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.
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.
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.
Arizmendi on his bike in the Basque mountains, not petitioning the state but starting a school, building the institutional capacity of a community from the inside, creating the conditions under which five former students could found a cooperative in 1956. He was doing war-of-position work decades before anyone called it that.
The Zapatista autonomous communities, thirty years in: governance structures, schools in indigenous languages, health clinics, cooperative enterprises — the new society built in the territory the old one abandoned. They have not taken state power. They have built something more durable than the state that surrounds them.
Every community land trust that removes housing from the speculative market permanently — a position won. Not a reform of the market. A piece of terrain reorganized under different assumptions, producing different common sense about what housing is for. Every worker cooperative. Every mutual aid network that outlasts the crisis that created it. These are positions in the war of position, accumulated across decades, building the terrain on which a different politics becomes possible.
These are not waiting for the revolution. They are the revolution, happening at the speed that permanent change actually happens.
The builders have not stopped. The war of position has been underway for a long time. The council movement of 1919, the cooperative movement of 1956, the Zapatista uprising of 1994, the municipal land trust movement that took root in Burlington in 1984, the mutual aid networks of 2020 — not separate attempts but a single thread, running through different hands, accumulating. Not every position held. The thread has never broken.
The council communists, who argued that the factory council is the basic unit of socialist organization because it's where workers actually hold the knowledge to govern — not a party headquarters, not a central committee, but the people doing the work. The Catalan collectives, running for a year. The cooperative movements building across a century on six continents. The Zapatistas, refusing state power because they understood what taking it does. Cooperation Jackson, patient about the timeline, building from the most marginalized.
Thomas Henry Huxley had argued in 1888 that nature was a "gladiatorial show" of mutual slaughter, that evolution rewarded the strong and eliminated the weak. This story was immediately adopted by everyone who needed it: industrialists whose accumulation became nature's verdict, colonial powers whose domination became biological necessity. The entire ideology now called Social Darwinism.
Kropotkin read Huxley from Siberia and found it inaccurate. Competition doesn't explain the patterns he observed. Cooperation does. The most successful species — the ones that survived the brutal Siberian winters — were not the most competitive. They were the most cooperative. Mutual aid was not the exception to the evolutionary record. It was the dominant strategy.
He spent the next twenty years building the evidence: insects, birds, mammals, human societies across every continent and historical period — the same pattern everywhere. Communities that developed mutual aid survived. Communities that didn't, didn't. The guilds of medieval Europe, self-governing and self-supporting for centuries. The village communes of Russia, managing shared land through collective governance without state or market. The rotating credit associations that immigrant communities built wherever they arrived, providing capital entirely outside the banking system. In one of the book's most striking passages, he describes Siberian horses during a blizzard: when the temperature drops past what they can survive alone, they form a tight circle, heads inward, taking turns at the exposed outer edge. No hierarchy. No leader. A distributed solution to a collective problem, arrived at without deliberation. It works because it has to.
The garden the tenant union plants together. The free library in the lobby of the cooperative. The music at the rally that isn't between speeches. These are not the fun parts of organizing that you add when you have time. They are the mechanism by which communities renew themselves — by which people learn that they are capable of more than they were told, by which the excess gets generated that makes movements irreversible in ways that policy victories are not. The renewal is carried in the felt register — felt before it is understood.
Murray Bookchin grew up in the Bronx in a neighborhood that was itself a kind of argument.
The Bronx of the 1920s and 1930s was dense, multilingual, poor, and alive — built around the specific mutual aid infrastructure that immigrant communities construct wherever they land: the landsmanshaftn, the fraternal societies, the credit unions, the cooperative apartment buildings, the political clubs where people argued in Yiddish and Italian and Spanish about how the world should be organized. The neighborhood had its own ecology, its own commons, its own way of distributing care and resources that didn't route through either the market or the state. You could, if you knew where to go, eat for days on the informal economy of neighbors who owed each other.
Robert Moses would spend thirty years destroying it.
The expressways that cut through the Bronx in the 1950s and 1960s — the Cross Bronx Expressway displaced sixty thousand people — were the automobile version of enclosure. The communities that had built an organic commons in the interstices of the city were sacrificed to the car's passage. The ecological commons of the neighborhood was cleared for the machine. Robert Moses and the planners who built Hampton Boulevard over Atlantic City were running the same calculation: the community is the cost, the infrastructure is the product, and the people who paid the cost don't appear in the accounting.
