Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Fascism

Populism

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:35:17 +0000

Donald Trump supporters at a political rally in Mesa, Arizona in October, 2018. Picture by Gage Skidmore.

Harvard University

Initially published 21 Mar 2025

Abstract:

Populism is a conception of political representation that views ‘the people’ as the primary political actor and the basis of political sovereignty. As populism does not refer to a specific ideology, ideologically diverse movements can fall under it. Thus, populism is not intrinsically conservative or progressive, left-wing or right-wing. However, populists’ insistence that their movement, leader, and party should represent ‘the people’ puts populist politics at odds with liberal democracy’s insistence on a public sphere characterised by rational deliberation—the model of deliberative democracy and liberal constitutionalism that has been celebrated throughout Western Europe and gained hegemony in the majority of the Northern Hemisphere since the French Revolution. Populism tends to reject consensus politics, even if it believes in democratic elections—as shown by most populist political parties. While the first populist party came about in the United States, populist parties and movements are prominent across all continents.

Anthropologists have studied populism within highly distinct cultural contexts, often foregrounding the very overt role of emotion and feelings of socioeconomic disenfranchisement in populist rhetoric. They have also investigated the relationship between populism and democracy, and the seemingly unique role of the leader in populist movements, which seem to equate a political movement with a singular figure. Ethnographic methods, which allow us to come closer to understanding the lives of others, have challenged hegemonic narratives about populism, questioning its assumed ties to specific ideologies and pushing back against the notion that populism disqualifies itself just because it relies on emotions. Thereby, anthropology provides us with a critical lens on populism that still helps us grasp its seemingly global appeal in the twenty-first century.

Introduction: What is populism?

The twenty-first century has been characterised by an upsurge in the popularity of populist movements across the globe. If it is possible to identify the first formal populist movement in history, we could arguably start with the United States, which, in the 1890s, saw the establishment of the People’s Party, or Populist Party. The American People’s Party never enjoyed significant electoral success, but its platform, which generally sought to improve the lives of labourers and regulate the concentration of capital, remains relevant in American politics. Historian Federico Finchelstein has claimed that Peronism, which came to power in Argentina in 1946, is the first populist regime in global history. Peronism emerged as a workers’ movement in 1945 but has evolved to take on many ideological iterations since then. Beyond Peronism, which within a single populist movement has taken on varying policy positions, in other places, such as the United States, different parties of opposing views may be labelled as ‘populist’, such as the followers of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States. As a result, ‘populism’ is difficult to define; it is a very broad concept—or an ‘overdetermined signifier’ (Stavrakakis et al. 2017, 425)—that stands for a plethora of political movements, which seem quite different from each other.

Because so many different political moments representing diverse and even conflicting views have been called ‘populist’, a question of great scholarly importance, including for anthropologists, is what exactly the term stands for. Many scholars of populism have argued that the term does not refer to a specific political platform, but rather, in the words of Ernesto Laclau, one of the most influential theorists of populism, to a ‘political logic’ or form of political discourse that can be adapted to any ideological program or political platform (2005). Populist movements, parties, and regimes can thus be on the left or right or anywhere in between. For example, the New Left leaders of Latin America that emerged in the 2000s, which included Evo Morales in Bolivia, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula Ignacio da Silva in Brazil, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, represented a populist turn to progressive politics in South America. In contrast, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States (as well as several other leaders in the Global North) are right-wing populists related to fascism, as they overtly celebrate xenophobia and anti-immigrant policies.

Further inspired by the work of Laclau (2005), anthropologists tend to think of populism as a style of political discourse that employs a polarising logic. This logic positions ‘the people’—the protagonist of populist politics—against an ‘enemy’, often internal to the nation-state or wider populace. In populism, ‘the people must be extracted from within the people’, as political theorist Jan Werner-Müller has stated (2014). This means that popular sovereignty does not extend to everyone, but only to ‘the people’ that populism celebrates, as opposed to others. Thus, for populist parties, which are often nationalist, not all citizens can be said to truly belong to the nation-state. The frontier that populism creates between ‘the people’ and their others is an antagonistic one. Thus, ‘the people’ are said to have ‘enemies’—often fellow citizens who are viewed as betraying a sense of national authenticity (Laclau 2005, 84-5). ‘Enemies’ or ‘anti-people’ may be defined along status, class, ethnic, party, or sectoral lines, and are often viewed as undermining national well-being (Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). Thus, a key aspect of populist politics is its divisive rhetoric, which, when repeated often enough, turns into a discourse, i.e. a way of perceiving and thinking about the world.

