An interesting book, but I have to admit that I came close to putting the book down a number of times. This was due to my sense that the author over-analyzes, over-parses, and strains, in my view, to try and fit his rather unique analysis into incredible boxes – such as “sustained incipience” or “stalled present” or “planned failure,” and further attempts to encapsulate much of the analysis within a Marxist framework. As an example, given that the author has a problem conceptualizing a cooperative as anything but a for-profit organization, he frames Fannie Lou Hamer’s attempt to redefine property as “possession of the possession,” in explicit analogy to Marx’s projection of the time when the “expropriators are expropriated.” In another section he tries to explain Hamer’s work as planned failures and “stalled dialectics.” Beyond what could be seen as rather insulting, it is hard to imagine, given that dialectics is, I believe, a process, how something defined as stalled by its very nature can still be referred to as dialectics. Regardless of this, and the critical thoughts that follow, I enjoyed reading this book as it made me think and prompted me to write this review. I am open to push back on this and what follows. This book is not an easy read, and the author seems to be writing this more for his peers than for the general public. As such, I may have missed or misconstrued much of the message. Additionally, I had to ask myself in reading this book, if the author was engaging in clever paradoxes or oxymorons, or both.
I did find some of his characterizations of historical figures demeaning. However, he certainly does not hold back his admiration, at least for Baker and Hamer. And right up front, the book points to the Black cooperative experience as “one of the most forgotten mass movements in American History…profoundly speaking to the challenge of our times.” This is a view I wholeheartedly agree with.
Personally, I enjoyed reading his take on John Locke, an analysis similar to the one I take in the draft of my fourth book (available on this blog). I also enjoyed his conversation with a cooperator with an indigenous (Native American) background. Along with some indigenous philosophy, such as ownership defined as stewardship, her point about how some movements work within gaps left by capitalist markets resonated. She was discussing her experience in Jackson, Mississippi, an experience that is very similar to my experience in the South Bronx in the 1970s.
Some specific comments:
DuBois was an explicit supporter of cooperatives. But what I took from the author’s description of DuBois was that he was duplicitous and deceived people into thinking that the Negro Cooperative League and other cooperative efforts were more successful than they were. The book starts with DuBois and here is where the author starts making his point about how Black cooperative initiatives are purposefully stuck in the present, with the need to always begin again in “sustained incipience.” Hunt also referred to the “shadow DuBois” who was critical of cooperatives as the be all and end all for Black advancement. With regard to disadvantages of cooperative development, DuBois is quoted as stating that cooperative development “intensifies prejudice and bitterness…narrows the activity of the best class of Negroes, withdraws them from helpful competition and contact, perverts and cheapens their ideals…provincializes them in thought and deed.” This is a time (1906) when DuBois was still espousing the need for a “Talented Tenth,” which at least presumes an assimilationist approach to Black development. It is not surprising that DuBois would be ambivalent towards cooperative development as working against assimilation, or at least acceptance into the mainstream. Later in life, his position changed regarding the Talented Tenth and he became an avowed Socialist, and one who along with Warbasse and Kropotkin saw cooperatives as pathways towards socialism. This seemingly duplicitous perspective of DuBois is also somewhat justified on the basis that the end of the 19th Century saw many cooperative enterprises destroyed by White mobs. The author, quite accurately, describes this violence as emanating from the “pyromania of envy and entitled control.” As such, instead of duplicitous, I would describe DuBois’s attitude more as ambivalent. In my mind, criticizing DuBois within an environment of racism and violence against any gains made by African-Americans is like criticizing emergency responders who, faced with a myriad of conflicting challenges, are unsure in their approach to dealing with the emergency and try different, maybe even, competing approaches in addressing the emergency.
