The Basques had a word for what they did when a neighbor's roof needed mending, or a road washed out, or a widow's harvest came in alone. Auzolan. Neighborhood work. The community would assemble, do what needed doing, and go home without payment, on the understanding that the obligation was reciprocal and that the account would never be perfectly settled because the account was the community itself. They had been doing this from before they had written records of doing it. They had a word for the household that ran the household — etxe — which was not a building but a unit of stewardship extending backward through the dead and forward through the not-yet-born. They had a word for the specific named neighbor whose obligation it was to be present at births and deaths and crises — lehen auzoa, first neighbor. Community was not an abstraction. It was a specific house down the path.
By February of 1941, much of this had been suppressed or scattered. Franco's regime had outlawed the Basque language in public life. Mondragón — Arrasate in Basque — had been on the Republican side in the Civil War, and the Basques had been a center of resistance: Guernica had been bombed in 1937, and the parish priest in Mondragón itself had been shot. The years that followed were called by the people who lived through them los años del hambre, the years of hunger. Spain's autarky kept imports out, the Basque industrial valleys ran below capacity, and the cooperative and self-help organizations that had long woven through Basque life had, in the words of one history, "died away after the war." What remained were the words: etxe, auzolan, lehen auzoa. And the practices the words named, dormant under suppression but not gone.
Into this valley, in February of 1941, a twenty-five-year-old priest arrived. He had been sentenced to death by Franco's forces during the war and escaped the firing squad through what is recorded as an administrative oversight. His name was José María Arizmendiarrieta. He would later write: La transformación del mundo pasa por la transformación del hombre. The transformation of the world passes through the transformation of the human being.
He had one eye — lost in a childhood accident. He read badly, in a monotone his new congregation found intricate and difficult to follow. His homilies were repetitive, hard to parse. The local parishioners asked the bishop to replace him within weeks of his arrival. The bishop didn't. And Arizmendi — as everyone called him — stayed.
He had wanted to study sociology in Belgium. Instead he had been assigned to a parish thirty miles from his own home town. He understood something quickly: faith without the material conditions for a dignified life was a performance. He started a school.
He taught. He selected the best students and arranged for them to study industrial engineering in Zaragoza, two hundred kilometers away — they worked fifty-five-hour weeks by day and studied at night. He quoted Attlee and Beveridge alongside Catholic social doctrine. He told his congregation: "The most important advantage of cooperation is defeating the loneliness that turns life into hell." He did not take a salary. He traveled by bike.
It took fifteen years from his arrival before the first cooperative was founded. He did not rush. The school in 1943. The polytechnic. The study circles. The careful selection of young people who could carry what he was teaching. The patient construction of human beings who could build the institutions the valley would need. The transformation of the world passes through the transformation of the human being. He had written this not as slogan but as method.
In 1956, five of his former students — Luis Usatorre, Jesús Larrañaga, Alfonso Gorroñogoitia, José María Ormaechea, and Javier Ortubay — pooled their savings and skills and founded a cooperative. They bought a small workshop, moved it to Mondragón, and began making paraffin stoves. The cooperative was called ULGOR, after the first letters of their surnames. It would later become Fagor. Arizmendi blessed the foundation stone of the new pavilion. He never held any position in the cooperatives he spent his life building. He died in 1976, the year after Franco, having spent thirty-five years in a single valley building what he believed the Gospel and the etxe together required.
The cooperative form was auzolan applied to industrial production. The federation, the etxe extended across many enterprises. Even the mandatory community investment funds — locking wealth into service of the future — were the etxe's stewardship across generations, made institutional. He didn't invent the cooperative form. He recovered the etxe.
In 2024, the federation had 81 cooperatives employing 70,085 people, with €11.2 billion in annual sales. It is the largest employer in the Basque Country and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain. The highest-paid worker earns at most six times what the lowest-paid worker earns. The wage ratio is set democratically by the worker-owners themselves and is voted on periodically.
