@ntnsndr

Having a clearly defined, narrow focus means that a co-op’s members don’t have to agree on everything. They don’t have to be all alike. They just have to be able to benefit from a common activity.

big agree on the general idea that co-ops need to be focused. there's a complicated intersection here with my main point of experience in housing co-ops where when the thing that the co-op does is "provide a place to live" then you very much do need to think about what the members of the co-op are like, and so the axis of splitting must become to some degree about membership - e.g. i was in a co-op previously focused on affordable housing for students, but then that slowly drifted into "affordable housing for everyone" which is certainly a noble goal, but the difference between different factions of people who have very different needs were teh largest problem with keeping the thing going for anyone. it very nearly fell apart, providing affordable housing for nobody, but narrowly avoided that fate last i checked.

@ntnsndr why pursue co-ops if we don’t see them as prefigurative and politically associated with emancipatory projects like communism? Co-ops which are just businesses or whose goals are narrow economic interests of their members reproduce the dominant capitalist relation based on strict/quantified equivalence and instrumental rationality. We need utopian thinking and experiments, but not in the derogatory sense of the term. We need spaces where different values are expressed, alongside creating infrastructure for social movements.

As we live in capitalist societies which are totalizing, we do have to interface with the market to make a living. So I agree with the warning against purity. We must be strategic and to an extent pragmatists. But a conscious political orientation and the connection with social movements is very important to be indeed agents of emancipatory social change. These two are often in tension so it’s a very delicate balance to hit.

@ntnsndr I think of the Flores Magon brothers, who taught their kids "todo es de todos" as a straight up anarchist principle. Good points about worker self-organization and having a clear focus but it also sounds like the "pure and simple unionism" which was promoted as an alternative to the various forms of radical unionism in the late 19th and early 20th c. For cooperatives to be movement organizations, that movement character needs to be built in, not just an add-on. Earthworker in Australia is a better model than Namaste, in that respect.