Politically Alive

DisCOs are designed to be developed from the bottom-up. To create the desired cooperative economic counterpower, they will need to find each other and network through agreements. Supportive legal and policy frameworks would greatly enhance some of the potentials described in DisCO Futures (Chapter 5 of the DisCO Basics). As explicitly political and federated initiatives, DisCOs also act as a training ground for deliberative, inclusive decision-making processes, preparing members for responsible civic action. In this way, DisCOs could act as pilots to prefigure new forms of policy around networked politics.

The following is extracted from the DisCO Manifesto chapter 6: Open-Value Co-ops for Radical Workplace Democracy:

Political: Of course, all cooperatives are political. They upend the three basic premises of capitalism: Private ownership of the means of production becomes collective ownership, wage labour becomes worker-owners and (absentee/hierarchical) production exclusively oriented towards profit and exchange is tempered by the original seven cooperative principles'. DisCO's additional seven principles turbocharge this. In particular, the addition of carework and feminist economics as essential components of the DisCO vision represents a change that is long overdue within movements that speak of emancipation (the old-school left) or the decentralization and disruption of hierarchical structures (the blockchain space). Whether a future DisCO chooses to “fly the flag” of these political aspects (like Guerrilla Media Collective) or not, the most important thing is that their practices will reflect these political principles.