The system is not utopian. Cooperatives have left the federation — Ampo and Irizar in 2008, ULMA and Orona in 2022, each over disputes about governance and autonomy. In 2013, Fagor Electrodomésticos went bankrupt; 5,600 workers were at risk; roughly 95% of them were absorbed into other Mondragón cooperatives within weeks. No member-worker has been laid off in an economic downturn in sixty-nine years of operation. Pope Francis declared Arizmendi a "venerable servant of God" in 2015, one step from canonization. His town is still debating it.
Nobody asked him to do any of it.
In 1981, the year Ronald Reagan took office and began the federal withdrawal of funding for affordable housing and community development, a thirty-nine-year-old democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by ten votes. He served four terms. In his second term, in 1983, members of his administration brought him a proposal for a community land trust — a nonprofit corporation that would own land permanently while selling the houses on it to working-class families, with a resale formula limiting how much the seller could capture from appreciation.
Sanders had reservations. Why should the working class be limited to shared equity when middle- and upper-class families could build full wealth from their homes? Wouldn't this create a second-class form of ownership? He was talked through it. The city's land trust would not be a substitute for full homeownership for those who could otherwise afford it; it would be a route into housing for those who otherwise could not. And crucially, the land's value — the speculative gain that otherwise flowed to whoever happened to buy at the right moment — would stay in the trust, available to the next family that needed a home.
In 1984, the Burlington Community Land Trust was founded with a $200,000 seed grant from the city, supplemented by a loan from the municipal pension fund matched by Burlington Savings Bank and federal HUD funds. It was the first community land trust in the United States to be initiated by a municipal government.
It was opposed. A group backed by real estate interests, Homeowners Against the Land Trust, picketed City Hall. Sanders and other progressive officials were red-baited — accused of seizing land and betraying property rights. The pushback was loudest in the Old North End, the working-class neighborhood where the trust was concentrating its early purchases. Some incumbent homeowners worried about property values. The Trust went ahead anyway.
The mechanism is precise. The Trust owns the land permanently through 99-year ground leases. Homeowners own the houses. When a house sells, a resale formula lets the seller recoup their investment and a share of appreciation — but not the full speculative gain. The land's value stays in the Trust. The next buyer pays below market because they are not buying the land.
Someone who bought a Champlain house in 1991 sold it in 2003 for less than the open market would have paid — because they had agreed to the structure when they bought, because they had decided that the affordability their neighbor would need mattered more than the premium they could have taken. Then someone else made that choice again in 2003, and again in 2015. The neighbor they were providing for didn't exist yet when the choice was made. That is the structure.
Burlington's housing market has gone through multiple boom cycles since 1984. The Champlain Housing Trust's homes have stayed affordable through all of them — not because the city kept subsidizing them, but because the community had already decided, once, that this land was not for sale.
Today the Trust holds over 3,000 units of permanently affordable housing. The model has been replicated in hundreds of communities. Forty-two years. The land that Burlington took out of the speculative market in 1984 is still out of it.
Jackson, Mississippi: median household income around $33,000; poverty rate approaching one in three among Black residents; a state legislature that passed a law in 2023 expanding state-appointed courts with jurisdiction over Jackson specifically — a maneuver so naked that the NAACP called it a modern form of plantation governance. The water system has failed repeatedly. The state has refused to fund repairs at levels even close to what its own engineers say are needed.
Cooperation Jackson was founded there in 2014, rooted in decades of Black liberation organizing and in the Jackson-Kush Plan developed by organizers in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. It was connected to the election of Chokwe Lumumba as mayor in June 2013 — Lumumba won the Democratic primary with 86 percent of the vote despite being massively outspent. He had been a leader of the Republic of New Afrika, a Mississippi human rights attorney for decades, and a member of the Jackson City Council.
Lumumba was sworn in on July 1, 2013. He died on February 25, 2014, at the age of 66. His son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, an attorney like his father, was in court when his father called complaining of tightness in his chest. He drove him to St. Dominic Hospital. After tests, after waiting, after a transfusion, Lumumba cried out about his heart, shook, and lost consciousness. He had been mayor for less than eight months.
