• 130 million Americans are now involved in co-ops, mostly credit unions and cooperative housing.
• 11,000 employee-owned companies already exist in this country. Together they involve more workers than are members of unions of private corporations.
• The number of community development corporations (CDCs) and municipally-owned utilities is steadily growing.
• Since the 1960s, countless non-profit organizations have been created to serve community needs. Most of these are funded by foundations but many support themselves by organizing local enterprises.
• Locally-owned businesses have also increased from 30% to 60%. Many of these were founded by socially-conscious entrepreneurs not only to make a profit but with the aim of protecting the environment and promoting social justice.
Together these new economic institutions are giving communities all over the country a sense of what can be done through collective ownership and management. Their successes and failures provide important lessons for a new radically decentralized community-based economy. These new economic institutions are being created not by starry-eyed idealists but out of a need and a void. Their necessity is only heightened by the economic insecurity millions of Americans face in the collapse of the housing bubble, the expansion of layoffs, and the evaporation of personal retirement funds.
In Michigan, as elsewhere, we have seen a growing number of average citizens scapegoating blacks, immigrants, and other people of color for their plight. That is why it is becoming increasingly urgent that we consciously try to learn the lessons of the many grassroots efforts to create alternative economic institutions that will not only bring greater stability to our communities but also provide us with the control over the ways in which we make our living that is necessary for a real democracy.
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AUTHORS:
Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of American Culture, History, and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan and currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008), which received the American Historical Association’s 2008 Albert J. Beveridge Award “for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present.” He has twenty years of experience as a grassroots activist and is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership based in Detroit, Michigan.
Grace Lee Boggs is a 93-year-old activist, writer, and speaker whose seven decades of political involvement encompass the major U.S. social movements of our time. A daughter of Chinese immigrants born in 1915, Grace received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 1940 but dedicated herself to movement building. Since 1953, Grace has lived in Detroit, including 40 years engaged in grassroots organizing and political theorizing with her late husband, James Boggs -- an African American labor activist.
Grace’s publications include Living for Change and Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (with James Boggs). Her blog postings are adapted from her weekly column for the Michigan Citizen newspaper
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