Portside

"We really would like to see the state step in... Now is a moment to push for limited-equity co-ops and community land trusts as an alternative."

The crisis of 2020 has created the greatest wealth gap in history. The middle class, capitalism and democracy are all under threat. What went wrong and what can be done?

One of FDR’s most successful New Deal programs electrified rural America thru federally funded community cooperatives. Now many are like fiefdoms, tied to costly, polluting coal plants, while their members demand transparency and renewable energy.

Cooperatives historically have provided an option when few alternatives to exploitation were available. In contrast, today some leftists would deny women and others these options because of a promise of what social movement activity could bring.

Labor organizations and tenants’ associations have a lot of common ground. After all, tenants are workers, and workers need housing. Decades ago, unions built affordable housing cooperatives for workers.

This strategy of economic and social reconstruction necessarily involves not only equitable treatments of gender exclusion and reproduction, but social control or democratic governance for innovation, manufacturing, and the core “commanding heights”

Read the Editor's Intro to our latest print issue of the NACLA Report, Radical Cities, focused on municipalism, housing movements, and local radical democracy in Latin America, from Mexico City to Montevideo.

Cooperation Jackson is a long term vision. “We’re going to ultimately have to create our own network of supply and value chain. If we exist in a bubble, we won’t survive. It’s a big experiment in democracy."

Viewing energy as a common-held resource, rather than a privately-owned commodity, directly links production to consumption and re-engages our liability as energy users.

Although the number of union members in CUCI’s projects in Cincinnati is still relatively small, their vision is big, and spreading to other parts of the country.