The end of the cooperative model (as we knew it): Commoning and co-becoming in two Nicaraguan cooperatives

Introduction

The cooperative model has played an outsized role in postcapitalist imaginaries of development and social change. Over the past 200 years, scholars and activists alike have suspected that the road to socialism runs through institutionalized cooperation (Gramsci, 1919–1920[1954]; Lenin, 1923; see also Jossa, 2014). Others have detected in cooperatives the seeds of a political and economic subject yet to come, whose reasonings will be guided by principles of mutualism rather than narrow self-interest (Byrne and Healy, 2006; Kropotkin, 1892 [1989]; Marshall, 2010). At the very least, the multiplication of cooperative organizations, from the eco-social formations of fisheries and nature preserves to the immense resources of the labor commons that persist in traditional and communal labor management, will serve as an institutional bulwark against the progressive enclosure of the commons (De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2010; Vollan and Ostrom, 2010).

Actually existing cooperatives tell other stories (e.g. Harnecker, 2012; Nash et al., 1976; Vásquez-León et al., 2017). These are stories about how cooperatives are assembled and re-assembled from bundles of socioecological relations, how they enroll myriad actors and marshal diverse resources to their cause, and how they live and die according to no single, overarching logic. These are stories in which something new is produced. If there is still more to be said about cooperatives and cooperativism, then, it is because the discussion has too long been tied to a given model. Just as it has become evident that capitalism is no monolith—that it is heterogeneous, contradictory, incomplete, and yet generative (Bear et al., 2015; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Tsing, 2015)—the time has come to rethink cooperatives.

In this article, we draw together three distinct but complementary theoretical literatures in order to explore the plurality and generativity of actual-existing cooperativisms. First, inquiring into patterns of commoning illustrates the limitations of institutional approaches to the commons and calls attention to the subjects, practices, dispositions, and socioecological relations and processes by which actually existing commons take shape (Bresnihan, 2016; Eizenberg, 2012; Singh, 2017). Cooperatives must be understood as sites where commoning happens, where labor performed generates new socioecological configurations, or even a “commonwealth” (Bollier and Helfrich, 2014, 2015; De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2010). Second, engaging feminist theories of diverse economies serves to challenge narrowly capitalocentric frameworks while also shedding light on the diversity of economic subjects, enterprises, and organizations that may shape the commoning process (Gibson-Graham, 1996, 2006; Roelvink et al., 2015). Here again, cooperatives do not come pre-assembled, but emerge from dynamic and indeterminate spaces of political–ethical interaction, decision, and debate (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 101). Third, critically engaging with the discourse of development helps to rethink the relationship between policy and practice, emphasizing the hierarchical structures of power and authority through which “projects” come into being (Escobar, 2011, 2008; Mosse, 2005). If the cooperative model has ever existed, we argue, it is only because such a thing has been actively disentangled from the broader field of relations that constitutes commoning and cooperating.

At the intersection of these theoretical approaches, the image of the cooperative model gives way to something different—particular cooperatives that are constantly evolving, adapting, diversifying, and generating new logics, forms, and subjects. In advancing this perspective, we agree that cooperatives, like commons, take shape according to certain “paradigms that combine a distinct community with a set of social practices, values, and norms that are used to manage a resource” (Bollier, 2014: 15). While it is true that both reflect an integrated whole that includes “a resource + a community + a set of social protocols” (Bollier, 2014), the relationship between them, we argue, is one multiplication, rather than addition. That is, cooperating, like commoning, involves an ongoing and emergent process of mutual transformation—relations, practices, subjectivities, and resources—and of generating new ideas regarding cooperatives, the commons, and the economy in general. Each iteration of cooperativism may therefore carve out space for new and dynamic articulations between policies and practices, communities and their resources, and forms of governance and intersubjective processes of co-becoming that may in turn multiply the possibilities for their future development.

Our findings come from a comparison of two cooperatives in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua’s most densely populated city, where we have each worked for more than a decade as ethnographers, collaborators, advocates, and colleagues. These cooperatives originated from similar blueprints, or at least a common legal framework, but they developed in very different ways. In the first case, based on long-term ethnographic research conducted by Josh between 2005 and 2014, the women of The Fair Trade Zone rejected the principle of open-membership, claiming that the cooperative was “like their child” and that no new recruit could match their embodied contributions or become a worker-owner of equivalent standing “in flesh and bone” (en carne y hueso). Here, blood, sweat, labor, kinship, and value mingle to transform a commons, while concepts like social capital “cut the network” (Strathern, 1996) by producing membership in accordance with the cooperative model. In the second case, based on ethnographic research conducted by both Josh and Alex between 2016 and 2019, members of Ciudad Sandino’s first recycling cooperative defied accepted policies for rules-in-use and elected to maintain a flexible and fluid membership. Although this decision invited critiques of disorganization, a perennial issue for in/formal sector recyclers, these cooperators defended the complex organizational structure of their organization, which they referred to as their hormiguero (ant-hill), while also seeking other ways to secure their collective legibility, legitimacy, and distinctiveness within the social and political environment of Ciudad Sandino.

Taken together, these case studies illustrate the importance of rethinking cooperatives, as well as other commons formations, par le milieu, “through the middle” or “with the surroundings” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 21; Stengers, 2005: 187). Minimally, this means approaching cooperativism with no expectation of disentangling them from specific relationships and specific discussions and debates, and with no ideal horizon for its development, aside from those that actually emerge from those particular discussions and debates. No cooperative is “like any other,” in other words, although generic equivalences—including the cooperative model itself—are certainly an effect of capitalocentric discourses that pit a diversity of capitalist forms against their anti-capitalist antagonists. But thinking “with the surroundings” also means rethinking research about cooperatives, which could become much more than the study of a model and its implementation. Instead, we expect that research on cooperatives will participate in a conversation in which diverse practices of commoning and cooperating—the assembly and reassembly of socioecological relations that simultaneously give rise to collective forms, reproduce them, or transform the conditions of their ongoing development—come into relation with those many forces that have historically militated against economic alternatives. We do not know what practices of commoning and cooperating will become, although we have hope for a conversation about commons and cooperatives that recognizes the diversity of possible trajectories for cooperative development, including still more equitable and inclusive economic forms that have yet to emerge.

