By Anna Belle Newport

In Mutualism, Sara Horowitz asks us to invest in mutualism and stop relying on the “same binary solution of free markets or government interventions.”[1] After tracing a history of mutualist networks of the past, Horowitz lays out three common characteristics of mutualist organizations: 1) they work to solve a social problem for their own community;[2] 2) they hold economic power through an independent, sustainable economic mechanism;[3] and 3) they have a long-term focus, which requires investments and organizational hierarchy.[4] Part I of Mutualism is both historical and familial—Horowitz traces the history of her family and her grandfather’s pivotal role in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, as well as her own story of building the Freelancers Union. Horowitz outlines the broad-strokes history of unions in the twentieth century. As Horowitz describes, unions were not only essential for collective bargaining, but they were also “one of the primary ways American workers articulated their needs to government.”[5] The labor movement built the safety net in America during the progressive era in the 1910s and the 1920s and then later, after the New Deal, through the middle of the 20th century.[6]

Slowly Democrats began abandoning unions and, by the 1970s, the left adopted a neoliberal slant by “reorient[ing] itself around social programs aimed at the working poor rather than policies that gave the entire working class more agency in their own lives.”[7] Equally devastating to the labor movement was the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which put limitations on union power and excluded “supervisor” from the list of workers who could receive Wagner Act protections.[8] This created a stark divide between low- and high-wage workers—the effects of which we are still feeling today. In addition, the Taft-Hartley Act excluded “independent contractors” from the Wagner Act. The lack of a concrete definition for “independent contractor” has allowed companies, like Uber, to be creative in defining all sorts of workers as “independent contractors” and therefore limiting their unionizing power.[9] All of this ties to one of Horowitz’s most important points: the nature of work today has radically changed. With a decrease in unions and increase in freelance/contract work, many people lack any social safety net at all. Today 59% of independent contractors live paycheck to paycheck and 75% worry they don’t save enough for emergencies or retirement.[10] While the union has the potential to be the laboratory of innovation, the Taft-Hartley act created huge fissures between different types of workers and thus limited the power of such innovation.

Reading Mutualism in conversation with Francisco Pérez’s article “How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism”[11] makes me wonder whether Horowitz’s vision and Pérez’s vision are either/or propositions, or whether they can somehow coexist, even to a partial degree. Horowitz emphasizes the importance of mutualist organizations taking a long-term financial view through acquiring “patient capital.” She describes patient capital as sustainable capital that stands between slow capital, like gifts and grants, and fast capital, like private equity, venture capital, and impact investment, that expects high returns.[12] Pérez, on the other hand, argues that employing capitalism as a means for racial and economic justice will always disappoint.[13] Black capitalism, an oxymoronic idea to those who view capitalism as inherently racist and racialized, has been deployed in some iteration by every presidential administration since Nixon, yet its results are less than stunning.[14] As Charisse Burden-Stelly articulates with reference to Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, “[r]acial capitalism, in other words, was the continuation of ‘the social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalisms’—that is, its ‘racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional’ antagonisms—into the capitalist form.”[15] If “capitalism is never not racial” then how can we trust that even Horowitz’s vision of “patient,” sustainable capital will create real, lasting change for those that racial capitalism has harmed the most? Do we want our safety network to be tied to capitalist markets, even if they are based in mutualism?

Horowitz argues that “we are trying to piece together our own safety net” because (referencing Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown) we have “internalized the neoliberal idea that we are market actors first and human beings second.”[16] Earlier in the book Horowitz poses a question to us: “If neither government nor market forces are solving a problem that you and the people in your community share, why not solve it yourself?”[17] While this is a powerful and needed call for us to actively engage in building our mutualist networks and take care of our community, I wonder how we can embark on trying to build viable solutions without at least considering leaving behind the economic system in which we are doomed to be “market actors first.” Horowitz herself outlined past failures in mutualist lending that were “upended by extractive capitalism.”[18] How do we avoid a similar fate? During our 5/13 talk, I hope to further dissect how Pérez, Horowitz, Hoover and Kelly’s visions diverge and converge around long-term economic structures and strategies for cooperatives and a mutualist future.

