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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 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?
A primary evaluation of current trends in cooperativism
The SCICs (Cooperative Societies of Collective Interest) in France, the «Steward Ownership» models in Germany and those based on «Assets in Common» in the USA are the spearhead of a new productive cooperativism in which workers share or cede ownership to other agents.
The term «New Cooperativism» has been used in academia since 2010 to define cooperative initiatives that go beyond the hegemonic model of the ICA and which promote new forms of cooperativism based on commons that prefigure «post-capitalist» relationships.
What is «radical cooperativism»? What does the debate in the US bring to table and to the future of cooperatives?
If you type «work community» in the Google search bar, the first results that pop up after you press enter would likely be "click bait" on something mistakenly referred to as «communitarian work». The articles talk about professional «social work», NGO volunteering or punitive community service, but never about what a «work community» is nor what real «communitarian work» entails, an institution as universal and ancient as the commons.
