The core components of this dual power strategy call for three fundamental programmatic engagements:

1. Building independent People’s Assemblies to hold governments accountable for their policies and actions on the one hand, and, on the other, autonomously address the various needs of the people through mutual aid and solidarity initiatives;
2. Developing and deploying independent electoral vehicles to wield state power and enact non-reformist reforms to further democratize society and enable greater social movement space and maneuverability;
3. To employ the tools and techniques of the solidarity economy to radically transform the local and regional economy by socializing the means of production, democratizing productive decision-making and resource mobilization, centering the needs of the Black working-class majority of Jackson, and serving as means toward the transition to ecosocialism.

Cooperation Jackson as a Vehicle of the Jackson-Kush Plan

Cooperation Jackson is a vehicle specifically created to advance the third component of the Jackson-Kush Plan: the development of the solidarity economy. Cooperation Jackson is a network of worker cooperatives and solidarity economy institutions based in Jackson, Mississippi. The mission of Cooperation Jackson is to build a vibrant and ecologically regenerative solidarity economy locally and throughout the southern portion of the United States as a prelude toward the democratic transition toward ecosocialism.²

Cooperation Jackson’s operating strategy and program is intended to accomplish four fundamental ends:

1. To place the ownership and control over the primary means of production directly in the hands of the Black working class of Jackson,
2. To build and advance the development of the ecologically regenerative forces of production in Jackson,
3. To democratically transform the political economy of Jackson and its greater metropolitan region,
4. To advance the aims and objectives of the Jackson-Kush Plan, which are to attain self-determination for people of African descent and the radical, democratic transformation of the state of Mississippi.

The cornerstone of our operation is the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust, which stewards over forty-five properties in West Jackson, including four commercial properties: the Kuwasi Balagoon Center for Economic Democracy and Sustainable Development, the Imari Obadele Center for Community Production, the Ida B. Wells Plaza, and six residential cooperative housing units. The mission of the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust is to decommodify and situationally decolonize as much land as possible in Jackson, to curtail the forces of gentrification and working-class displacement, and to establish as much permanently affordable and sustainable housing and productive facilities, both agriculturally and industrially, in the community as possible.

The Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust houses all of the cooperatives that are currently part of the Cooperation Jackson federation. These include the following interconnected cooperative enterprises.

Freedom Farms is a worker-owned cooperative specializing in urban farming in West Jackson. Freedom Farms currently produces on five acres of land stewarded by the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust. Freedom Farms specializes in producing organic vegetables, herbs, and fruits.

The Green Team is a worker-owned cooperative specializing in yard care and landscaping. It focuses on sustainable methods of lawn care, and the gathering and processing of organic yard waste to transition it into compost, with the objective of keeping the refuse from entering the municipality’s landfill and water drainage system, to thus support the city becoming a zero-waste center.

Zero Waste of Jackson is a worker-owned recycling and composting cooperative. The cooperative employs the organic waste secured by the Green Team and gathered by families and various institutions in the metro region to make commercial-grade compost, which it sells to farmers throughout the region. It also collects, sorts, and processes inorganic materials that it either sells or repurposes. The aim of this cooperative is to make Jackson a zero-waste community through comprehensive community education efforts that shift waste disposal methods at the family, commercial, and municipal levels. It also aims to turn as much organic waste as possible into reusable compost to trap more carbon and methane and to regenerate the soils in the greater Jackson metro region.

The Community Production Cooperative is a small-scale worker-owned manufacturing cooperative. It utilizes digital fabrication tools and techniques, including 3D printers, mill machines, and so on, to produce a range of products from personal protective equipment to toys, t-shirts, banners, furniture, and office equipment.

Evansville Catering Cooperative is a worker-owned food catering cooperative that specializes in Afrikan culinary arts derived from the South, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the African continent. It also specializes in producing diabetic friendly, vegetarian, and vegan meal options. It focuses on provisioning special events, conferences, and festivals.

Eversville Design and Printing Cooperative is a worker-owned cooperative specializing in graphic design and printing on multiple mediums, including t-shirts, banners, stickers, decals, and more.