There is another tension in Horowitz’s book that bears examination: the government has failed us (and will likely continue to do so) and yet in the long term we need to turn to the government to support a mutualistic economy. Horowitz lays out the history of the U.S. government’s failure to provide a reliable social safety net to its workers. She outlines how in the post-Reagan world the left and progressives had “internalized the call for a smaller government, and as a result had shifted their attention to focusing only on vulnerable workers.”[19] This is what created the imperative to build mutualistic networks within our own community. Yet, if we look to the example of Emilia-Romagna, we see that mutualism’s longevity is tied to government buy-in. Horowitz describes Emilia-Romagna as “one of the best examples of what an activist government, one that evolves and grows in tandem with global changes while staying embedded in a philosophy of mutualism, can accomplish.”[20] Horowitz also describes the “indivisible reserves” written into the law in Italy and a 1992 law that requires cooperatives to put three percent of their profits into a fund that promotes new cooperative enterprises.[21]

Contrast Emilia-Romagna with the United States. During Utopia 2/13, Kali Akuno spoke about how most of Cooperation Jackson’s cooperatives were organized as LLCs because of the limitations and political biases against collectives entrenched in the law since the 1930s, due to U.S. fears of socialism.[22] In Mississippi, cooperatives can only take three forms, agriculture, utility, or credit unions, which barred most of Cooperation Jackson’s projects from operating as a cooperative. Horowitz challenges the government to change these political biases to support rather than limit cooperative movements. She asks the government to scale up the mutualist sector “by creating a market that lets it thrive.”[23] Horowitz provides three main ways for the government to build the mutualist sector: 1) define mutualism as a sector of the economy that has begun to deliver the next safety net; 2) create a market for mutualism economic activity; 3) protect (instead of replace) mutualist solutions to social problems.[24] This would have an immediate positive impact on mutualists and cooperatives, such as Cooperation Jackson.

Sometimes the vision of mutualism and government support run up against each other. For example, Horowitz describes how the Affordable Care Act put the Freelancers Insurance Company out of business.[25] She explains that “[t]here’s no reason that proposals for nationalized healthcare can’t coexist with mutualism, but mutualist organizations themselves—unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, faith communities—are uniquely positioned to be the delivery mechanism for that care.”[26] This definitely seems to be true under current U.S. law, but should we require these sorts of organizations to be the delivery mechanism for care, or is mutualism merely filling a gap that, in the long term, we want the government to take on instead? Will local cooperatives always be better situated than the state to meet the material needs of their people?

Horowitz emphasizes the need to start local and address the unique needs of one’s own community. One reason Horowitz’s freelance insurance company was so successful, until it wasn’t, was because it was built around the unique needs of “like-minded” freelance workers. It prioritized the health concerns that most ailed that particular type of worker: depression and carpel-tunnel. Mutualism does need to start small to address real concrete needs, but organizers should not work in isolated silos. As Hoover and Kelly articulated in Future Horizons: Visions toward Democratizing Our Economy, “[s]hared ownership advocates must see ourselves as part of a labor movement, a fair housing movement, a movement to change how capital flows, and immigrants’ rights and racial justice movements…[o]ur asks are grounded…in what will benefit whole workforces, industries, and communities.”[27] Horowitz emphasizes that a major failure of union organizing has been viewing unions as only for low-wage workers, as opposed to all workers.[28] How do we build coalitions across workers and sectors when the tangible needs among members may be vastly different? How do we do this while also effectively ensuring that all communities have equal access to power within the mutualist network?

Notes

[1] Sarah Horowitz, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy From the Ground Up 87 (Random House 2021).

[2] Id. at 67.

[3] Id. at 70.

[4] Id. at 73.

[5] Id. at 32.

[6] Id. at 146.

[7] Id. at 37.

[8] Id. at 157.

[9] Id. at 160.

[10] Id. at 140.

[11] Francisco Pérez, How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism, NonProfit Quarterly, April 27, 2022.

[12] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 74.

[13] Francisco Pérez, How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism, NonProfit Quarterly, April 27, 2022.

[14] Mehrsa Baradaran, The Real Roots of ‘Black Capitalism’, N.Y. Times, March 31, 2019.

[15] Charisse Burden-Stelly, Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism, Monthly Review, July, 1, 2020.

[16] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 41.

[17] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 4.

[18] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 202.

[19] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 98.

[20] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 112.

[21] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 11.

[22] Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Utopia 2/13: Cooperation Jackson with Kali Akuno, Youtube (Oct. 12, 2022).

[23] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 181.

[24] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 183.

[25] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 190.

[26] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 191.

[27] Melissa Hoover & Esteban Kelly, Future Horizons: Visions toward Democratizing Our Economy, NonProfit Quarterly, July 27, 2022.

[28] Horowitz, supra note 1, at 99.