In dealing with Ella Baker, she comes off as self-deprecating and as someone who ultimately and too readily accepts her own obsolescence. Here the author projects on to Baker the intention to start cooperative enterprises while planning for them to fail. I agree with Hunt that Baker is a kind of precursor to BLM’s “leaderful” as opposed to “leader-led” or leader-less” style of organization, “transforming the traditional dyad between passive listeners and ministerial orators into a horizontal structure of an audience participating actively in an extended debate.” But then the author goes on to describe how the planning for failure and endless beginnings create a form of ecstasy for Black cooperators. “Ecstatic is what it feels like to form a cooperative and plan its failure.” He relates this to the need for Blacks to counter the “logics of property.” Here he also compares the ecstasy of creating a cooperative to the ecstasy of emancipation, a dubious comparison, except by some attenuated extension: emancipation – control over one’s own body; cooperative – control over the outcome of the use of one’s body. He also feeds into the discriminatory perspective that Blacks cannot plan ahead and instead revel in the present. “For Baker and Schuyler, however, it was as though the only way to keep the present going was to keep it from going on.” This seems to fly in the face of Baker’s involvement in Soul City and other efforts. To refuse to follow a time/progress/success paradigm that is structured for dominant society and likely to fail in non-dominant societal spheres, is not the same as saying that the protagonists of counter initiatives plan for failure. With absurd flair Hunt proclaims “On the high seas of planned failure, we are not born to die, we die in order to begin.” This quote might smack of religious fervor, except for the fact that the author believes that to begin again is to plan again for failure.
Also, the author is saying that movements do not fail due to burnout, exhaustion and the like, but they fail because the ecstatic principles compel failure in order to begin again. Again, I find this absurd. I can understand that upon abolition of slavery, proclaimed freedom allowed Blacks to claim control over their own bodies, but only to a very limited and often illusory extent. That freedom was then circumscribed by geography, profession, and (ultimately in cases of extra-legal and legal lynchings and convict leasing) by the reclaimed and legal ability to once again control the bodies of ex-slaves and their progeny. This farcical freedom might create perverse priorities or at least ambivalence, but to say that these very meaningful cooperative efforts were meant to fail and that failure brought about ecstasy is wrong and a seeming insult.
In reviewing the extraordinary work of Fannie Lou Hamer, Hunt describes her as the quintessential “captive maternal,” or “the contradiction of being the celebratory caretaker of U.S. democracy, whose very stabilization destabilizes her.” This is certainly not a stretch. But again, Hunt states that “Hamer forged a social movement as a mode of stillness, a movement entirely based on ceasing to move,” this based upon the experience of Freedom Farm, which lasted a total of nine years – hardly a fly by night operation. Time stopped, according to the author for Hamer, because “There was simply too much tension to brook any forward flow, any movement whatsoever.”
But any social movement that contradicts prevailing norms will encounter tension. This is the basis for progress. To say that Hamer was stopping time consciously is to say that she was against progress. Again, this is a woman who accumulated some personal power and used it consistent with her desire to balance the needs of her people against the constraints and opposition her efforts faced, all the time putting her people first. It is no wonder that she was not ultimately successful with regard to the Co-op.
The author, however, also predicates the failure of Hamer’s Mississippi Freedom Farm on other factors. Part of the problem I have with the author here is that he sees an irreconcilable difference between a not-for-profit and a cooperative, a difference that for him becomes an irreconcilable contradiction. He takes the position that a non-profit cannot have owners, whereas a cooperative does have owners. He takes this further by stating that if everyone owns, then no one owns. He also states that dividends are profits, and therefore you cannot be a non-profit and make a profit.
You can be a cooperative and be a non-profit. In a consumer cooperative, when the cooperative has a surplus, this is not a profit. In a true, conventional consumer cooperative, a surplus is not surplus, not a profit and not income to the members when distributed. What it is, is a return of a price overcharge. In a producer (farmer) cooperative, if there is a surplus, then the farmer was paid too little, and the excess is returned to the farmer. However, even though this is income to the farmer, even if deferred income, it is not profit to the cooperative. In the case of the Co-op (the Farm), given how so many were provided with homes and food and day care and other services, substantially free of charge, and how membership was open, it is difficult to imagine that any surplus income shared with these members would even raise them out of poverty, let alone be defined as profit.