Jane Jacobs was watching the same destruction from Greenwich Village and drawing the same conclusion from the other direction: the city that works is not the city the planner designs but the city that emerges from the mixed uses, the overlapping rhythms, the eyes on the street, the density of informal relationship that Moses's expressways and towers-in-the-park destroyed everywhere they landed. Her argument and Bookchin's are the same argument made from different vantage points — she from the street, he from the theory. The neighborhood is a commons. The planner's intervention is an enclosure.
Bookchin synthesized what he was seeing into a theory he called Social Ecology: the domination of nature and the domination of human beings by each other are not separate problems. They have the same root — hierarchy, the structure that treats the world as a resource to be managed from above rather than a commons to be governed from within. You cannot solve the ecological crisis without dismantling hierarchy. You cannot build genuine democracy without reintegrating humans into the ecological systems they have separated themselves from.
The result, in the region of northern Syria known as Rojava, was one of the most remarkable political experiments of the twenty-first century: four million people building commune systems, women's councils, cooperative economics, and ecological agriculture while simultaneously fighting ISIS and managing the pressures of Syrian civil war, Turkish military operations, and international indifference. The women's councils weren't symbolic — they held veto power over decisions affecting women, with a parallel institutional structure running alongside every other governing body. The cooperatives weren't aspirational — they were managing the actual economy of the region under siege conditions. Graeber went there. He spent time in the communes, talked to the council members, watched the architecture function under pressure. He came back more convinced than when he left that the tradition was not theoretical. It was operational.
This is what Gramsci meant by the war of position — not as metaphor but literally. The commons is built block by block. The new common sense grows in the soil opened when the pavement comes up. The community garden that survives the campaign that created it. The cooperative that outlasts the crisis that brought it into being. The mutual aid network whose members know each other's names years after the emergency ended. These are positions won — not because they're winning the debate, but because they are changing what feels natural, what a person knows in their body about how communities can work.
A financial cooperative, owned and governed by its members, oriented toward their financial wellbeing rather than toward extraction from them. The money members deposit is lent to other members, at terms set by the institution they collectively govern. The interest paid on loans becomes the interest paid on deposits, minus the cost of operating the institution. No shareholders extracting returns. The surplus belongs to the members.
Community development financial institutions — CDFIs — extend cooperative finance into communities conventional finance has written off. They underwrite loans that a bank's algorithm would reject because the algorithm is optimized for extraction, not for whether the person in front of you will actually repay — or what it would mean for their community if they did.
The Mondragon cooperative federation built its own bank — the Caja Laboral — because the existing financial system wouldn't lend to workers buying out their own firms. The Caja Laboral lent to Mondragon cooperatives on terms governed by the same principles as the cooperatives themselves. When cooperatives faced difficulty, the bank restructured rather than foreclosed. The institution that held the credit was governed by the people who needed it. That single structural fact changed everything about what happened when things got hard.
Childcare collectives where parents share the labor, the cost, and the knowledge of caring for children together — outside the market, governed by the families who depend on them. Cooperative home care agencies where the workers own the business, set the terms, make the decisions — and where the quality of care improves because the incentives that degrade it under conventional employment are gone. Community care networks where neighbors organize systematic support for elderly and disabled community members, keeping people in their homes rather than in institutions. In over 350 communities across the United States, the Village to Village Network has organized exactly this: older adults and their neighbors building mutual support systems outside institutional care, on the organizing principle that the community takes responsibility for caring for its members.
The third capacity is building. Not in the sense of waiting for the budget, the permit, the consensus. In the sense the Basques meant when they said auzolan — the work the neighborhood does on its own behalf, because it is the neighborhood and the work needs doing. The fire circle. The federation. The land trust. The cooperative kitchen. The reading group that has met for four years without dying. The newsletter no one is paid to write. Nobody asked the priest to start the polytechnic and nobody is going to ask you either. The wizard builds anyway, and is willing to be wrong about the thing they built, and is willing to build again.
Come find us. The us is real — the people who have been walking this terrain in their actual towns, in their actual lives, before you opened the book and while you were reading it and after you put it down. We are not hidden. We are not somewhere else. We are in the room you are in, in the next coffee shop over, in the civic league nobody told you about, on the porch of the house that has been here longer than the developers, in the kitchen of the cooperative that does not advertise. Come find us is not a metaphor and it is not just a metaphor. It is both, the way real instructions usually are.