Cooperative Ideals at the Heart of Everything

“THIS MAY SEEM like a rather fanciful time to argue that cooperation is a realistic solution to life’s problems.”

“But in his new book Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory, legal scholar and critical theorist Bernard Harcourt sets out to make precisely that case.”

“a new cooperative paradigm imbued with the core values of participation, equity, and sustainability is not only desirable, but also eminently realizable.”

“Harcourt’s analysis rests on a few interlocking propositions.”

“First, that the competitive models of politics, society, and economy that we live with today are antiquated.”

“Second, that instead of breaking with these models, we have become stagnant in our thinking, locked in a pointless tug-of-war between a social democratic state-based model and a conservative market-based model.”

“The third point, to which the bulk of the book is dedicated, is a positive argument that cooperation can break this stalemate without needing a massive revolution.”

“He gives clear examples of how cooperative work can be scaled up. He notes, for instance, that in the United States, the tax code currently favors personal equity gains over cooperative disbursements because the former are charged at the lower, capital gains tax, while the latter are treated as taxable income. This is the kind of legal change that could in theory bring together small business–minded conservatives with worker-minded liberals, without too much disagreement.”

“A possibly more contentious part of Harcourt’s argument is that a cooperative economy should replace both capitalism and communism as economic models.”

“The only things centralized in his cooperative model are the values of equality, participation, and sustainability. How we get there is viewed as an open-ended task of learning and experimentation.”

“Harcourt thinks we are better off developing a new theory (called “coöperism” throughout the book) for cooperation today.”

“This theory has “three core principles: it is concentrated and compounded; it is deliberate and chosen; it is open and inclusive.””

“Harcourt argues skillfully that a truly cooperative society would sever the link between crime and punishment to strive toward a more holistic understanding of human failures and develop ways to work together to avoid or redress them.”

“He shows that the power of cooperation is not only in how it may transform democratic participation or the economy, but also in how we conceive of the very meaning and purpose of life.”

“Harcourt anticipates that the Left’s main criticism will be that cooperatives seem to undercut the need for class struggle. While his argument against the Right is that they naturalize current conditions, this logic creeps into his own diagnosis of class struggle as he argues that the current decline of left-wing parties and unionization shows that there is not much hope through these venues. This seems to hypostatize the present in a way he avoids elsewhere.”

“Harcourt insists that we need not have a revolution to begin making cooperatives. We can, and should, begin to do so now.”

“When it comes to the abolition of punishment, however, Harcourt himself is revolutionary. In response to possible critics, he recognizes that he may be an outlier here, as he even has to politely reject the idea of “nonreformist reforms”—reforms that move toward abolition—advanced by thinkers like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba.”

“He joins many others in reminding us that we need not wait for society as a whole to realize a new cooperative vision; we can just cooperate at whatever level we can. And we can start that today, even knowing full well how difficult our transformation will be.”

Commentator’s Note: Strong synergies with Adam Greenfield, Lifehouse (2024)