Book Review: Assets in Common

Assets in Common: Stories of Business and Community Leaders Remaking the Economy From the Ground Up. Chelsea Robinson, ed.  Charity May, Jay Standish, Chelsea Robinson, Zoe Schlag, Derek Razo, contributors. Foreword by Zoe Schlag and Derek Razo of Common Trust (Infrastructure for Shared Ownership, 2024).

This book is published under the auspices of the Infrastructure for Shared Ownership, which, according to its website, is “a research project by Common Trust and Purpose Foundation (US), exploring how interconnected networks of enterprises can foster economic resilience, generate shared upside, and provide a viable alternative to the extractive economy.”

A look at the table of contents confirms the impression, already conveyed by this description, that the book is about networked and cooperative alternatives to capitalist financing for community economies, and scaling up shared ownership models. 

The basic idea — coalescing individual cooperative enterprises into a larger counter-economy through financial umbrella-organizations of one sort or another, in order to present a coherent alternative to capitalism — is an old one. It goes back at least to the Rochdale principle of cooperation among cooperatives — a principle which is mostly honored in the breach by present-day cooperatives. The Antigonish cooperative movement, founded by Frs. Moses Coady and Jimmy Tompkins and several other priests in Nova Scotia, started out by creating credit unions and then using them to finance an ecosystem of cooperative enterprises one at a time. The Mondragon system in the Basque region (one of the case studies in this book) is a federative umbrella organization or conglomerate of hundreds of manufacturing and service cooperatives, with its own finance arm for allocating capital between enterprises. The new municipalist projects in Cleveland, Ohio and Preston in the UK were both inspired primarily by the example of Mondragon. Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, a grassroots community organization which grew out of a generation of activism by the New Afrikan People’s Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, is engaged in building an entire networked family of “cooperative and mutually reinforcing enterprises and institutions, specifically worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, and community development credit unions.”

But Assets in Common is an important addition to the literature on the subject, particularly as it provides an analytical framework for understanding the elements common to this organizational form. In her introduction, Chelsea Robinson lists a number of tools or concepts for strengthening mutual financial ties and collective resilience among cooperative enterprises. The most important of them, from my perspective, are conscious consolidation (“aggregating assets into unifying entities like holding companies or multi-stakeholder cooperatives”), shared balance sheets (asset pooling, or “[p]utting many buildings, employees, business units, funds, or loans onto shared balance sheets,” which “enables pre-tax internal trade”), companies cooperating (for example “co-investment in co-owned services,” in order to “create connective tissue between businesses and assets”), municipal and civic integration (by which municipalist policies and the infrastructures of the cooperative economy interact synergistically), seed assets (by which “people have used a seed company or an asset base to start a network of entities”), and shared services between organizations (e.g. “an accounting company that is dedicated to back-office services for a network of businesses”).

Following a brief fictional scenario envisioning the daily life of someone born into the triumphant cooperative economy, in which they democratically control most of the material aspects of their life, the middle part of the book is devoted to a dozen case studies of real-world local projects. 

The final part of the book is a set of lessons and principles generalized from the case studies, with heavy emphasis on practical application of the organizational tools listed in the beginning of the book.

Cooperative alternatives to capitalism have failed, historically, because of capitalist enterprises’ privileged access to capital. And of course, this problem is greatly exacerbated by an underlying assumption of capitalism: that credit is something that must be “lent against” previous accumulations of stockpiled wealth rather than serving as a simple accounting system for coordinating production streams between groups of producers.

The methods surveyed in this book all facilitate, in one way or another, the pooling of assets, resources, risks, and costs between cooperative enterprises and thereby increasing their collective resilience. In addition, the revolution in decentralized, small-scale, ephemeral, low-overhead, and open-source production technology further enable the alternative economy to circumvent its disadvantages in access to capital, and to outcompete the legacy capitalist economy in terms of efficiency and agility. 

I recommend Assets in Common highly to anyone interested in further reading on new municipalist movements, economic counter-institutions, and interstitial models of postcapitalist construction.  

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative