Theory and Vision · 7 min read
The future will not arrive because we are more ethical than capitalism. It will arrive only if we build forms of power that make capitalism less necessary.
This is the final post in a series that has moved through history, theory, culture, and strategy. It ends here — not with a conclusion, but with a direction. Not with an argument, but with a list of work that needs doing. The next system begins wherever people stop relating as owners and employees, masters and servants, rulers and ruled — and start building as equals.
What Eight Posts Have Been Building Toward
This series began with a simple claim: systems do not end because they are unjust. They end when new forms of power grow inside the old world.
It moved through the core relationships of economic systems, traced how capitalism grew inside feudalism, argued that the future has to be built before the crisis, examined how law follows power, looked honestly at the left’s history, argued that cooperative culture must be built alongside cooperative structure, and insisted without apology: cooperativism is not charity. It is power.
Now the series ends with the only thing that matters more than the argument: the work.
The Work Is Specific
Build Worker Cooperatives. In every sector. At every scale. In every city. Worker cooperatives that own their own enterprises, set their own wages, make their own decisions, and keep their own surplus.
Mondragon started with five workers and a paraffin heater factory. The Drivers Cooperative started with 2,500 drivers and an app. Equal Exchange started with three coworkers at a food warehouse co-op and $100,000 raised from friends. The size of the start does not determine the scale of the outcome. The commitment to democratic ownership does.
Build Consumer Cooperatives. Consumer cooperatives build the demand side of the cooperative economy. A worker cooperative with a consumer cooperative as its customer base has structural solidarity — two democratic institutions supporting each other, keeping money within the cooperative ecosystem.
Build Housing Cooperatives and Community Land Trusts. Housing is the terrain where capitalism’s extractive logic hits people most directly. Community land trusts and cooperative housing remove housing from the speculative market permanently — not for one generation but for every generation that follows.
Build Cooperative Finance. The cooperative economy needs its own circulatory system. Credit unions. Cooperative banks. Community investment funds. Mondragon built its own bank — Caja Laboral, founded in 1959 to fund and support the growing network of cooperatives. The OCFCU co-founded the Cooperative Bank of Oromia in 2005–2006, becoming its largest shareholder and giving member farmers access to loans previously unavailable to them. Cooperation Jackson is building its own cooperative financial institution as one of four pillars of its long-term vision for a Jackson-based solidarity economy. The cooperative economy cannot depend on capitalist finance. It has to build its own.
Build Mutual Aid Networks. The barter networks of Argentina. The mutual aid fridges that fed neighborhoods during the pandemic. The community health clinics of the Zapatista autonomous communities. Closer to home, groups like New Orleans DSA’s Fork & Knife Club run bimonthly food distributions that cook, package, and deliver hundreds of meals to community fridges across the city — a small-scale, ongoing version of the same principle. These are not emergency measures. They are the connective tissue of a cooperative society. Build them before the crisis. They will be needed during it.
Build Cooperative Media, Education, and Technology. The story of the cooperative economy needs to be told by the cooperative economy. Build cooperative social media. Build cooperative news. Build cooperative education platforms. Cooperative Codebase is one small piece of that work. It needs a thousand more pieces alongside it.
Build the Ability to Survive Crisis. Resilience is not an accident. It is architecture. Build cooperative institutions that are designed to survive — federated, capitalized, democratically governed, and connected to networks of mutual support that absorb shocks collectively.
Want more theory like this in your inbox?
New posts every week on cooperative economics, solidarity economy strategy, and the work of building the next system. No spam — ever.
Subscribe at solidarityecono.my →
Then Politics Becomes More Than Asking for Mercy
When Argentina’s recovered factory workers were already producing — already demonstrating that cooperative production worked — their demand for legal recognition was not a request for mercy. It was a demand backed by economic facts on the ground.
When the USFWC won the Main Street Employee Ownership Act, it was because they represented real enterprises with real worker-owners who had already demonstrated that worker ownership was viable and politically significant.
Build the economic base and politics will be reinforced, with facts on the ground.
What Cooperatives Are Not
Cooperatives are not the whole answer. They do not by themselves address every dimension of oppression — racial, gendered, colonial, ecological. The cooperative form is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the world we are trying to build.
It needs to be built alongside antiracist organizing, feminist organizing, ecological organizing, and political organizing. The cooperative movement is one current in a broader river. It is a crucial current — perhaps the most concrete and scalable current available right now. But it flows best when it flows with the others.
The Manifesto
This is what the left needs to build. Not only argue for. Not only vote for. Build.
- Worker cooperatives — in every sector, at every scale, starting now.
- Consumer cooperatives — that make the demand side of the cooperative economy as democratic as the supply side.
- Housing cooperatives and land trusts — end speculative markets permanently.
- Cooperative finance — credit unions, cooperative banks, and community investment funds.
- Mutual aid networks — the connective tissue of solidarity, built before the crisis.
- Cooperative media, education, and technology — the cultural infrastructure that reproduces cooperative values.
- Federated networks — that connect individual cooperatives into ecosystems capable of surviving shocks.
And then — political power that reflects economic power. Not asking the old system for mercy. Asserting the new system’s right to exist and grow.
Where It Begins
It begins wherever two or more people decide to own something together and govern it democratically.
It begins in a worker-owned bakery in Jackson, Mississippi. In a coffee cooperative in the Ethiopian highlands. In a driver-owned rideshare app on the streets of New York. In a community land trust in Burlington, Vermont. In an autonomous school in the Chiapas jungle. In a recovered factory in Buenos Aires. In a barter network in the ruins of an economic collapse. In a mutual aid fridge in a pandemic-emptied neighborhood.
It begins whenever people stop relating as owners and employees, masters and servants, rulers and ruled — and start building as equals.
It is already beginning. Everywhere. In a thousand forms. With a million people. Building the next world before asking to inherit this one.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014 National Book Foundation Medal acceptance speech
This is the final post in our Theory and Vision series. The argument is made. The history is told. The work remains. Join the Solidarity Economy platform and be part of building it.
Written by the Cooperative Codebase team — Aaron, Israel, and Jamie. Part of the Solidarity Economy Marketplace. Last updated: July 2026.
Comments