The concept of “development” itself, it is worth noting, emerged in the mid-20th century from a discursive field shaped by biological metaphors that compared social transformation to the growth of a living organism, a structure of thought in which “the final stage is already given at the beginning” (Esteva, 2010: 3–4; Rist, 2014: 27). But as evolutionary biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin write, “An organism does not compute itself from its DNA, [it] is the consequence of a historical process that goes on from the moment of conception until the moment of death” (1985: 89). Cooperatives, for their part, germinate from the seeds of “being-in-common” (Nancy, 1991), even as that process of germination also reshapes the terrain for forms of commoning and cooperating yet to come. Where their trajectories will take them nobody can say, because they take shape not according to general rules but through specific patterns of commoning and co-becoming. Cooperatives, like all commons, are active and living processes that defy rigid and reductionist models. The analytical task at hand is not merely to evaluate a given model, but to understand how exactly these collectivist assemblages emerge, why they come apart, and under what conditions new cooperative forms—new subjects, new practices, and new organizations—are produced.

Myth, model, and spirit

“Cooperation” is an expansive concept. It emerged from the intellectual habitat of early industrial work practices and the problem of coordinating increasingly complex socioeconomic groups and their activities (Holyoake, 1906). It gained purchase in nineteenth century social and evolutionary thought as a metaphorical counterpoint to the ideological predominance of natural selection, promoted by Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer, among others, and to explain the inherent mutualism appearing in nature (Gardner and Foster, 2008). When it then migrated back into the world of work, it was as if accounts of nature—relationships between plants and pollinators, not merely predators and prey—could provide the political basis for the established division of labor as well as for anti-capitalist movements (Kropotkin, 1892 [1989]; see also Lindenfors, 2017; Nowak, 2006). ¹ That is the point where we pick up the story of the cooperative movement, and its shifting forms and organizational practices.

The story of the cooperative movement—admittedly in a very limited sense, for as we will show, there are many histories yet to be recounted—is often told as if it emerged from the experiences of European industrialization, the subjection of work to market logics, and popular resistance to the encroachment of capitalism itself (Birchall, 1997: 201; Hobsbawm, 1964; Thompson, 1991). In that political and intellectual context, early cooperative theorists were self-described utopian socialists who believed that an alternative to the industrial society was both possible and desirable, and who pursued designs for realizing those possibilities. Charles Fourier believed that the model of the “phalanx,” an intentional collective built upon mutual concern, could transform the very practice of work and liberate human passions for self-realization (cf. Marcuse, 1969). Robert Owen promoted experimental socialistic communities called “villages of co-operation,” where collective self-government could lead to economic self-sufficiency. Even Karl Marx viewed cooperatives as a minor victory for “living labor” against capital, furnishing proof that the capitalist is superfluous to production, although he also feared that producer cooperatives could become “their own capitalist” without actually challenging the underlying structures of the commodity society (Marx, 1894 [1961]: 511).

Perhaps the most canonical of these cooperative experiments is the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, an alliance of Owenite activists and weavers, dislocated by the mechanization of their trade, who started a consumer cooperative on Toad Lane in Lancashire, England in 1844, as the basis for what would become the basis for larger-scale agricultural and industrial cooperative production. ² The history of Rochdale, on the one hand, and its mythology, on the other, are distinct lines of inquiry. The history illuminates the particular social and historical conditions of commoning, motivated by socialist idealism and practical need in the context of industrialization and automation (Fairbairn, 1994: 4). The mythology is equally important to understand because a certain imagination of the Rochdale principles is now widely considered to have provided the foundation for the modern cooperative movement (Walton, 1997). Those principles are:

Voluntary and Open Membership: Rights/responsibilities of membership are accorded without gender, social, racial, political, or religious prejudice.

Notably, many of the principles listed above were not part of the founding charter of the Rochdale cooperative. In the first charter, there was no mention of cooperative education, commitment to cooperation among cooperatives, or explicit statement of democratic control. Nor was there a notion of the cooperative’s political and religious neutrality. (In fact, the charter was written to be acceptable to the Registrar of Friendly Societies, because only under the Friendly Societies Act could the cooperative gain legal status.) And the principle of patronage refunds—how and why cooperators should expect to receive dividends, and what should instead go to education or capital reserves—was revised at least five times in the cooperative’s first 20 years.

In other words, the above principles, though attributed to Rochdale and memorialized in the Rochdale Pioneers Museum, do not codify some original and essential spirit of cooperativism, though they are often recruited to do so (Harnecker, 2012: 32; Williams, 2012). Rather, they took shape through decades of dialogue within Rochdale, as cooperators reflected on their own practices of commoning, and in tandem with many other cooperative experiments in Europe, North America, and beyond. Consequently, Rochdale’s own experiences were never meant to be taken as blueprints for cooperatives to come. Instead, as historian of the cooperative movement Brett Fairbairn describes it, the cooperative experiment is “a complex, interwoven tradition that is never complete, but is rediscovered or re-constructed by each generation of co-operators” (1994: 26).