These cooperatives constitute the core of our first generation of cooperatives. We are also in the process of developing a second generation of cooperatives. Like the first class, these are mission-driven cooperative enterprises that align with the larger aims and objectives of the Jackson-Kush Plan. We currently have four cooperative working groups that are in advanced stages of development and are preparing to open within the next twelve to twenty-four months. These include: 1) the Starline Transportation Cooperative, which is a sustainable trucking and hauling cooperative; 2) the Praxis Team Cooperative, which is a cooperative training and promotions cooperative; 3) the People’s Grocery, which is a multi-stakeholder community grocery cooperative; and 4) the Balagoon Reading Room and Cafe Cooperative, which is a coffee house and community library cooperative.

In addition to the effort to construct a new commons in the form of the community land trust and build a federation of worker cooperatives, we have also worked diligently to establish a number of accompanying solidarity institutions. The most prominent of the solidarity institutions we have established is the Really, Really Free Market.³ It is our first critical step toward creating a comprehensive system of mutual exchange. At present the Really, Really Free Market gathers and distributes surplus materials to whoever may need or want them based on their own ability to access them, primarily on a first come, first serve basis. While we are providing people with access to materials on a noncommodified basis, we are not in structured relationships with them yet wherein they are engaged in any direct reciprocity with the Really, Really Free Market organizers or the other individuals participating in the Market. There are no direct relationships or correlations between the givers and the receivers in this dynamic, which in many respects does not challenge the power relationships between those who have and those who have not—which is one of the fundamental things we want to eradicate. In addition, because the participants involved in the Really, Really Free Market do not control the production of the materials that are being donated, we are subject to the whims of those who donate as to what we receive, when, and why. As has been noted, we do not want to be dependent on the whims of corporations, such as Costco or Whole Foods or other well-wishers.

Mutual aid, it bears repeating, is not charity. Rather, it is people collaborating on a voluntary basis to exchange resources and services for the benefit of the community of which they are a part. It requires a sense of solidarity, and it requires that people give some of what they possess, be it their time, energy, or material resources, to the community on a voluntary basis to serve the whole, rather than narrow or exclusive parts. In our case, the Really, Really Free Market still has some characteristics of a charity organization but is starting to make a qualitative transformation as the people who are currently utilizing its resources and services have started to volunteer and sustain the program by donating their time and labor, and by consistently providing it with various materials and services. Once a critical mass of people starts to engage with it in this way, in the range of 250-plus people in our context, it will become a mutual aid hub. But it is a process of transformation; one that will require persistence, patience, perseverance, and consistent good practice on our part to make it attractive and reliable to people, so they are ensured that the time and energy they put into the process will not be wasted, taken advantage of, or disrespected.

Becoming a mutual aid hub will be a significant accomplishment, but we need to be clear that this is not where we ultimately want to go. We fundamentally want to create a mutual exchange network, wherein we develop a system that elicits exchanges of goods and services “from each according to their ability,” and distributing them “to each according to their needs.” Now, in order to create a practice and system in which folks are creating a social pool of resources and contributing to it voluntarily to meet the needs of others, but also getting their needs met through voluntary exchanges, we are going to have to enhance our own productive capacities and those of everyday Jacksonians to a significant degree—a very significant degree. It is toward the aim of promoting this enhanced productivity that gave rise to the formula “every yard a farm, every garage a factory.” The challenge, however, is how to move and motivate our people to engage in these types of productive activities and exchanges.

In order to move away from the charity operation, we are now seeking to organize a system of mutual exchange. We have to develop the consciousness of our base (which includes ourselves) and supplement this with a coherent set of practices and tools that reinforce our conscious choices with a sound material foundation.

The one area where our work has been in retreat is in the realm of organizing and conducting People’s Assemblies. The last substantive Assembly organized by Cooperation Jackson was in the fall of 2022. Unfortunately, that event turned out to be a COVID-19 superspreader event, despite utilizing a number of precautions. In the wake of the pandemic, turnout for mass events in Jackson, as in many U.S. urban areas, has been drastically down, even some three years later. We tried to do some online assemblies, but they did not work for a host of reasons, one of the primary ones being the digital divide (that is, the lack of adequate internet access and the computers or other hardware needed to access it), which is a product of the systemic racism that imbues the U.S. settler colonial state.

