What is Communalia?
Communalia is an European association of maximalist cooperatives open to NGOs that support our cooperative principles and to people who, individually, show solidarity with them.
Goals
Communalia will work on four axes:
- Disseminate and make visible maximalist cooperativism and its principles throughout the EU.
- Promote international social impact projects. It is about coordinating the capacities of cooperatives, associations and foundations, to gain scale and scope in all areas of social action in which we work, from rural revitalization to free software.
- Facilitate associated cooperatives in the joint creation of products and services, in strengthening their economic base and accelerating their growth.
- Initiate systems of support and solidarity between cooperatives that serve to strengthen them and improve the lives of their members.
Why include NGOs and individuals?
Our principles do not end at the door of our cooperatives. We believe that the cooperative movement has to be much broader and that its values must reach much further. That is why we want to support the social action of people and groups who in many towns and neighborhoods throughout Europe, although they do not work in a cooperative, share similar values.
It doesn't matter if your goal is to start a modest reading club or if you want to revitalize a town or an entire neighborhood, if you want to organize a tutoring support system, a Fab Lab or a neighborhood association. If we share values, we can share efforts and go further together.
Where does Communalia come from?
A long-standing conversation
Communalia was the result of an open discussion initiated almost fifteen years ago about the need to revitalize worker cooperatives. This discussion was based on the rejection of the internationalization model of large industrial cooperatives, and the experience of the new digital universal commons created by the free software and hardware movement.
The fruits of that discussion were not immediate. History was accelerating. An economic crisis started and gave way to Brexit, the first manifestation of a rise in nationalism across Europe. A new international scenario appeared. It was marked by the rise of new economic, technological and military blocs and the return of war to Europe. Our cooperatives have had to spend years of maturation and adaptation to changes in the economic and social environment before starting projects together and resuming the discussion.
Meanwhile, the European cooperative world was entering a true existential crisis.
The “minimalistist” and “managerial” approach to ICA cooperativism
In the history of the European cooperative movement, the postwar period marked the moment in which the ICA (International Cooperative Alliance) and its model became hegemonic.
Until then, the ICA was only a minority tendency in cooperativism, with roots in social Anglicanism and a part of the German Protestant clergy. They shared a managerial and neutralist ideology was centered on consumer cooperativism. A minimalist cooperativism that created the Anglocentric myth of The Rochdale Pioneers, at the cost of first making invisible and then erasing a rich history of the majority of the movement both before and after the birth of ICA.
Today the different European branches of the ICA hold the monopoly of the social and institutional representation of cooperativism in each country and in the EU as a whole. There are, of course, cooperatives that fall outside their structures, but they are isolated. For all intents and purposes the ICA has integrated the organized cooperative movement into its corporatist structure.
Its minimalist principles, which are much more lax and ambiguous in comparison, have formed the basis of the long dissolution of the cooperative movement under the managerial ideology whose ultimate consequences are the total invisibilization of the movement and its absorption under concepts such as Social Economy or Companies with Purpose. All of this ended up eliminating the original objective and transformative spirit of cooperativism and diluting cooperatives in the world of capital companies and their socially responsible peripheries.
The consequences of ICA minimalism
Decades of minimalist speech have legislative results. The regulations of the SCE (European Cooperative Society) literally equate cross-border cooperatives with multinationals. And in the European legislative landscape we already have supposed worker cooperatives in which the number of votes can vary depending on the economic capacity of the member when joining.
That is to say, we are already in a phase of open and total denaturalization that can only lead to the disappearance of the most basic foundations of European cooperativism.
It has never been more necessary to make visible the worker cooperatives that maintain the original spirit in their cooperative principles. And that is the core of what we want to do.
How can I follow and contact Communalia?
We already have website and Telegram channel, but a direct conversation will surely be more fruitful. You can write to us at coordination@communalia.eu or participate in the conversation in our Telegram group .
An important note: although the contents of the website and the channel are in English, you can -and we recommend that you- participate and write in your native language. Communalia is an association of equals.
How can I contribute?
- Did you think of a specific cooperative somewhere in Europe when you read the maximalist cooperative principles? Share this entry with them and get in touch!
- Are you trying to organize or take part in any association, group or initiative aligned with our values? Let's talk! Surely we can collaborate and move forward together.