Coops against Collapse - Metacrisis Salon #16

As we navigate an era defined by polycrisis and the looming threat of systemic collapse, a vital question emerges: How do we prepare? How might we learn from history and take advantage of this moment to build structures that make our communities genuinely resilient? The blueprints for surviving failing systems already exist. Black Americans have been building cooperatives since before the Civil War. Mutual aid societies paid for burials and pooled money to buy relatives out of slavery. Farmers shared land, seed, and credit. Families ran grocery stores, credit unions, and housing that they owned together. Members were boycotted, sabotaged, and sometimes killed for it. They built anyway. Jessica Gordon Nembhard spent fifteen years in the archives to document that record. Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice is the first nationwide study of Black cooperatives since W. E. B. Du Bois published his own in 1907. It follows Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Nannie Helen Burroughs, the Young Negroes' Co-operative League that Ella Baker ran in the 1930s, Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm in Mississippi, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and the Black Panther Party's survival programs. Many civil rights leaders learned to organize inside a co-op before they ever led a march. Salon #12 asked how the powerless win. Salon #14 asked how a few people hold power over everyone else.