Case Cooperation Jackson, community solidarity and mutual aid

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Cooperation Jackson is a network of worker cooperatives and solidarity economy institutions, like the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust, based in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson is the Capital of Mississippi. It is over 80% Black, with the overwhelming majority of the Black population being low wage, underemployed, or unemployed workers. Cooperation Jackson has three interrelated and interconnected green cooperatives at the core of our cooperative federation. These are 1) Freedom Farms, an urban farming cooperative, 2) the Green Team, a landscaping, organic waste gathering and composting cooperative, and 3) the Community Production Cooperative, which is a small scale manufacturing production, specializing in digital fabrication.

Cooperation Jackson | CooperationJackson@gmail.com

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939 W. Capitol St., Jackson, Mississippi, United States US

Authors Vasna Ramasar with Kali Akuno
Topics Commons, Leadership, Rights, Social changeCommons, Leadership, Rights, Social change
Case Report Volume 2: "Resilience in the Face of COVID-19"
Number of participants
Photo courtesy: Cooperation Jackson

Cooperation Jackson is a network of worker cooperatives and solidarity economy institutions, like the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust, based in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson is the Capital of Mississippi. It is over 80% Black, with the overwhelming majority of the Black population being low wage, underemployed, or unemployed workers.

Cooperation Jackson has three interrelated and interconnected green cooperatives at the core of our cooperative federation. These are 1) Freedom Farms, an urban farming cooperative, 2) the Green Team, a landscaping, organic waste gathering and composting cooperative, and 3) the Community Production Cooperative, which is a small scale manufacturing production, specializing in digital fabrication.

Freedom Farms is an urban farming worker-owned cooperative, based in West Jackson. Freedom Farms currently produces on 2 acres of land in the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust, held by Cooperation Jackson. Freedom Farms specializes in organic vegetables and fruits, and is expanding into fish via aquaponics. Freedom Farm’s produce is primarily being sold in local restaurants and grocery stores and consumed locally.

The Green Team is a yard care and composting worker-owned cooperative. It focuses on gathering and processing organic yard waste into compost to keep it from the landfill and water drainage systems. It also gathers organic materials from grocery stores and restaurants and turns this organic waste into compost that is sold to gardeners, farmers and hardware and home supply stores.

The Community Production Cooperative is a small scale manufacturing cooperative. It utilizes various digital fabrication tools and techniques, including 3D printers, mill machines, etc., to produce a range of products from personal protective equipment, to toys, to t-shirts.

We are also currently developing three additional Cooperatives. 1) A recycling and composting cooperative, called Zero Waste of Jackson, 2) a hauling and trucking cooperative, called Starline Transportation Cooperative, and 3) a community grocery story, called the People’s Grocery, which will be located at the Ida B. Wells Plaza.

To address the anti-Black systems of oppression that define our context, Cooperation Jackson’s operating strategy and program is intended to accomplish four fundamental ends: 1) to place the ownership and control over the primary means of production directly in the hands of the Black working class of Jackson, 2) to build and advance the development of the ecologically regenerative forces of production in Jackson, Mississippi, 3) to democratically transform the political economy of the city of Jackson, and 4) to advance the aims and objectives of the Jackson-Kush Plan, which are to attain self-determination for people of African descent and the radical, democratic transformation of the state of Mississippi.

In response to the Trump administration’s failure to protect workers during the pandemic, Cooperation Jackson initiated the People’s Strike (Cooperation Jackson,c 2020; Madeson, 2020). The People’s Strike is “a united front of radical Black, Brown, Indigenous and allied resistance groups” (Cooperation Jackson,a 2020) who mobilized their collective labor by striking on May Day 2020, and on the first day of every month, demanding the American state and corporations to put people over profit (Cooperation Jackson,b 2020).

Among Cooperation Jackson’s list of demands are to protect all frontline workers, protect vulnerable communities such as Indigenous, Black, Latino, and Asian communities, freeze payments including rent and utilities, cancel student debt, and institute universal basic income (Cooperation Jackson,b 2020). Millions participated in the first strike on May 1, 2020, signifying the start of a critical movement whereby an unprecedented coalition of essential federal workers from Amazon, Whole Foods, FedEx, and Walmart walked out during their lunch break to demand better health and safety conditions (ReelNews, 2020).

