Cooperation Jackson
An attempt to build economic democracy from the ground up in a majority-Black Southern city — worker cooperatives, a commons, and a solidarity economy ecosystem rooted in Black radical political tradition.
The Practice
Cooperation Jackson emerged in Jackson, Mississippi around 2012–2014, developed by activists in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement including Kali Akuno and Sacajawea Hall. It was shaped by the political project of Chokwe Lumumba, who was elected mayor of Jackson in 2013 on a platform of transforming the city’s economy through cooperative development. He died in office in 2014, eight months in. His son Chokwe Antar Lumumba was elected mayor in 2017, continuing the project from within city government.
The project aims to build: worker cooperatives in sectors relevant to Jackson’s immediate needs, a community land trust to hold assets outside market logic, political education through Freedom Schools, and a fabrication lab and production center with the tools for local manufacturing. It draws on the Mondragon and Emilia-Romagna cooperatives and on zapatista-autonomy — the principle of building what you need without waiting for the state to provide it — and its Pan-Africanist lineage echoes ujamaa, Julius Nyerere’s cooperative village economics in Tanzania.
What It Teaches
Cooperation Jackson is a thought experiment that’s actually running. The question it’s trying to answer: can cooperative economics take root in a place that has been structurally disinvested for generations — where capital has been extracted, where infrastructure is decaying, where the political class has been complicit in exploitation?
The theory of change is that you don’t need to wait for the state or the market to change. You build an alternative economy that meets people’s actual needs, and that economy gradually becomes the one people prefer. This isn’t naive. Akuno’s writing is honest about the obstacles: lack of capital, hostile state politics, the difficulty of building democratic enterprises in a community whose relationship with collective action has been shaped by generations of betrayal. Some cooperatives didn’t survive. The land trust aspirations have met legal and financial barriers.
But the failure modes are as informative as the successes. Where cooperative economics runs into trouble in Jackson — access to startup capital, legal structures for holding land collectively, building democratic governance skills from scratch — those problems are the same problems anywhere the commons model meets the resistance of existing ownership structures.
The Tension
Cooperation Jackson operates under intense material constraint. It’s one thing to build cooperative economics in a place with accumulated capital and established technical infrastructure; it’s another in a city with 25% poverty rates and a crumbling sewer system. The project has been criticized for overreach — attempting too much without enough resources — and defended as necessarily ambitious, because incrementalism under conditions of crisis isn’t a strategy.
The deeper tension is political. Cooperation Jackson is rooted in a tradition — Black radical politics, New Afrikan self-determination, explicit solidarity with liberation movements globally — that is not universal. It is specifically about Black liberation, and its cooperative economic model is inseparable from that political context. Extracting the economics from the politics — “let’s just do the cooperatives” — misses what makes the project distinctive and what it’s actually for.
Connections
- ujamaa — Nyerere’s cooperative economics as a Pan-Africanist touchstone
- Julius Nyerere — the political-economic model Cooperation Jackson draws on
- zapatista-autonomy — building outside the state, without waiting for permission
- cooperative-movement — the broader tradition of worker ownership
- commons — governance structures that hold assets outside market logic
- land-trust — the community land trust as a holding structure for place
- replication-not-scaling — the pattern that propagates rather than the institution that grows
Sources
- Akuno, Kali and Ajamu Nangwaya, eds. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi (2017)
- Akuno, Kali. “Build and Fight: The Program and Strategy of Cooperation Jackson” (2017)
- Cooperation Jackson website and published materials