Private, Cooperative, and In Between

Counting the broad concepts of private property on the one hand, communalism on the other, and the areas in between the two, there are four possible arrangements that are of concern to us within this article:

1. Privately owned business and privately owned housing.
2. Cooperatively owned business and privately owned housing.
3. Privately owned business and cooperative housing.
4. Cooperatively owned business and cooperative housing.

The first of those is the everyday capitalist society that most people in the western world currently live in. Businesses, or the means of production, are privately owned. People hire out their labor for a wage, which they partly use to purchase privately owned housing, or rent housing that is privately owned by someone else. This is a pretty straight forward concept that most people are very familiar with and spend most of their lives navigating. We don’t need to elaborate much further on it here.

The last of those categories would be intentional communities. Specifically income sharing communities, like those in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC), which are economically self-supporting. In these, the community businesses are cooperatively owned and managed, while the housing arrangements are likewise cooperatively owned. Except for personal possessions, there is no (or little) private property. The means of production, the land, and the infrastructure are all cooperatively owned and managed by the membership as a whole. Business and living arrangements are both self-contained within the communal organization. This represents the optimal arrangement by modern Utopian Socialist standards. This is the goal that all of their community building projects are ultimately geared toward. But it is not necessary to get there all in one step. The second and third categories listed above are at least partially allied with Utopian Socialist communalism and are generally supportive of it. They could also represent halfway steps toward the fully cooperative arrangement of category four. We’ll examine each of them in greater detail below.

The second category would represent worker cooperatives where the members maintain privately owned housing. The most famous example of this would be the Mondragon Cooperatives of Spain. This is a federation of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain that employs some 75,000 workers. Another example would be the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, Ohio. In both of these examples, the workers cooperatively own their businesses, but they all maintain private housing in the wider housing market. While worker cooperatives are vastly superior to privately owned corporations on every front, on their own they will not lead to a sufficient degree of social transformation. But they should be viewed as an important halfway step that is closely aligned with the Utopian Socialist ethos. And they could be converted to fully functioning intentional communities rather easily. If, for example, the Mondragon Cooperatives were to invest in cooperative housing for their workers, they could make that full transition in short order.

The third category comes in two varieties, with a stronger version and a weaker version. The weaker version would be the cooperative housing developments that are popping up across the US and Europe. These are membership-based entities where individuals own their own private unit, but which also have extensive common areas which are designed to foster a greater sense of community among those members. The members are all responsible for their own financing and usually maintain employment within the traditional job market. This weak version is the closest to category 1 and represents the least amount of change from it. But its popularization could lead to gains down the road for fully cooperative entities. The stronger version is represented by intentional communities and ecovillages that are not income sharing and are not economically self-supporting. Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, in Missouri, is a prime example of this. It’s members live communally, but mostly maintain employment outside the community in the private sector. There are some jobs within the community itself, but a minority of their membership earns their living this way. Most communities that bill themselves as ecovillages fall into this category. This stronger version is very closely allied in spirit with the Utopian Socialist ethos and is probably the closest of being able to make the final transition to being fully cooperative entities.

So in the final analysis, worker cooperatives and cooperative housing are only halfway steps toward Utopian Socialism. They are insufficient in themselves to bring about a necessary degree of social change, but they should still be viewed as allies and fellow travelers in the transition away from from the private ownership of an increasingly dystopian capitalist world, and their success can only have a positive impact on the eventual success of the 21st century Utopian Socialism.