Worker-Run Enterprises
Another feature that often emerges is the combination of production for use with some kind of cooperative self-management. For example, in 1934 the Ohio State Relief Commission used relief funds to support a dozen factories in which unemployed men and women made clothing, furniture and stoves for the unemployed. The Ohio Plan became a model for programs in several other states and was incorporated in the Federal relief agencies. It became the basis for Upton Sinclair’s sensational “end poverty in California ” (EPIC ) campaign for governor – and the bete noire of those who feared the U.S. was on the road to red revolution.
The massive deindustrialization of the 1980’s led to the emergence of efforts throughout the “rust belt” to save and create jobs through worker and community ownership. For example, the Ecumenical Coalition to Save the Mahoning Valley conducted a three-year campaign, ultimately defeated, to preserve Youngstown’s steel plants through labor and community ownership. Another such effort, the Naugatuck Valley Project in western Connecticut, helped workers buy and for seven years run a threatened brass mill dubbed Seymour Specialty Wire: An Employee-Owned Company and create an community-worker-owned home health care cooperative.
These groups developed a strategy based on networks designed to give early warning of threatened plant closings, coordinated efforts to save threatened plants, employee buyouts, new cooperative enterprises, and other locally-initiated economic development. Fifteen of these organizations came together in 1988 to form the Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal.
Self-Help Mutual Aid
In the early years of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the unemployed in many cities tried to create a counter-economy. A Seattle Unemployed Citizens’ League, for example, established 22 locals throughout the city, each with its own commissary at which donated food and firewood were exchanged for the services of barbers, seamstresses, carpenters and doctors.
By the end of 1932 there were 330 such self-help mutual aid organizations in 37 states, with membership over 300,000. (For an account of this movement see Strike! by Jeremy Brecher who is one of the authors of this post.)
Unfortunately, commissaries needed food and carpenters required wood: when the materials that could be begged, borrowed or stolen petered out, so did self-help mutual aid.
Much more sophisticated versions of such mutual aid self-help are being developed today. Much of it is occurring through bartering web sites – Craigslist.org reports that traffic is up 100 percent in a year on its bartering boards. About a dozen communities have now established local currencies. The BerkShares currency in western Massachusetts can be used in 370 local businesses. These alternative systems of exchange all help bring resources together to do something useful that isn’t happening in the mainstream economy.
Transgressing Property Rights
When things get desperate, people often find they have to ignore established property relations.
In the early 1930’s, unemployed organizations used direct action to halt evictions. Journalist Charles Walker described how a local branch of the Unemployed Council in Chicago responded when it received word that a neighbor was to be evicted.
The sheriff arrives and in the face of protest does his work. The MacNamaras’ bed, bureau stove, and children are transported to the street. Then the Council acts. With great gusto the bed, bureau, stove and children are put back in the house. Then the neighbors proceed to the local relief bureau, where a Council spokesman displays the children, presents the facts, and demands that the Relief Commission pay the rent or find another flat for the MacNamaras…. If the Commission is adamant, he leaves and reappears at general headquarters with a hundred Council members instead of fifty. Usually the Commission digs up the $6 a month rent or the landlord throws up his hands, and Mrs. MacNamara’s children have a roof over their heads.
Such direct action halted many evictions and forced the authorities in Chicago and other cities to halt them entirely.
During the 1980’s, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now – ACORN) developed a movement in which squatters occupied and set out to renovate thousands of abandoned city-owned buildings in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and other cities.
In 2009, Acorn has started a new campaign called Home Defenders to use civil disobedience to support families who refuse orders to vacate their homes. According to The New York Times, in cities like Orlando, Boston, Houston, Baltimore, Oakland and Tucson, Acorn organizers have been creating networks to alert a homeowner’s neighbors when an eviction has been scheduled or deputies are on the way. Some volunteers will summon friends and relatives to converge at the home, while others will be in charge of notifying news media.
