a “sister network” of co-ops across the globe, all working with one another to create an economy parallel to the one we live in but governed by different rules.
That goal might not be as far-fetched as it seems. A version of it already exists in Emilia Romagna, a region in Italy where several thousand interlinked manufacturing cooperatives have worked to support each other and turned the area into an industrial powerhouse. There’s also a deep history of cooperatives in the US going back to at least the early 1800s, including a black-led farmers’ cooperative in the South comprising 70 individual farming co-ops and currently representing 20,000 farming families. It has been operating for the last 40 years
All signs point to the co-op movement growing in the United States. According to one study, 60 percent of the 250 or so worker cooperatives currently operating in the country were formed after the year 2000. The biggest impediment to their future growth is that there’s not yet a way to ensure their sustainability; they have neither the size of Mondragon nor the government support of a place like Emilia Romagna, where the regional government has assisted in creating service centers to help keep each of the small manufacturing cooperatives up-to-date on product trends, pricing, and manufacturing techniques.
“You don’t have the closing of the loop,” says John Duda, the communications director for the Democracy Collaborative, an organization dedicated to supporting the development of co-ops and other vehicles of shared ownership. “You don’t have the economic activity to feed into the next generation.”
Akuno says the way to get there is to politicize co-ops so that they’re not just operating in a bubble, but as a cohesive system. That’s especially important under Trump, he adds.
“It’s not just about surviving,” he emphasizes. “We want to build a new economy, a new society. In order to do that, you have to survive, but you have to also grow and reach out and change people’s minds in the process.”
Akuno’s background is in politics and protest. He was part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a large, multi-city community organization that advocates for black liberation and the end of white supremacy. Four years ago, he helped elect Chokwe Lumumba as mayor of Jackson. He’s now hoping to bring that political experience into the cooperative world, to convince people that working together with shared responsibility isn’t just an economic task.
“People think running a business isn’t political,” Akuno says. “But business is the most political thing there is.”
Meet the Radical Workers’ Cooperative Growing in the Heart of the Deep South
The Next Generation of Democratic Socialists Has Started Winning Local Elections
Campaigning for economic and social justice, they are winning municipal races in states like Illinois and Georgia.
Democratic socialists have advised presidents and cabinet members; they have been elected as members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and as as state legislators, judges, sheriffs and school board members. But their primary service has been at the municipal level, as mayors and city council members-leading not just big cities such as Milwaukee but mid-sized cities like Reading, Pennsylvania, and small towns like Girard, Kansas.
So it is worth noting that, at a moment when democratic socialism is experiencing a surge of interest and enthusiasm nationwide, some of the first electoral victories are coming in small and medium-sized cities. The 2016 presidential campaign mounted by Bernie Sanders-who first came to prominence in the early 1980s as the democratic socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont-opened up the constrained American discourse and got millions of Americans thinking anew about an ideology that was deeply rooted in American history. Sanders struck a chord, especially with young working class activists, when he declared: “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.”
Since the 2016 race finished, Democratic Socialists of America-the group forged over many decades by Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dolores Huerta, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West and others to give voice to American democratic socialist vision-has experienced rapid growth in states across the country. And now DSA members are campaigning for and winning local races in states like Georgia and Illinois.
More than a dozen DSA members now serve in local posts across the country, and their numbers are growing.
Early this month, Quad Cities Democratic Socialists of America member Dylan Parker was elected to the city council in Rock Island, Illinois. A 28-year-old diesel mechanic who was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Parker came home and mounted a city council campaign in the city of 39,000. He focused on open government, citizen engagement and economic justice issues and he got specific. Steering attention to the role that an equitable approach to economic development could play in strengthening the whole community, he talked about providing universal high speed broadband internet access for residences and businesses and about expanding Rock Island’s publicly-owned hydroelectric power plant. The campaign resonated with voters. Parker won 68 percent of the vote on April 4.
Two weeks later, in South Fulton, Georgia, another DSA member, khalid kamau, won an equally striking victory. A #BlackLivesMatter and #FightFor15 organizer who was also one of the many young Sanders delegates to last year’s Democratic National Convention, kamau (who lower cases his name in the Yoruba African tradition that emphasizes the community over the individual), outlined an economic and social justice vision that proposed to make the newly incorporated community of South Fulton “the largest Progressive city in the South.” On April 18, we won 67 percent on the vote.
Declaring that “another world is possible,” DSA celebrated kamau’s victory, with DSA national director Maria Svart describing kamau’s win as “a tremendous victory for his community and a shot across the bow for politics as usual nationwide.”
America elected thousands of local officials, and it is easy to neglect election results from small towns and small cities. But American democratic socialists have always recognized that big things can begin far from the economic and political power centers of New York and Washington. When a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, 36 years ago last month, that victory was viewed as an anomaly. In fact, the ripples from that 1981 municipal election in Burlington is still shaking up American politics.
The Next Generation of Democratic Socialists Has Started Winning Local Elections