In order to fully understand Cooperation Jackson’s mission and structure, it is important to grasp the history and tradition from which Cooperation Jackson was born, especially as the organizers and members themselves are so closely attuned to the historical project within which they fit. The blog post “The Jackson – Kush Plan and the Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy” lays out this history and places Cooperation Jackson and many of the prominent activists at the core of Cooperation Jackson within a greater context of ongoing struggle.
The Jackson — Kush Plan emerged out of recognition that the progress of the Black Liberation Movement in the 50s-70s, while important in dismantling legal structures of white supremacy, was insufficient. In order to achieve economic self-determination for black people, a “critical break with capitalism” had to be realized (no pagination). The J-K Plan cites two major ideological and historical influences, the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) and the Black Liberation Movement (BLM). It is interesting to note that many of the major events undertaken by these movements that inspired the J-K Plan involve engagement with electoral politics. While representation has never been the end goal of radical movements like BLM, it is clear that campaigns aimed at galvanizing a radical coalition and installing members of that block within state offices are not only hugely inspirational to the movement as a whole, they are able to yield significant gains as a result of this engagement. As Kali Akuno notes, limited engagement with electoral politics is important: “we ignore the power of the state at our own peril.”
Electoral politics appears again in the J-K Plan’s three pillars: Building People’s Assemblies, Building an Independent Political Party, and Building a broad-based Solidarity Economy. People’s Assemblies are “vehicles” through which activists hope to build democratic power and establish political self-determination. An independent political party, for J-K Plan advocates, allows BLM candidates to engage with existing state structures while also resisting erasure within the existing Democratic apparatus. The solidarity economy, which Cooperation Jackson most directly engages with, is understood to be a “transitional means to the construction of socialism.” This entails a rethinking of economic relations in order to undermine the capitalist logics of profit and exploitation, replacing that set of relations with values of “social solidarity, mutual aid, reciprocity, and generosity.”
To put it simply, the mission at the heart of the J-K Plan is “Afrikan or Black Liberation in the European settler-colonial project called the United States.” Liberation through economic self-determination is just one facet of the J-K project. I see Cooperation Jackson as the apparatus through which this small subset of the J-K Plan is enacted. The people who organize and run Cooperation Jackson come from many different backgrounds. Jackson is significant because of its location within the south’s Black Belt and its history as the site of successful critical electoral engagement (Chokwe Lumumba was elected as a City Councilman in 2009 and Mayor in 2013; his son Chokwe Antar Lumumba was also elected Mayor in 2017). Members of the J-K Plan coalitions, both local and transplant, represent the original organizing core of Cooperation Jackson. Many of those members were deeply involved in the efforts to elect Lumumba in 2007. Since then, both native Jacksonians and out-of-state organizers have joined the struggle, inspired by the revolutionary praxis espoused and embodied at Cooperation Jackson.
The project of black liberation is led by people of Afrikan descent with a broad, diverse solidarity committee supporting this project remotely and on the ground. As part of this solidarity structure, I recognize my supportive role in the efforts towards black liberation and economic self-determination. This summer, I want to focus on being flexible and diligent in any array of projects presented to me at Cooperation Jackson because helping where need presents itself rather than having a preconceived notion of what is most useful shows respect to the labor and project of black liberation organizers.
The strength of Cooperation Jackson’s vision may also be their weakness. Their bold, unapologetically radical mission continues to successfully attract many supporters. They’ve built strong inter-regional and national alliances in order to support the struggle for black liberation and economic self-determination. This struggle is notably an urban one. Cooperation Jackson’s community land trust and housing cooperative initiatives demonstrate this. In working towards “sustainable community development,” Jacksonians are making a claim on exercising their right to the city. They seek to control how the city and land function by challenging the underlying assumptions and practices of capitalist land speculation that actively harm black and working-class dwellers. But one has to ask and evaluate, how much can a community organization achieve when working against massive, entrenched structures of power? How are the practices developed at Cooperation Jackson going to be moved beyond the local? Are the teleological aspirations built into Cooperation Jackson’s understanding of the solidarity economy useful or limiting? And how can Cooperation Jackson successfully stimulate a shift in the dominant culture and practices of everyday life that reinscribe capitalist, racist, imperialist logics in social relations? It seems clear that there is at least some risk of disillusionment within the base if many of these challenges are unresolved or left open-ended.
Regardless of the uncertainty and the massive task laid before Cooperation Jackson, it seems that activists and community members on the ground are eager to do everything they can to actualize their goals one step at a time. I hope to contribute to this critical project and also learn through engaged research how cooperative members make sense of these challenges and envision actualization of their goals. This seems like crucial research to apply to many other community movements around the world that endeavor to seek self-determination and a better world.