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Definition of a food co-op

How the definition was formed

Our first task was to create a common definition of a food co-op. We considered it important and necessary to define our identity. It is also a signpost for people from outside the movement. The fashion for cooperatives has led to the emergence of numerous entities calling themselves “cooperatives” but which have little in common with the idea of joint cooperation.

During the Second Food Sovereignty Forum (Warsaw, 30.01-02.02.2020) a group of people representing food cooperatives initiated their work. We met within the framework of the “Umbrella for Food Co-operatives” thematic group, which resulted in establishing an informal and open group called Umbrella for Food Co-operatives.

We developed the shape of the definition thanks to discussions among experts in the field of the history of the idea of co-operatism, post-growth, and platform co-operatism. We consulted the content of the definition on an ongoing basis in our home cooperatives, taking into account the comments coming from there.

Text of definition

A food co-op is an autonomous community of people working together in solidarity to meet the needs for access to high quality, organically and ethically produced food. It promotes food sovereignty and agriculture that supports ecosystem, food and seed diversity.

A food co-op is an institution of the common good, understood as a collective of individuals and social relationships and the resulting opportunities to work in partnership and share the results of work. Its existence is based on trust, self-organization, shared responsibility and joint work. All members have equal rights and responsibilities, including equal decision-making rights. A food co-op may collect dues and raise common funds. Membership is voluntary and not restricted by any discriminatory conditions. Any person may establish and belong to a food cooperative.

The activity of a food cooperative is based on:

  • the production of value, the aim of which is not profit maximization and unlimited economic growth, but concern for the common good of local communities and their natural and cultural environments,
  • a socially just and ecologically responsible partnership with those who produce food and craft products locally,
  • the conviction that universal access to quality local and good food is a basic human right,
  • short food supply chains,
  • promoting digital technologies that are as much as possible in line with cooperative values and where possible based on the principles of free, open source software and decentralized infrastructure,
  • conducting educational activities, including the dissemination of knowledge about food and agroecological methods of food production, as well as cooperative values and practices,
  • organizing integration events,
  • collaborating with other entities in support of food sovereignty.

Glossary of terms

We felt that in order to understand the above text well, we needed to clarify a few terms.

the common good

A concept that in modern uses refers primarily to two scientific-political traditions. The first is the theory of Elinor Ostrom – author of Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Actions, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics – who showed that certain commons, such as coastal fish populations, need collective management by so-called institutions for collective actions, composed of entities or communities dependent on their reproduction, in order to develop and reproduce.

The second is the so-called post-operaism, a set of philosophical, political and economic concepts that grew up around the leading figures of the “Autonomia Operaia” movement in Italy, and above all Antonio Negri (and later writing in a duet with Michael Hardt, authors of the key book in this context Commonwealth).

Hardt and Negri argue that the Common is an inalienable structure for the reproduction of material and social life, so it includes both natural goods such as rivers or metal ores, as well as social relations and “intangible” or infrastructural capitals, such as language, technical knowledge, the Internet, and even the community structure itself.

The latter tradition strongly contrasts the common good with the concept of property, both in the metaphysical sense (emphasizing that the common good is not a specific property of one or another resource) and in the economic sense (no one is the sole owner of the common good).

The common good turned into property (both private and public) becomes the source of the accumulation of capital (both financial and other) and serves the particular purposes of individual or collective forces (Hardt and Negri call this process the decay or corruption of the common good).

The common good, e.g. knowledge or network code, is therefore reproduced only in a relation of reciprocity, e.g. knowledge cannot develop privatized (imagine the privatization of mathematical or physical theorems). The reproduction of the common good (not production aimed at profit and growth) is de facto the production of identity and the subjectivity of a given social system (and as such is often called biopolitical, i.e. decisive for the subjectivity of the species), e.g. cooperatives, but it always takes place in the movement of becoming, i.e. the existence of the system is change, transformation, reproduction of a given system always takes place in a completely new shape, is a transformation of its identity.

Author: Bartłomiej Błesznowski

food sovereignty

The right of nations, countries or national associations, as well as local communities and communities, to determine their own agricultural and food policies, without dumping third countries. It is the right to self-determination, to choose independently the ways of producing and consuming food, without giving decisions to the mechanisms of the free market and to international corporations operating on the agricultural and food market. Within the framework of this self-determination, respect for the decision-making autonomy (food sovereignty) of others is also recognised.

