Cooperatives have empowered people by pooling their resources and expertise. Though the principles of cooperation existed long before the first cooperative organization, the movement is said to have begun in England. In 1844, the Rochdale Pioneers founded the modern Co-operative Movement in Lancashire, England, to provide an affordable alternative to poor-quality and adulterated food and provisions, using any surplus to benefit the community.

“A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.” (International Cooperative Alliance)

Though individual cooperatives have their specific values, cooperatives are based on the values of solidarity, equity, equality, democracy, self-responsibility, and self-help.

In the United States

Americans in the labor movement have long championed the cooperative movement. From movements like The Knights of Labor, consumer co-ops in Minnesota, and even modern-day co-op businesses in our NWA community, such as Ozark Electric
Throughout the United States, one can find cooperatives in most communities. Credit Unions, consumer cooperatives, agricultural/farmer cooperatives, housing cooperatives, energy cooperatives, healthcare cooperatives, and more. In all of these, the organization is owned by its members. Membership types vary in different cooperatives. Sometimes member-owners are the consumers, such as in credit unions and consumer cooperatives. Sometimes they are the workers.

Cooperative Principles

Cooperatives share seven internationally agreed-upon principles. These include:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership – No discrimination
2. Democratic Member Control – Members participate in making decisions and policies
3. Member Economic Participation – Members equally contribute to capital of the cooperative
4. Autonomy and Independence – Must always maintain cooperative autonomy
5. Education, Training, and Information – Spreading the benefits of co-operation
6. Cooperation among Cooperatives – Strengthening Cooperative Movement
7. Concerns for Community – Assisting with community development

Revolution, Not Reform

As socialists, we operate in actionism. Actionism rejects reformism as counter-revolutionary. We affirm that revolution is “the material process of undergoing continuous transformation between metabolic rifts and social tensions, the leap of quantitative changes to qualitative developments.” (Engels, Dialectics of Nature)

Revolution is not moral; it is material. It is not gradual but dialectical. Revolution is the rupture from capitalist relations of production, property, and state power. It is born from contradiction and resolved through class struggle, not the ballot box.

We do not just participate in the spectacle of elections. Electoralism is the belief that liberation can be granted by institutions designed to deny it. No party within a capitalist state can abolish wage labor, dismantle empire, or end the domination of capital.

Our politics are lived in practice: strikes, occupations, mutual aid, tenant unions, digital coordination, and autonomous infrastructure. We do not wait for conditions, we create them through organized intervention.

The Proletariat and Its Vanguard

The working class is not a demographic, it is the exploited majority whose labor creates all value and who possess nothing in return. Class is not culture. Class is a material relation.

The vanguard is not a hierarchy, it is the most conscious, disciplined segment of the class. It organizes from below, not above. It leads not by decree, but by example. It educates, mobilizes, and prepares for rupture.

No revolution is spontaneous. Revolutionary consciousness must be cultivated. The vanguard must be rooted in proletarian life, coordinating struggle, building institutions of dual power, and resisting both opportunism and dogma.

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Cooperative Actionism: Multifaceted Organization within the Vanguard

In Actionism, the proletariat and its vanguard must recognize that the struggle is multifaceted, always changing. Co-operatives, worker councils, and collective forms of organization are vital structures within this context. These are the foundational building blocks for a new form of solidarity, where horizontal networks enable autonomy from capitalist structures. Whether through worker-controlled, community-based agriculture or collective housing initiatives, we embrace co-operatives as the practical expression of revolutionary strategy, providing immediate alternatives to capitalist labor relations.

We argue that the cooperative sector within the working class forms a vital part of the vanguard, where practical experiments in self-management demonstrate the potential for non-capitalist organization. These cooperatives function as both an incubator for broader revolutionary praxis and as a means of constructing dual power.

Cooperative Housing in the Housing Crisis

A housing cooperative is created when people join together to own and control their housing/communal facilities democratically.

Living in Cooperative Housing

In these cooperatives, Weekly house meetings, house rules, bylaws, and consensus decision-making process are common fixtures of cooperative housing. Co-ops are more affordable because residents can divide the costs associated with utilities, ongoing maintenance, and monthly mortgage payments.

Benefits of Living in Cooperative Housing

• Affordability: Housing co-ops typically set rents below market rates to improve access for low- and moderate-income individuals and families.
• Collective Ownership: Residents are members of a cooperative that owns the property. This structure allows them to have a say in management and decision-making processes.
• Democratic Governance: Residents help run the cooperative by electing a board and participating in decision-making. This democratic structure encourages active community involvement and strengthens accountability. Together, residents make decisions about maintenance, improvements, and policies, building a strong sense of ownership and shared responsibility.
• Community and Diversity: Mixed-income housing creates diverse communities by bringing together people from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Non-profit cooperatives actively contribute to their neighborhoods through community service and development efforts, building stronger local ties and supporting grassroots initiatives.

Responsibility of Living in a Cooperative House

• Attending house meetings
• Participating in the system
• Making payments on time for maintenance, accounting, and mediation

Types of Cooperative Housing

• Equity Cooperatives – Members buy and sell their share of the cooperative at market rate
• Limited Equity Cooperatives – Members buy and sell their share of the cooperative at restricted amounts in order to maintain the cooperative’s affordability.
• Rental Cooperatives – Members participate in the cooperative’s management but do not own shares of the cooperative.

Housing coops: Reform or revolutionary?

While praising the cooperative movement as the vanguard to socialism, should the cooperative movement be involved in the housing sector in a socialist society? No. Housing cooperatives are often framed as a progressive alternative to conventional landlordism, but within a socialist framework that eliminates commodification, they fall short of transforming housing into a truly liberated social relation. Housing, unlike productive capital, serves a reproductive function—it sustains life rather than generating surplus value. This is a fundamental distinction that prevents housing from fitting within cooperative ownership models in the same way that worker cooperatives manage factories or industries. Because decommodifying means removing the power of capital.

We must remember that co-ops themselves under capitalism exist as an ideological question of management; it doesn’t actually, in the case of housing, solve the issues of ground rent, or extraction as extraction would still be prominent through cooperative taxation. In the question of, How do we develop toward better socialized housing outcomes outside capitalist relations?

To develop better socialized housing outcomes outside of capitalist relations, we must shift away from treating housing as a commodity and instead focus on collective stewardship. The current system prioritizes issues of profit through landlordism, rent extraction, and speculation, leaving working-class people vulnerable to cycles of dispossession. The simple tweak of replacing the landlord with a share of the value of the property to the tenants creates little landlords, as is the case with cooperatives in a capitalist society being viewed as little capitalists.

What would a socialist housing system look like then, after replacing the one-person-one-share one share type of housing?

Part II