How Rochdale came to have such currency beyond England is yet another question. For supporters like the French sociologist Marcel Mauss, who looked upon the Rochdale experiment as nothing less than revolutionary, cooperatives were like cells: Where they sprung up, they would federate and begin the process of forming larger social organisms (Fournier, 1994: 205; Hart, 2006). Indeed, at the turn of the 20th century, Rochdale held powerful sway over the development of cooperative movements in France, Italy, and Norway, where traditions of cooperativism were already well-established (Earle, 1986: 11–17; Furlough, 1991: 47–49; Grimley, 1950). Likewise, in Germany, Finland, Denmark, Canada, and the United States, Rochdale provided the inspiration for new movements (Aschhoff and Henningsen, 1996; Odhe, 1931: 26–27; MacPherson, 1979; Sekerak and Danforth, 1980: 35; Smith-Gordon and O’Brien, 1919: 39; Wieting, 1952: 7). And in planned economies—Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Castro’s Cuba, and Sandinista Nicaragua, among many others—cooperativism maintained its own cooperative traditions, rooted in political principles of solidarity, among other concepts, while also shaping the terms of an emerging global movement. Members of the old Rochdale guard doubted that state-owned and managed projects could meet the criteria of autonomy, self-management, and political neutrality. For example, Soviet delegates—who represented about 43 percent of International Cooperative Alliance’s (ICA) income—tended to read principles of “equal shares” and “patronage refunds” as residually capitalist, and therefore antithetical to the goal of generating of socialist subjectivities (Watkins, 1970: 170). Consequently, the conversation that started with an articulation of the Rochdale principles in 1844 culminated in the formation of the ICA in 1895. Those principles were re-codified—in 1910, 1934, 1937, 1963, 1966, 1986, and then again 1995—to reflect the different experiences and demands of cooperating in different historical contexts. Notably, at each stage, those revisions were conceptualized as efforts not only to defend cooperative but also to replicate a core set of cooperative logics, organizational structures, and successes (ICA, 2019; Watkins, 1986: 19).

The ICA model did not replicate Rochdale—not exactly at least—but it certainly shaped conversations about cooperative development through the 20th century. The wide range of projects that eventually came under the heading of ICA illustrates that point. Farmers seeking to collectivize in the United States and Canada, for example, initially had their own beef with the Rochdale principles. They believed it was a poor model for farmers, who wanted to coordinate marketing and distribution, not consumption or production, and who thought that the trade union model would give them more political clout in the face of an emerging, monopolistic agricultural capitalism (Birchall, 1997: 192; Fairbairn, 1994: 38). Mounting economic pressures on the North American farming sector eventually compelled farmers to see themselves as part of a global movement. Meanwhile, Latin American cooperatives were shaped simultaneously by continued influence of European models, their North American variations, Marxist-inspired Soviet models, and myriad other endogenous traditions of commoning and cooperating (Bajo et al., 2017; Piekielek and Finan, 2017; Silva and Dávila, 2002). The complexity of those political influences is also why cooperativism in Latin America is generally understood to be a rather flexible concept, subject to extensive political mobilization and co-optation (Fals Borda, 1971; Vásquez-León and Burke, 2017). In the end, the ICA’s concessions are what brought many of these other cooperators into the fold, generating in turn the appearance of a single movement. For the ICA, however, no longer could the original Rochdale principles serve as the sole criteria for determining what was or was not a cooperative. Rather, it was the spirit of Rochdale that came to matter more, making cooperativism a question of degree and allowing for discussion of greater or lesser adherence to cooperative ideals (Fairbairn, 1994: 49). Hence, in the Basque region of Spain, the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation—which has the size and organizational structure of a multinational corporation, and even outsources production in the global South—carries the banner of the ICA and Rochdale (ICA, 2011; see also Gabilondo et al., 2013; Kasmir, 1996). At the same time, the ICA is still working to align cooperative experiments with explicitly political goals—e.g. in Cuba, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—with its own mission (DuRand, 2017; ICA, 2012). ³

Rochdale contains no secret code awaiting discovery. It should be understood as its own historical formation, one that, despite its historical particularity, became a symbol and myth that was actively interpreted and reinterpreted according to the needs and conditions of the time. As Fairbairn summarizes, “for over a hundred years, this quest to find the right or true principles of co-operation has been cast as a search for the ‘Rochdale’ principles” (1994: 24). Whether as myth, model, or spirit—and like any diagram or map—the cooperative model should be understood as an ongoing project that (partly) enrolls an ever-expanding network of actors with divergent needs, practices, and goals, sometimes also producing something new (c.f. Mosse, 2005: 8). ⁴ At the same time, there are still more possibilities for commoning and cooperating than those dreamt of in the philosophies of Rochdale.

Commoning and the new cooperativism

As Marcelo Vieta (2010) argues, the term “new cooperativism” is meant to encompass the myriad modes of commoning and cooperating that are currently underway around the world with various degrees of formality and informality. Generally speaking, these modes are beholden neither to institutionalized cooperative movements nor to institutionalized conceptions of the commons as common pool resources (Linebaugh, 2008: 279; Vollan and Ostrom, 2010). Rather, the projects start with commoning as the first premise of cooperating, by engaging the arts of collective association and co-becoming in response to conditions of crisis and emerging social and economic need (de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford, 2010). At the same time, they tend to prefigure postcapitalist imaginaries for reorganizing and restructuring the intersubjective relations of everyday life (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Vieta, 2010: 2). The new cooperativism thus raises the question of how different patterns of commoning and cooperating generate new subjects and terrains of practice (Federici, 2014: 228–229; Gambina and Roffinelli, 2013).

In The First International, Marx (1867) hints at the transformative potential of cooperatives, “these great social experiments”. Unlike slave labor, serf labor, or hired labor, he says, “associated labor” portends a laboring subject “with a willing hand, a ready mind, and joyous heart.” The cooperative subject he later depicts is, in many ways, the inverse of the alienated one. By practicing self-organization and self-management through cooperative production, workers come to form a “single productive body” that in turn stimulates their capacities as “social animals” (Marx, 1867 [1996]: 326). For Che Guevara (1977), similarly, who studied the Soviet kolkhozy model in some depth, the socialist project depended in large part upon developing a collective conciencia (consciousness or conscience) and thus a critical mass of “cultured cooperativists”. And in Nicaragua, comandante Tomás Borge (1985) saw cooperatives as a catalyst for a Sandinista movement vision of “a new man, new woman, new society,” namely, a socialist subject who is selfless, hard-working, gender-blind, incorruptible, non-materialist, and anti-imperialist.