However, we remain committed to the development of the People’s Assembly instrument. For, as we said in Jackson-Rising Redux:

People denied their agency and power and subjected to external authority need vehicles to exercise their self-determination and exert their power. A People’s Assembly is a vehicle of democratic social organization that, when properly organized, allows people to exercise their agency, exert their power, and practice democracy—meaning “the rule of the people, for the people, by the people”—in its broadest terms, which entails making direct decisions about the economic, social and cultural operations of a community or society and not just the contractual (“civil”) or electoral and legislative (the limited realm of what is generally deemed to be “political”) aspects of the social order.⁴

And further:

The People’s Assemblies that (Cooperation Jackson) is working to build in Jackson and throughout the state of Mississippi, particularly its western Black belt portions of the state, are designed to be vehicles of Black self-determination and the autonomous political authority of the oppressed peoples and exploited classes contained within the state. The Assemblies are organized as expressions of participatory or direct democracy.⁵

We hold true to this vision and practice despite the many challenges we confront in making it a reality and realizing its full potential. Now, eleven years in, this is all an ongoing work in progress.

Assessing Over a Decade of Development

All of the aforementioned projects and cooperatives constitute the economic base we have built over the last ten years in order to fuel the advancement of the Jackson-Kush Plan. To that end, we note that “politics without economics is a symbol without substance.” This old adage summarizes and defines Cooperation Jackson’s relationship to the Jackson-Kush Plan and our political aims and objectives in putting it forward. Without a sound economic program and foundation, the Jackson-Kush Plan is nothing more than a decent exposition of revolutionary nationalist politics. Cooperation Jackson is the vehicle we have collectively created to ensure that we do more than just espouse good rhetoric, but engage in a concrete struggle to create a democratic economy that will enable Black and other colonized, oppressed, and exploited people to exercise self-determination in Mississippi and beyond.

We have to be crystal clear that self-determination is unattainable without an economic base—and not just a standard, capitalist-oriented economic base, but a democratic one. Self-determination is not possible within the capitalist social framework because the endless pursuit of profits that drives this system only empowers private ownership and the individual appropriation of wealth by design. The end result of this system is massive inequality and inequity. We know this from the brutality of our present experience and the nightmares of history demonstrated to us time and time again over the course of the last five hundred years.

We strive to build a democratic economy because it is the surest route to equity, equality, and ecological balance. Reproducing capitalism, either in its market-oriented or state-dictated forms, will only replicate the inequities and inequalities that have plagued humanity since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. We believe that the participatory, bottom-up democratic route to economic democracy and ecosocialist transformation will be best secured through the anchor of worker self-organization, the guiding structures of cooperatives and systems of mutual aid and communal solidarity, and the democratic ownership, control, and deployment of the ecologically friendly and labor liberating technologies of the fourth industrial revolution.

As students of history, we have done our best to try and assimilate the hard lessons from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century national liberation and socialist movements. We are clear that self-determination expressed as national sovereignty is a trap if the nation-state does not dislodge itself from the dictates of the capitalist system. Remaining within the capitalist world system requires submission to the domination and rule of capital, which will only empower the national bourgeoisie against the rest of the population contained within the nation-state edifice.

However, we are just as clear that trying to impose economic democracy or socialism from above is not only problematic as an anti-democratic endeavor, it also does not dislodge capitalist social relations. It only shifts the issues of labor control and capital accumulation away from the bourgeoisie and places it in the hands of the state or party bureaucrats. We are clear that economic democracy and the transition to ecosocialism have to come from below, not from above. We understand that workers and communities have to drive the social transformation process through their self-organization and self-management, not be subjected to it. This does not mean that individuals, organizations, and political forces should not try to intervene or influence the development of the working class and our communities. We believe that we should openly and aggressively present our best ideas, programs, strategies, tactics, and plans to the working class and to our communities in open forums, discussions, town halls, assemblies, and other deliberative spaces, and debate them in a principled democratic fashion to allow the working class and our communities to decide for themselves whether they make sense and are worth pursuing and implementing.

Although Cooperation Jackson is rooted in an ideological framework, vision, and macro-strategy grounded by decades of struggle, it is not a static entity. Like any dynamic organization, we do our best to center our practice on addressing the concrete conditions of our space, time, and situation and to align our theory with our practice. As such, our program and strategy are constantly adapting and evolving to address new challenges and seize new opportunities. One major new challenge we are now confronting is the electoral defeat of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba.

