Cooperation Jackson: Principles and the Jackson-Kush Plan

The cooperative principles and the Jackson-Kush Plan that frame Cooperation Jackson, a network of worker cooperatives in Jackson, Mississippi, building a Black-led solidarity economy in the U.S. South.

Cooperation Jackson was launched on May 1, 2014, International Workers' Day, in Jackson, Mississippi. It is a network of worker cooperatives building what the founders describe as a solidarity economy in a city that is more than 80% Black, with deep poverty, a history of organized abandonment, and a strong tradition of Black political organization.

The cooperative principles published by Cooperation Jackson draw explicitly from the International Cooperative Alliance and from Mondragon, then adapt them. Key commitments include:

• The cooperative is democratically controlled on the basis of one member, one vote.
• Cooperation, in the Cooperation Jackson system, is an instrument for social transformation.
• Internal cooperation operates on three levels: among individual cooperatives organized into groups, among cooperative groups, and between the Cooperation Jackson system and other movements.
• Governing structures are democratically controlled and accountable to the general assembly or other elected body.

The Jackson-Kush Plan is the broader political document, developed by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement before Cooperation Jackson was launched. It frames the cooperative work as a transitional strategy and praxis to build 21st century socialism and advance the abolition of capitalism and the poverty and oppressive social relations that it fosters. The Plan names three pillars: building People's Assemblies, building an independent Black political party (the New Afrikan People's Organization and allied formations), and building a solidarity economy. Cooperation Jackson is the third pillar made operational.

For a researcher, this is a case where the cooperative principles and the political constitution are explicitly distinct documents that the same organization holds simultaneously. The principles govern the cooperatives' internal operation; the Plan governs the political project. Reading them as one document distorts both. Reading them in pair shows how a Black-led constitutional project can integrate the institutional grammar of the cooperative movement with the strategic grammar of liberation politics.

Living examples and entry points for community builders

If your community is asking what economic institutions you need to build, not just what values you hold, Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi is one of the clearest contemporary answers to that question in the record.

Cooperation Jackson itself is the primary living example: Freedom Farms urban agriculture, a cooperative incubator, and the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Human Rights, all operating in a majority-Black city with a specific and well-documented history of radical political organizing. The Jackson-Kush Plan, which preceded Cooperation Jackson as a political strategy document, called for building independent community institutions as the material basis for self-determination. The cooperatives are not the end goal; they are the infrastructure.

The New Economy Coalition in the United States connects Cooperation Jackson to a broader network of organizations working on solidarity economy, cooperative development, and community ownership. Cecosesola in Barquisimeto, Venezuela is the adjacent international comparison: similar commitment to self-management and economic democracy, different political and cultural context, much longer operating history.

Where the door is:

• The Jackson-Kush Plan is available online and is essential reading before you engage seriously with Cooperation Jackson's work. It is not long, and reading it makes clear that the cooperative economics piece is embedded in a specific political strategy, not floating free of it.
• Kali Akuno, one of Cooperation Jackson's founders, has given extensive interviews and written widely; searching those out in English gives you the most direct account of how the framework was developed and what has been hard about putting it into practice.
• Cooperation Jackson has also developed curriculum materials through their center that are available to outside organizations.
• The question worth sitting with before you draw on this framework: what economic institutions does your community actually need to build, not just what values does it want to express?

One caution that anyone engaging with this framework seriously needs to name: Cooperation Jackson's work is explicitly rooted in the political and demographic specificity of Jackson, Mississippi: Black working-class community self-determination in the face of ongoing disinvestment, political repression, and the specific history of the civil rights movement and its limits in the Deep South. This is not background context you can set aside when you apply the framework elsewhere. The cooperative economics layer is real and applicable in many settings. The framework that holds it together is grounded in a particular community's experience of race, class, and political power. Drawing on Cooperation Jackson's model requires engaging seriously with that context, not just borrowing the institutional vocabulary.