“If the idea of a co-operative movement is to mean anything, then surely it is to make the world better than it was before,” says Raj Patel, author, academic and activist. “That means thinking seriously about how we can contribute to a better world.”
Mr Patel believes strongly in the transformative power of co-operatives in imagining – and implementing – change, and will be delivering a keynote speech at the International Co-operative Alliance’s Global Conference on ‘The Value of Nothing: Reclaiming Markets through Democracy’.
“The idea of the co-operative movement is to inject democracy into transactions and market relations,” he says. “The origins of modern co-operatives – the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers – was that people couldn’t afford to eat. Their response was to organise and mobilise capital to be able to make it possible for them to access food, and to organise that access around the principles of democracy.”
However, he thinks the power to set an economic agenda has been taken out of the hands of co-operatives by a combination of monetary and fiscal policy, and by trade policy trumping environment and employment law. “I do see the co-op movement having an important role in restoring some of those rights,” he adds, “not just bringing it back to the status quo, but moving forward from the status quo.”
It is this way of thinking that means co-operatives have something to offer Greece in light of the current financial crisis, he says, “not just in terms of surviving, but in terms of a Greece that can thrive [...] but that means imagining a very different economic environment.
“Our imaginations about how different the world can be have been severely constricted, particularly by debt and the current arrangements of consumerism and economic relationships.” But he believes the ability to imagine something radically different is in the DNA of the co-operative movement. “That radical DNA has really been suppressed, and now’s a good time for it to come out, particularly as we think about the future of the planet.”
One of Mr Patel’s current projects is Generation Food, in collaboration with award-winning documentary maker and director Steve James. “We are looking at experiments to feed the world in the future,” he says. “The idea of Generation Food is to show that a radically different world isn’t just possible, but that people are doing it right now.” They are doing this, he says, by challenging some of the “deeper rules” that govern society.
One such rule is patriarchy. “If you’re interested in feeding the world, challenging patriarchy is a great idea. Look at how child malnutrition has been reduced in India over the past 40 years; 45% of that reduction comes from increased women’s education and empowerment. It works. But how do you do it? One of the experiments we have looked at is in Malawi where people are growing food differently and engaging with patriarchy. There’s a lot of feminist organising that’s happening in the villages and we’re looking at how that has contributed to the reduction in child malnutrition.”
Raj Patel, whose books include Stuffed and Starved (2008) and The Value of Nothing (2009), believes sustainable food production and the environment are going to be two of the biggest challenges the co-operative movement faces. “The geography of thinking about sustainability doesn’t necessarily match up with the geography of a firm,” he says. “I think co-ops are the vehicles through which we could imagine all stakeholders, from farm labourers to consumers, getting together and reimagining what the relationships between buyer and seller could look like.” But he acknowledges that would involve a comprehensive re-imagination of that relationship.
He adds: “It’s only in conversations in organisations that span the world that this transformation is possible. That’s why an international forum like the Global Conference later this year is going to be very exciting, it’s a space where we are able to broker an exchange of ideas.”
At the conference, Mr Patel will be presenting a project he has been working on with a colleague, Jason W Moore, on the idea of ‘The Seven Cheap Things that Capitalism Needs to Survive’ – and the role that co-ops have in challenging this.
“Imagining what the co-operative movement does for the folk outside the co-op movement is a frontier challenge,” he says. “What can we do? What can we change? Hopefully we’ll be able to offer some ways of thinking about these problems that will be useful to those throughout the movement.”