Confronting New Challenges

Chokwe Antar Lumumba lost the Democratic Party Primary on Tuesday, April 22, 2025.⁶ His defeat marked the end of the second phase of the Jackson-Kush Plan’s overall implementation. The first phase of the Jackson-Kush Plan started by adjusting to the new political realities of the post-September 11 world, which severely limited the political activities and even language employed by radical organizations like the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Afrikan People’s Organization. We first had to come to a general consensus that we, in fact, needed a new plan and strategy to advance our work and to deal with the shifting political realities inside the U.S. empire. Once this was accomplished, we developed a five-year plan in 2004 to guide the work of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Afrikan People’s Organization. The Jackson-Kush Plan and its core strategic planks emerged from this five-year plan, and were drilled down into the form that was publicly presented between 2005–2009.

The second phase of the Jackson-Kush Plan’s execution, the “electoral phase,” commenced in the fall of 2008. This phase primarily centered on running candidates partisan to the New Afrikan Independence Movement for offices in Jackson and throughout the Mississippi portion of the Kush District, better known as the Mississippi Delta. The initial aim of this phase was to build an independent electoral vehicle that would help advance the narrative of Black self-determination, position the independence movement to press for transitional demands, and serve the political and material interests of the Black working-class majorities throughout this region. The secondary focus of this phase of the Jackson-Kush Plan centered on developing the solidarity economy with the support of the municipalities and counties the Independence movement would secure through its electoral victories.

The second phase officially commenced when the late Chokwe Lumumba, the father of Chokwe Antar Lumumba, announced his run for City Council as a candidate for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in November 2008. Chokwe Lumumba won the council race in the summer of 2009 and served as the Councilman for Ward 2 until June 2013. He then successfully ran for Mayor and served in that capacity from July 2013 until February 2014. Unfortunately, Mayor Lumumba died from obscure causes on Tuesday, February 25, 2014.⁷ This date sadly lives on in infamy in Jackson’s social movement circles, in large part because no definitive determination of death was ever established. Following Chokwe’s death, his son Chokwe Antar ran for mayor. He placed second in the special election that occurred in the spring of 2014, but won the office during the next regular election in 2017.

Chokwe Antar Lumumba held office for eight years, from 2017 until the present year. His term will have expired at the end of June 2025. His defeat to State Senator John Horhn in the Democratic party primary by a 3-to-1 margin, with Horhn receiving over 75 percent of the vote, officially ended the initial electoral phase of the Jackson-Kush Plan.⁸ I say initial, because if and when the partisans of the Jackson-Kush Plan regroup and realign around the core principles of the plan, we will once again run candidates for office. However, it remains to be seen if all of the forces that launched the implementation of the plan in 2008 will regroup and realign. Unfortunately, our forces split during the “electoral phase” of the plan’s execution over the question of running independent electoral candidates and building an independent electoral vehicle. One faction in the split chose to try and run an experiment within the Democratic Party—albeit a semi-autonomous local wing of the party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which was established by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. This was the majority faction at the time of the split, which consisted of most of the members of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Afrikan People’s Organization and the core elements of the Jackson People’s Assembly. The minority faction chose to pursue independence in all forms, as articulated in the Jackson-Kush Plan. Cooperation Jackson was squarely in this faction.

With Antar Lumumba’s defeat, in effect, the second phase of the Jackson-Kush Plan’s execution came to an end. The nature of his defeat indicates that the voting constituency in Jackson was determined to move in a new direction. The voters clearly rejected the policies, programs, leadership style, and conduct of the administration of Antar Lumumba. The implication here is that in rejecting the Lumumba administration, the voting constituency also rejected the Jackson-Kush Plan and its aims and objectives, at least to the degree that they were represented by the policies and actions of Antar Lumumba. However, while Antar Lumumba’s stewardship over the mayor’s office came to an end, it needs to be made clear that the Jackson-Kush Plan is alive and well, and has not been wholly rejected by the Black working-class majority in Jackson. The path chosen by Cooperation Jackson, the independent path, is alive and well, even with all of its challenges—which are legion.

Understanding and Addressing the Limitations of Our Circumstances and Conditions

It is our position that the third phase of the Jackson-Kush Plan is now fully commencing. May 1, 2025, marked the eleventh year of Cooperation Jackson’s existence. In the course of these eleven years, the organization has made some significant advances, as noted above. It should be noted, however, that Cooperation Jackson was born prematurely, and the effects of this premature birth have stunted critical aspects of our development over the years. In spite of all of our accomplishments, they are minor in comparison to what we arguably could and would have accomplished if we had the full support of the municipal authorities and institutions, buttressed by a beneficial set of policies and procedures that supported local labor, procurement, and production. Cooperation Jackson would have had access to all of this if the elder Chokwe Lumumba had lived to usher through their institutionalization and execution or if Chokwe Antar Lumumba had adopted them, which he did not.

