(2020-10-30) Schneider We Need To Reinvent The Coop

Nathan Schneider: “We need to reinvent the co-op.” the hardware company my grandfather ran at the end of his career was a cooperative

In 2018, YES! Magazine executive editor Zenobia Jeffries Warfield argued that, despite her publication’s history of promoting cooperative efforts, “co-ops and community farms can’t close the racial wealth gap”—even if their leadership were more inclusive. Since these institutions are based on pooling and sharing community wealth, communities that have experienced systematic deprivation will wind up with less wealth in their co-ops, and less land for their gardens, than other communities do. As Warfield puts it, “Capital can’t concentrate in areas where capital doesn’t exist.”

Even in diverse communities, the co-ops often have all-White co-op boards. Much of the institutional heft that the cooperative commonwealth has achieved is not crossing the United States’s brutal racial wealth gap—or is outright widening it.

I keep being haunted by a passage from the writings of Fr. Albert McKnight, a Catholic priest and Pan-Africanist who helped found many Black-led cooperatives in the South: “What we need to do is reinvent the cooperative idea,” he wrote before his death in 2016. “If ever the cooperative approach was needed, it is today. It’s still a disgrace to Black folks that no place in the country do Blacks control economically.”

I think I still love the cooperative model, and I know I still love the cooperative movement. The reinventions I suggest are not mine, really, so much as they come from years of documenting the hopes that many new cooperators are already inscribing into the cooperative idea with their practice. Their example is a prophecy and demand upon the movement that needs them to inherit it.

Wrote Fr. McKnight, “If we risk nothing, we gain nothing. We’re lost. We need to reinvent the co-op.” And then he turned it into a prayer: “May we have the wisdom, the faith to reinvent the co-op.”