The preparation for a different world is already happening. Not in the future. Now. In communities that are taking back land. In cooperatives that are replacing profit with mutualism. In networks that are sharing care, knowledge, and resources without going through markets or states.
This is not a plan waiting to be implemented. It is already being built. The question is not whether it’s possible. The question is whether it can achieve the scale that the problems require.
Mondragon: the proof at scale
In 1941, a young Basque priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta arrived in Mondragón, a town devastated by the Spanish Civil War, with unemployment at depression levels and Franco’s regime having banned most forms of labor organizing. He established a technical school and began teaching a group of workers the principles of cooperative organization.
In 1956, five of his students formed the first Mondragon cooperative. In 2024, the Mondragon Corporation employs 70,085 people across 81 self-governing cooperatives, with annual sales of €11.2 billion — the largest federation of worker cooperatives in the world and the fifth-largest private employer in Spain.
The numbers are significant but the structure is the argument. Each cooperative is owned and governed by its workers, who vote their leadership into office and share in the profits. The income disparity between the highest- and lowest-paid employees is capped at 6:1, compared with a typical ratio of 344:1 in the United States. When a cooperative faces financial difficulty, others in the network contribute from a solidarity fund. In sixty-eight years of operation, no member-worker has been laid off due to economic downturn — in downturns, the cooperatives have reduced hours and redeployed workers rather than terminate employment.
Mondragon is not a utopia. It faces the same pressures as any large enterprise operating in global markets: pressure to reduce costs, pressure to expand abroad in ways that don’t extend cooperative ownership to non-Basque workers, tension between the logic of the cooperative and the logic of competition. These are real tensions that Mondragon has not resolved and that any large-scale commons institution must grapple with. The point is not that Mondragon has solved the problem. It is that it has operated, at significant scale, for nearly seven decades, demonstrating that democratic worker ownership is not incompatible with economic viability. The question of whether cooperation can work at scale has an answer: yes. We know this because it does.
Cooperation Jackson: building in the hardest conditions
Jackson, Mississippi has a median household income of $33,000, a poverty rate of 34% among its Black residents, and a state legislature that has repeatedly attempted to override its majority-Black city government. It is, by most economic measures, one of the most difficult places in the United States to build anything.
Cooperation Jackson was founded there in 2014, rooted in decades of Black liberation organizing in Mississippi and drawing explicitly on the Jackson-Kush Plan — a strategy developed by local organizers in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement to build economic and political power in majority-Black communities. Its founding was connected to the election of Chokwe Lumumba as mayor of Jackson in 2013 on an explicitly cooperative economics platform. Lumumba died eight months into office. The organizing continued.
The cooperatives that have been built — The Green Team landscaping, Freedom Farms organic agriculture, the Center for Community Production with its 3D printing facility — are deliberately small. The strategy is not rapid growth but the construction of a complete solidarity economy ecosystem: cooperative production, cooperative finance, cooperative education, cooperative land ownership, all in relationship with each other and with the political infrastructure of people’s assemblies and local electoral organizing.
What Cooperation Jackson proves is not scale — it is method. It demonstrates what it looks like to build from the most marginalized rather than the most advantaged, to root cooperative economics explicitly in Black liberation history, and to pursue the long-term institutional infrastructure of economic democracy rather than the quick wins of individual enterprise development. The Nonprofit Quarterly called it, at its tenth anniversary, a model for how progressive forces build in conditions of active hostility from the state.
Champlain Housing Trust: the land question solved
The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont was seeded in 1984, in part by Bernie Sanders as mayor, as the first municipal community land trust in the United States. It owns land permanently — the land is never sold — while the housing built on it is sold to individual owners at below-market prices.
The mechanism maintains affordability permanently. When a resident sells their home, the resale price is governed by a formula that allows them to recoup their investment and a share of appreciation, but not the full speculative gain. The land’s appreciation stays with the trust. The next resident can afford to buy at below-market prices because the land is not included in the transaction.
