Co-operatives and Liberation, not necessarily in that order
It’s an amazing time to be alive. As a society, it genuinely feels like we’re making progress on discussions of systemic racism. This is a huge step forward, both in that I can now have conversations about racism within contexts which felt too “conservative” to have them in the past. And also – the fact […]
Read More Opposing White Supremacy AND Meritocracy (shouldn’t be this hard)The pandemic offers an instructive lesson: individual action towards a social goal, in the absence of a social effort to coordinate the actions of all, is meaningless. As individuals we can pursue certain types of goals – we can perhaps build a garden, write a play, bake a pie, etc, but we cannot end poverty […]
Read More Thinking the Pandemic: Compliance and FreedomCo-operators go on and on about the “Rochdale Principles”. If you hear someone doing this, it might be the case that they are less than familiar with happened at Rochdale, or why Rochdale is an important part of Co-operative history. As Orion Ulrey, founding father of student co-ops at Michigan State University has argued, there […]
Read More Abolish the Rochdale Principles19th century American worker co-ops practiced co-operative federalism – they put portions of their surplus towards creating new co-operatives, and they belonged to federations that participated in creating and managing new co-op firms. “In 1885, the Solidarity Watch-Case Co-operative, was organized in Brooklyn, New York, by the Knights of Labor (KOL) after a strike against […]
Read More What Happened to Worker Co-op Federalism?Campus Co-op Residence Inc. was formed by four University of Toronto students who, after seeing Toyohiko Kagama speak at a conference in Indianapolis during the 1935 Christmas break, returned to Toronto determined to start a co-operative of their own. Our first house at 63 St George was leased for a nominal fee from Victoria College […]
Read More Campus Co-op’s Legacy
Only a Northern Song 