Nathan Schneider - Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

M y maternal grandfather came into the world just north of Johnstown, Colorado, in 1916. Its a place of high, dry plains under the Rocky Mountains, which stretch far off along the western horizon. On cassette tapes recorded a few years before his death, he and my grandmother bicker about those days. Shed come from Lincoln, Nebraska, and, like my grandfather, was the child of German-speaking migrants whose ancestors had lived for centuries in Russias Ukrainian conquests. She complains that his parents were hard and cruel for not keeping him in school longer than it took to learn reading and some math. He fires back, not kindlysaying you cant apply modern standards to the way it was then and there, when he slept with his brothers year-round in an open lean-to on the sugar-beet farm where the family tenanted, no heat or light at night except what scarce wood could provide. My grandparents were about the same age, and of the same peculiar ethnicity, but town and country then were two entirely distinct worlds.

Modern standards eventually came to the farms around Johnstown, but not inevitably. Although cities like Lincoln had electric lights by the time my grandmother was born there, electric companies had no interest in stringing power lines to dispersed farmhouses. Electricity arrived only in the 1940s with the expansion of the Poudre Valley Rural Electric Associationa company organized and owned by its customers, set up with financing through the Rural Electrification Act, which President Franklin Roosevelt steered through Congress in 1936. Poudre Valley REA is still running, still a cooperative, and is an aggressive adopter of solar farms. Its part of a resident-owned grid that delivers power to about 75 percent of the territory of the United States.

As a teenager, my grandfather moved in with his older brother in Greeley, where he started working at an auto-parts store. He made extra money connecting power lines to German-speakers farms and selling them their first washing machines. After a wartime spell in the army, he began a career as a roving hardware-store manager, then as an executive, and finally, as the director of Liberty Distributors, which became one of the larger hardware firms in the country during his tenure.

Libertys members, and my grandfathers bosses, were regional hardware wholesale companies; together, they bought saws and sandpaper and other goods that would be sold in local stores and lumberyards. Each member company held one share and one vote, and members split any surpluses. It was a co-op. Since the onslaught of big-box chains, its mostly thanks to co-ops like this that the small hardware stores my grandfather loved can persist at all. Perhaps the co-op model helps solve a family mystery, toohow Grandpa managed to build a national company without becoming especially rich.

Liberty did about $2 billion in business annually in todays dollars during the early 1980s, serving three thousand or so stores. The companys mission, according to the company handbook, was to fulfill its members continued desire through a cooperative effort to meet with the economic pressures facing each business. It also allowed a more flexible arrangement than the conformity expected by other co-ops such as Ace Hardware. But, like them, its job was survival.

Liberty is not the only co-op Ive encountered in my familys past. When I take a ride in a nearly automated tractor with one of my grandfathers nephews, who still farms near Greeley, he tells me about how he brings his sugar beets to Fort Morgan for processing. He is a member of the Western Sugar Cooperative, a descendant of the same Great Western Sugar Company that brought our ancestors to Colorado after they arrived at Ellis Island in 1907. Thanks to the co-op, he keeps up the old family crop.

A map of Liberty Distributors member wholesalers, from the 1980 company directory.

Nobody told me when I was growing up that this particular way of doing business had so much to do with our family history. Why should they? Why would the kind of company matter?

More than a century later, here I am. I was raised back east, lived on both coasts, and then wound up movingreturningfrom New York City to Colorado with my wife and our unborn son, who would enter the world an hours drive from the nameless spot where my grandfather did. Compared to what it was in his time, Colorado is another kind of place, a land of ski resorts and hydraulic fracturing and tech startups. Cooperative business shores up the areas burgeoning affluencethe mortgage-lending credit unions, the babysitting time-banks, the consumer-owned REI stores for skiwear and climbing gear. High-country electric co-ops helped plan out some of the famous resort towns. But Colorado is still a place where people have to create an economy of their own to get by. When I take a ride with an East African driver-owner of Green Taxi or meet a child-care co-op member who speaks only Spanish, I remember my grandfathers immigrant parents a century earlier.

It wasnt investigating my family history that put me on the lookout for cooperatives. I started looking because of stirrings I noticed as a reporter among veterans of the protests that began in 2011, such as Occupy Wall Street and Spains 15M movement. Once their uprisings simmered, the protesters had to figure out how to make a living in the economy they hadnt yet transformed, and they started creating co-ops. Some were doing it with softwarecooperative social media, cloud data, music streaming, digital currencies, gig markets, and more. But this generation was not all lost to the digital; others used cooperation to live by dirt and soil.