Coursing through each of these projects is the prospect of autogestión—literally, “self-management,” but more conceptually, the potential of a group of people to become something other than what they are, and to do so, moreover, on their own terms (Peixoto de Albuquerque, 2004; Vieta, 2016). The term refers to the process of liberating one’s subjectivity from the hegemonic structures of capitalist wage labor while also prefiguring a postcapitalist future. Yet, prefiguration, the suggestion that a world of the future is evident in present means, is too simple an account of how cooperatives ultimately take shape. Unlike in development projects, the end is not always visible at the beginning in the formation of cooperatives. As cooperative subjects fashion themselves, they may also come to reimagine themselves and their shared futures.

If the new cooperativism, then, refers to an ongoing project of cultivating a certain “quality of relations” (Federici, 2014: 228; see also Bollier and Helfrich, 2014, 2015; Singh, 2017), cooperatives themselves can be understood as lively and emergent assemblages of common and uncommon elements, an unfolding nexus of relations human and nonhuman agents that are continually shaped and reshaped by the particular interactions and political-ethical actions of those who constitute them (c.f. Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017; Escobar, 2015; Gibson-Graham et al., 2016). Here, there is no “explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules” (Massumi, 2002: 27). Cooperatives are more generative processes, and ethnography is well positioned to chart how they actually take shape.

Sweat and blood: Making kin in The Fair Trade Zone

At first glance, it might seem that The Fair Trade Zone—a small women’s sewing cooperative located on the outskirts of Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua—was the collaborative effort of a North Carolina-based development NGO called the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) and a Michigan-based ethical clothing retailer called Clean Clothes (Fisher, 2013). The former endeavored to create an engine for sustainable development in the community, where they had permanently relocated seven years prior. The latter was in search of an elusive labor market that would simultaneously observe the high standards attendant to their particular niche, but that was also located outside of the US, where labor costs had become prohibitively expensive. Together, they devised a cooperative production model based upon the examples of Mondragón and the ICA’s Rochdale principles. The model was consistent with their joint aspirations of building a vertically integrated, fair-trade certified garment production chain. CSD and Clean Clothes framed this partnership as a “three-legged stool”. The third of those legs—a labor force composed of future cooperative members recruited from the local community—was but a theoretical presence in these initial stages.

In designing this project, CSD quickly realized that the Mondragón model had several shortcomings when translated into the context of the developing world. Although Spanish cooperators might come well equipped, financially speaking, to contribute the “buy-in” required to join the cooperative system—a process designed to simultaneously finance their projects and provide a process for formalizing membership—poor and working-class Nicaraguans had no such access to capital, aside from their ability to work. So, within the framework established by Nicaraguan cooperative law, CSD modified the Mondragón model to allow in-kind contributions of social capital in the form of “sweat equity,” in their terminology, referring to the labor that future members would perform in the actual construction of the sewing cooperative.

Twelve women from Ciudad Sandino performed a substantial part of that labor. A scant two years after losing their homes and livelihoods to Hurricane Mitch in 1998, these women worked without immediate remuneration for 20 hours a week, with only a vague promise from a foreign NGO that they would become the cooperative’s proprietors. Of course, numbers are deceiving, here, and they disguise the actual intersubjective processes implied by autogestión. Perhaps it would be better to say that their struggle—at once physical, social, intellectual, and emotional—was life-changing. “Sweat,” the central idiom for that struggle, came to have multiple meanings. For the NGO, sweat was a way of counting the labor contributed in numerical terms, as hours and then as money, according to the standard rate for wage-labor in Nicaragua at the time. For these women, however, sweat was embodied. As burgeoning cooperative members, they sweated to build the social and material infrastructure of their cooperative, from its foundation and walls to its organizational structure. As primary breadwinners, moreover, they sweated to provision their families socially, emotionally, and financially. And as stakeholders in an international development project, they also sweated over the prospect of laboring without pay for nearly two years; of taking time and energy away from addressing immediate needs; and of finding their way to trusting, or at least working with, their foreign partners.

In other words, sweat became a practice of commoning, an emergent and collective transformation of the very relations, practices, and subjectivities involved. In the Fair Trade Zone, these practices were at once material and immaterial, comprising the concrete labor that transformed a shared physical space and economic infrastructure as well as the more intangible, but no less generative, forms of emotional labor and carework that transformed workers’ social and material lives. The early work of building the cooperative—of laying the foundation, erecting the walls, and figuring out a fair division of labor—was therefore charged with a certain prefigurative politics, though certainly not in any definitive sense. These women understood their work not as “investing” in a future, but as an active process of reimagining and building that future.

Through a certain approach to commoning, that of “sweating” to build their cooperative, these women also refashioned themselves. They became heads of household, community leaders, and cooperative subjects—not in the Borge model of a “new man,” but rather more unruly capacity of gendered actors (see Fisher, 2018). They became cooperative agents capable of redefining what it means to cooperate, or to be part of a cooperative. Once strangers, these women came to understand their bonds with one another as stronger than those of formal membership. Indeed, they came to think of one another as kin. Kin is an expansive concept in Latin America, extending from the relationships that form the nuclear and extended families, into networks of compadrazgo (godparenthood), to concepts of la raza, and beyond (de la Cadena, 2000). A sufficient discussion of Latin American kinship systems is beyond the present scope, but in The Fair Trade Zone, as elsewhere, the kinship (parentesco) that came to exist between these women was not inherited but made. They shared household resources when others were in need. They collaborated on various projects to make ends meet, including planting small community gardens of herbs and vegetables (huertos) on the land where their factory would be. Working relationships turned into close friendships, and a spirit of solidarity, care, and shared fate extended well beyond the workplace into every aspect of their daily lives. Although working the cooperative became a source of tension at home for some, interrupting domestic routines and provoking conflicts, fellow cooperative members stepped in—as “sisters” (hermanas), and with all the complexities that entails—to support the others socially, economically, psychologically, and otherwise.

