Joe Waters speaks with Nathan Schneider about the role of the cooperative tradition in building a more equitable, more just, and more humane future of caring.
Nathan Schneider is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Enterprise Design Lab. He is the author of Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy, published by Nation Books, and two previous books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, both published by University of California Press. His articles have appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. He also writes regular columns for America, a national Catholic weekly. He has lectured at universities including Columbia, Fordham, Harvard, MIT, NYU, the University of Bologna, and Yale. In 2015, he co-organized “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference on democratic online platforms at The New School, and co-edited the subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. Follow his work on social media at @ntnsndr or at his website, nathanschneider.info.
This conversation is part of our ongoing series exploring the role of cooperatives in advancing a more equitable child care system. It has been edited by Nancy Vorsanger for length and clarity.
How are economic democracy and cooperation critical to the more humane economy that we all want to build towards in the caregiving sectors?
The premise is that care is not captured and recognized in the economy. That includes unpaid family care work, which is unacknowledged by the wage market. An important influence for me has been the Wages for Housework Campaign of the 1970s, in which feminists called for recognition and wages for the work that that women were often expected to do for no pay. That extends to paid or otherwise compensated or partially compensated work that also has been devalued in the market. For instance, when labor protections were established in the 1930s, domestic work was explicitly not included.
“There’s a space for deliberation and action around values that other businesses might not have if they are oriented more toward maximizing profit. In recent years, many people have been turning to cooperative models as a response to crises around different kinds of care work to try to create that space for seeing value where the economy otherwise has been ignoring or intentionally devaluing it.”
So, we’ve had outright exclusions of care work from protections that other kinds of work received. The hope is that cooperative models might capture some of the value of that work. Cooperatives can see some of the human needs and human values in economic life that other models can’t see, because they have democracy built in. There’s a space for deliberation and action around values that other businesses might not have if they are oriented more toward maximizing profit. In recent years, many people have been turning to cooperative models as a response to crises around different kinds of care work to try to create that space for seeing value where the economy otherwise has been ignoring or intentionally devaluing it.
During a recent roundtable that Capita hosted, the role of Italian cooperatives was discussed. I’m very interested in the relationship between the culture of cooperation in the Italian economy and their politics. How does Italians’ commitment to economic cooperation influence politics? And is there actually a way in which the cooperative tradition in the Italian economy might also help us think about how we reform our policy?
The political story in Italy is interesting. The cooperative movement gained some power before World War II, then was co-opted and suppressed under Mussolini, and then was guaranteed in the new Italian constitution. It created a broad umbrella for cooperatives in the country’s policy that we in the U.S. have a lot to learn from. In particular, around the question of care, cooperatives became a response to privatization projects of the late 20th century, when Italy, like many countries, began moving from state-managed services to private vendors to reduce both costs and the size of the state.
One invention that emerged from that process was led by Confcooperative, the Catholic Italian Association: a hybrid “social cooperative” with multiple stakeholders. Some members are workers, some members are service recipients, some members might be community organizations. These hybrids have been delivering home care for elders, child care, and other services largely paid for by the state or through philanthropy, as well as their own revenues. Social cooperatives can also be an employment solution. I’ve seen a printing business that is mainly staffed by people with disabilities who might have trouble finding employment elsewhere. There’s also a restaurant in Rome largely staffed by people with disabilities run by the Sant’Egidio Community, a lay religious community.
In many respects, this model is similar to things that we know. It resembles community-based nonprofits that deliver services in this country. But the cooperative movement takes the top-down, patronizing side of charity out of the picture. Social cooperatives are deeply committed to the dignity of the participants, who are full participants and co-owners of the project, rather than simply recipients. Particularly in light of Catholic social teaching, which emphasizes the dignity of all people, that’s an important distinction.
There is a long tradition of African-American cooperatives that you discuss in your book, so I would love your perspective on how the cooperative tradition can be a catalyst for racial equity and justice, particularly given what’s going on in the country right now,
Yes, a critical part of the cooperative legacy in the U.S. has been among African-Americans, who have been excluded from so many parts of the social safety net in the economy over the years. Cooperative models, including fraternal associations and worker cooperative businesses, have been part of how Black Americans responded to this exclusion. One example is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a network of agricultural co-ops among Black farmers in the South. It was so moving to interview early participants in that work. They were trying to bring their crops to market, but racist police would stop them on the side of the road until their crops went to mush. The repression they experienced was so direct and economic, so much targeted at their ability to have a livelihood. The cooperatives enabled them to create independence.
Many movements of resistance that we celebrate had cooperative models at their core. In the early 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois mapped out the cooperative businesses across the country among Black Americans. He was committed to this model as a strategy for resistance, survival, and flourishing and tried to start a federation of Black cooperatives. Over many years, this was a critical strategy for leading Black intellectuals. Cooperatives were a big part of the work of Martin Luther King and the Black Power movement in the ’60s and ’70s. King helped groups establish credit unions as he traveled around the South. Stokely Carmichael developed some of the first rhetoric around Black Power while staying at a cooperatively owned farm. Fannie Lou Hamer was also involved in developing a cooperative farm.
Over and over we see this connection, and it goes to the present. The Black Lives Matter economic platform mentions cooperative models dozens of times. This is the vision that that movement sees as the way forward. Under the crisis that we all are facing now in different ways—particularly the economic crisis—it’s an opportunity for this model to really shine again.