The Hinds County coroner did not perform an autopsy. The family commissioned an independent one. Asked about claims that the mayor had been assassinated, Chokwe Antar Lumumba said: "We know that our father was loved and appreciated by many and a number of people both in Jackson and around the world have inquired into the manner of his death. At this time, there has been no information provided to the family other than that provided at the time of his death by the doctors. The family will explore all possible causes of his death."
The cause of death has never been definitively settled in public. What is settled is what happened next.
At the memorial, Lumumba's daughter Rukia, an attorney and his son's campaign manager, spoke for the family: "My father had a dream, a purpose, to create a new way of governing by, for, and including the people. My brother helped my father create that plan. My brother was bred to do this work. We know nothing else but to love and serve the people."
The organizing continued. Chokwe Antar Lumumba lost the April 2014 special election. He ran again in 2017 and won. He served two terms as mayor of Jackson. He was indicted in 2024 on corruption charges that he disputes; in 2025 he lost the Democratic primary to John Horhn. The work has not been seamless. Power in Jackson has not stayed with the Lumumba family or the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
Ten years in, by May 2024: six operating worker cooperatives — Freedom Farms (organic vegetables on five acres), Green Team Landscaping, the Community Production Cooperative (3D printing and small-scale fabrication), Zero Waste, Eversville Design and Print Shop, and the Catering Cooperative — with five more in development.
The Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust holds over forty-five properties in West Jackson: five housing units, a community center, two commercial units, a shopping plaza, twelve farming plots. Production linked to cooperative finance, to cooperative education, to community land — held together by people's assemblies and years of political organizing.
What Cooperation Jackson proves is not size. It is method — building from the most marginalized, rooted in Black liberation history, patient about the timeline. The work continues when the person who carried the vision dies, when individual political careers do not.
Kerala is an Indian state of approximately 35 million people with a per-capita income significantly below the national average. Its life expectancy is roughly 77 years (men 75, women 80, per 2023 estimates) — the highest in India, matching countries with incomes three to four times higher. Infant mortality is India's lowest. Literacy was recorded at 94 percent in the 2011 census, the highest in the country; subsequent surveys put it higher still.
The explanation is not a mystery. Decades of communist-led government that broke up the landlord class, invested in public health and public education, and treated governance as infrastructure for collective wellbeing rather than management of conditions for private accumulation. Strong labor organizing that kept wages above the national norm. Democratic institutions held accountable, over generations, to the organized working class.
Kerala grows its wealth the way Kerala grows pepper: in tiers. The homegarden is the state's signature landscape — coconut and areca in the canopy, pepper vines climbing them, banana and coffee in the middle shade, ginger and turmeric and tuber at the ground, every layer yielding without any layer being stripped. You harvest from all of it, continuously, for generations, because nothing is clear-cut and the soil is never sent away. The other way to farm a hillside is to level it for one cash crop, take the maximum the ground will give, and move on when the dust blows — two good harvests, then a desert. Seventy years of left governance is the first kind of farming applied to a people: the landlord class broken up so the canopy could not monopolize the light, health and education fed back into the ground every season, wages kept above the line that lets a household put down roots. The floor is the kept soil. A floor that holds.
In March 2020, mutual aid networks formed across the United States in days. Neighborhood food distribution. Prescription pickups. Childcare exchanges. PPE sharing. Built on group chats and spreadsheets by people with no prior organizational experience, without any institutional support, in the first weeks of a pandemic that the federal government was actively mishandling. Within a month, there were thousands of these networks.
In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a network called Crown Heights Mutual Aid organized food distribution and didn't dissolve when the acute phase passed. It converted — into ongoing food support, into tenant organizing, into the sustained infrastructure of neighbors who had found each other through crisis and decided to stay found.
On sidewalks in dozens of cities, community fridges appeared. Refrigerators stocked collectively, governed by the simple rule that anyone could take what they needed and anyone could contribute what they could. No application. No eligibility determination. No caseworker. A fridge on a sidewalk, stocked by the neighborhood, for the neighborhood. The first ones were plugged in to power borrowed from sympathetic businesses. People built awnings to protect them from rain. Volunteer schedules formed and dissolved and reformed. Some fridges were broken, unplugged by hostile neighbors, taken away by police. Many weren't.
