Practice Freedom

This book is full of powerful stories about new ways of organizing our economies, and there are many thousands of other examples globally. The reason we think it is important to tell these stories is because community institutions and democratic workplaces can be spaces where we can make different choices, choices that are about becoming free.

A beautiful solution is an act of resistance against the systems that dominate our people. Resistance is not just about marches, blockades, and protests; it is also about building the systems we need here and now for our communities to thrive. Resistance is setting up our own schools, our own housing complexes, our own factories in ways that reflect our values. It’s collective liberation in practice.

Living by our values and embedding these in our work doesn’t just happen, though. All of the solutions described in this book, from cooperatives to land trusts to communities of mutual aid, face pressure from existing power structures to perpetuate racism, classism, and heterosexism instead of cultivating relationships of interdependence and mutual respect. Building different structures is not enough. Practicing freedom means we work to understand how systems of oppression operate in all of our groups. We don’t assume that because we are trying to change the system, we are immune from recreating it.

Imagine a growing cooperative enterprise that has to compete with similar sized capitalist businesses to survive. It comes under increased pressure to adopt exploitative practices and take shortcuts in how it sources its materials. The business also becomes large and complex enough that the majority of members are not aware of the cooperative’s practices or of how management makes decisions. To overcome this, the cooperative’s members need to actively work to understand these pressures, come up with creative solutions, and commit to steering the co-op to make decisions that protect workers and the earth.

Working toward our collective liberation must be at the core of everything we do—otherwise, what’s the point? Above the success of any single cooperative project, we must prioritize the broader goal of transforming society for all of us. We must be that ambitious, because our ancestors are counting on us to continue the work they started, and our children will inherit the world we create.

The good news is that everyone—and we mean everyone—can practice freedom in their everyday lives, whether we are raising a family, cooking meals for our religious community, making art, delivering healthcare, or simply surviving in a system that doesn’t want us in it. The choices we make about how we do these things can always move us toward practicing freedom.