Author Archives: lasairdhubh

Georgian Cooperatives

Posted on March 13, 2018

Near the end of World War I, Georgia declared independence and set up one of the world’s first experiments in democratic socialism. The Georgian experiment wasn’t perfect. Mistakes were made. And it didn’t last long, just three years. In 1921, … Continue reading →

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Interview: Harold de Jesus, P.O.L.I.D.O. Skateboards

Posted on February 27, 2018

P.O.L.I.D.O. (Physics and Other Laws I Don’t Obey; Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr) is a custom skateboard company in the Bronx, NY, that was recently organized into a small workers’ cooperative. I wanted to interview P.O.L.I.D.O., in part, as a window on the … Continue reading →

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Worker Coops in the USA

Posted on December 7, 2017

The Democracy at Work Institute in Oakland California conducts an annual census of all the worker cooperatives in the United States, and they have just released their analysis of their data from 2015. This is a relatively new research project. … Continue reading →

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Cooperatives in Times of Crisis

Posted on October 22, 2017

The 2008 global financial crisis was the greatest economic shock to the world economy since the great depression. The crisis not only tested the foundations of the capitalist economic system; it also presented a severe test for the cooperative economic … Continue reading →

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Coops are huge

Posted on October 3, 2017

New figures just published show that almost 10% of jobs in the world are either in a cooperative or closely linked to a cooperative. This figure includes employees in consumer coops, worker-owners in worker coops, and self-employed workers in producer … Continue reading →

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Informal Leadership and Burnout

Posted on August 28, 2017

Catherine W. Ng and Evelyn Ng (2009) “Balancing the Democracy Dilemmas: Experiences of Three Women Workers’ Cooperatives in Hong Kong.” Economic and Industrial Democracy 30(2), 182–206. This paper is a study of three new, radically horizontal worker-coop start-ups in Hong Kong. … Continue reading →

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Degeneration and Regeneration 2

Posted on July 8, 2017

Beginning with some of the earliest socialist theorists, many have argued that worker cooperatives cannot remain democratic in the long term. This is called the ‘degeneration thesis’ and according to this view, worker cooperatives are inherently unstable and will inevitably … Continue reading →

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