A New Year with Feathers

The coming year brings, as always, hope. Given the rhetoric of the last year, that might seem a rather odd statement, but even if you feel that the abundance of hope has diminished, it still exists.

Indeed, in some of the darkest hours, hope has moved people through cooperation to create great things. On the craggy shores of Newfoundland in a place where in the 1920’s “the Great Depression” simply meant a normal life. Father Jimmy Tompkins and Moses Coady worked with the people to create economic opportunity and power. In a small industrial basque town under the iron heel of the fascist Falange Party and its Caudillo, Franco, a Jesuit priest, José María Arizmendiarietta, spared execution founded a small school for the children of workers which would eventually give rise to the much-lauded Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. In 1843, when Capitalism was truly unfettered with children laboring 12 hour days and any resistance met with imprisonment or forced relocation to Australia, workers and socialist came together in a small textile mill town to form the first modern-era cooperative store, Rochdale Society of Pioneers, known today simply as The Co-operative.

Hope is the Thing with Feathers

by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Hope, of course, does little without action. As we venture into the future, we must have hope, but also resilience and the willingness to act.

Rochdale, Antigonish, and Mondragon came into being through the hard work of their creators and members. They did it often in spite of the lack of political power held the participants.

So, too, we can take our worker co-op movement in the US and Canada and everywhere to new levels. Keeping our hopes alive through our individual efforts to support and build co-operatives along with raising the awareness of co-operatives must be our mission for the coming years. We need to truly make this the Cooperative Decade.

I am planning on returning to a weekly post on this site (along with urging you as a co-operative activist to join in posting your thoughts–just sign up and send me an email that you want to be a contributor). I also plan on writing each of my elected officials from my council person in Olympia to the President pertaining to the role of co-ops in his/her district, why these models are important, and how they can further support their constituents to engage in mutual self-help. I will post the letters here (and I will post yours if you send them to me with permission to post).

It is a bit fitting that the Chinese New Year (beginning with the New Moon on January 28th) is the Year of the Rooster. While there are many interpretations, let’s simply use the phrase, “the early bird gets the worm”–hard work and attention to principles will bring reward. This bird, a thing with feathers, is the symbol of the French Revolution whose motto remains “liberty, equality, fraternity” (the latter of which I interpret as the gender neutral “solidarity”. The values of the cooperative economic movement match the political values of people who seek freedom. They match the values of the Declaration of Independence.

Our movement has never depended on elected or appointed politicians–our hope lies within us. Let’s make 2017 the new Year of the Co-operative.