Continued from previous post:
People are beginning to recognize the folly of having only one system of markets, finance, and business. Because of the 2008 downturn, however, many cooperatives are amalgamating. Many farm co-ops in particular, such as Land O'Lakes, have done so recently, even merging with conventional corporations. This is no time to let our proven alternatives be eaten up by the same old corporate model. Is there a way for alternative businesses to get big enough to protect themselves but not fall into the corporate trap? The answers might be found in South America, where a massive business revolution - invisible to most of us in the north—is well underway.
SOUTH AMERICA LEADING THE WAY
European immigrants first brought the idea of cooperative businesses to South America. It meshed well with the indigenous peoples' familiarity with collective work and resource sharing, and it received, ironically, a boost in the 1960s, when the U.S. Alliance for Progress promoted worker-owned cooperatives "in an attempt to isolate growing support for Cuban-inspired guerilla movements." Subsequent U.S. backed dictatorships did their best to dampen the enthusiasm for this model, but when the terrible economic.crash of 2001 hit Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, thousands of factories in the region closed their doors. Their managers and boards said they were too small, badly capitalized, and labor intensive to remain globally competitive and stay open.
Undeterred, the disenfranchised workers at these companies, especially in Argentina, broke into the boarded-up factories and turned them into co-ops and worker collectives. "We began to say, the buildings are here, the machines are here, and so are the workers. The only thing missing is the boss. Let's, continue to produce; and that's what we did," says Jose Abelli, cofounder of Argentina's National Movement for Recuperated Businesses and president of FACTA, the Argentine federation of self-governed worker cooperatives. "During the 1990s," says Diego Rosemberg, "in Latin America, they said that the problem of economic development was above all else the cost of labor... What the workers have discovered with this type of [cooperative] organization is that the true cost that made these businesses unviable was the cost of the owners."15 This realization spread, and people began to form new alliances in every imaginable industry. Around the same time, MST, the landless worker's movement in Brazil (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra), began to organize rural worker and producer co-ops to sell their products through agrarian reform stores. This helped support their core efforts to get land tenure reform across Brazil.
The widespread South American alliance between urban and rural workers is also seen in northern Italy and is probably the most vital component in the creation of truly green jobs. If urban workers do not support rural workers, the latter are left without political allies and are generally overwhelmed by business interests that see farm and forest landscapes as extraction and dumping sites. Because it is the rural areas that supply all cities with clean water, air, and food, seeing the two areas as completely separate, as we normally do now, undermines the efforts either area makes toward resource and eco-services sustainability.
An article on South America's co-op movement in a recent issue of Third World Resurgence points out that the cooperative movement there spans not only urban and rural but all types of work. "Each of [their] experiences is unique, shaped by the home country's diverse history." So Uruguay is best known for its housing cooperatives, which were a factor in the overthrow of a repressive Uruguayan dictatorship in the 1970s; "Argentina is known for its service cooperatives and recuperated factories; Paraguay has a rich tradition in savings and loan cooperatives; Brazil has important numbers of worker collectives and agricultural co-ops." Venezuela, has, of all things, vibrant cooperative funeral services and is now branching out into worker collectives. Less than ten years since this movement was kick-started by disaster, it's beginning to integrate production and marketing branches—the way Land O'Lakes and the Mondragon co-ops have done—but in a completely different spirit.16
Cooperatives across the continent are grouping together in small, local networks, medium-sized national ones, and cross-border international umbrella groups. An example is Justa Trama, a local network of Brazilian cooperatives, recuperated businesses, and home artisans making organic clothing. They've managed to integrate every step of their supply chain, cutting out corporate intermediaries. Univens, one of their smallest members, with twenty-six workers, produced fifty thousand bags for the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2005. The only way they could do that was to join with thirty-five other textile co-ops and similar businesses in their part of Brazil. Without corporate distribution overhead, the co-op's unity with others enabled it to get twice the price its bags would have fetched in the open market, and its client still paid less per bag than they had at other venues. Inspired, Justa Trama brought in organic cotton farmers, thread-spinners, and weavers in the rural-urban configuration that makes this movement fundamentally sustainable. Today, "Every step of the supply chain is in the hands of local producers, cooperatives, recuperated or. small businesses." Seven hundred workers are being supported by this integrated organization, producing 10 tons of organic cotton clothing a year for markets as far away as Europe. Rather than increasing the size of the individual co-ops, they've increased their ability to access markets, all without having to deal with multinational corporations or adopting their business model. Part of this growth in alternative business models is due to the unsustainable power of oil money Venezuela has helped fund the co-op movement with fairs and teaching sessions, and some commodities are being exchanged across borders, like buses produced by a cooperative in Venezuela, tied to a trade with Argentine coffee producers. There's still chaos and a lack of coordination in many places, with rural cooperatives in particular competing with each other for market access. There isn't yet the kind of state support for cooperatives that Italy's constitution has bestowed on theirs. And, just as elsewhere, many cooperatives are still tempted to adopt a corporate model as they grow bigger.
For now, however, it's no small accomplishment that across the entire region, this alternative model has enabled landless peasants and laid-off factory workers to take charge of their own livelihoods and create stable, decently paid, and, most of the time, sustainable green jobs as well. These benefits to the individual workers and their families radiate outward. Reborn factories mean reborn housing and revitalized neighborhoods; and that has enabled entire cities to recover from a devastating economic recession and to expand government services.
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WE IN NORTH AMERICA ARE BLIND AND DEAF TO THE WAY OUR ECONOMIES SHOULD BE RUN; WE HAVE THE MASSIVE HUGE COMPANIES AND THEIR CEO PEOPLE WHO WANT THE WEALTH.....WANT TO BE PART OF THE ONE PERCENT THAT HAVE THE SHARE OF THE TOP MONEY. WE ARE A SOCIETY NOW BUILT UPON PHYSICAL GREED BY THE FEW. WE SHALL BE BROUGHT DOWN AND LOOSE IT ALL; THE ETERNAL HAS SO SPOKEN, AND SO IT SHALL COME TO PASS.
Keith Hunt
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