CONTENTS
SUMMARY
WITH OTHER MARGINALIZED
CAPITAL
ECOSYSTEM OF IMPACT
COOPERATIVE INSTITUTIONS & ELDERS
OTHER INSTITUTIONS
SUMMARY
Relationships with individuals, cooperatives, and institutions were, by far, the most mentioned aspect of cooperative life and work for the youth interviewed. While relationships were explored via explicit questions, they also came up indirectly in the context of sustainability questions (membership transition, financial viability), as well as with regard to an alignment with social justice and transformation. Certain kinds of relationships, those of “solidarity,” became delineated in the course of the interviews, in strong contrast to compulsory and coercive relationships (e.g. government regulators, financiers). Additionally, some of the relationships assumed by coopyouth to be borne of solidarity - such as relationships with other cooperative entities, at times turned out to ultimately be solely nominally cooperative and lacking in true cooperation and solidarity. Coopyouth embraced various strategies and approaches to each kind of relationship encountered as their cooperatives engaged with their communities and the broader Cooperative Movement.
WITH OTHER MARGINALIZED
Throughout the world, countless peoples are treated poorly and experience various forms of oppression for their race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and more. Many coopyouth - even those who consider themselves safe from most forms of prosecution - ultimately perceive themselves in shared struggles with injustice, which causes them to pursue relationships to support one another in their collective work against the injustice they all experience.The 7th Principle of “Care for Community'' and the 6th Principle of “Cooperation Among Cooperatives'' compel cooperators of all ages to connect with others who share their values, whether or not they have shared experiences of marginalization, in order to build a cooperative commonwealth. More generally, the connection of all peoples’ struggles is a strongly held belief by many. A popular sentiment, “Until we are all free, none of us are free,” has been restated by many people throughout history, including Martin Luther King Jr of the United States. Its earliest recording was in the writing of poet Emma Lazarus in the 1800s. Solidarity with all those fighting for justice and facing injustice is a requisite for collective liberation. While this sentiment is sufficient in and of itself to pursue solidarity work, it cannot be ignored that the vast majority of people in the world are oppressed to varying degrees by capitalism and its ilk, and are thereby in shared struggle with one another whether or not they recognize their orientation as such. Further, uth also generally experience marginalization by being denied access to spaces or resources because they are deemed to be “too young” or to not have “enough experience.” Those youth with other identities that compound their marginalization, such as via those forms of oppression mentioned above, often encounter even more challenges than their elder counterparts. Youth that experience and acknowledge their experiences of marginalization as shared with others are especially and intimately called to solidarity work with others most societal systems have been designed to exploit and repress.
CAPITAL
Within capitalism, providing financial support to one another can often be the most impactful form of solidarity. The reallocation of money to young people and their frequently nascent cooperatives by wealthier people or cooperatives can sometimes be the only way for a cooperative to launch or achieve scale, especially given the discrimination cooperatives and youth, alike, encounter in conventional financial systems. That said, as discussed in the “Relationships of Coercion” section, the most challenging relationships coopyouth have with institutions and individuals are typical those in which coopyouth are receiving funding from a more powerful party. Relationships involving the exchange of capital are especially fraught - in most contexts - because of how fraught our notions of money, value, and personal worth have become through the influence of capitalist values in our daily lives. Individualism, one of capitalism’s central values, tells us that money is earned independently, and if one has earned more money than another person, they must be better, smarter, and more capable - therefore money makes a person worthy of respect and care while discouraging the sharing of capital. In addition, capitalism professes that every individual must “earn” money in order to deserve to have the things they need to survive and thrive, thus implying that if a person cannot be productive within capitalism, they do not deserve to live. These notions cloud financial relationships, even between cooperatives, when the recipient is seen as inferior to the provider or when the provider views their loan or gift of capital as an expression of their benevolence and/or that the provider still has some claim to the money that entitles them to placing conditions and restrictions on its use. This is in contrast to a provider of capital viewing the act of reallocating funds they have in excess of what they need to be a matter of responsibility to the collective wellbeing of humanity. Any sense of ownership over money given to a cooperative degrades that cooperative, as it ultimately amounts to some degree of outside control that negates the membership’s full ownership and control of their cooperative. Solidarity relationships that exchange capital without obligation or expectation affirm the inherent value of people and the subordination of capital to the health and happiness of people.
ECOSYSTEM OF IMPACT
The 6th - Cooperation Among Cooperatives - and 7th - Care for Community - Principles strongly indicate the importance of relationships with people beyond a cooperative’s immediate membership. Assessing who and how your cooperative impacts and, following, engaging input from all those impacted can potentially cost or inhibit the cooperative’s function in some way, as exploring the realities and needs of all those impacted by an enterprise can reveal externalities (e.g. a factory in a neighborhood has a smokestack that spews smoke from processing plastics, which has been linked to an increase in respiratory illnesses in the surrounding community). However, while assessing and accepting responsibility for externalities is in one way a cost and challenge, it is ultimately a support for the cooperative in achieving its highest possible use within the community. In the example of the plastics factory, the creation of poisonous smoke that makes members of their community members sick exemplifies a violation of the terms of the Cooperative Identity, as it does not fulfill its responsibility to care for the surrounding community. Further, it exemplifies profit-taking without environmental concern, which is representative of humanity’s ultimate community, the earth and all its human and non-human inhabitants. Cooperatives are not closed systems, the bounds of enterprise cannot contain costs nor should they hoard benefits. Cooperatives are members of broader communities, movements, and ecosystems; acknowledgement of this in accordance with the Cooperative Identity necessitates the creation and nurturance of many relationships with people and groups external to the organization.
COOPERATIVE INSTITUTIONS & ELDERS
The most common form of solidarity relationship within the cooperative movement is that between cooperatives and/or cooperators. For coopyouth, such relationships with larger and older cooperatives or more experienced cooperators, specifically, can provide a great deal of support in the form of financial capital, mentorship, and networking to develop additional solidarity relationships. As a result, most cooperatives enter into such relationships with an assumption of good faith in all parties. However, youth sometimes encounter unanticipated issues when those wealthier cooperatives or elder cooperators practice a form of cooperativism corrupted by capitalism. Those instances aside, solidarity relationships with other cooperatives and cooperators are often key factors in the survival and thriving of youth cooperatives.
OTHER INSTITUTIONS
Relationships of solidarity extend beyond the formal Cooperative Movement, as there are many people who share the cooperative values but do not organize themselves or identify themselves as explicitly cooperative. “Future society will have to be pluralist in all aspects, including economics” (Arizmendiarrieta, 1999, 100). Examples of such cooperative institutions that don’t identify with the Cooperative Movement with which coopyouth maintain solidarity relationships are: educational institutions, charitable enterprises, mutual aid organizations, and individuals leveraging their personal resources for collective liberation.