Another structural continuity of populism is that it frames its central political actor—‘the people’—as a victimised group within broader national or global populations (Samet 2019). Their ‘enemies’ are somehow a source of ‘the people’s’ suffering or exploitation. This may seem surprising, as ‘the people’ and their assumed ‘enemy’, are single names for heterogeneous groups and social sectors, each representing highly disparate sets of social demands. Moreover ‘the people’ can even include powerful groups, such as dominant racial groups within a society. Yet, this sentiment of victimhood or of being a morally upright ‘underdog’ is particularly important, as it unites vague sectors and otherwise heterogeneous factions of a given society (Chatterjee 2011, 15). By relying on antagonistic victimisation, populism is a necessarily polarising political force. As such, it engenders an illiberal rejection of consensus-seeking politics or deliberative democracy—even if most populist regimes have been democratic. As some scholars have underscored, liberal regimes that present emotional politics as ‘irrational’ may further marginalise the social demands of the most vulnerable populations within society (Ahmed 2004). Populism, on the other hand, allows for the expression of political voices that might otherwise go unarticulated.

A final structural continuity between different forms of populism that draw on ‘the people’ as an underdog, even a downtrodden group, is that its discourse does not rely on traditional notions of class warfare. This can be explored through Trumpism in the United States. In this case, ‘the people’ stands for a highly racialised concept of American identity but is not defined, in membership, by being white. ‘The people’ consists of a broad coalition that feels that their different demands could be satisfied by the same leader and movement. ‘The people’ is also an identity that is inherently exclusive towards many Americans who are considered to be sympathetic to migrants, protesters associated with amorphous leftist forces, as well as various ‘elites’, be they academics and universities, part of a general intelligentsia (including non-aligned media), and even corporate managers who do not adhere to Trumpist politics. Trumpist discourse is thus not restricted to ideas of class warfare but has, instead, allied various sectors of American society against common and often vaguely defined enemies, such as ‘the media’, ‘the Washington elite’, or ‘the Left’.

In sum, populism refers to a discursive logic or manner of constructing the political rather than a specific ideology, and it thinks of politics in polarising, often self-victimising terms. Populism is also usually characterised by charismatic leadership, overtly emotional rhetoric, and positions ‘the people’ as the central actor in politics. While this definition of populism is broad, its structural continuities differentiate its various ideological stripes from the liberal forms of democracy most celebrated in Europe and North America after the French Revolution. As this entry will explore further, the relationship between populism and democracy is not one of diametric opposition, but populist notions of political representation certainly disturb liberal norms of deliberative democracy. More specifically, populism is a political logic that encourages an overtly emotional brand of politics.

The anthropology of populism

While much social science literature has been dedicated to populism, the term does not yet occupy a large amount of literature within anthropology (see Mazzarella 2019). This is surprising, as the discipline is uniquely suited to study the appeal of populist movements. Its ethnographic research methods reveal the emotional, economic, social, and cultural factors that lead to populism’s appeal. Additionally, because anthropologists conduct their research in diverse geographic contexts, their inquiries into populism clarify the historical and social contingencies that give rise to and shape populist movements in specific field sites, while also considering what these sites reveal about the appeal of populism more broadly.

Anthropological investigations of populism have focused on recent and current populist regimes, such as Erdoğan’s Turkey (Tambar 2014), Maduro’s Venezuela (Samet 2019), Modi’s India (Hota 2020), Trump in the United States (Kalb 2023), and Orbán in Hungary (Laszlo 2020), adding distinctively ethnographic insight into what has been described as an illiberal rejection of liberal democratic norms prevalent in the post-WWII era. They have often sought to explain the appeal of the respective populist movements upon which they focus, frequently asking how populist communities are created and sustained. Anthropology links this question to its interest in the structure and reproduction of community as well as to its long-standing interest in the creation of social solidarity. It turns out that rhetoric, ritual, and state fetishism are central to populism’s appeal. For example, in Lauren Derby’s history of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, she understands fetishism to be key to the dictator’s appeal, or ‘seduction’, in her words, diminishing the population’s capacity to resist authoritarianism (2009). Similarly, Fernando Coronil, Michael Taussig, and Rafael Sánchez have all underscored how reifying and even deifying political figures is central to populist politics.

Similarly, work on scapegoating in times of uncertainty has shown that ambiguous social conditions lead to blaming individuals or groups for social ills, often resulting in violence (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976; Geschiere 2013; Siegel 2006). In recent ethnographic work on ethnonationalism in Turkey, for example, we have seen how wounded masculinity among disabled Turkish veterans of the Kurdish conflict contributes to their hatred for their Kurdish foes. Coming home from war disabled, these veterans feel betrayed by the Turkish state, which they criticise for taking too soft of an approach against the Kurds (Aciksoz 2019). Ethnographic work on racialised nationalism elucidates how the demonisation of racialised others becomes the basis for racist political movements. For example, ethnographic work on white nationalists in de-industrialised parts of the United States has reflected this logic of demonisation. Instead of drawing on theories of scapegoating explicitly, some anthropologists have traced this othering logic through a psychoanalytic framework, meditating on the dialectical relationship between self and other to understand how whiteness is constituted through xenophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in deindustrialised North America (Song 2011).