Josh first noted the recurring reference to kinship in a relatively early stage of his ethnographic research, when the cooperative was but a few years old. During a life history interview in 2005, Dora alluded to those connections she felt with her fellow members, especially when it came to deciding whether or not to leave her husband for the cooperative: “My husband said to me, ‘Look, this is never going to amount to anything, you’re crazy’… I left because I said that I’m going to see about a future for my children. This is what I was trying to do with the cooperative, make a future for my children.” Those references continued on daily basis during Josh’s fieldwork with the Fair Trade Zone in 2007 and 2008, until he finally asked about those lazos de parentesco (ties of kinship) during a focus group interview that included all of the founding members of the cooperative. Andrea smiled and replied, as if explaining something to a child:

We know the irony of calling ourselves sisters. There are those who are related by blood, that have at least one parent in common. And there are those who choose to become related to one another. Here in Nicaragua, the Law does not allow people who are related by blood to join a cooperative together. That would be incest! [Laughing]. What we mean to say when we call each other kin is that we chose to become sisters to one another, and we care for each other as sisters because of the way we work together.

Of course, the process of making kin in the cooperative was not without its own politics. These women negotiated interpersonal differences, disagreements of principle, and struggled over the reins of power in the cooperative. Yet that participation was also the provenance of profound personal and social change. Those who were once the most timid became the most vocal. Those whose instincts told them to take charge learned, eventually, to listen and follow. And so they built their cooperative—not merely the factory that would become their own, but also the evolving social practices that made them “a cooperative in spirit” (una cooperativa de espiritu). The precise details of the rather intense process are also beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that, by 2004, aided by CSD and Clean Clothes, the Fair Trade Zone became the first worker-owned zona franca, or free trade zone, in the world, prompting a special segment on CNN International. In 2008, it struck a lucrative deal with Whole Foods Market to sell its products nationwide in the US. By early 2014, however, things had changed. The Fair Trade Zone turned against the fair trade system, deriding it as “exploitation”. Over the coming months and years, they cut whatever ties they could with CSD and Clean Clothes, dropped out of the fair-trade certification project, and elected to go their own way. In justifying their surprising decision, they claimed that they never desired to be rich, only the autogestión (as they put it) to pursue “dignified work” (trabajo digno).

Although staff at CSD and Clean Clothes read this decision as a lack of social consciousness and work ethic, the claim could not be further from the truth. In building their cooperative and producing fair trade goods, the women of the Fair Trade Zone refashioned themselves as mothers, leaders, and dignified beings (Fisher, 2018). Likewise, in the process of becoming common subjects—or figurative kin—they also built a forum for realizing their intrinsic worth, and for creating new possibilities to assemble their collective lives. “Making kin,” as Kath Weston (1997) and others have pointed out, is a process of inventively connecting with others (see also Haraway, 2016). It is a process of co-becoming that extends the scope of commoning well beyond the establishment of common pool resources to entangle humans with other humans and nonhumans in new ways. In the Fair Trade Zone, building a cooperative, fashioning clothes, and making kin all went hand in hand. As Dora summarized, only cooperative members experienced “in flesh and bone” (en carne y hueso) those deprivations and sacrifices that were necessary to “give birth to” (parir) the cooperative. The comparison between commoning and childbirth is telling. By pooling their sweat and blood—exertions collectively termed la obra madre, or “motherwork”—they transformed their surroundings and themselves.

Meanwhile, sweat (sudor) was beset with equivocation. “Equivocations,” as Blaser and de la Cadena (2017, citing Viveiros de Castro 2004) explain, are those moments of failed understanding that occur when interlocutors use the same term but do not recognize that they are referring to different things. In this project, CSD was charged with the financing and organizing the project in its early stages and approached commoning in terms of “sweat equity,” believing that the framework would allow the cooperative membership to grow and thus catalyze sustainable development in the community. Counting each member’s contribution toward labor commons as 160 hours, then valuing that labor at the typical rate of 50 cents per hour, they pegged these women’s investment, as well as that of all future members, at 320 dollars. For those who founded the Fair Trade Zone, by contrast, this was an uncommon logic, and the never really understood their membership in that way. They did not merely become members, they also became family. Their cooperative became a material expression of their collective efforts. As Andrea put it, “Our blood and sweat are in this cooperative, because of what we went through … It’s like our child, [and] we are who we are, because of our lucha [struggle].”

Equivocations such as these play an important role in the constitution of the commons because they enable uncommon or divergent practices to “stand together with minimal mutual interruption” (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017: 190). And so they did in The Fair Trade Zone for nearly a decade. That was until the orders from Clean Clothes grew so large that they had to increase their productive capacity simply to keep up. At this juncture, the founding members of the cooperative elected to close their membership rather than admit those whose capital or in-kind contribution could never be considered equivalent, those who could never be considered kin, on the basis of basis of the concrete labor they had not performed to make themselves so. To meet Clean Clothes’ orders, they instead hired individuals from the community on a contracted basis. Before long these workers outnumbered members twofold. Although these men and women received pay, benefits, and treatment on par with the members—much more than they likely would have received at the dozens of neighboring maquiladoras in Ciudad Sandino—they were not accorded equal voting rights or stake in the cooperative.

