Organized Labor, Public Banks and the Grassroots: Keys to a Worker-Owned Economy

[marmar]

by Matt Stannard.
PUBLISHED ON MAY 1, 2014


Worker-owned cooperatives build economic democracy, but how do we build more worker-owned cooperatives? Here are three valuable allies to help us get there.

Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.

For Richard Wolff, whose most recent book is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, this time-honored form is also the key to arenewed movement for economic democracy. For Wolff, a synergy of labor and the left around worker-owned cooperatives promises to be an “unapologetically anticapitalist” strategy, challenging “the essence of the capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee relationship” and reshaping it in an egalitarian fashion.

And it’s a cause more and more people on the economic periphery – and their allies in economic justice movements – are taking up. More workers are taking the plunge, too, from solar energy co-ops that provide infrastructure for renewable energy, to the 25 worker cooperatives in Queens, including the newly formed Pa’lante Green Cleaning. Here, people committed to a new economy are practicing and preaching to, as Wolff puts it, “take over the enterprise,” bypass Wall Street and economic oligarchy, and build new economic structures either in defiance of, or alongside, old ones. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://rdwolff.com/content/organized-labor-public-banks-and-grassroots-keys-worker-owned-economy

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Irony.....

Can remember when the State of North Dakota looked like this model. Time marches on,it now is a bastion of Rethugerery.

[blkmusclmachine]

2. ,

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