"At the same time, cooperativism is trapped in a myopic politics, clinging to the 2025 UN Year of Cooperatives slogan “Cooperatives Build a Better World” as if co-ops alone prefigured such a future, while sidestepping wider coalitions. That omission matters. Governments around the world bend digital policy to a United States that is itself captive to the firms building and training the dominant AI systems. Yet we continue to write as if regulation could be guided by a policymaker with the will and capacity for radical reform. Such figures are today vanishing across the globe.

What is needed is a counterpower capable of operating at the scale where tech firms now dominate: capital, infrastructure, and political access. Those capacities cannot be conjured up through elections alone. Nvidia’s market valuation now rivals that of major national economies, while Amazon and Meta each spend more on federal lobbying than most labor federations spend on organizing, ensuring regulatory frameworks are shaped long before legislators ever vote.

The popular turn to “digital sovereignty” identifies the right problem but mislocates the solution, treating the state as something that can simply be recaptured rather than as an arena already structured by concentrated private power. Reclaiming public authority thus depends on strengthening the democratic parts of the economy itself — rebuilding institutions capable of pooling capital, coordinating at scale, and exerting leverage. Cooperatives, if politicized and federated, remain one of the few tools available for doing that work."

https://jacobin.com/2026/02/socialist-co-ops-silicon-valley-tech

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