Resilience is what you need when you are no longer able to resist
After the outbreak of the 2008 financial crisis the word resilience became fashionable. And once the term was incorporated in the registry of clickbait journalists, fourth-rate gurus and coaches, its meaning eroded to the point where it has become nothing more than a poor substitute for the term resistance.
But resilience is not resistance. Resilience is the ability to start again once resistance breaks down and the position achieved cannot be sustained. It is the virtue of reinventing oneself and advancing along a new path that overcomes the difficulty that one could not or did not know how to overcome. It therefore implies transformation, action and progress.
Examples of resilience and cooperativism this week
Our Telegram channel shares daily news that demonstrates the way in which cooperatives can be used as a tool for worker resilience in very different contexts. Some examples from this week:
- USA. Overworked migrant workers, accumulating unpaid wages, are fired after joining unions to protest. On the street and unemployed, they decide to create their own organization and set up a Worker Cooperative for screen printing and sewing folk costumes.
- France. Workers of a bankrupt metal company purchase the company with the help of their customers and turn it into a Worker Cooperative.
- Belgium. A group of musicians who have set up an independent label realize that if they continue to be a private business that they would never be able to meet the scale of promotional expenses that the media and the music industry impose. They realize that the only way to achieve this is to broaden their base and become a worker cooperative.
Of course, the worker cooperative is not the only option. Germany and Italy are experiencing a rise in communitarian cooperatives. The problems that communitarian cooperatives solve are of a different order from those of worker cooperatives, but they share two things in common: the importance of the community and the improvement of material and cultural conditions. Whether that entails creating nursing and home care services to improve care for the elderly in a small town, or opening spaces for families to work remotely and socialize, or heating an entire village or even creating a nettle industry to economically revitalize a depopulated region, etc.
And just this week, in the USA, when the hurricane passed and all that was left in its wake was ruins, the first to get to work rebuilding, without even waiting for bridges and roads to be rebuilt, turned out to be the workers of local energy cooperatives. And, in a country as divided and with a social sector as fragmented and regionalized as the USA is today, what is even more significant is that fact that cooperatives in states unaffected by the hurricane such as New York or Minnesota sent contingents of thousands of workers to the entire region between Texas and North Carolina.
Community and cooperative: the organic and the mechanical
Let us return for a minute to the old Buberian distinction between the organic and the mechanical.
- The mechanical: norms and incentives, the rules that, whether consensually imposed or not, shape a community
- The organic: the growth of the community, the interaction between the parts, the result of its development as a whole
The mechanical is the trellis, the organic is the vine. The mechanical serves to automate and constrain, the organic tends to multiply the particularities within the whole and expand the whole. The mechanical provides predictability while the organic provides diversity.
But this is not an exclusive dichotomy. Every community needs a mechanical component... that does not stifle it. Every community is in a constant search for a balance between improving its own rules to survive and preserve its essence and the need for a space to evolve, to adapt in new ways to the environment and to transform itself.
The cooperative is in reality a mechanical element. Tremendously versatile, adaptable, customizable... but mechanical.
Conclusions
Why then do cooperatives build the resilience of human communities that so different from each other? 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. Like a tomato plant or a vine with its guide. Just the same. This is the role of the cooperative: to support the growth of the community when the community becomes aware that it needs to strengthen and act.
From this we learn at least four important things:
- Cooperatives, however, are not the balm of Fierabras. They do not work miracles nor do they transform reality on their own. It is the community that mobilizes, creates and transforms.
- No cooperative can work without a community, without healthy community bases, whether in the workplace, in the neighbourhood or in the village
- But without a strong and versatile organizational form capable of aligning itself with community values, all the energy from the community could not take shape. We need cooperatives and especially worker cooperatives, the only community form that is capable of maintaining high levels of commitment in a stable way over time.
- That is why cooperativism is not and cannot be a cause in itself. That is why cooperativism will mean one thing or its opposite depending on the surnames it bears.