Scholars working on ultranationalist politics have also drawn on the notion of sacrifice to better understand the rhetoric of ethnonationalist populist discourse. In Turkey, disabled military veterans (gazi) are lionised as modern-day martyrs (şehitler). Their sacrifice, particularly the sacrifice of their bodies in war, is deeply implicated in notions of citizenship. Disabled veterans are held to be owed debts of honour and gratitude by the state, which entitles them to various privileges, such as high-quality prostheses, jobs, interest-free housing credit and medical care (Aciksoz 2019, 56-7). They do not embody the horrors of war as much as they serve state purposes for further militarisation. The celebration of their sacrifice exists alongside a scapegoating of the Kurdish movement as a threat to Turkish sovereignty (Aciksoz 2019).

Further broadening ethnography’s insights into populism, anthropologists of the post-Soviet Visegrád nations (i.e. Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) have looked at how populism can emerge in opposition to liberal discourses of multiculturalism. Here, people attracted to populism consider national culture to be under attack by an urban intelligentsia. In Poland and Slovakia, populist politics underscore local valorisations of cultural authenticity (both fascist and progressive), which appeal to local identities associated with rural origins and agricultural labour (Buzalka 2021). Post-Soviet populism is also marked by a nostalgia for a sense of collectivism and community, which seem at risk in an increasingly globalised world. In Hungary, the interplay of economic transformation and an attachment to national culture and solidarity are equally at play (Kurti 2020). Here, populism is closely tied to racist ethnonationalism and xenophobic political sentiments that translate into anti-immigrant discourse, as is evident elsewhere in the region (Buzalka 2022; Kalb 2009a, 2009b; Malewska-Szalygin 2009). The ethnographic study of Visegrád politics thus helps understand the logics of populism in other regions, notably Brexit and Trump (Kurti 2020).

The following sections will foreground three main tensions in the anthropological study of populism, namely the emotional drivers of populism, its relationship to democracy, and the nature of populist leadership.

Emotion and political economy

Anthropologists have been interested in the emotional and affective drivers of social life since at least the 1990s. They neither condemn nor celebrate emotion as irrational or rational, but consider feelings, sensations, and emotional and affective dispositions as revelatory of political dynamics. This is true for work on the emotions and affect of political memory (Yashin-Navarro 2002, 2012), volunteer work (Muehlebach 2011), or citizenship (Cox 2016; Savell 2015), for example.

Anthropologies of populism share this overarching concern with affect and emotion and have often aimed at understanding the ritualisation and routinisation of emotion in illiberal politics (Sánchez 2016, de Abreu 2021). Take Peronist rallies in Argentina during the 1940s and 1950s. These rallies, in which thousands of Peronists gathered to express loyalty to the leaders of the movement, were highly emotionally charged ritualised theatre in which the masses played a mostly passive role. Many women active in Peronist politics have imitated the matriarch of Peronism, Eva ‘Evita’ Perón, in their speech patterns and hairstyles (Auyero 2001). In contrast to spontaneity, these practices ‘modulate affect’ through ritual, inculcating the followers of such movements with a series of habits that some critics qualify as authoritarian (Sanchez 2015) or at least at odds with the freeing affects of revolutionary politics (Beasley-Murray 2010, 25).

The emotional and affective underpinnings of populist mobilisation can be libidinal, even erotic. The election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in India in 2014, for example, catalysed a populist Hindu nationalism that was not just racialised and caste-oriented, but also highly gendered (Hota 2019). Here, Hindu ethnonationalists shored up popular anxieties linked to sex by presenting the ‘national body’ as ascetic, masculine, and pure, whilst conceiving of vilified others (e.g. protesting students, Christians, Muslims) as feminised and polluting. Doing so helped Modi supporters add a sexualised edge to the emotions involved in political othering.

Some scholars have drawn on Western crowd theories to trace a genealogy between the libidinal urges evident in crowds and populist emotions. People in crowds experience a contagious collective effervescence, frequently described as producing sentiments and actions that transcend the individual (Canetti [1960] 1984, Freud 1921, Le Bon [1895] 1995, Tarde [1898] 1989). They may thus act differently than they would on their own. Thus, crowds are sometimes perceived as stripping people of their agency or as intrinsically sinister, as they may elicit irrational and base feelings. Perceived as such, crowds can be thought of as threats to the social order, bypassing institutions and sanctioned normative behaviours. While this can be true—taking the January 6^th, 2021 riots of Trump supporters in the US, who stormed the Capitol because they did not accept that Trump had lost the 2020 election, as an example—ethnographic work also shows that crowds can be a generative political force, capable of transforming social and political norms. The imprisonment of then-Secretary of Labor Juan Perón in 1945 by the Argentine government provoked mass protests that not only led to Perón’s release but solidified Peronism as a formidable political force that would drastically expand workers’ rights in Argentina.

