1. Origins of the concept of “New Cooperativism”
2. First approaches towards “New Cooperativism”
3. What would define the new cooperativism?
4. The paradox and continuity of the “New Cooperativism”.

Origins of the concept of “New Cooperativism”

In 2010, the consequences of the crisis that began with the financial crash of 2008 began to be felt in full force. For the first time in a long time, a social need for systemic alternatives emerged which would later begin to be defined from different places and positions.

Within this framework, a group of researchers linked to the English-speaking academic environment of the ICA (International Cooperative Alliance), published a special issue of the magazine Affinities of the University of Queens (Canada), putting into circulation the concept of “New Cooperativism”.

From then on up until this very year, these groups of university academics linked to the world of the ICA and Social Economics in the EU and Great Britain (UKSCS, EMES, Euricse) have published different compilations of papers delimiting and defining the term.

First approaches towards “New Cooperativism”

What defines “New Cooperativism” in the first papers on the subject is not related to anything new that the cooperatives were doing, but rather refers to its approximation to the original cooperativism from which the ICA had been distancing itself since its founding.

It was defined by the following characteristics:

• As being based on new democratic economic relations not only inwardly but with the larger community in which the cooperative is established
• Not necessarily formally constituted as cooperatives

Through the combination of these two characteristics - which have been essential to cooperativism since its birth - the researchers conclude that "New Cooperativism" is a tendency to prefigure alternative forms of economic organization and overall constitutes a rough draft for an alternative to capitalism¹.

The concept - and the expectation linked to it - reached the general public with the publication of the best seller “Postcapitalism” by Paul Mason in 2016. It still suffered, however, from a certain nebulosity that made it difficult to clarify the question of whether or not the new cooperatives had a real materiality that differentiated them from traditional cooperativism.

It would be by 2022, with the ICA and governmental structures already fully on board with diluting worker cooperativism through the concepts of Social Economy and Social Responsibility, when researchers would begin to point out a crucial element of "new cooperativism": the centrality of the commons precisely in a movement that remains outside of institutional cooperativism.

What would define the new cooperativism?

In all the academic literature on the subject created since 2010 until today, four characteristics that would define the initiative labeled as “New Cooperativism” were delineated.

1. Promotion of democratic practices in the area of sustainable production and equal access to distribution of goods and services
2. Involvement of the wider community in collective decision-making processes linked to the maintenance of a given commons of any kind (ranging from agricultural land to historical patrimony to free software).
3. Definition of a collective morality and a way of living that is communitarian and not “capital-centric”.
4. Horizontal organization and promotion of this horizontality in communitarian forms of cooperativism.

That is to say, “New Cooperativism” would come to define those cooperative initiatives that go beyond the hegemonic model of the ICA and which promote new forms of cooperativism based on commons that prefigure post-capitalist relations.

The paradox and continuity of the “New Cooperativism”.

The paradox is evident. Under the term “new cooperativism”, the academic environment of the ICA points out and places emphasis in precisely what the ICA itself fails to redirect towards its denaturalizing model of cooperativism. It goes without saying that the ICA's way of resolving this contradiction has been to look the other way at whatever practical criticism these models contain without renouncing using them as a rhetorical example.

In reality, "New Cooperativism" is none other than what cooperativism originally was and stood for², in which work and the commons play a central role. It has never disappeared and it may only seem new to those who believe that that the cooperative model of the ICA represents all existing worker cooperativism.

What is indeed true is that traditional cooperative models, whether termed “new cooperativism” or not, have lacked independent international bodies for far too long. The good news is that there are already initiatives, albeit germinal, to build them, such as Communalia. The continuity of these almost 15 years of new cooperativism under different names and forms can only emerge from there.