Maximalism

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?

Europe is currently experiencing a revival of cooperativism and in particular that of worker cooperativism. Despite the fact that cooperatives are invisibilized through the "Social Economy" discourse, thousands of workers in France, Germany, Italy or Spain, fed up with the precariousness of life and work and the absence of solutions proposed in increasingly divisive and aggressive discourses, are overcoming passivity, confronting atomization, organizing productively, joining their families and communities and collectively taking the future into their own hands.

The growth of social passivity since the late 1980s has been a consequence of the devaluation of work. The first Internet began to reverse passivity, but through social networks it ended up multiplying it until it became the air of the ultra-individualized world we now live in. But what if communicating not mediated by the pillars of passivity were not as difficult as we think?

The possibility of an economic, social and territorial crisis is open throughout Europe during the second half of this decade. A crisis that could exceed in its effects on the well-being and income of families that of 2008. What can we do from cooperatives?