To understand more of what could have been accomplished, we have to look back at the infamous date of Tuesday, February 25, 2014. This date sadly lives on in infamy in Jackson’s social movement circles, because as it turns out, it was fateful on two fronts: the stunting of the solidarity economy in Jackson and the deepening of our city’s water crisis. This fateful day was the date that the City Council was set to approve Mayor Lumumba’s choice of public works director, who was deliberately chosen to focus on the water crisis confronting the city by strategically developing an extensive network of public-community partnerships to bypass various state level limitations and launch a program of autonomous self-taxation to overcome the fiscal challenges confronting the city. Furthermore, it was set to approve my operations plan for the development of the solidarity economy in Jackson. This plan was distilled from the Jackson-Kush Plan and framed for policy implementation in my capacity as the Mayor’s Special Assistant in the role of the Director of Special Projects and External Funding. On this day, the City Council was set to approve the following policies and programs to build the solidarity economy in Jackson:

1. The establishment of a cooperative development division within the city’s economic development department to provide training and professional development to individuals and groups seeking to build cooperative enterprises.
2. The establishment of a cooperative development fund through the institutionalization of a public-community partnership with various credit unions within the municipality. This was intended to provide development assistance and low to no interest loans to developing cooperatives, particularly those that represented traditionally underserved and under-resourced communities.
3. The reformation of the city’s procurement policies, mandating that the city supply a minimum of 50 percent of its resource needs from local vendors, to both stimulate the local economy and reduce the city’s overall carbon emissions.
4. The reformation of the city’s contracting policies, mandating that the city grant more than 50 percent of its contracts to local contractors, particularly from business entities drawing from underserved and underrepresented communities.

If Cooperation Jackson, or an entity like Cooperation Jackson, was able to utilize these enabling policies and conditions, it is reasonable to assert that the scale of our economic and material operations would have a regional character, as originally intended, instead of the more localized impact we have at present. Why do we say this? For starters, if the training institution was in place, there would be exponentially more people trained in the basics of how to start and operate a cooperative enterprise than what we ourselves have been able to do with our scant resources over the past ten years. Without an endowment, there is only so much a grassroots organization like Cooperation Jackson can do to train thousands of people relying on grants and member dues. Further, if we had access to a locally operated and controlled development fund that supported cooperative initiatives offering locally produced goods to the municipality and provided it with essential labor and services under the aforementioned policies, there is no question that the scale of the projects we have engaged would be significantly larger than what we have been able to launch and sustain over the last decade.

The Build and Fight Formula

We note this because we think our experience provides some key lessons we would like to share with the field regarding how to build a solidarity economy to scale. We also believe that our methodology, which we have called the “Build and Fight Formula,” is unique in that it both serves to build a solidarity economy to scale and challenges aspects of the employer-versus-employee and owner-versus-nonowner relations that structure the capitalist system of production in which we are currently embedded. (Our arguments—still in formation—are drawn directly from our experience over the past decade as well as from the experiences of numerous other entities in the mutual aid, solidarity economy, trade union, and social justice movements.)

The Build and Fight Formula is fundamentally an argument for building ecosocialism via the democratic practices and tools of the solidarity economy, through the federation of countless self-organized and autonomous projects organized around practices that aggregate power and capacity using broad, democratic planning mechanisms on national and international scales. These mechanisms are intended to operate on multiple levels but center on advancing the principles and practices of decolonization, ecological regeneration, material circularity, appropriate technology, and locally focused bioregional production.

The fundamental premise of the Build and Fight Formula is that we must abandon our deficit-based perspective of scale and pivot to a perspective of bounty—one that appreciates the value of a multitude of autonomous organizing projects engaged in meeting people’s material and social needs and stimulating their productive capacities. We do not need uniformity in the practices and structures that enable our material and social life; rather, we need their coordination along democratic lines of equity and equality.

