Two Tales, Two Cities: Worker Cooperation, Community Development, and the Quest for the Next Economy

Abstract

In the past two decades, the community development world has begun to turn to worker cooperation as a potential strategy for wealth building in low-income urban communities. This thesis examines two such efforts, the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland and Cooperation Jackson of Jackson, Mississippi. I first establish a spectrum of theoretical approaches to cooperativism from remedial cooperation, which seeks to reform (but not replace) capitalism, to transformative cooperation, which seeks to build a new, non-capitalist form of economic and socialist relations. I then analyze and compare each of the two case studies along this spectrum by examining the ways they engage with, challenge, or uphold traditional structures of race and class power.