 The point of co-ops is that you pool your resources and use the bulk of what you pool together. Either it's enough or if it's not enough, it leverages for other things. It's all about what's possible and the ways, again, that people, human solidarity, human energy comes together to do something differently that benefits more people. My name is Jessica Gordon-Nemhard. I'm a professor of community justice and social economic development at John Jay College City University of New York in the Department of Africana Studies. Economic democracy is all about voice participation, decision-making, and power sharing. So it's a concept that we use to explain sort of the goal of what economics should really accomplish. It should accomplish something that everybody can participate in and benefit from, that everybody has a voice in, and that addresses power inequities. So one of the strategies to get to economic democracy, which gets us to economic justice, is to use what we call solidarity economics. So that's when you think about economics as a political economic system where people are connected because of their human bonds, as people who want to make, you know, who want the world to be better, who want to address community issues in a way that helps everybody as opposed to the kind of system we have now where the rich get richer and the greediest people get to grab everything. So this is an alternative to that kind of a structure where everybody works together to make sure that everybody gets what they need and that you distribute the wealth and the surplus in a way that's supportive of people. In the African-American civil rights movement, we learned through the years, and what I mean by the civil rights movement, I'm talking about what we call the Long Civil Rights Movement. From when we were brought here in chains to the current period, it's not like a 10-year period in the 60s when there was a lot of publicity about it, but it's a long struggle for economic and political rights. People in their everyday lives made sure to assert their humanity, even when they were enslaved, even when under horrible segregation issues, et cetera. What I found in my research, I was trying to understand how people, black people, have engaged in solidarity economics. When I started to study that, I noticed that there was this parallel movement we mostly know about African-American history from the civil rights side, trying to assert our rights to eat in the same restaurant as somebody else or sit in the front of the bus or that kind of thing. But when you actually look at what people were doing in their everyday lives, there was this thread of solidarity and cooperative economics that made the political work possible. What do I mean by that? I mean that often, if you took sharecroppers during the Jim Crow era, they were in terrible debt-peanage, couldn't get out of it, but were trying to farm. They realized that with collective economics, working together to own a farm collectively or to own a lending distribution collectively, they could get a better deal, access to land, access to materials and supplies that they needed, where they could depend on their own community and not depend on outsiders who were exploiting them. That way, they were able to get out of the debt-peanage situation in a collective way, but also as sharecroppers, their political rights were totally denied because the landowners would throw them off the land or whatever if they registered to vote, if they didn't register the way the landowner wanted that kind of thing. So again, the cooperative having their own economic independence, switching their ownership structure to a cooperative one, allowed them to then also be politically active. That's one example of the ways that we talk about this solidarity, cooperative economics was essential to also achieving the civil rights. I started researching African-American cooperative movement and African-American cooperatives because I was doing work with community revitalization and community economic development and talking especially to black communities about using cooperatives as a part of community economic development. And most black folks gave me stares and looks and didn't understand what it was, didn't think it had anything to do with black folks. And so I went back into the history because it didn't make any sense to me that we hadn't been involved in it to find examples. And so the more I found examples, the more I was able to talk to people currently that we have this legacy and experience and a positive experience with viable business alternatives that were community-owned through a sense of solidarity and cooperative ownership. And so from that research and that perspective on current community revitalization, I realized that it was important to talk to people about how we can change our current economic structures. Because right now we live in a racial, gendered capitalist system, which really doesn't benefit communities, it doesn't benefit most people and it definitely doesn't benefit people of color, especially black folks. And so we've come a long way in terms of getting involved in the economy from a position of equality. But equality in a ruined and in a bad system isn't enough so that even if we get some level of equality in a capitalist system, capitalism is very exploitative. It exploits our planet, exploits human energy, it exploits human labor. And so I now have been talking about this language from mutual aid to solidarity economies to cooperative economies as a way to really liberate us from the exploitation of economics and that we need to understand that this liberation is not something new and it's not something