FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD: WORKER COOPERATIVES AND FAITH COMMUNITIES
In the midst of the many challenges of our time, the ability to shape your own communities and to do your own thing is rare but not impossible. Worker cooperatives and their growing networks can make it happen. Take, for example the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, co-founded by Benny Overton and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger, who are no strangers to contemporary political and economic challenges. Worker cooperatives, Benny and Rosemarie have discovered, not only provide people with the opportunity to exercise economic and political agency they were previously denied; they also help lay the foundations for increased political and economic power. In the process, other areas of life are being transformed as well, including culture and even religion. A long but forgotten history of worker cooperatives, often embodied in minority communities (as described by other contributors in this series of Interventions), confirms the tremendous potential for the transformation of the world.
Imagine being able to do work that provides for a living and having control over how your work is organized, performed, and managed. Imagine further that this work is less affected by coercion and the constant pressure to do more for less, with more opportunities for collaboration, participation, and the ability decisions about things that really matter. This was once the dream of professionals and others in the middle class, but much of that dream has long been displaced by the pressures of the neoliberal economy, and this has provided the rationale even for lawyers and doctors to organize unions. There are few places left where people’s needs and concerns are balanced with the need for profit and efficiency. Even academics and teachers are forced to produce ever greater results, measured by the growing demands of “outcomes evaluations.”
What does any of this have to do with faith communities and religion? Some might argue that the world’s religions can provide relief from the everyday rat race that determines the lives of the 99 percent who have to work for a living, but religion itself has been dragged into this race for the most part. Religious leaders, too, are feeling the pressure to produce more and faster, including the expectation to grow bigger budgets and larger membership rolls.
Yet while religion has too often served to sanctify the status quo and offered its support to the dominant powers of the ages, it also contains records of resistance and tales of alternatives that might be inspiring even today. That some of these alternatives are now embodied in worker cooperatives is no accident, and this is where faith communities might find some of the inspiration that they often lack.
The tradition of the Hebrew prophets, shared in common by Jews, Christians, and Muslims, provides some insight into the problems that can be addressed by worker cooperatives. In a famous speech, the prophet Samuel channels the voice of God pushing back against the “elders of Israel,” who demand a king. Such a king, Samuel contends, will
“take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. He will take one-tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and his courtiers. He will take your male and female slaves, and the best of your cattle and donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves” (1 Samuel 8: 12-17).
This is not merely a political story about past monarchies—it is an economic one as well, and in a strange way it foreshadows the dynamics of the neoliberal economy where “winner takes all” and where corporations take substantially more than one-tenth of people’s production.
This and other ancient traditions can serve as reminders that the everyday rat race is neither a matter of necessity nor the way the world necessarily works, but that it is imposed on the many by the few. Today, the monarchies of old have for the most part been replaced by the even more effective neoliberal mandate that the profits of corporations are produced for the benefits of the shareholders and not the workers. No matter how much neoliberal economists assure us that the economy is not a “zero-sum game,” the pressures on working people keep increasing just as wages and benefits keep decreasing and profits keep rising. In this world, worker cooperatives not only create some relief but provide genuine alternatives that have not yet reached broad public awareness, even though the cooperative movement and its networks are growing, in the United States and elsewhere. The largest and most famous conglomerate of worker cooperatives is Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain, founded by Roman Catholic Priest José Arizmendiarrieta, in 1956.
While many believe that religion and politics or religion and economics do not mix, keep in mind that religion is actively at work in the economic realm, often in support of the status quo. Religious charities like soup kitchens, clothes closets, and homeless ministries are taken for granted in a climate where corporations are not required to pay their fair share of taxes. Nevertheless, charity does little to challenge the “winner-take-all” system. More radical religious efforts have preached more equal distribution of wealth or even the redistribution of some of it. Ever since the book of Acts in the New Testament (4:44-45; 4:32-37), there have been Christian voices demanding the sharing wealth. What is still often missing, however, is a sense of how wealth is produced in the first place.
Taking a leaf from the Hebrew prophets and from Jesus, the Abrahamic traditions can help us to understand the production of wealth better and to reclaim it. As God’s judgment is pronounced on those who exploit and abuse the people by prophets like Amos and others, God makes this promise:
“I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them, says the Lord your God” (Amos 9:14-15).
Salvation is not pie-in-the-sky or another system of domination (no matter how well-meaning) but people reaping the benefits of what they produce, for the well-being of all. Jesus continues in this tradition when he preaches “good news to the poor” (Matt. 11:5 and Luke 4:18). Such good news cannot be limited to charity or the receiving of alms, but contains the promise of the reign of God on earth (Luke 6:20) where people have power (not only political but also economic), have enough to eat, and are liberated from their increasing indebtedness to the elites (Matt 6:9-13). This is where worker cooperatives pick up: those who produce are the ones who decide what gets produced, how things get produced, and who gets the profit. Another world is possible.