By Bernard E. Harcourt
The revolution, when it comes, will start where it always has: with groups of like-minded people, yoked together by shared geography, a shared economic stake, or a shared belief, who come together to try to solve an intractable problem that government or markets either can’t or won’t solve for them. Profound change will come when we individually stop waiting, and collectively start building.
— Sara Horowitz, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up
Our explicit vision is for an economy in which all people have access to ownership and control of the institutions that sustain us—work, land, home, care, education. This is not a utopian vision. It is not an alternative. It is possible. And it is necessary. There is no shortage of crises to address, and democratic economic institutions thrive in times of crisis. Our challenge—to ourselves and to you—is first to assert this vision and aim for embedding it in policy, and then to get to work building the relationships of active, functional solidarity that will help bring this vision to reality.
— Melissa Hoover and Esteban Kelly, Future Horizons: Visions toward Democratizing Our Economy.
A movement that seeks economic justice without addressing race and other forms of inequality would surely fall grossly short of the mark.
— Francisco Pérez, How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism.
How can we move inductively from a practice of worker cooperatives and mutuals—from, in effect, practices of concrete utopias—to critical theories of “mutualism” and “cooperation”?
In these 13/13 seminars, we frequently debate the ways in which theory can guide praxis and praxis can inform critical theory. The relationship between the two is always heart and center. And it surely has been at the core of this year’s Utopia 13/13, from our very first discussion of the critical foundations of concrete utopias with Étienne Balibar to the most recent conversation on the relationship between the writings of André Gorz and the praxis of degrowth.
Theory and praxis: the relationship resembles a double helix in an infinite Möbius loop—forever connected, intricately threaded, taking turns leading, inextricably linked. This week at Utopia 5/13, we turn the Möbius strip inside out to explore how practices of cooperatives and mutuals can inform the theory of mutualism and cooperation. Who better to explore these questions with than two brilliant mutualists and critical thinkers who have done just that: Sara Horowitz and Esteban Kelly.
Sara Horowitz founded a nonprofit in 1995, Working Today, which grew into the Freelancers Union, headquartered in New York City, that provides support, resources, and benefits, including insurance policies, for freelance workers. Building on that experience, Sara Horowitz has continued to organize forms of mutual support, founding another insurance start-up for independent workers, and has developed a theory of “mutualism” that she spells out in her new book Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up (Random House, 2021).
Esteban Kelly is a founding board member of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network and the executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, having been at the heart of the cooperative movement in this country for years. He co-founded and is a worker-owner of AORTA (Anti-Oppression Resource & Training Alliance), a worker co-op that builds capacity for social justice movements and projects through intersectional training, consulting and facilitation. Building on those foundational practices, Esteban Kelly spells out his vision for a democratic solidarity economy in writings including Future Horizons: Visions toward Democratizing Our Economy.
In her book, Mutualism, Horowitz develops what she calls three “rules of mutualism”[i]: the first is that mutualist organizations exist “to solve a social problem for a community”[ii] and in that sense are intended to serve the community and not to make a profit. The second is that mutualist organizations have to be able to support themselves financially by means of an “independent, sustainable economic mechanism.”[iii] The third is that mutualist organizations must be oriented toward future generations and have resilience to operate with “a long-term focus.”[iv] On the basis of those principles of mutualism, Horowitz sets forth a robust vision of a mutualist future that includes religious organizations, mutual aid societies, cooperatives of all types, and labor organizations.[v]
In his writings, Esteban Kelly pushes us to reimagine the political economy entirely—and our relation to work and property. As Melissa Hoover and Esteban Kelly write, this is a future where, in tandem with the racial justice uprisings of the summer of 2020 and the looming threat of climate crisis, we
more fundamentally reckon with ourselves and our relationships to land and work. This leads to a watershed of abolitionist modalities—land back, reparations, transformative justice, worker power, community ownership, social housing, just transitions, renewed global solidarity—which we use to step through the portal. While these practices start in the cracks and margins, as crises intensify and people need the answers to how they and their communities are going to survive, they blossom into genuine and necessary alternatives.[vi]
Both Horowitz and Kelly draw on models from around the world. Horowitz writes movingly about her visit to the Emilia-Romagna province in northern Italy near Bologna, which is a hub of cooperative networks, with thousands of interrelated cooperatives of all kinds, including consumer, worker, agricultural, and housing cooperatives.[vii] Melissa Hoover and Esteban Kelly also return to Northern Italy’s Reggio Emilia, as a model for innovative educational practices, as well as “cooperative ‘guilds’ of freelancers in Belgium and France,” women’s collective self-employment associations in India, and the worker cooperatives in Argentina and Spain.[viii] These formations—which we find throughout the world and across historical periods—form the theoretical foundations of their work on mutualist and cooperativist theory and practice.
Their writings raise important questions about the role of capital and capitalism, issues of race and capitalism, and many more. There is room for productive debate on many of these questions. Sara Horowitz sees a role for what she calls “patient” capital markets and, in her book Mutualism, argues for a reformulation of long-term, supportive capital investment in mutual organizations.[ix] Others, including myself, argue for a transition away from notions of capital investment toward a different economic model. That was, at least, what I was proposing in For Coöperation and the Abolition of Capital. Or, How to Get Beyond Our Extractive Punitive Society and Achieve a Just Society (2020 draft online).[x]
Similarly, the debate over racial inequality and racial capitalism can point in different directions. On the question of racial capitalism, Esteban Kelly refers us to an important article by Francisco Pérez, “How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism,” in the Non-Profit Quarterly (April 27, 2022).[xi] The article proposes, on the one hand, a socialist alternative to present-day capitalism, through the voice of Fred Hampton: “We’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.” The article also proposes a solidarity economy built on cooperative enterprises: “an alternative approach to racial equality [is] founded on collective ownership and democratic management of businesses and housing…. Now grouped under the banner of the ‘solidarity economy,’ these initiatives promised a more egalitarian society by directly challenging capital’s concentrated ownership.”[xii] One important question this raises is the exact relationship between mutualism and socialism.
These are some of the many questions that we will address at this seminar on the praxis and theory of mutualism.
Welcome to Utopia 5/13!
Notes
[i] Sara Horowitz, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up (New York: Random House, 2021)., 66 et seq.
[ii] Horowitz, Mutualism, 67.
[iii] Horowitz, Mutualism, 70.
[iv] Horowitz, Mutualism, 72.
[v] Horowitz, Mutualism, 76-85.
[vi] Melissa Hoover and Esteban Kelly, “Future Horizons: Visions toward Democratizing Our Economy,” Non-Profit Quarterly, July 27, 2022, at https://nonprofitquarterly.org/future-horizons-visions-toward-democratizing-our-economy/
[vii] Horowitz, Mutualism, 109.
[viii] Hoover and Kelly, Future Horizons, at https://nonprofitquarterly.org/future-horizons-visions-toward-democratizing-our-economy/
[ix] Horowitz, Mutualism, 194-207.
[x] Harcourt, Bernard E. 2018. For Coöperation and the Abolition of Capital. Or, How to Get Beyond Our Extractive Punitive Society and Achieve a Just Society. New York: Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Open Review Edition: First draft dated September 1, 2020. Available at http://harcourt.cooperation.law.columbia.edu/
[xi] Francisco Pérez, “How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism,” Non-Profit Quarterly, April 27, 2022, at https://nonprofitquarterly.org/how-do-we-build-black-wealth-understanding-the-limits-of-black-capitalism/
[xii] Pérez, “How Do We Build Black Wealth?”