alien, especially to black folks and people of color. It's something that human beings have practiced throughout human history and that if we can reconnect to it, it's also something we all do in our daily lives. Like we all kind of barter, you know, I'll take your kids to school and you sometimes make dinner for me or you might fix my fence. So we all do acts of solidarity, especially economic solidarity without even thinking about it. So I'm trying to give terminology to things that we already do so we see it as something that's normal and regular because mostly we just see capitalist exploitation in greed as regular and normal. So I'm trying to find language, terminology and examples of things that show us that actually we are cooperating human beings. We are people who have a sense and act on that sense of solidarity and that if we were more proactive about doing it, if we created more of our economic relationships in that way that we could actually liberate ourselves, our families and our communities. There's a wonderful example from the 1880s with actually an integrated movement. The Knights of Labor at that time were one of the earliest labor unions in the US, but it was actually one of the most progressive labor unions in history because they quickly realized that the labor movement needed to be combined with other movements. And so the Knights of Labor were a progressive, a populist political party. They were a labor union and they were a co-op development group because they also realized there's no point in arguing for labor if you don't also argue for labor worker ownership and worker ownership through cooperatives and things like that. They also were integrated. It's the end of the Reconstruction period, which was a period of trying to make up for enslavement. All the early civil rights laws ending slavery, allowing for other civil rights was happening, but then that was overturned by the 1776. By the 1880s, you have a regressive period. The Klu Klux Klan has arisen segregation. The Jim Crow segregation that we talk about has arisen and the economy has gone bad. So it's a really kind of similar to our period right now, sort of rise of fascism and anti-racism and all that kind of stuff. But then you have this incredibly progressive union that's doing worker cooperatives. It's including women in their labor organization and their labor demands, women's rights. It's integrated even though the chapters in the segregated states have to meet separately. When Jim Crow starts, Blacks and whites aren't allowed to be in the same room. So this is a union that organized both Blacks and whites in integrated platforms and policies, but the chapters had to meet separately by race because they weren't allowed to sit in the same room together. And yet they managed to do incredible things. The working man's party that was run by the Knights of Labor in Richmond, Virginia actually won control of the city council and was able to rebuild the city town hall with unionized labor, worker co-ops and women, men and integrated workers. At a time when the city council before them had wanted to just use convict labor to build the new city hall. In rural North Carolina in the 1930s, there's some independent Black schools who are actually teaching their students and the parents about cooperative economics to help the parents to own their own land, to do farming, to create credit unions, things like that. And two of the schools, Bricks Rural Life and Terrell County School, realized that they're about 30 miles apart, that they're doing similar things. They create an Eastern Carolina federation of Black co-ops and credit unions. That federation then allows them to combine ideas and to start working on manuals to help more Black folks to learn how to create a co-op or to start a credit union. They then, they're able to pull together a meeting with other groups around the state who are doing it and meet with the agricultural department of the state that has some promotion of credit unions and co-ops. They get some extra money from them. They end up creating all kinds of manuals and doing workshops throughout the state and within an eight year period, the state goes from having three Black credit unions to 98 Black credit unions and from three or four Black co-ops to 40 Black co-ops. In an eight to 10 year period, because of the joining together, because of the education they're able to do and because they're able to leverage what they were doing with the state government facilities, they were able to make a huge impact in how many co-ops get developed, that kind of thing. So those are the kinds of exciting projects, energies that I'm able to show people so they can see that we can do the same thing now. And doing the same thing means seeing a problem, getting together with other people, study the problem, study the different models for how to address the problem, learn about cooperative economics, get back to your solidarity roots and then work with people who can help you to set up a co-op and to make it work. For me, it's liberating in the sense that we don't have to always talk about economics as what we can't do, because that's often what the conversations are always about. We don't have the money, we don't have this, we don't have that. This allows you to talk about what we can do. Even with small amounts of money, the point of co-ops is that you pool your resources and use the bulk of what you pool together. Either it's enough or if it's not enough, it leverages for other things. It's all about what's possible and the ways, again, that people, human solidarity, human energy, comes together to do something differently that benefits more people.