Search Results

This chapter deliberates on the feminization of poverty to illustrate diverging feminist agendas and organizing processes as the first local Chinese women's groups reinforce an enduring organizational base for women's activism in Hong Kong. Women activists confront a difficult dilemma of balance – as popular education, political mobilization, and poor and working-class women's empowerment are being replaced by gender policy assessment, project execution, and social services delivery – and often have to compromise between their feminist ideals and the realities and demands of their socio-political environment. Feminism as a collective action frame is incorporated into organizations, networks, and other sorts of strategic mobilizing initiatives. Frames do not do anything by themselves; they allow different political and social groupings to engage in debate and negotiation. In this way, women activists can embrace diverse feminist organizational forms, rhetoric, and strategies and, at the same time, develop shared understandings and aspirations of changing prevailing gender structures and advancing women's empowerment.

Drawing from the civil rights and Black Power movements, a cooperative movement swept the south in the late 1960s to address economic injustice and the lack of jobs. Rural African Americans organized cooperatives to resist the poverty and oppression that spurred northern and western migration, creating opportunities for community self-determination. Founded in 1967, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) helped former tenant farmers and sharecroppers develop autonomy. By 1974, the FSC encompassed 134 cooperatives in fourteen states. Motivated to promote and protect Black land ownership, by 1977 the cooperative controlled more than one million acres. The FSC’s agricultural programs trained farmers in areas such as conservation, management, and cooperative purchasing and marketing. The FSC provided technical and financial assistance to the member cooperatives, growing to include initiatives such as credit unions, manufacturing cooperatives, housing programs, and health care centers. The FSC developed mechanisms for multistate collective organizing, engaged in local politics, and lobbied for policies that benefit their member organizations. The FSC’s successes in collective action and collective responsibility threatened white power structures, and white elites responded with political and legal attacks. While harming the FSC, it continues to organize southern cooperatives today, remaining a model for self-determination and resistance.

This chapter applies the intelligent trial-and-error framework developed by Edward Woodhouse and David Collingridge to technologies that impact community life. The framework has generally been used to analyse technologies with environmental, physiological, and financial – rather than psychocultural – risks. This chapter explores how technological innovation related to driverless cars and social robots would proceed if important decision makers were to take their potential social and communal risks seriously. Next, intelligent trial-and-error is proposed as a set strategies to make attempts to deploy communitarian technologies more effective, considering the cases of residential development and cooperative grocery stores. Finally, this chapter examines the barriers to getting intelligent trial-and-error applied more of the time and to already existing, rather than only emerging, technologies.

Against the visible return of the state across the globe this chapter seeks to contribute to discussions on emanicpatory and progressive forms of public ownership. In line with foundational thinking such an agenda seeks to strengthen the role of citizens as active economic and political agents and aims at re-distributing power and democratization. Hence, we argue for a new framing of public ownership that also includes new (and old forms) of collective ownership beyond the central state. After a conceptual discussion that provides a critique of the dominant view on public ownership the chapter presents three illustrative case studies that provide potential for foundational provisioning with a more active role for citizens. These are: Austrian limited-profit housing associations which operate as a “social licensed” housing provider, remunicipalised French water companies with new governance mechanisms, and water cooperatives in Austria as a form of self-governed provisioning system in rural areas.

In Morelos, Cárdenas positioned himself as part of long-standing patronage network linked in a new symbiotic relationship with the nation-state. Despite the fact that Cárdenas institutionalized clientelism through the sugar cooperative in the town of Zacatepec, rural peoples did not blame him. This chapter revisits Cárdenas’s progressive populist image that unflinchingly believed in his “goodness,” even when, after 1938, the president began advocating a more conservative approach to rural development–a process that only accelerated once he left office in 1940. When peasants protested, government officials employed divide and rule strategies against them to stall broader mobilizations. No story captures this transition between hope and disillusionment better than that of Rubén Jaramillo. He gave voice to the hope of Cardenismo in the early years, and increasingly expressed frustration with the narrowing of political channels for rural peoples in the 1940s. This chapter arrives at two conclusions. First, it argues that Cárdenas’s progressive reforms cast a radical shadow across 20^th century Mexico–so much so that subsequent regimes tried repeatedly to undo Cárdenas’s radical legacy. Secondly, Cárdenas’s proto-socialist promise of inclusion, reflected in the cooperatives, ironically led popular groups to gradually accept a compromised vision of revolutionary leadership.

This chapter picks up the history of farm families’ challenges to the power of tobacco manufactuers in the 1920s when farm families across the bright tobacco-growing regions of the American South rushed to join the Tri-State Tobacco Growers’ Cooperative in hope of monopolizing the selling of their crops. In addition to offering a new approach to controlling the market to demand higher prices, the Cooperative articulated a vision of tobacco agriculture consistent with the culture of small production that resonated with many farm families. The Cooperative was unsuccessful for a number of reasons, but its demands for limiting production and pooling crops for sale established a pattern that federal planners followed in creating the Federal Tobacco Program in the 1930s under the ausipices of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Farm families, thanks to the federal government, finally had a system of production controls that matched their vision of tobacco agriculture.