The author states that Hamer worked to right “systemic wrongs.” This is true, but this very statement seems inconsistent with the view that she stopped time. If you stop time and exist within some capitalistic twilight zone, then you are working outside of the system by definition, without the ability to right systemic wrongs.
Further on, Hunt talks about Hamer being against and for ownership, all at the same time. He spends pages parsing and explaining how this is possible. This is where he compares Marx’s “expropriators are expropriated” with his sense of Hamer’s purported attempt at “possession of possession itself.” He says this because cooperative land can only be owned if it is unowned. He posits that Hamer is looking not to own land but to own the concept of owning land, and thereby turn it on its head into something different. This is hardly a working analogy to Marx’s expropriation quote. Referring back to what I described above potentially as DuBois’s ambivalence, Hamer was seemingly open to anything that worked for her people without compromising her principles. It is not surprising that she was not perfectly consistent, as those who live lives on the ground never have a glimpse of anything like life being consistent, let along perfectly consistent.
Again with strain and attempting to place Hamer’s intention in a Marxist framework, he states that Hamer worked to “perpetuate internal tensions” where the owners of the cooperative displace the owners themselves. Perhaps this is what Hunt means by “stalled dialectics,” or commencing a process that never seeks to get beyond the tension or conflict. But this again seems too much of a stretch.
Furthermore, he describes a movement where no endpoint or ultimate goal is projected. “A movement toward an unspecified change intimates a movement without direction, a movement that is, in the fullness of the word, a ‘phase.’ The nature of the change is not only a change to indirection, but to a ‘fading out,’ the only change that Hamer offers. Each phase, a fade, always fading out.” I also find this disrespectful. I am reminded of an interview with Noam Chomsky. He was asked to lay out the steps to radical change and he refused to do so. His position was that there needs to be a fixed set of humane principles, space, opportunity to try different approaches to operationalize those principles, a tolerance for setbacks, and learning through such a developmental building process. That is a far cry from having no direction. What it is, however, is faith in the ability of people, working together, within a non-antagonistic or manageable antagonistic environment, to solve their own problems and secure a better life for themselves individually and collectively.
But then, later on he makes the point in contravention to his position in discussing the work of Kali Akuno of the Cooperative Jackson. “The weak and relatively sparse concentration of capital in Mississippi creates a degree of “breathing room” on the margins and within the cracks of the capitalist system that a project like ours can maneuver and experiment in the quest to build a viable anti-capitalist alternative.” Of course, as we have experienced in the South Bronx, once that “breathing room” collapses, all bets are off. But if given time, space, and the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them, the Cooperative Jackson could evolve into something lasting and meaningful.
A few more critical observations:
At one point at the end of the book, Hunt compares DuBois’s concept of double consciousness to the doubling and further multiplying of cooperatives. I do not get this as my understanding of the term as DuBois used it was that Blacks can seldom be themselves, as they are always looking at themselves through the eyes of White people, hence the double consciousness.
In the Afterword, in his conversation with Kali, he asked “how else can we think of” a term she used: “living into the present.” He surmises that it means that the present always has a gap for us to fill. That may be so, but I can think of another explanation, given Kali’s indigenous background. I would suggest it may mean that we have to consider the present as the cumulative progression of all that has come before us. And to live into the present is to live our lives, in some meaningful way, through those who came before us and appreciating all that has come before us.
He also interprets a poem about nature and the absence of grief by Wendell Berry as meaning that we grieve so that others will not have to. I interpret it differently. Grief is not a condition of the natural world, in its balance, comprehensiveness, integration and diversity. Circumstances that we would typically define as grief could represent the natural order of things to be reconciled with our lives, if we lived our lives in a socially ecological manner. Those things that cause us grief are mostly those things that arise due our arrogance, anthropocentrism, and self-deification.
In closing, I am glad not to have put the book aside. It is a worthwhile read, provocative and worthy of discussion.