Trying to grasp the nature of our unsettled, crisis-ridden world occupies much of Arena’s energies, yet a crucial reason for filling our pages with critique is that we are committed to thinking through how things could be otherwise—how we could create a meaningful alternative to the present. Put simply, we need a socially cooperative way to live fairly and meaningfully with one another within the living natural world.
Cooperatives are a practical social form well suited to this task—a place for radical experiments in how to live differently. They can help to prefigure a world beyond the restrictions and deformities of capitalism, taking root in and spreading out from the system’s already obvious cracks and crises.
The historical changes that saw the sidelining of face-to-face community, and the rise of capitalism within that, are only a few hundred years old. For billions of people, this shift has only occurred within the last few decades. Whenever this has occurred, people have responded by attempting to reconstruct cooperative ways of life, in religious and self-sustaining communities, in mutual aid societies and worker cooperatives. In high capitalism, cooperatives were formed among farmers, workers and city-dwellers, as existing communities resisted the commodification of their ways of life, drawing on regional, religious and extended kinship ties to reground those lifeways in practical cooperative activity. Some of those ties dissolved as life became yet more abstracted, fluid and mobile, until consciously revived in the social revolution of the 1960s.
Now, today, there is a need for renewed attempts and serious thinking about how to build socially cooperative forms of life: eco-agriculture, convivial technologies, worker cooperatives and de-commodified housing in towns and cities remade for human-scale living; deconsumption, cooperative self-provisioning and transformative redistribution of wealth and power; communal forms of care-giving, system-level reorganisation of meaningful education and the subsumption of the techno-sciences in deepened democratic practices.
The ethos that empowers cooperatives is often taken for granted as part of how people interact locally and familially in informal networks of care and interest. That ethos emerges from the kind of social creatures we are, but there is much that is needed to re-enliven and consciously deepen such forms. In our era, cooperatives have often arisen from the reflexive politics of intellectuals, as well as in times of crisis and collapse in villages and on factory floors.
The social transformations of the last decades have made it more difficult for cooperatives to operate in Australia, with many older examples either collapsing or merging into increasingly distant replicas of generic corporations such as Mitre 10. For any meaningful renewal of cooperatives to occur, a more explicit, reflexive awareness of the current contradictions of life will need to be made visible. This contradiction presents itself in fragments as the hyper-individualised, burnt-out, techno-addicted, cost-of-living besieged, ecologically disastrous and ungrounded cultural life many now inhabit. Fundamental to any substantial expansion of the co-op form will be sparking an understanding that lasting solidarity can only be created if ways of being are meaningfully grounded, ‘drawn back’ from the most abstract forms of life.
That is no simple thing to do. When the cooperative form does succeed, as the following four articles make clear, the structure of the cooperative, developed in practice for different circumstances, has huge potential to respond to the intensifying disasters that presently beset us. There is something distinctly grounded about co-ops, being composed of particular people, in particular places, empowered to make the decisions that matter to them. Rooted in this fertile ground, they can grow and link with other cooperatives, forming co-operative ecosystems and higher-order organisations that can work to facilitate the large-scale transformation that we so desperately need.