The Fair Trade Zone’s strategy came under fire from both CSD and Clean Clothes for violating the widely accepted cooperative principle of “open membership” (the first of seven principles on the Rochdale list). From an ethnographic standpoint, however, the conflict was more complex than a disagreement over policy and its implementation. Policy is a practice among practices, as Mosse (2005) argues. In this case, the founding cooperative members drew not upon the logics of social capital and sweat equity that had been imposed by other members of the network—and codified in policy—but developed their own conceptions of membership from within the milieu of complex entanglements of blood, labor, kinship, and value. In that milieu, they also developed ideas about what a cooperative could and should be: it’s like a family, as countless cooperative members reported. At the same time, constructing a commons always involves some degree of enclosure, if only because to decide what can become part of the commons is also to demarcate that which will be excluded (Harvey, 2011). In this case, commoning by way of sweating can effect a kind of “cut” in the network, excluding those who were not and could not be considered kin. “Belonging marks relations based on continuities of identity,” as Strathern argues, “while property presupposes discontinuity” (1996: 531). But the obverse could also be true of The Fair Trade Zone. The continuities of identity within the membership also define that which does not belong, while treating membership as property or investment harkens a larger system of equivalences that might have allowed the cooperative to grow and expand its commons.

In The Fair Trade Zone, then, we might imagine a conflict not between policy and practice, nor even between actors with different priorities and goals. Each party in the network drew upon the idiom of sweat to mark the difference between common and uncommon, designating a boundary between that which forms the basis of belonging and that which places oneself on the outside. But these groups sought to do so through dramatically different practices of commonings. And so the story of The Fair Trade Zone is at once one of building lives-in-common and assembling different cooperatives—incommensurable ones, in the end. The Rochdale model might have started the project out but, for better or worse, something new was produced.

How ants work: Flexible membership in the Ciudad Sandino Recycling Cooperative

Not far away, in a neighboring barrio, Ciudad Sandino’s first and only recycling cooperative opened its doors in 2014, albeit with significantly less fanfare. In the years leading up to this cooperative’s debut, both Ciudad Sandino and the capital of Managua had experienced something of a waste management crisis. Underpaid municipal garbage collectors had taken to supplementing their income by gleaning the more valuable items from their trucks before depositing the remains in the local dump. In 2008, however, the situation reached a critical juncture. Networks of trash pickers who made their living sorting through discarded materials such as plastics, metal scraps, cardboard, and other items in the city dumps—open-air, largely unregulated sites referred to as “La Chureca” in both Managua and Ciudad Sandino—mobilized and protested the practice as unfairly shutting them out. When municipal garbage trucks entered on their daily routes, churequeros (as in/formal recyclers are called) bombarded them with rocks. When police were called in and attempted to drag them to jail, they set fire to makeshift barriers assembled from old car ties. In so doing, they effectively halted the waste management infrastructure for weeks, prompting a city-wide economic and public health crisis that would come to be called el churecazo, or “the fiasco in La Chureca”.

The political crisis was just beginning. A Spanish magazine called Interviú called international attention to the conflict, listing Managua’s sprawling La Chureca as one of the “Twenty Horrors of the Modern World”—third, in fact, ahead of Amazonian deforestation. National and municipal government figures responded by calling the recyclers who live and work in these dumps zopilotes, or vultures, and comparing their work to those that feed off the detritus of society. Meanwhile, recyclers attempted to wrest control of the unfolding narrative by characterizing their own work as similar to that of the hormiga (ant), emphasizing its highly social, organized, and “grassroots” nature. ⁵ As for the conflict that started it all, recyclers also cast blame on a class of alacranes, or scorpions, intermediaries (including municipal workers and other capitalist interests) who prey upon their labor (Nading and Fisher, 2018).

Ciudad Sandino was by no means insulated from these events, although the government’s response was rather different. Municipal authorities there sought support from the national government, the European Union Development Fund, and an advocacy network for informal sector recyclers called REDNICA (Red de Emprendedores Nicaraguenses del Reciclaje) to start the process of formalizing waste and recycling collection in the city. ⁶ With that support, the city built a small bodega (warehouse) for storing and sorting recyclables. It purchased two dozen tricycles, bicycles re-engineered by a local welder to include an oversized basket and an additional wheel. And they started recruiting from Ciudad Sandino’s own expansive network of informal sector recyclers to build a recycling cooperative. With these hybridized recyling-tricycles, they would make their way around the city collecting recyclables and depositing them in their warehouse, where they would be sorted for sale. By formalizing the collection of recycling, the municipal government’s reasoning went, they could head off yet another confrontation and address the various social and public health ills with which these activities are associated.

In accordance with Nicaragua’s Cooperative Laws, REDNICA then built a framework for formalizing membership through the contribution of a modest buy-in of 20 dollars. Though the nature of the work was not entirely different from what recyclers were accustomed to doing in Ciudad Sandino’s La Chureca, those who elected to join the cooperative were accorded certain rights that they had not enjoyed before. They gained access to the bodega and the tricycles, and members had equal claim to any profits derived from the income that they generated as a collective. With these rights, however, came certain responsibilities. Members had to coordinate their daily activities with fellow cooperative members, including working an established number of hours per day on certain days of the week, along predefined routes established by a democratically elected leadership.

As a matter of design, then, Ciudad Sandino’s Recycling Cooperative developed from an uneven partnership between players—an NGO, the municipal government, and member-recyclers—and served a singularly disciplinary purpose, to reorganize the sprawling networks of uncommon practices that have long constituted informal sector recycling in the city, and thus to assert control over those practices by constructing a recycling commons. In practice, the cooperative developed in a very different way. Josh worked alongside its members, both in the cooperative and along their routes, in 2017 and 2018. He was told that the workday began at 4:30 a.m., and that’s when he arrived for the first week or two. But as soon as he learned that, he also came to understand that of the cooperative’s 40 or so members, only about a dozen would show up on any given day, and many would not arrive until hours later. Each morning, moreover, there were always unfamiliar faces, because if a more lucrative opportunity happened to present itself to a member—for instance, if they had a line on a larger haul than could be collected along the day’s route—they would outsource the day’s work to family or friends who came in their stead. In sharp contrast to the schedule prominently posted on the wall inside the bodega, who showed up and when actually depended upon a number of factors, including matters of sheer mathematics but also the weather forecast. Indeed, sorting recyclables from trash in the rain is unrewarding, not to mention unpleasant.