Food sovereignty speaks of ensuring food security based on local production and distribution systems, in which food is seen primarily as a source of human nutrition and only then as an object of exchange. Food sovereignty ensures that food producers/farmers have the right to a dignified life, a wage and decent working conditions. It respects the knowledge and skills of farmers, which must be developed and protected from marginalisation resulting from technological pressures in global industrialised food production. Especially the work and knowledge of women should be appreciated.

Food sovereignty also promotes the production and distribution of food that interacts with nature to the highest degree, protects natural resources and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

The concept of food sovereignty – as an alternative to neoliberal policies favoring agricultural industrialization and the global free market – was developed at the 1996 World Food Summit by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina, bringing together 200 million farmers from all continents. Today, food sovereignty has acquired the status of a concept officially used by the World Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and which is permanently functioning in the international public debate.

For more information: Nyeleni Poland – Food sovereignty movement

growth vs post-growth

Post-growth (also: degrowth, dewzrost) is an interdisciplinary intellectual movement inspired by social movements and inspiring them. The main postulate of the movement is the reduction of production and consumption, especially in the Global North. Representatives of the movement argue that the development model of the global economy based on unlimited economic growth leads to the degradation of the natural environment and creates enormous social inequalities – both at the national level and within individual societies. Proponents of post-growth advocate the creation of a socio-economic model based not on economic growth, but on the actual development of quality of life and social well-being.

Post-growth has many areas in common with, among others, deep ecology, ecofeminism, agroecology, permaculture, voluntary simplicity or movements for food sovereignty and environmental justice. However, it is not identical to any particular ideology or movement, but stems from an attempt to combine different areas into one holistic system that can be simultaneously a life philosophy, a critical theory, and a political action. In addition to critiquing the economics of global capitalism, the movement aims to seek alternatives and create new alliances between existing social movements….

platform cooperativism

A decentralized alternative to venture capital-funded platforms that puts stakeholders ahead of shareholders.

Platform cooperatives are based on the following principles:

  • broad ownership of the platform, where employees control the technological functions, production processes, algorithms, data and task structures of the web platform;
  • democratic governance, in which all stakeholders who own the platform collectively manage it;
  • co-designing the platform where all stakeholders are involved in the design and development of the platform, ensuring that the software grows out of their needs, capabilities and aspirations;
  • striving for the development of open source and open data software, in which new cooperative platforms can create an algorithmic basis for other cooperatives.

Platform cooperatives create fair and decent working conditions for users and employees, offering profits for the many, not the few.

More on: https://platform.coop/pl/

cooperative of commons and cooperative

The terminological division of cooperative/cooperative does not exist in the Western languages from which the term is derived. The word cooperative exhausts both of these terms. In Polish, they are synonymous. The fact that we use both of them does not result from any specificity or discrepancy between the two terms, nor from the difference between the two forms. the organisations to which they would relate. It is only the specificity of the Polish language and an attempt to convey in the Slavic language what in Western languages derives from the Latin cooperari – to work together, to act for mutual benefit. In Poland, at various times, the name “co-share”, association or company was also used, although the latter – during subsequent phases of development of forms of the capital market – was later associated with another form of ownership of capital based on unequal shares and the disproportionate decision-making structure in such entities.

Thus, originally, i.e. at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more or less until 1939, these words mean one organizational being. Even then, however, there is a conflict in Poland between the so-called “cooperatists” – pejoratively called “neutralists” by their enemies, to emphasize the apolitical character of this movement, implicitly: acting solely for one’s own interest in alliance with those who happen to be at the top. It is about Edward Abramowski and the cooperative movement associated with the Society of Cooperatists and the union of food associations “Społem”. They themselves – implementing one of the roczdel principles – recognized that they were non-political only in the sense of not being subject to a certain a political party, not associating itself with an ideology external to the idea of cooperativeism, and not – as they were also trying to impute – having specific political goals, and therefore the idea of implementing social and economic changes that would lead to the transformation of capitalism into a just society of the future. Most of them she came from the Polish left associated with the Polish Socialist Party. They recognized that their economic activity was in fact a political activity steady towards a peaceful change of the capitalist order.

