Non-profit, egalitarian and socially committed worker cooperatives that operate by consensus and renounce the use of intellectual property and other forms of artificial scarcity as a way to generate income.
Manifesto of the Second Maximalist Congress, which we will hold after the summer heat. The manifestos of our congresses are a call to participation and, at the same time, a kind of "framework document," seeking to provide a global and historical context for our tasks and objectives, serving as a basis for coordination between maximalist cooperatives and NGOs.
Accounting is imbued with ideology, but it also provides valuable information. Understanding the former and applying the latter are essential in order to increase the viability of worker cooperatives, social projects, associations, foundations, etc.
Being viable and being profitable are two very different things, both in the short and long term. Taking the criterion of profitability as a guide for the development of companies increasingly confronts them with their own sustainability and that of their environment. The alternative can only come from associated work.
Work and management that is based on tackling challenges sustains the types of incentives and logic that mobilize efforts and encourage workers to take the courageous leap to become a cooperative. Workers thus derive happiness from contributing and from being able to produce the extraordinary.
Are you a better person for not eating meat, and does dietary restriction make you more progressive or more ‘sensitive’? There is a long history behind attaching morality to diet. It is a history that should be known because what if, in reality, what is truly immoral is, for example, veganism?
Cooperatives build the resilience of human communities that are very different from each other and this is because, when needs and commitment to a cause come together, we need to have at our disposal a mechanical element that allows us to respond and scale up a communitarian response as quickly as possible.
When people talk about education, they usually mean training. But if we really want to learn, we need to abandon the idea that problems can be solved through recipes and procedures. Learning is learning to solve problems by understanding and overcoming them. And in order to do that we have to understand that learning is not only about doing better but about being better.
The social movement is repeatedly coming up with cooperative-based solutions, but many of those we see emerging are destined to become diluted and collapse, leaving behind a deep trail of demoralisation. Why? What is wrong with the very foundations of present-day cooperativism?