Josh typically worked alongside Doña Yaritza, who is the vice-president of the cooperative and, as a mother of eight, was not only most likely to show up but also first to arrive, with her youngest daughter in tow. The day’s work was determined by the routes of garbage trucks. Along these routes a wealth of recyclables was readily available, mixed with trash. Our goal was to outpace the garbage trucks, which turned out to be quite difficult on the tricycle, in part because the placement of the oversized basket in the front made steering a challenge. The stakes were high, because if the municipal workers happened to pass us by, the bounty was theirs. After returning to the cooperative’s warehouse at the end of the day to deposit what we managed to collect, we usually spent the rest of the workday, which typically ended around noon or 1:00 p.m., sorting and compacting the materials for delivery to buyers and exporters in Managua. At that point, the objects we collected entered into a global market for recycled aluminum, plastic, steel, cardboard, and other primary materials.

By organizing their work this way, one could argue, these recyclers tended to disregard interpretations of rules-in-use that traditionally apply to cooperatives and other commons of this sort. Membership is flexible, and barriers to entry are rather low. Organized around the central hub of the bodega, lines of connection extend out into the city through family, friends, and numerous others. In describing the network’s complex organization, recyclers often refer to the cooperative as their hormiguero (ant-hill). The metaphor is, first and foremost, a direct reference to the original stand-off with municipal and national authorities, yet it also works on other levels. The physical space of the cooperative strikes quite a resemblance to an ant-hill. As recyclers collect paper, cardboard, cans, bottles, and broken appliances, they deposit them in towering stacks on which they climb about as they sort the stuff. Making their way through the streets of Ciudad Sandino, recyclers appear eminently productive, and oftentimes capable of carrying surprising amounts. And though outside observers often remark that these workers and their work appear quite chaotic, what they do collectively is actually rather complexly organized, highly social, and remarkably responsive to members’ changing needs. Although membership in the cooperative is indeed flexible and fluid, those characteristics are important elements of its structure. As Arturo Escobar writes of these complex formations:

Anthills, swarms, cities, and certain markets, for example, exhibit what scientists call “complex adaptive behavior”. Thousands of invisible units formed by singular cells occasionally merge into a swarm and create a broad visible form. Ant colonies endure and develop without a central planner. Medieval markets effectively link a multitude of producers and consumers through prices defined locally. In this type of situation, simple beginnings lead to complex entities without the existence of a master plan or central planner. These processes are generated from the bottom up, where the agents that work on a (local) scale produce the behaviors and forms of higher scales (i.e. the large anti-globalization demonstrations of recent years). Simple rules at one level give rise to sophistication and complexity at another level of emergence … Sometimes these systems are “adaptive”; they learn over time, and respond more effectively to the challenges of their environment (Escobar, 2005: 40, our translation).

In the collective organization of the recycling cooperative, whose members find their way through complex urban ecologies on a daily basis, one can find an analogous situation. In Rochdale, members were those who fully invested themselves, morally and socially, in the cooperative. In Ciudad Sandino, the commons was formed differently. In place of organization, we can speak of the division and organizational distribution of labor. And in place of adaptation, we might reference the creative and imaginative capacities of human beings to bring into being, through their labor, new socioecological forms. Those who perform the painstaking task (trabajo de hormiga, literally “ant-work”) of collecting recyclables do so as individuals who are part of loosely formed networks of exchange, and as members of collectives who nevertheless work semi-autonomously as individuals. In either case, these activities are complex in spatiotemporal terms, and subject to the distributed effects of that network’s regulatory functions, which may emanate from a single source of centralized authority but might also emerge from a social milieu of ethical and political norms. “We are cooperative members and entrepreneurs at the same time,” as one temporary cooperative member told Josh, “we move in and out of the cooperative when it suits us, but we always know what the rules are.”

The blurry boundary between flexibility and disorganization has presented a political challenge in recent years. With international recycling markets flagging, and without much if any capital investment from the outside, many of the cooperative’s tricycles have fallen into disrepair. This is concerning to Doña Yaritza and others not merely because of they are part of the cooperative’s infrastructure, but because those unwieldy tricycles are emblems of each recycler’s membership in the cooperative. That much became evident during an experimental ethnographic workshop that Josh and Alex conducted with leaders of the recycling cooperative in Ciudad Sandino in 2017. The president of the cooperative, Doña Marcia, approached the two of us asked if we could help repair the tricycles. When we indicated that our granting agency was unlikely to approve such an expenditure, she wondered if we could instead contribute to another of their organizational goals, to purchase T-shirts for each member of the cooperative so that they might be more readily identifiably with that cooperative and with the social good that they performed as grassroots recyclers (recicladores de base). Without some form of identification, Doña Marcia feared, they might become indistinguishable from the scavengers.

A similar conversation resurfaced two years later. In February, 2019, Doña Marcia and Doña Yaritza called a cooperative-wide meeting to address the fact that certain members of the cooperative had taken to moonlighting in La Chureca on some afternoons. The meeting began in a typical fashion for Nicaraguan cooperatives: The reading of the principles of cooperativism, inherited from Rochdale through Nicaragua’s Cooperative Law, from a hard-bound ledger. To our surprise, however, that ritual was followed by a second: the reading, with equal reverence, of another list of principles that reflected a rough translation of the first set of principles into the languages and experiences of this cooperative. This translation emphasized practices over principles. To become a member, one had to show that they could “act like a member of a group,” and not someone who is only out to pursue their own interest. To stay a member, one had to “act like a member,” that is, in the interests of the group. Other than that, all “industrious” people were welcome.

