In 1903, an American entrepreneur, Charles Boettcher, founded the Great Western Sugar Company in Colorado, and opened two beet sugar refineries outside of Denver. Over the course of the 20th century, the company expanded, adding more facilities in Wyoming, Montana, and Nebraska, and encompassing hundreds of growers across those states. The company passed from owner to owner for several decades, starting in the 1970s, and its last owner, unnerved by the volatilities in the beet sugar market at the time, began looking for someone to buy it in 1990. In 2002, they finalized a sale not to another private owner, but to the nearly 1,000 sugar beet growers who had kept the business alive for decades. They still do. Only now, the growers own and operate it themselves as the Western Sugar Cooperative .

For Nathan Schneider, a journalist and professor of media studies at University of Colorado, Boulder, the story of the Western Sugar Cooperative is a family one: His grandfather was born in Colorado in 1916, and grew up helping his family, who tenant-farmed sugar beets for the Great Western Sugar Company. Now, his grandfather’s nephew grows beets as a member-owner of the Western Sugar Cooperative, where he shares in company profits and votes in decision-making.

This type of transition from top-down corporation to a democratically run cooperative is radical in that it bucks the trend of the powerful conglomerates that one might think of when they think of American business. But it’s also a surprisingly pervasive and traditionally American way of doing business. Bridging these two aspects forms the core of Schneider’s new book, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy.

In it, Schneider documents the history of cooperativism: He delves into early Christian monasticism (itself a type of radical cooperativism, in a way) and how it informed a much later movement, starting in 2011 in Italy, to develop an “unMonastery” dedicated to creating a more shared and transparent internet and technological framework. In the United States, he describes how farmers organized into cooperatives to save money on purchasing supplies and processing transactions, and how African Americans, following the abolition of slavery, pioneered the formation of co-op lending circles, stores, and insurance pools to support one another when the government neglected them. He details how, since the Great Depression, rural electric cooperatives, in which utility rate payers own and govern their own power supplies, serve 75% of the U.S. landmass, and how cities from Jackson, Mississippi, to New York City are beginning to throw financial and administrative support behind the development of more cooperatives. The blockchain, too, Schneider writes, can be a type of cooperativism.

Lately, Schneider says, co-ops have been gaining some small amount of momentum: The National Co-op Grocers, an umbrella organization that oversees food cooperatives, has seen its membership grow from 106 to 151 in the past decade, and, while still small, this type of steady growth is extending across different industries. The focus, largely, has remained on worker cooperatives–generally, smaller businesses owned and democratically governed by their employees. Earlier this year, for instance, the Democracy at Work Institute, an umbrella organization for U.S. worker cooperatives, released a series of videos highlighting a number of business owners who sold their companies to their employees, who now are worker-owners of small cooperatives.

This, though, is just one model of cooperativism. There are also producer co-ops, like the Western Sugar Cooperative, which unite producers of a specific commodity or craft so they can share resources, and consumer co-ops, where people who buy goods and services also share in the ownership of a business, but the range of involvement in consumer co-ops can vary. REI and rural electric co-ops require next to no participation from members, but grocery cooperatives like the Park Slope Food Co-op require member-customers to put in hours of work at the co-op to reap the benefits of membership. There are also purchasing co-ops, which are owned by local businesses who band together to share resources. With some notable exceptions, these other co-op varieties aren’t often discussed as particularly revolutionary. In some cases, like with the Western Sugar Cooperative and rural electric co-ops, they’ve been around for so long that people tend to just take them for granted. “But a lot of the most powerful co-ops are the ones working in the background,” Schneider says. “We need a new way of telling these stories to make their cooperation more visible.”



That, in essence, is what Schneider does in Everything for Everyone. In documenting both the reach of co-ops already in existence, as well as how they operate and the benefits they deliver to people who participate in them, Schneider makes the case that the various cooperative models are not only feasible in the modern economy, but could also help rectify some of its more serious ailments, from social inequity to economic disenfranchisement. “There’s a value in re-introducing this tradition–its breadth and depth and long history,” Schneider says. That value lies in the fundamentally democratic structure of cooperative business models, and how that ethos could begin to re-inform the way businesses and the economy are run now.