From the Editor's Desk

"… [F]reedom and opportunity do not mean a license to climb upwards by pushing other people down." — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address to Young Democrats Clubs, 1935

"If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?" — Eduardo Galeano, http://upsidedownworld.org

Though FDR evinced opposition to exploitation, in practice, he endorsed (and, some claim, rescued) capitalism, a system that grants its highest rewards to people who get rich off the labor of others. In the very next statement of the address quoted above, FDR warned against an economic system based on paternalism and regimentation. Apparently, FDR could not imagine any alternative to capitalism on the one hand, and Soviet-style totalitarianism on the other. He couldn't imagine an economy that wasn't based on the violence of either capitalist or communist expropriation. Under both systems, the "captains of industry" rule, in an economic dictatorship, over workers and consumers.

Mohandas Gandhi challenged India, and nonviolent activists everywhere, to start building on a small-scale the societies that we want to create on a large scale. This issue of Peacework focuses on models of cooperative economics, based on the principle of "not pushing other people down," while turning FDR's assumptions upside down.

Greg Lawless provides us with historical background to the global cooperative movement, rooted in democratic self-management, which now involves an estimated 730 million people worldwide. Jane Livingston describes a Masters of Cooperative Management program, and explicates the values and principles underlying contemporary co-ops. James Graeber takes a global view, arguing that knowledge of the multitude of ways human cultures have devised to institutionalize cooperation can help us forge new non-hierarchical, anarchist, societies.

Jake Miller's and Liana Foxvog's descriptions of the role international solidarity is playing in fostering the development of co-ops in Mexico, Brazil, and El Salvador illustrate that though corporations globalize exploitation, cooperatives can globalize cooperation.

Richard Stallman, who helped invent free software, warns that even though the open source software movement has channeled the creative cooperative efforts of over a million programmers, thus challenging corporate hegemony over cyberspace (and often winning), unless the movement becomes grounded in principles of freedom, our liberty will be at risk.

Sometimes, one of the best ways of mobilizing people for visionary economic changes is to wage, and win, struggles for economic empowerment, such as the campaigns in the US to increase the minimum wage. Similarly, sometimes it is necessary to struggle simply to avoid going backwards, as in the astonishingly large protests to defend young workers' due process rights in France; the inspirational upsurge of the immigrants' rights movement in the US; and efforts in the US to prevent the gutting of urban Native American health programs.

Not all nonviolent uprisings succeed right away, as the continued crackdown in Belarus demonstrates. But in Nepal, every attack by "security" forces on pro-democracy protesters seemed only to fuel the determination of an even greater number of courageous demonstrators the following day. Despite shoot-on-sight orders, the Nepalese poured out of their homes and took to the streets, once again demonstrating the power of cooperative nonviolent action to turn the world right-side-up.

Are these utopian ideas? I hope so. Eduardo Galeano reminds us, "Utopia is on the horizon: when I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking." Let's walk — and roll.