Next came the meeting’s main agenda item, a dialogue about the problem of moonlighting. The discussion was vigorous, and at various points, one of the accused stormed off only to shout his defense from a distance: “What I do in the cooperative, I do in the cooperative. What I do by myself, I do by myself.” Thirty minutes later, however, the group had come to a consensus and added a new principle to the list, each signing their names in the ledger: Although cooperative members could work on their own (i.e. in the dump), no individual cooperative member could lay claim to that which belonged to the cooperative as a whole (i.e. in the street).

Commoning in Ciudad Sandino’s Recycling Cooperative can thus be understood as an emerging process of coordinating movements, timings, and activities across diverse networks. In so doing, recyclers experience a kind of co-becoming in the sense that, through the cooperative, each develops a consciousness of the needs and the goals of the collective, even as each maintains a strong sense that they belong to that collective as individuals, if only they continue to act as such. That flexibility and fluidity is in part their strength because even as they strive to maintain their commons and to build a cooperative identity, their divergent practices may still activate larger and larger networks of labor and other resources.

Conclusion: Patterns of cooperating

If cooperatives are like cells, as Marcel Mauss imagined them to be, what he may not have anticipated is the diversity of organizational forms they may take. The two examples presented in this article suggest many possibilities. In the first case study, commoning produced cooperative members who were like kin, collectively caring for a cooperative that was “like their child,” materialized by their own sweat and blood. In the second case study, cooperativism but quickly became something different, as members built their own loosely federated, but no less organized, network of coordinated labor. Established models, most prominently those of Rochdale/ICA, certainly helped bring each of these cooperatives into being, but models did not determine their outcomes. Heeding Deleuze's (1977) admonition, we approached these two cooperatives looking for clues about the novel possibilities afforded by commoning, rather than lessons about the robustness of abstract models. To that end, we have emphasized how these cooperatives, as commons, ultimately took shape in particular milieus.

If cooperatives are not pre-given structures but unfolding, unruly, unpredictable, and oftentimes un-manageable processes of commoning and co-becoming, then research on cooperatives par le milieu might also promise something new. First, research on cooperatives can aid in the development of a language for thinking and expressing economic diversity in practices of commoning and cooperating. As incubators for diverse economies, communing and cooperating are sites where “ethical decisions can be made, power can be negotiated, and transformations forged” (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 77). The language we use should continue to dislocate cooperatives from capitalocentric imaginaries and the hegemonic effects that follow from them. In place of universalizing frameworks of social capital or “buy-in,” for instance, we might consider the actual processes of co-becoming that membership entails. In place of the dominant focus on the economic functions of cooperatives, we might also talk about their social, cultural, political, and historical effects. And instead of talking about how to put a model into practice—or better realize cooperative governance—we might consider cooperating and commoning as an emergent and transformative process of organization. Organization—a term that is etymologically related to organism as well as the organic (see Williams, 1976: 226–228)—is by definition complex and emergent, referring to an ongoing unfolding relations between parts that make many possible wholes.

Talk of organization leads to a second area of potential for cooperative research: to build a better arsenal of conceptual tools for understanding what we have called patterns of commoning. The figure of the rhizome, for example, has become a standard post-structuralist figure for thinking about the relational quality of both the material world and of emergent socio-political forms. If we focus on horizontal connections alone, however, relations tend to “run riot,” making it much harder to see how particular kinds of organizational forms take shape (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2008). Not all collective endeavors become cooperatives, of course, but even new forms cooperative organization can also enact new kinds of hierarchy, inequality, and exclusion (Burke, 2012; Stephen, 2005). Each act of commoning is also an act of uncommoning, of designating what can be held in common and what is disruptive “excess” (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2017: 186). By the same token, commoning is not a method for bringing everything into relation. Commoning is a specific mode of organization, an ethical and political act of bringing certain kinds of things into certain kinds of relation. The fact that commoning can imply forms of exclusion should not distract us from the fact that new kinds of equality and inclusion are made possible by cooperative organization. In The Fair Trade Zone, potential new members were denied entry because a group of biologically unrelated women had become kin. In Ciudad Sandino’s recycling cooperative, the division of labor was complex and difficult to coordinate because membership in the cooperative was anthill-like: centralized, but flexible and fluid. When we as researchers refuse the impulse to measure cooperative trajectories against the precepts of well-worn models, we acknowledge that we do not yet know where lines of inclusion and exclusion should be drawn, or what form cooperatives should take.

Third, we need many histories of cooperativism, including accounts of its evolution and development that are not so beholden to Anglocentric accounts of Rochdale and the ICA. The story of Rochdale is not the story of all cooperatives. We could speak of the monastic orders in Italy, and the intellectual role that contemporaries of Adam Smith or Antonio Genovesi played in the emergence of social economies and the widespread political support for cooperatives in contemporary times (Bianco, 1975; Bruni, 2000; Bruni and Sugden, 2000). We could trace another history of cooperativism through the social economies of the Black diaspora in the Americas (Hossein, 2016; Nembhard, 2014). Still other histories of cooperativism could be told through accounts of indigenous or Marxist movements in Latin America (Burke, 2010, 2012; Harnecker, 2012; Vásquez-León et al., 2017), endogenous development in sub-Saharan Africa (Holmén, 1990; Pollet, 2009), or the alternately colonial and anti-colonial politics of cooperation, including Gandhian principles of swadeshi and sarvodaya, in south Asia (Baviskar, 2019; Madan, 2007; Sinha, 2003).

We have argued that cooperatives are dynamic processes of commoning and co-becoming, in part, in order to salvage the conversation about cooperative development from overdetermination by the Rochdale myth and model. At the same time, thinking in terms of commoning and cooperating, broadly conceived, is an opportunity to do exactly what the Rochdale Pioneers did: to consider the situation and make something new. We cannot know what forms commoning and cooperating will take in the future, though we can attune ourselves to the possibilities. We might even consider ourselves as participants, among many other participants, in conversations about how to build new forms of commons and cooperatives that are more inclusive, more just, and more responsive to our times.

Highlights

Traces the historical origins of major cooperative models in use today