Sacred Headwaters #54: TINA Pt 6 - Cooperation Jackson
The Zapatistas and the Rojava revolution sprung up in circumstances that don't seem replicable in the Global North. Cooperation Jackson offers a model for revolutionary change from within.
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Issue #54: TINA Pt 6 – Cooperation Jackson
This is the sixth issue focused on challenging the concept of TINA: “there is no alternative.” Many of the other examples we’ve looked in this series have sprung up under unique circumstances: the Paris Commune emerged in the aftermath of a lost war and the end of an empire and Kurdish Rojava self-organized in a war-torn region where state authority was already crumbling. The Zapatista uprising occurred in a context more similar to that most of us live under — that of a functioning state with no power vacuum — but as a global south country on the periphery, the political environment is still different enough that it’s hard to see it as a guide for organizing in the north. It’s also worth mentioning that the power of the security and surveillance state has changed substantially in the last three decades, which may make that kind of movement much more dangerous. But the examples of alternative systems we’ve looked at in the north — like Transition Towns — don’t seem to have a a real path to change laid out.
Issue #47: TINA Pt 1 - Building Alternative Systems – Transition Towns (Feb 28th, 2022)
Issue #48: TINA Pt 2 – Catalan Integral Collective (Mar 13th, 2022)
Issue #54: TINA Pt 6 – Cooperation Jackson (Dec 15th, 2022)
Cue Cooperation Jackson, a radical movement in Mississippi focused on rekindling the Black Liberation Movement and winning a future of what they call “economic democracy and self-determination” for the classes (and races) oppressed by capitalism today.
Before I go further, I’d highly recommend reading a few earlier issues to understand the theoretical and historical context behind what Cooperation Jackson is doing. The last issue on Radical Municipalism outlines the case for localism and radically participatory democracy as a path towards overcoming capitalism. The series on race and racial capitalism (issues #15, #16, and #17) provides a background on race in the US and explores how race and racial oppression are (and have always been) fundamental components of capitalism, not accidental byproducts. Cooperation Jackson relies on that theoretical framework to make the case that Black liberation in the US (and everywhere) requires overcoming capitalism.
Cooperation Jackson was founded in 2014, though it was born out of organizing efforts in the area that have been ongoing for far longer. It is, in their own words,
an emerging vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership.
It combines almost everything this newsletter has talked about over the last few years into a program for revolutionary change from within the heart of capitalism. This includes networks of open cooperatives and tools for supporting them (similar to the Catalan Integral Collective), community land trusts, public housing, public banking, education, and sustainable infrastructure. It also includes deliberate and purposeful engagement in local electoralism, an area where it has seen significant though qualified success.
Obviously, Cooperation Jackson hasn’t overcome capitalism yet, but it represents a real and ongoing effort towards building an alternative to capitalism that will eventually confront it; a real-life approach to developing the “dual power” that Murray Bookchin described. And perhaps most notably, it’s doing this from deep within the lion’s den — the heart of the nation most responsible for the globalization of capitalism — and not shying away from critiquing every aspect of the global order that the US maintains.
Cooperation Jackson’s context is somewhat unique, both historically (as they emphasize) and in terms of racial and class demographics, but even so, I think it offers critical insight into how to plan, execute, and confederate these kinds of movements across the global north. Learning about its context should also serve as a reminder for those of us who are not subject to oppression because of our race that, like all structural problems, anti-racism can’t be achieved through individual behavioral change. It requires collective action to overcome the structures driving oppression.
In this issue, we’ll read Cooperation Jackson’s founding document, the Jackson-Kush Plan, as well as some more recent updates and some reflections on the hazards inherent in engaging in electoralism as a radical movement.
I’d also encourage you to browse Cooperation Jackson’s website and their news feed which includes more up-to-date happenings, information about how Cooperation Jackson is engaging with respect to the ongoing water crisis in the city, and updates on new publications like the just-released pamphlet, “From Crisis to Transformation: What is Just Transition? a primer.” They are also active on social media.
Build and Fight: The Program and Strategy of Cooperation Jackson (10 minutes)
Ajamu Nangwaya and Kali Akuno, Atlanta Black Star, 2017. This is an excerpt from the book Jackson Rising
More work, profoundly more, must be done to accomplish the main tasks in this regard, which are to elevate and strengthen the class-consciousness of the community, foster and cultivate new relationships of social solidarity amongst the working class, and co-construct and advance new social norms and values rooted in radical ecological and humanitarian principles. In effect, what we are aiming to do is develop a new transformative culture.
This article situates Cooperation Jackson within the broader political picture of the South and the broader efforts of the authors and other radical groups in the region. It also outlines the strategy that Cooperation Jackson is a part of — a strategy that has as its ultimate goal overcoming capitalism and implementing eco-socialism. I found two really interesting pieces in this: first, the authors argue that the majority of the South continues today to be a colony of the greater US-centered capitalist system. It is a region that capital holds at arms length and that exists, effectively, on the global periphery, despite its geographic location. The authors advocate for industrializing Mississippi as a way to break that extractive relationship, calling to mind the theoretical frameworks that came out of the global south in the post war, neocolonial period (dependency theory, etc.). They are very clear, though, that industrialization needs to be done with ecological health and sustainability as core tenets from the beginning; it’s interesting to see them identify that challenge so clearly and continues the strong parallel with global south countries and their struggles to escape the capitalist system.