There’s also a connection to New Deal cooperatives, which were a critical strategy for enabling communities that were being abandoned by investor-owned business. Rural electrification was made possible through cooperative models through funding from the Department of Agriculture. The credit union system was established around that time to help people who didn’t have access to fair financial services.
Today the needs are just so varied and immense. It’s a critical moment where we need to ensure that we don’t have to rely on what investors think is valuable to create value in our communities, and that includes care work. Certainly, right now, we’re seeing all this talk about essential workers but we know that many of those them are not treated as essential in our economic system. We need to find models that are capable of recognizing and rewarding their essential nature.
What can we learn for contemporary policy making from the New Deal experience of catalyzing cooperative development?
The critical challenge that cooperatives face in our investor-driven economy has always been financing. Cooperatives are designed to be owned and governed by the people they serve. Often these people are not wealthy and so their access to capital is limited. Cooperatives can’t generally allow outside investors to inject capital in exchange for ownership, so that’s a real disadvantage in certain respects. It’s a moral advantage in other respects.
But there are ways of financing cooperative models. For instance, there’s a $130 billion cooperative bank down the road from you called CoBank that serves the agricultural sector. During the New Deal, most of rural America had no electricity. The federal government set up a loan program to enable rural people to form electric co-ops. The rural electrification problem was basically solved in around a decade. So when you create the structures for financing these models, they really can take off.
The problem is, we just do not have those structures. During the New Deal, those structures were established in specific sectors: farming, rural electrification, credit unions—that’s about it. Similar to how the same period created the thirty -year mortgage, that allowed much more widespread homeownership, at least among white Americans.
I think we need to take a page from that book but maybe a bigger page. We need to think not just about how to create cooperative financing in a few sectors, but how to make it generally available so that whatever problems someone’s trying to solve, cooperative ownership is a serious option. We need a framework that enables people to safely and effectively finance viable businesses through this mechanism. Right now, the cooperative model is completely disadvantaged and that needs to change.
Just to clarify about CoBank: was it initially capitalized by the cooperative members or was there some sort of government policy involvement to get that type of planning and structure up and going?
It was formed as part of the farm credit system that emerged gradually over the early 20th century out of the Populist Movement of the late 19th century. An act passed in the early ’30s as part of the early phase of the New Deal created the infrastructure that led to CoBank. CoBank is a more recent evolution of that farm credit system. It’s a private bank that’s now owned and governed and capitalized by its members, but it emerged out of that public chartered system and that’s why it is limited in what it can lend to. CoBank is still bound by its charter and its relationship to the farm credit system.
I wish that more farmers had had the foresight not only to get these infrastructures for themselves, but also for other sectors. For instance, a couple of decades ago in a few states, farmers led the creation of the Limited Cooperative Association, which is a more flexible and dynamic cooperative structure that allows for social and multi-stakeholder cooperatives that balance the interests of different groups. Colorado, where I live, has done this. Its statute on cooperatives isn’t limited to farmers. Today, this statute, which was created for rural development, is being used by 21st-century cooperatives using online platforms and other technology to address all sorts of challenges. It’s a reminder of what can happen when we create structures that invite creativity rather than just limit us to a particular challenge.
Throughout your book, you identify places of resistance, of humanity, of flourishing, really contra the dominant economic reality in Europe and North America, at least. How are those organizations and groups playing a prophetic role in this moment and how can they not only be amplified, but also positively contribute to the reconstruction of a post-pandemic, more racially just society?
I’ve learned a lot from European activists. They’re really motivated, and they work in a lot of ways, but one thing they tend not to be so helpful on is racial justice. Our original sin of colonialism and slavery is more acute and deeper than the European experience. These things are very relevant in Europe but there isn’t the same kind of focus on these issues. That’s one area where our experiences, hopefully, have made racial justice more front of mind for Americans.
I’ve been really pondering this call made in the scattered memoirs of Albert McKnight, an African-American priest. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he was one of the founders of Black southern agricultural cooperative and land ownership systems. It was a great cooperative model that was involved in grocery store co-ops and the like. He calls for reinventing the cooperative model. For him, the question of racial justice is central to that reinvention. He doesn’t give us a whole lot about what that looks like, but I take the call very seriously. I think there are respects in which the cooperative model isn’t quite equipped for addressing some of these systemic challenges on its own. For instance, a lot of rural electric cooperatives are in black-majority districts but have all-white boards. I’ve been really wrestling with what it would look like to have a cooperative model that was really ready for the kind of resource transfers and reparations that we’re confronting now.
So the cooperative model in itself does not protect you against racial injustice. Yet today, a lot of the people moving the cooperative movement forward are people of color. For instance, among immigrant care workers, as well as in Black communities, the cooperative model is being adopted as a way of working with returning citizens and people who are coming out of incarceration.
“How do we move the cooperative movement from a posture of false neutrality toward a posture of direct reciprocity and reparation?”
In those cases, of course, they are interpreting the cooperative values and purpose to explicitly address racial injustice. I think the next phase of the movement has to take that seriously. I look at the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, the people in mid-19th-century in England who created some of the core values of the modern cooperative movement. They took a stand against discrimination, mainly discrimination around religion. That was a big deal in England at the time. It’s not such a big deal for us right now, but how do we translate the stand that they took against a specific form of discrimination into a moment where we need not just an absence of discrimination but active reparation? How do we move the cooperative movement from a posture of false neutrality toward a posture of direct reciprocity and reparation?