The development of the Build and Fight Formula was inspired by the critical events of the spring and summer of 2020. In particular:

• The mass explosion of mutual aid and solidarity efforts that emerged in direct response to the market and medical shortages created by the COVID-19 pandemic;
• The wave of wildcat strikes triggered by the combination of corporate capital and the government’s responses to the pandemic;
• The social movements’ political responses to the pandemic;
• The historic events of the George Floyd rebellion.⁹

These incidents demonstrated not only that the attempt to eviscerate social solidarity during the “neoliberal” period (the 1970s) was not completely successful but also that the social movement writ large has more connections and capacities than its actors may realize.¹⁰ Most importantly, as it relates to this work, the events of 2020 demonstrated that many of the critical skills, practices, processes, and technologies that we need to transform the relations of production (that is, place ownership of capital into community hands) and social relations overall are in fact in our collective possession and being practiced on a mass scale.

That said, these practices have not been as impactful as they can be because they are not being strategically connected—at least not in a deliberate and intentional way, due to an all-too-human lack of a shared transformative vision, mission, objectives, and program between and among this large number of partisan actors. As a result, we are proposing not a call for ideological or political unity but rather for programmatic alignment toward a set of shared objectives and principles. Because, as it has been said, it is easier to act your way into new ways of thinking than to think your way into new ways of acting. This does not mean that we are not advocating the need for revolutionary ideology and theory; on the contrary, we are arguing for a practical way to get there through shared practice.

To this end, we have positioned the Build and Fight Formula as a transitional program, one that puts forward a set of practices toward building collective power in the here and now, based on the dynamics of our current space, time, and conditions. At its root, the core aims and objectives center on the following:

Stated in the negative:

• Ending the regimes of private ownership of the means of production;
• Ending the regime of commodity production;
• Ending the regime of wage labor;
• Ending the regimes of labor segmentation;
• Ending the regimes of hydrocarbon extraction and dependency;
• Ending the regimes of settler colonialism, land commodification, imperial extraction, and unequal and undemocratic exchange.

Stated in the positive:

• Socializing production and social reproduction;
• Democratizing society;
• Socializing all land and housing;
• Localizing governance and direct democracy.

We believe that if the adherents of the core practices outlined in the Build and Fight Formula can agree on these basic aims and objectives (being mindful that these are only starting suggestions), we can develop a comprehensive political force and social movement that could consciously and deliberately shift and redirect many of the fundamental relations of production that shape our lives.

To do so, we have to start by anchoring ourselves in practices that will enable us to directly assess people’s needs, and work from there to develop systems of production that are based on need, premised on care, and structured around democratically determined roles of social reproduction, and adequate energy production and consumption, in order to address issues of ecological scale and impact.

The Practices of Position in Summary Form

These practices constitute the fundamentals that our movement(s) have to develop to build a flexible set of social relations that will enable us to exercise a relative degree of autonomous agency from capitalist relations of production and institutions. If adopted and incorporated in whole, the power wielded from the widespread engagement of these practices via federated bodies planning and coordinating their activities democratically can provide us with a solid social and material foundation that could position us to withstand and overcome a frontal confrontation with the forces of capitalism through practices of maneuver.¹¹

• Organize Mutual Aid on a communal scale to address the initial economic shocks that are coming, to prepare for the increasing number of national disasters, and to better address the day-to-day ravages of the capitalist system that produce systematic homelessness and hunger in our communities on a daily basis.
• Engage in Collective Food Production and Exchange, utilize and claim all of the lands that can be employed to meet the social need, including the decommodification of corporate lands and the democratization of public lands.
• Engage in militant Worker Self-Organization, build class-conscious cooperatives and trade unions, and have them coordinate the production and distribution of the essential goods and services we need to survive and thrive.
• Engage in Community Production through tool lending libraries, maker spaces, and the adoption of digital fabrication production techniques to break our dependency on industrial monopolies and the byproducts of their wasteful methods.
• Engage in the development, promotion, and mass migration to open source technologies to break the bonds of surveillance capitalism, the growing concentration of “cloud” capital, and the monopoly powers of the tech lords to greater enable the equitable flow of information; the facilitation of democratic transactions and exchanges in the coordination, planning, and distribution of essential goods and services; and enhance the productive capacities of workers and peasants to aid in our collective transition to “associated producers.”
• Defend your peoples and communities and protect what you build through the organization of Self-Defense Committees.
• Organize People’s or Popular Assemblies to plan and coordinate all of these activities to ensure that all those who engage have their needs directly met.

If we can democratically link all of the social forces that are engaged in these activities, we could create an autonomous value chain and build a coherent movement for economic democracy that would serve as a transformative agent on all scales and scopes of social life in the United States and beyond. It would not be without its challenges, and it would not be welcomed by many of the dominant economic and social forces in the country—but it would be a force to be reckoned with.