Some of these networks persisted. Not everywhere, and not at the scale the underlying conditions require. But the capacity was demonstrated. Millions of people experienced what it feels like to be in relationships of mutual dependence and reciprocal care, and many of them did not simply return to isolation when the emergency passed. Some of what formed has stuck.
What the 2020 mutual aid wave proves is that the practice is not extinct. People know how to do this. They had not forgotten. What had been suppressed could be revived in days. The Basques had a word for this — auzolan — and so did the Asturians (it is andecha in their language), and so did communities across the Philippines (bayanihan), in the Andes (minga), in many pre-enclosure villages of Europe under many names. The conditions had simply, briefly, made it visible again.
In 1994, on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose against the Mexican state in Chiapas. Thousands of indigenous combatants — Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chol, Mam, Zoque — took five municipal seats. The armed phase lasted twelve days before a ceasefire was negotiated under domestic and international pressure. The political phase has lasted thirty years and is ongoing.
In 1996, the EZLN and the Mexican government signed the San Andrés Accords, which would have constitutionally recognized indigenous autonomy. The federal legislature passed a watered-down version in 2001 that the Zapatistas denounced as a betrayal. In 2003, the EZLN declared that it would implement the original accords itself, in its own territory, without permission. On August 9, 2003, in Oventic, the Zapatistas announced the creation of five caracoles — snail-shells, governance centers named after a spiral that turns inward and outward at once — and the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the Councils of Good Government, that would coordinate them.
For twenty years, the caracoles administered health clinics, schools teaching in indigenous languages, agricultural cooperatives, restorative justice forums. The Juntas rotated their members and operated on the principle of mandar obedeciendo — to govern by obeying. The structure absorbed international support and outside attention without losing its indigenous grounding.
In November 2023, the Zapatistas announced that the Juntas de Buen Gobierno and the autonomous municipalities were being dissolved. Cartel violence had been growing in Chiapas; the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel were fighting for control of border smuggling routes; the Mexican state was either unwilling or unable to intervene. The Zapatistas decided that the existing structure, with its twelve regional councils, was too vulnerable to cartel pressure and too concentrated to survive the coming era.
What they announced in its place was a more radical decentralization. Instead of dozens of autonomous municipalities, there would be thousands of Local Autonomous Governments (GALs), one in each Zapatista community. Instead of twelve Good Government Juntas, hundreds of Collectives of Autonomous Government (CGAZ). The caracoles remain, but as community centers, not governance hubs. Power was pushed downward, to the village assembly. The explicit horizon, announced in the communiqué, was one hundred and twenty years — seven generations. "In the midst of collapse," Subcomandante Moisés wrote, "we have to look far ahead."
This is not the failure of the Zapatista project. This is the project doing what it has always claimed to be: a form of governance that develops itself through governance, in response to specific conditions, on its own timeline. The 1994 uprising, the 2003 caracoles, the 2023 GALs — these are three iterations of the same long practice, each adapted to the conditions in front of it.
Thirty years after the uprising, schools teach in indigenous languages. Community health clinics operate. Cooperative agricultural enterprises run. Judicial systems based on restorative principles continue. The communities have survived thirty years of low-intensity military pressure, economic blockade, paramilitaries, and now cartel war. They have restructured themselves more than once. They have made mistakes and named them in public. They have outlasted a dozen governments that intended to outlast them.
What they have built has outlasted, and has continued to restructure itself to outlast more.
And one more — this one mine.
In December 2020, in an industrial neighborhood in Norfolk, Virginia, my wife and I and a friend opened a restaurant. We had been dreaming about it since 2017 — using the capital left over from a house sale, negotiating a private purchase with no bank involved, DIYing the conversion on a shoestring while I spent eight months convincing the city to let us change the zoning. COVID hit when we were pulling our final permits. I cashed out $100,000 from a Microsoft 401k to float us through the shutdown. We opened anyway.
