Cooperatives are worth nurturing, and not just as models of democratic workplaces — though that's a good start.

Two bills making their way through New Mexico's legislative session, SB 419 and HB 481, would budget $200,000 for “activities to promote and develop cooperative forms of business,” including “training and technical assistance to create and maintain cooperative businesses.”

At this writing, the house bill has passed committee, while the senate bill awaits a hearing.

The effort is well worth Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham's signature. A small appropriation for teaching workers how to found and manage enterprises is a large human investment.

What's a co-op?

Cooperative enterprises (or “co-ops”) come in different shapes. There are purchasing co-ops, in which businesses and local governments pool their buying power; co-ops where owners jointly process and/or market products; cooperatives that sell goods and services to consumer-owners; or combinations of these.

There are also worker-owned and managed enterprises, in which the employees are the owners and perform the function of a board of directors. Another way to describe these are “labor-managed firms.”

Research indicates they tend to be productive and efficient businesses, able to maintain employment during downturns (which helps under a supply-and-demand model), and make decisions about production, investment, distribution and dividends democratically.

There are also community dividends. When a company’s decisions are made by workers who live near work, decisions about pollution, outsourcing labor or layoffs tend to weigh more heavily in favor of community. Worker-owned and -managed firms also help keep money in a community.

Cooperatives are also more inclined to invest in the personal development and autonomy of their workers than large-scale capitalist organizations with top-heavy management hierarchies disciplining their workforce and cutting labor costs.

Co-ops and capitalism

As businesses, co-ops encounter problems and sometimes fail. In a capitalist economy, cooperatives must compete in the marketplace and worker-owners sometimes behave like shareholders and executives of capitalist corporations.

That's because the rule of the game remains exchange, over human need, as the basis for decisions about production. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, workers involved in cooperatives “are thus faced with the contradictory necessity of governing themselves with the utmost absolutism.”

Cooperatives provide millions of jobs in the United States, retain employees, and enrich local economies.

In some cities — like Durham, North Carolina and Jackson, Mississippi — cooperatives also address society more broadly, providing people of color with opportunity and some protections from workplace injustice.

Thus, cooperatives provide some badly needed spaces within capitalism for autonomy, self-governance, and human development, along with enrichment of local communities. This is well worth ongoing appropriations, as an investment in New Mexicans and a contribution to a more diversified and resilient economy.

Although the transformative potential of co-ops can be overstated, and co-ops may even function as an alternative to broader societal change, the work of Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi's capital city inspires political imagination.

This organization of human solidarity and purpose not only fosters businesses democratically owned and managed by their members, but also addresses our ecological crisis, colonial relations of power, and social structures defined by patriarchy and white supremacy.

"For us, that meant both exercising political power to be in a position to shape some of the policies that would curb all the practices of extraction and utilization of fossil fuels that leads to the climate crisis," the cooperative's co-founder, Kali Acuno, said in a 2018 interview for Resilience.org, "but also how do we meet the basic needs of our community to address the inequities that we have long faced."

At a time when New Mexico is seeking a more diverse economy statewide, some cooperatives model how to go further, to examining how society works and who should make decisions on its behalf.

Algernon D'Ammassa is Desert Sage. Share thoughts and questions at adammassa@lcsun-news.com.

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