The People’s Network for Land and Liberation and the Path Forward

Of course, we would not make a recommendation without making a genuine effort to put it into practice. Our effort to this end is the People’s Network for Land and Liberation. Cooperation Jackson launched the network in 2021, in the midst of COVID-19 and in the wake of lessons we learned in launching the People’s Strike as a movement response to the pandemic. The People’s Network for Land and Liberation was launched to experiment with the ideas and practices articulated in the Build and Fight Formula on an empire-wide scale. The People’s Network for Land and Liberation is a multiracial, multinational network of six community-based organizations spread throughout the U.S. empire. They include Community Movement Builders, based in Atlanta, Georgia, with chapters in several cities throughout the United States; Cooperation Vermont, based in Marshfield, Vermont, but operating throughout the state; Incite Focus, based in Idlewild, Michigan, but also operating in Detroit; Native Roots Network, based in Pit River, Winto, and Yana traditional lands in Northern California; and Wellspring Cooperative, based in Springfield, Massachusetts.¹²

Together, we are working to demonstrate that we can build ecosocialism from below in real time, starting by “making every yard a farm and every garage a factory.” The challenge is scaling this movement in real time. The Trump regime and the contradictions it is unleashing provide us an ample opportunity. The question is, will the social movements in the United States seize these opportunities to build the alternative in real time? Time will tell. All we can do is continue to play our part. Play it we will.

Notes

1. ↩ Kali Akuno, “The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy,” in Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present, eds. Kali Akuno and Matt Meyer (New York: PM Press, 2023), 102–16.
2. ↩ Kali Akuno, “Build and Fight: The Program and Strategy of Cooperation,” in Jackson Rising Redux, 12–55.
3. ↩ Cooperation Jackson, “Really, Really Free Market Info Pamphlet,” cooperationjackson.org.
4. ↩ Akuno, “People’s Assembly Overview: The Jackson People’s Assembly Model,” in Jackson Rising Redux, 117–29.
5. ↩ Akuno, “People’s Assembly Overview,”‘ 117–29.
6. ↩ Molly Minta, “How Lumumba Faulted to Horhn: Jackson’s Mayoral Candidate Rematch Explained in 5 Charts,” Mississippi Today, April 15, 2025.
7. ↩ Kali Akuno, “Building a Solidarity Economy in the South (and Beyond): Cooperation Jackson,” Nonprofit Quarterly 31, no. 2 (Summer 2024): 88–95; Anna Wollf, “Lawsuit Filed in Former Jackson Mayor Lumumba’s Death,” Clarion Ledger, February 19, 2016.
8. ↩ Minta, “How Lumumba Faulted to Horhn.”
9. ↩ Steve Dubb, “Organizing the Solidarity Economy: A Story of Network Building amid COVID-19,” Nonprofit Quarterly 28, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 56–61; Ed Whitfield et al., “Beyond More: The Transformative Potential of Mutual Aid,” Nonprofit Quarterly, May 21, 2020; Penn Loh and Boone W. Shear, “Fight and Build: Envisioning Solidarity Economies as Transformative Politics,” in Nonprofit Quarterly, December 14, 2022; Michael Sainato, “Strikes Erupt as US Essential Workers Demand Protection amid Pandemic,” Guardian, May 19, 2020; Dorothy Hastings, “‘Abandoned by Everyone Else,’ Neighbors Are Banding Together During the Pandemic,” PBS NewsHour, April 5, 2021; Cooperation Jackson, “Mutual Aid: Building Communities of Care during Crisis and Beyond,” webinar, May 21, 2020; “Hundreds of Mutual Aid Groups Formed in Response to COVID-19. What Comes Next for Them?,” NBC LX, YouTube video, 9:04, September 1, 2021.
10. ↩ Steve Dubb, “Of Myths and Markets: Moving Beyond the Capitalist God That Failed Us,” Nonprofit Quarterly, April 19, 2023; Elizabeth A. Castillo, “Restoring Reciprocity: How the Nonprofit Sector Can Help Save Capitalism from Itself,” Nonprofit Quarterly, September 30, 2019.
11. ↩ Cooperation Jackson, “The Practices of Position in Summary Form,” cooperationjackson.org.
12. ↩ David Cobb, “Organizing for the Long Haul: How to Build a Network for Land and Liberation,” Nonprofit Quarterly, April 30, 2025.