You have the name for this now. What we were trying to build was a commons — a place where people could just be, that gave them space to choose what they wanted to become, not what institutions had on offer. Where they could express their soul, their love, their joy, and be welcomed. Southern hospitality has a real reputation and a real asterisk: you will be welcomed if you are the right kind of person, and you will always know if you aren't. What we offered was: you can be one of us instead.
We offered a $15 tipped minimum in 2021 and never backed down. We always paid our people well and on time. We ran nature education tableside — when someone asked about the wine, I told them about the plants, the birds, the soil, how it was all made. The queers kept us in business. The neighborhood never quite came. We ran the best menu we ever ran in our final year, just the two of us. We closed in December 2025. Sold the property in March 2026.
It cost me my idealism and my faith in humanity.
I say this as transformation, not as defeat. Idealism that has been tested by five years of fifteen-dollar minimums and hot dog cartons in the bushes and COVID and two prior burnouts is not gone. Mondragón has lost cooperatives. Cooperation Jackson lost the mayor in eight months. The Zapatistas dissolved their own structure because the structure could not survive what was coming. The commons does not always survive in the form it first took. The people we paid, the people who felt welcome, the conversations about birds and wine — those happened. The idealism has been converted into something that knows what it is up against.
Arizmendi on his bike in the Basque mountains. Auzolan in February of 1941, dormant under suppression and not yet returned. Bernie Sanders, elected mayor of Burlington by ten votes in 1981 and not letting the proposal die in 1983. Eight farmers in black blouses in Valencia's cathedral plaza, the Water Tribunal in session for a thousand years. Zanjera farmers in Ilocos rebuilding bamboo dams after the typhoon, the cook feeding everyone while the work gets done. The Champlain homeowner who sold below market in 2003 for a neighbor who did not yet exist. Chokwe Lumumba's campaign, and the eight months, and Rukia speaking at the memorial, and the son who picked it up and lost and got back up. The community fridge on the Brooklyn sidewalk, stocked by whoever walked by that morning. The restaurant in Norfolk that ran for five years. The Zapatistas dissolving their own structure in order to keep building. The caracol.
See the edges of the spell, too. The commons has not replaced the market — not yet. The two want different things. The market coordinates the wants of millions of strangers who will never meet; the commons holds the things that die the moment they are sold. Whether a commons could coordinate those millions the way prices do, no one knows. It has not been sustained at that scale, with tools we may not have invented yet. Not it can't. It hasn't been tried. And it is worth trying. The scales already standing are not one instrument: a fridge on a sidewalk is a gift, seventy thousand workers a federation, thirty-five million a state — and Kerala is not a commons in the strict sense but a government that chose the floor. One refusal runs through all of them: that what we need to live should not be enclosed. Whether the commons grows beside the market or past it, we do not yet know. We know it grows.
These are not all the same thing. They operate at different scales, with different tools, in different conditions. What they share is the structure Ostrom found in the cases that worked: people governing something they depend on together, through rules they developed themselves, in response to the specific conditions they live with. None were invented from theory. They are either continuations of practices older than capitalism, or reconstructions of such practices in conditions where they had been broken.
The question people ask is: but has it actually worked? Has it worked at scale? Under real pressure? Over time?
Mondragón at sixty-nine years. The Champlain Housing Trust at forty-two. Kerala at seventy years of left governance. The Zapatistas at thirty, restructured twice in their own lifetime and now committed to a hundred and twenty more. The Valencia Water Tribunal at a thousand. The Swiss alpine commons at seven hundred. Auzolan from before recorded history, in continuous practice in Basque villages and across the diaspora, into the present moment.
The answer is in the record. It works. It has been working in hundreds of places, across centuries, at scales from a sidewalk fridge to seventy thousand workers to thirty-five million people. It is happening now. The wizard who knows how to look can see it.
Prefiguration at every scale: the world we want, built and defended in the present, against the structure that says it cannot be. The same spell on a Tuesday street where music made the commons, in a hundred-year quilombo, in a federation of workers that built its world and held it — one casting, at every scale that will carry it.