The other piece I found particularly interesting was around the author’s holistic perspective of what “controlling the means of production” means and implies. It speaks to why it’s so hard for a socialist nation state to exist in the modern system: without control of “distribution, consumption, and recycling,” it’s impossible to mitigate the externalized harms that capitalism causes. Their point is that, whether at the scale of a city or a nation state, any less control than what they describe as their goal will ultimately be subject to the logics of capitalism.
The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy (40 minutes)
Kali Akuno, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement & New Afrikan People’s Organization. 2012
This document first outlines the historical context of Black radicalism in the South, arguing that the Black Liberation Movement can’t truly win without overcoming capitalism and “dismantling…the American settler colonial project,” then goes on to describe a plan for doing exactly that — from the ground up. The plan is built around three strategic areas: participatory democracy, engagement in traditional local electoralism (with some important caveats), and the construction of a “Solidarity Economy.” Akuno explains how these three pillars have the potential to work with each other to bring about revolutionary change while noting that, individually, they are prone to the risks of both cooptation and becoming a dead end. (His explanation of how the development of a “Solidarity Economy” on its own can’t overcome capitalism but can be part of a “transitional strategy” when coupled with other tools, is in some ways the point I tried to make in this newsletter’s discussion of Transition Towns).
Finally, the plan outlines how to turn theory into action, laying out four different campaigns that the organizations behind it are pursuing in their efforts to actualize the broader strategy. While each of these could be compared with initiatives around the world, what makes this plan unique is its deliberate and careful focus on the big picture and ensuring that everything they do — regardless of how small — contributes to that larger goal. The four campaigns described cover political education, transforming property relations, strengthening the working class, and seizing electoral power specifically to use it in ways that can support the other efforts. Together, they represent a holistic approach to overcoming the sovereignty of the capitalist state, one local effort at a time.
I want to highlight briefly how carefully Akuno approaches electoralism: he repeatedly notes that engaging in electoralism comes with the risk that it may legitimate the oppressive regime instead of challenging it, but argues that risk is worth taking for the value that electoral engagement can offer as a tool. That value comes in two forms: radical campaigns can “create political space,” which may be vague but can be beneficial, and radical elected officials can implement policies that support and enhance the non-electoral organizing efforts of the movement. Akuno goes into some detail on the types of policies that radical city councillors might be able to pass in on pages 15 and 16; the list is similar in some ways to the policy proposals for degrowth found in issue #7, but applied at a smaller scale.
“Electoral Pursuits Have Veered Us Away” (10 minutes)
Adam Weaver and Kali Akuno, 2018
This is an excerpt from a presentation given by Kali Akuno in 2018 with an introduction written by Adam Weaver. Chokwe Antar Lumumba was elected major in 2017; this was seen as a major victory for many of the groups involved with Cooperation Jackson. In this piece, Weaver and Akuno assess the movement’s status and the role that electoralism is playing in helping it actualize its goals. Akuno, both in his presentation here and in other writing that Weaver cites, argues that — as seems to happen all too often, and despite his cautioning against exactly this risk from the get-go — radical social movements in Jackson have fallen into the dual electoral traps of cooptation and legitimation. Weaver also notes another distinct phenomenon in the introduction: despite having “the Most Radical Mayor in America,” Jackson was, just a year after his election, being “forced to administer the very austerity they fought to oppose.” In simple terms, the city was being disciplined by capital. Today, those same capital interests are using the drinking water crisis (that had been brewing for decades) as a critical juncture:
Much of what Akuno describes seems like it would fit almost every radical that social movements help elect. And, in a comparison that I feel more connection to (we don’t get lot of radicals elected in Canada), it also describes what seems to happen when environmental non-profits engage in electoralism.
The social movement development work that got us to this point I think is gradually being eroded and then sidelined and there’s much more of an emphasis being placed now on how to sustain ourselves in office, how to build alliances that will enable more of our candidates to be able to retain themselves in office. In the wake of those compromises — and in effect that’s what they are I would argue — as you make those types of compromises you will wind up jettisoning more and more of your program.
As he tries to emphasize in this piece, electoralism can be a useful tool, but it’s a tool that comes with a trap that is all too easy to fall into.
Book Recommendation: Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, Ajamu Nangwaya and Kali Akuno
The first reading in this newsletter is an excerpt from this book. I haven’t read it so can’t add too much more, but based on the excerpt and the other readings about Cooperation Jackson, I have no doubt that this book combines a thorough analysis of the political and economic context of Jackson today with inspiring stories about and lessons learned from organizing in that context.
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