Process that led to the community being resilient (Pre-COVID)

Cooperation Jackson is the realization of a vision decades in the making. Their roots lie deep within the struggle for democratic rights, economic justice, self-determination, particularly for Afrikan people in the Deep South, and dignity for all workers. Cooperation Jackson’s basic theory of change is centered on the position that organizing and empowering the structurally under and unemployed sectors of the working class, particularly from Black and Latino communities, to build worker organized and owned cooperatives will be a catalyst for the democratization of our economy and society overall. Cooperation Jackson has developed out of the Jackson-Kush Plan and has the starting point that the struggles have historical roots and that self-determination and economic democracy cannot be left in the hands of the capitalist state. Cooperation Jackson was thus well-placed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis since a mutual support system had already been put in place.

Cooperation Jackson operates with 13 principles that have been maintained through the pandemic:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership

2. Democratic Member Control

3. Sovereignty of Labor

4. Autonomy and Independence

5. Instrumental and Subordinated Character of Capital

6. Members’ Economic Participation

7. Universal Nature

8. Self-Management

9. Pay Solidarity

10. Internal Cooperation

11. External Cooperation

12. Education, Training and Information

13. Social Transformation

The Kuwasi Balagoon Center is the coordinating base for Cooperation Jackson, its overall operations and administrative offices. The primary function of the Balagoon Center is to host the various cooperative development activities of the organization including, community orientation meetings, general membership meetings, working group meetings, trainings and skill shares. The emerging network includes Freedom Farms Cooperative, the Green Team Landscaping Coop and the Community Production Cooperative. In addition to these cooperatives, the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust has been established with over 30 properties in the surrounding area of our Balagoon Center. Additionally there is the Dambala House division of the Community Production Center which will become the MakerSpace portion of the Center.

How resilience that was established has helped during the pandemic

Cooperation Jackson’s resilience program is based on concrete experience. More than anything, Cooperation Jackson’s program was based on the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi on August 29, 2005 and devastated nearly all of the states of the Gulf Coast region, with major damage inflicted upon the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The Hurricane and flood waters killed over 2,500 people and displaced over 2 million. However, the most heart wrenching dimension of this catastrophe was the intentional neglect of the government in its response to millions of people who were displaced and harmed by the Hurricane. As much of the world witnessed, the US government left thousands of distressed Black people to die in New Orleans in the days and weeks following the Hurricane. What the founders of Hurricane Katrina learned from this experience was that a) we could not rely upon the US government for any critical support, and b) that we are on our own. It is on the basis of this experience that we developed our “Build and Fight” program and strategy.

Photo courtesy: Cooperation Jackson

COVID crisis action

Building on this experience and program, Cooperation Jackson has employed a range of programs and tactics to meet the moment of the crisis of the pandemic over the past two years. Some of these included:

  • Mutual Aid: We started providing PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), canned goods, and water, primarily to the homeless members of our community, as these are the most vulnerable and without adequate access to health care given its fixation on profit in the US. We started these efforts in March 2020 and they continue until the present.
  • Worker Rights Defense: In addition to the launch of People’s Strike, we supported local organizing drives in our community during the height of the pandemic, including protecting the rights of migrant workers on various farms and factories in central Mississippi, and supporting the organizing campaigns of Nissan and Amazon workers in Mississippi and Alabama.
  • Rental Rights: Renters in Jackson started being targeted very early in the pandemic, despite the moratoriums that were instituted by the feds in the spring of 2020. We started engaging in various forms of renters rights education and defense work starting May 2020. We expanded this work into a formal campaign and alliance in the summer of 2020, and we started engaging in formal Rental Assistance Fairs in the fall of 2020 that lasted throughout 2021.
  • The Jackson Emergency Response and Mutual Aid Network: We started this Network in the Spring of 2021 to fully operationalize all of the crisis response work we begin in 2020. It consists of training and developing response committees on a neighborhood level throughout the city of Jackson. The work is steadily expanding as the city is confronting the effects of climate change on a more open and consistent basis.

Lessons learnt

Cooperation Jackson, through the People’s Strike, recognizes that things won’t, nor should they, go back to ‘normal’ after the pandemic, because ‘normal’ was never normal to begin with. Instead, Cooperation Jackson strives to build a socialist transition from below, “to carve an alternative, which is based upon democratizing the overall economy, deepening the democratization of society, moving towards more direct means of governance and direct participation, and building on all the various practices of the social and solidarity economy” (Global Tapestry of Alternatives; GTA, 2020).

References

Berkowitz, D. Worker Safety in Crisis: The Cost of a Weakened OSHA. National Employment Law Project, April 28, 2020.

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