Adrienne Petty presents a historiography that challenges readers to reconsider the prevailing method of analysis for studying agriculture in the American South. She argues that black farmers were distinct but not separate from their white peers. Therefore, scholars should not set them apart for study and analysis as though they existed in a separate society. Scholars must recognize the ways that racism affected the prospects of black farmers, including landowners, and the ways that race relations played out in the countryside among landowners, other farmers, and farm laborers. Yet the prevailing approach to studying black farmer history obscures the fact that they farmed the same crops on adjacent land and depended on the same markets, and that exploitation affected both white and black farmers. To understand any nuances in this general exploitation that may be a consequence of racism demands a common approach to studying farmers as a single class. Such broad analysis can inform politicians and policy makers such as Shirley Sherrod and the organizations such as the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and the U.S. Department of Agriculture that exist to serve farmer interests.

Jarod Roll explores the evolution of black agrarianism between the Great Migration and the Great Depression. He does so by analyzing the membership of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the National Federation of Colored Farmers (NFCF). He connects the two organizations, showing that members of the UNIA, predominantly landowners, shifted allegiance to the NFCF when the UNIA dissolved during the 1920s. He indicates that both organizations gained membership because of their race-conscious goals, but UNIA members, predominantly farm owners, believed that self-reliance and autonomy through landownership could save the race. The NFCF celebrated similar goals until economic conditions worsened. By the early 1930s NFCF leaders articulated a new agrarian protest rhetoric that emphasized labor as patriotic and worthy of national government protection. The NFCF, however, did not prosper, but the ultimate failure of the UNIA and the NFCF should not be considered proof of their irrelevance. Instead, studying the demise of one and the rise and eventual decline of another can help explain the contested nature of farmer politics during an era of farm consolidation and changing agricultural practices.

This chapter examines the rise of the low-income cooperative movement and the opportunities it offered for rural poor people to take charge of their economic destiny. In response to layoffs and evictions, activists formed cooperative enterprises that provided employment to displaced workers. Cooperatives represented an attempt to establish a measure of economic independence for rural poor people and thus facilitate political participation in a region where many African Americans still feared losing their homes or livelihoods if they tried to challenge the social order. Creating black-owned businesses founded on cooperative principles also demonstrated that alternatives existed to capitalist economic structures that exploited and then discarded black labor. Despite some internal weaknesses and hostility from white supremacists that hindered their effectiveness, cooperatives showed significant promise as a model for alleviating rural poverty.

This chapter examines the efforts of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to encourage cooperative enterprises and other economic development initiatives in rural southern communities. The services it provided to cooperatives ensured the survival of many black-owned businesses and encouraged African Americans to remain in the South instead of migrating away. The FSC’s activist staff continued the struggles for civil rights and social justice by working to increase black representation in economic development initiatives, encouraging black political participation, and organizing local communities to fight persistent racism. These efforts generated resistance from powerful white southerners. In 1979, accusations that the FSC was misusing government grants to fund political activities sparked an eighteen-month-long investigation that disrupted and weakened the organization, despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing.

This chapter demonstrates that the push for voluntary rationing during World War I rendered foods like beef and wheat, which were once of enormous symbolic significance to black food reformers, as unpatriotic. Black food reformers had to choose between performing a U.S. patriotic food identity that demanded conservation and sacrifice and continuing to shun foods like pork and corn that were associated with the plantation South and thus with the history of slavery. Assimilationist eaters generally chose U.S. patriotism, a choice that inevitably muted some of the earlier antagonism that members of the middle class had shown toward the iconic southern foods they associated with the history of slavery. Ultimately, the economic pressures of the Great Depression worked to mute the machinations of even the most ardent food reformers as the community’s emphasis shifted from what to eat to the even more dire problem of having enough to eat.

Chapter five documents the legacy of hybrid racial justice cooperatives on the post-Hurricane Katrina recovery projects the Gathering Tree Growers Collective and the Louisiana Association of Cooperatives. New racial justice cooperatives reenacted the historical circulation of goods, people, and ideas across neighborhood, national, and international channels to thread seemingly isolated ethnic enclaves into a robust regional network promoting egalitarian food policy into city and state economic development, labor policies, and land-use plans. In keeping with the International Cooperative Alliance’s aims, minority cooperative activists like Harvey Reed have opened autonomous food cooperatives that spread workplace democracy regionally, nationally, and internationally.

This chapter looks at the capitalist endeavors rural workers and farmers pursued in the Gilded Age. Although they condemned their employers for cutting costs to increase their profit, rural workers often pursued capitalist gain in ways similar to their bosses. Farmer and laborers' decisions to work extra jobs, purchase stock shares, or jointly own small companies often caused rural workers to see themselves as businessmen or capitalists. As with corporations, profit motive quickly undermined collective agendas, sometimes even with cooperatives run by labor organizations. Workers took shortcuts, accepted less pay, undercut their coworkers, and broke neighbors’ strikes all because these actions increased their personal incomes. Ultimately, this need to earn greater profit shaped worker relationships with labor unions. In some cases, workers worked lower than union wages. In other instances, union leaders, concerned about the sustainability of their organizations, ordered workers to accept wage reductions rather than strike. This stance frequently angered laborers who cared more about securing their immediate incomes than reaching their union’s long-term goals.