An interview with Kali Akuno, Cooperation Jackson Mississippi and co-author of “Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present”, Kali Akuno & Matt Meyer
Interviewer: Georgia Bekridaki, Dock- Ripess
Kali Akuno represented Cooperation Jackson in Greece, as a guest of the Association of Social Solidarity Economy Organizations of Attica, named “Syntonismos”. Two public events were organized in order to bring Solidarity Economy activists and promoters in contact with experiences from USA, Europe and especially Greece.
On the one hand, the focus of the exchange was on the living conditions of the black community in US and especially in Mississippi as well as the role of SSE as a political project for the deliberation process. Οn the other hand, we discussed the evolution of the SSE wave in Greece under completely different conditions from those in which it emerged during the years of the intense economic crisis.
Important lessons learned and the overall conclusion was that in years of global polycrises the Solidarity Economy, in order to achieve its most visionary goals, must be a conscious work of the grassroots with the aim of creating a new society in the here and now, but also a struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, so that cooperatives and other forms of Solidarity Economy will not narrow their fullest role in a strategy of survival and alleviation.
1. Kali, can you briefly explain to us the social framework in which Cooperation Jackson emerged? What is its mission and what are its short-term objectives?
We emerged to confront the ongoing subjugation of Black or New Afrikan people in the USA. We focused on Mississippi because of its strategic positioning and the concentration of New Afrikan people in the state, and the broader Mississippi Delta bio-region, which we call the Kush District.
Cooperation Jackson grew out of a social movement called the New Afrikan Independence Movement, which is a tendency within the overall Black Liberation Movement. In the 2000’s, one of the organized expressions of this movement, the New Afrikan People’s Organization, which I was a member of, developed a strategic framework called the Jackson-Kush Plan, which laid the foundations for Cooperation Jackson.
We were born in 2014 to execute the solidarity economy dimensions of this framework, and our short-term objectives are to build a lively and comprehensive solidarity economy in Jackson that improves the quality of life for the Black working class majority of Jackson, and lays a foundation for the development of a regional and eventual USA empire wide solidarity economy movement that challenges capitalist social relations and gives material support for a transformative eco-socialist political movement.
2. What is the main driving force of Cooperation Jackson? What are the main projects you implement?
Our driving force is unquestionably our vision, which is best expressed in the Build and Fight chapter of our Jackson Rising book. As for our main projects, it’s critical to understand that our foundation is our Community Land Trust. The Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust is an effort to decommodify and decolonize as much land in Jackson, MS as possible.
The community land trust affords us the space to start building the solidarity economy we envision, by providing space for housing, for commercial operations, production facilities, and agriculture. All our cooperative business operations reside on these lands.
Following the development of this institution, we focus on advancing food security, building worker owned cooperatives, and regenerative methods of material sourcing, production, distribution, consumption and recycling. The chief vehicle we have to help us advance the movement towards local food sovereignty is Freedom Farms Cooperative.
The next step towards this end is opening a community grocery store, the People’s Grocery Cooperative, which is currently under development. Our regenerative oriented cooperatives are Zero Waste of Jackson which is a recycling and composting cooperative. Along with the Green Team which is a landscaping and organic waste management cooperative. We also have an emerging and evolving Community Production Cooperative, which is working to become a small-scale regenerative manufacturing cooperative, that utilizes local material resources to produce goods on as needed basis. We also have a local print and design cooperative, the Eversville Design and Print Shop Cooperative, and a catering cooperative called the Evers Cafe. We are also trying to develop a number of supportive solidarity institutions, to fortify our cooperatives, and improve the quality of life of the people of Jackson.
We are currently working on developing a mutual exchange network, wherein community residents can barter and exchange with each other and supportive local businesses, to meet their material needs without the need to exchange or spend hard US currency. The first steps in the development of this institution is the really, really Free Market, which we are in the process of transforming into a monthly operation.
3. Solidarity Economy as a movement within extractivist capitalism. Opportunities and limits.
Let’s be honest, most solidarity economy operations throughout the world at present serve either as relief institutions or niche economic operations. This is because they are very constrained by the dynamics of capitalism. Not the least of which is access to capital, as a means to secure materials within the framework of capitalist social relations. And also access to material resources that don’t require purchase, which again just supports commodity relations. Now, the deep democratic and self-organizing dimensions of the solidarity economy can be profoundly transformative, and help us create a society of associated producers, of which we have little doubt from our perspective.
But, the solidarity economy movement must become more of a political movement to accomplish its goals. This is going to be hard to do, particularly in places like Eastern Europe, wherein anything socially collective is perhaps too reminiscent of the state socialist experiments that were exercised and imposed on many of the states that once comprised the Eastern Bloc and the former Soviet Union. And in Western Europe, the US and many other places in the world, we have to fight the deep anti-communist ideology that permeates the world on account of the success of capitalist propaganda, but also the shortcomings of the various experiments that have called themselves socialist in the third world since WWII. So, we have an uphill battle to define how our bottom-up construction of socialism will in fact be different from previous experiences that appropriated the name of socialism. We have a lot of work to do. But the deep ecological, political and economic crisis we are confronting as a species demands it.
4. This year you celebrated 10 years – what achievements did you celebrate?
Quite frankly, our biggest achievement is surviving this long. These last 10 years have not been easy. We’ve been beset by political attacks, under resourcing, internal fracturing, and a global pandemic. But we are still here and we are slowly, but surely learning, adapting, and growing.
5. Taking into account the polycrisis period we live in, can cooperativism be a vehicle for social transformation?
Let me say unequivocally, yes. We believe that our experience bears this out. In the midst of revanchist and reactionary settler-colonial state like Mississippi, that was buttressed for four years by utterly reactionary government for four years, we have found ways and means to deepen solidarity practices amongst the working class in our community and make some critical strides towards improving our material lives through our self-organization. We take strength that Mondragon grew under the Franco dictatorship in Spain, just like many social movements survived and thrived under adverse conditions during the dictatorship in Greece. We believe that self-organized and self-conscious people will find a way, and that the solidarity economy provides us with many essential tools to not only survive and thrive under adverse conditions, but to create a new society, one not defined by capitalist social relationships and commodity production. Capitalism is a short phase in the history of humanity. And we are here to work on hastening its timely demise by working in concert with each other to produce a democratic world, defined by associated producers sharing the gifts of the earth in right relationship with our mother earth. This is the way.