In contrast to the former, class cooperatives, the so-called “classists”, directly associated with the radical left – communists or radical socialists (e.g. Bolesław Bierut was an important figure of this movement) recognized that cooperatives play a subordinate role to the workers’ party, which is to lead to political revolution in the proper sense and the overthrow of capitalism by force. Cooperatives, therefore, as such themselves, do not have the character of political, it obtains it only through the connection with political groups and serves them. Thus, it does not lead to a change in the political system, but is simply a form of “socialism of capital”, and therefore another form of collective private property, nothing more.

As you can guess after the Second World War, the latter gained a decisive influence on the political shape of cooperatives in the People’s Republic of Poland – cooperatives were subordinated to the party and the state, and the word “cooperative” associated with Abramowski and “neutralists” was sent back to the past. Only the “cooperative” remained, and this defined the great cooperative enterprises in this sector. That is why the word “cooperative” is associated today with a relic of the Polish People’s Republic, great behemoths that function somewhere between the market economy, the state and cooperation (to the smallest extent). In the system of “real socialism”, however, cooperatives (including the “Społem” food cooperatives) became a de facto sector of the economy centrally controlled by the party and the state (having relative internal autonomy, but without the will to its existence and relations with the outside), which through their activities controlled and organized society.

The word “cooperative” survived only in the writings from before the war and… returned only when:
a) Western-inspired activists (mainly associated with the anarchist movement, alter-globalism, ecology, etc.) have begun to call their organizations so in the last decade, referring to the Cooperative rather than the Polish “cooperative”;
b) researchers of the history of cooperative ideology, m.in Aleksandra Bilewicz, Bartłomiej Błesznowski, Adam Duszyk, Filip Leszczyński, Remigiusz Okraska, Arkadiusz Peisert, and others, began to restore the connection of contemporary activist practices with pre-war ideas and dig up this word from forgotten annals.

Thus, there is virtually no difference between a “cooperative” and a “cooperative”, but the first one is to refer to the PRL “combines”, which in a post-privatization form exist to this day, e.g. part of “Społem” or housing cooperatives, such as the Warsaw Housing Cooperative (derived from the pre-war practices of radical socialists and communists), operating with an ossified structure and ties with the state. The latter, on the other hand, have been seen as subjects of a young movement born relatively recently and somehow alternative to both the former and the forms of capitalist organization. Thus, although historically both these terms refer to the same source, today it has become customary to denote slightly different forms of organization, inscribed in the history of the same idea of cooperation, but constituting different stages or moments of its development.

BIBLIOGRAPHY / LITERATURE around the topics of food cooperatives:

  1. David Bollier, Silke Helfrich; Free, fair, and alive: the insurgent power of the commons [on line], [dostęp 23 marca 2021], https://www.boell.de/en/2019/09/06/free-fair-and-alive-insurgent-power-commons 
  1. Marcin Wrzos, W stronę dobra wspólnego, Zielone wiadomości [on line], [dostęp 23 marca 2021], https://zielonewiadomosci.pl/tematy/miasto-2/w-strone-dobra-wspolnego/
  2. Aleksandra Bilewicz, Jak kiełkuje społeczeństwo obywatelskie? Kooperatywy spożywcze w Polsce jako przykład nieformalnego ruchu społecznego.
    https://www.academia.edu/6203118/Jak_kie%C5%82kuje_spo%C5%82ecze%C5%84stwo_obywatelskie_Kooperatywy_spo%C5%BCywcze_w_Polsce_jako_przyk%C5%82ad_nieformalnego_ruchu_spo%C5%82ecznego
  3. Edward Abramowski, Kooperatywa jako sprawa wyzwolenia ludu pracującego
    https://kooperatyzm.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/kooperatywa-jako-sprawa-wyzwolenia-ludu-pracujacego-edward-abramowski.pdf
  1. Zrób sobie Kooperatywę | Anna Zarębska-Urbańska | TEDxKatowice
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ZubSliBPU
  2. Maria Szyszkowska (red.), Dzisiejsze znaczenie ideałów spółdzielczości: https://wszechnicapolska.edu.pl/dokumenty/wydawnictwo/2013-M-Szyszkowska-Dzisiejsze-znaczenie-idealow-spoldzielczosci.pdf