Over four decades, the Champlain Housing Trust has weathered multiple real estate cycles that made Burlington housing broadly unaffordable, while maintaining permanently affordable housing for its residents. The mechanism works because it is structural, not programmatic. It doesn’t depend on ongoing subsidy. It depends on removing land from the commodity market, permanently, through a governance structure that the community controls.
The model has been replicated in hundreds of communities across the United States. It is the institutional proof that housing affordability can be made permanent — not through market mechanisms, which cannot produce this outcome, and not through ongoing subsidy, which depends on political will that fluctuates — but through governance. Through deciding, collectively and bindingly, that this land is not for sale.
Kerala: what fifty years of left governance built
Kerala is an Indian state of 35 million people that has been governed by the communist-led Left Democratic Front for most of the past four decades. The numbers are stark: life expectancy is 75 years, the highest in India and well above the national average of 70. Infant mortality is the lowest in India. Literacy is 94%, among the highest. Despite GDP per capita well below the national average, Kerala’s human development indicators consistently match or exceed those of countries with far higher incomes.
The explanation is not complicated. Decades of land reform broke up the landlord class and distributed land to tenant farmers. Investment in public health and education built the human capital that market-led development cannot produce. Strong labor organizing — Kerala has one of the most organized workforces in India — maintained wages and working conditions above the national norm. The communist parties that governed the state treated governance as infrastructure for collective wellbeing rather than as management of the conditions for private accumulation.
Kerala is not a commons in the strict sense. It is a state with functioning democratic institutions that have, over generations, been captured by and held accountable to the organized working class. What it demonstrates is that governance oriented toward collective wellbeing produces different material outcomes than governance oriented toward conditions for capital accumulation — even in conditions of limited resources, even in a state embedded in a hostile national political environment.
The mutual aid infrastructure that didn’t disappear
When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, thousands of mutual aid networks emerged spontaneously across the United States: neighborhood food distribution networks, prescription pickup networks, childcare exchanges, rental assistance funds, PPE distribution systems. Most were built in days by people with no prior organizational experience, using group chats and spreadsheets, without any institutional support.
What is less documented is how many of those networks persisted. The Mutual Aid Disaster Relief network, which coordinated community response to Hurricane Sandy in 2012 from Occupy networks, grew through the COVID period into a national infrastructure for peer-to-peer disaster response. Neighborhood mutual aid networks in cities from Los Angeles to Detroit converted from emergency food distribution to ongoing community fridges, tool libraries, and care networks. Solidarity economy organizations that had existed at the margins of progressive politics for decades found themselves, for the first time, with access to organizing infrastructure, public attention, and in some cases public funding.
The material result is not a transformed economy. It is a demonstrated capacity. Millions of people, having experienced — some for the first time — what it feels like to be in relationships of mutual dependence and reciprocal care, did not simply return to isolated consumption when the emergency passed. The networks became infrastructure. Not everywhere, and not at scale sufficient to address the underlying conditions. But the proof of concept exists in every city and most neighborhoods: people organized for mutual aid, and some of it stuck.
The sum of the evidence
Mondragon at 70,000 workers. Champlain Housing Trust at 40 years. Kerala at 35 million people. Cooperation Jackson at year eleven. The mutual aid infrastructure that emerged from COVID. The Zapatista autonomous governance at year thirty. The Rojava commune system at year twelve. The community development financial institutions deploying billions of dollars into communities the banking system wrote off.
None of these is a completed alternative. All of them are ongoing experiments, facing ongoing pressures, with ongoing failures alongside their successes. What they collectively constitute is a proof of concept by accumulation: the question is not whether commons-based governance can work. It works. In enough different domains, at enough different scales, in enough different conditions, that the “it can’t work” objection requires ignoring a large body of existing evidence.
The question now is scale. And scale requires more people making the same choice that the people who built these institutions made: to govern collectively, to orient toward shared benefit, to build the institutions that make the alternative real.
Nobody has to make that choice. That is exactly the point. The commons has always been built by people who didn’t have to and did anyway — because the thing was worth building, and because the mode of building mattered as much as the thing itself.