Beyond focusing on affect and emotion, the popularity of nationalist populism, particularly in Europe, is often linked to a general disenchantment with neoliberalism (Gusterson 2017, 210). While populism predates neoliberalism, populism’s increased popularity can be read as a reaction to an economic system in which state intervention favours the market, rather than regulating the market to favour its citizens (Foucault 1979). In Guatemala, this disenchantment takes the form of pessimism in which citizens, even if they may sympathise with drastic political reforms, view social transformation through politics quite cynically. Ethnography has shown how a significant number of citizens from the Indigenous population, which faced genocide at the hands of the military dictatorship led by Ríos Montt in the 1980s, has, since the 1990s, supported his Guatemalan Republican Front in local and national elections. In a context of neoliberalism where revolutionary change seems impossible, this population is drawn to this political party’s local development projects and clientelistic practices, which bring capital to Indigenous communities. In this context, Indigenous Guatemalan subjects are resigned to understanding the limitations of politics and pragmatically engage with a political party that can contribute tangible material gains to their lives (Copeland 2019). Disaffection with neoliberalism and wariness of globalised cosmopolitanism was also evident in the UK’s 2016 withdrawal from the EU through the Brexit referendum (Gusterson 2017).

Notable ethnographies of populism have foregrounded the role of cynicism in the face of neoliberalism. For example, in post-Soviet contexts such as Slovakia (Buzalka 2022) and Poland (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgin 2001a, 2001b), citizens feel left behind by neoliberal policies that render them further marginalised. In these cases, cynicism towards neoliberalism is also accompanied by a celebration of national tradition that takes on, often, ethnonationalist flavours. As shown by work on post-Soviet populisms in anthropology, the reification of traditional and even rural ways of life are part of a rejection of neoliberalism and liberalism.

The study of populist emotions and affect raises the question of who exactly the subject of populist movements is. Ethnographic work on populism has confirmed that ‘the people’ are not explicitly related to socioeconomic class categories. ‘The people’, even when they are primarily thought of as ‘workers’, such as in the case in early Peronist rhetoric in Argentina, is a vague enough moniker to unite various social sectors that are not constricted by class identity. Instead, who ‘the people’ are is often intentionally left vague so as to absorb as many different social forces as possible. This coalitional nature of populist politics cuts across class alliances. In Brazil, for example, right-wing authoritarian politics include supporters that are not limited to one particular socioeconomic class (de Abreu 2021). Similar inter-class alliances have also been observed in right-wing populism in Guatemala (Copeland 2019), and Chavista and anti-Chavista mobilisation in Venezuela (Samet 2019).

At the same time, populist movements celebrate an underdog identity that appeals to notions of being part of a social sector excluded from the elite. Some scholars have been particularly attentive to the ‘double devaluations’ of space and class felt by those attracted to right-wing populism. The double devaluation refers to feelings of disenfranchisement that arise from those who feel both their socioeconomic class and place of origin to be devalued by liberal norms. Neoliberal global flows of capital, people, and ideas have produced a rise in the popularity of right-wing populist movements that imbue their supporters with a sense of dignity (Kalb 2023). In this work, like those working in post-Soviet contexts and in Latin America, we see how disenchantment with neoliberalism produces cynicism, resignation, and, in the case of Poland, resistance in the form of illiberal, right-wing politics (Kalb 2023).

Both populism’s critics and its supporters are attentive to its emotionally charged nature. Critics often find its overtly emotional dimensions to be proof of its irrationality, disqualifying it from being taken seriously or even condemning it as something that has no place in the political sphere (Ostiguy 2009, 2017). Supporters have argued that populism is radically democratic, and that its capacity to express the affective dimensions of political mobilisation is precisely part of its democratic potential (Samet 2019; Laclau 2005; Mouffe 2018). From this point of view, liberal paradigms of democracy that focus on mediation through institutions are overly restrictive as they repress the emotional nature of political participation.

Ethnography has trodden a middle ground in this debate. While highlighting the importance of emotion and affect, anthropologists refuse to fetishise populism as inherently less rational than other kinds of politics (Hann 2019). Consider the discussion of Peronism mentioned above. While Peronism is marked by dominant emotional features, these do not thereby render it irrational. Instead, its emotional appeal exists in addition to a political field of highly limited practical options. Peronist supporters are motivated by a ‘structure of feeling’ that coexists alongside practicality (Auyero 2000). Rather than pointing at populism as a mostly rational reaction to neoliberalism or as simply a ritualised collective effervescence, ethnographic work shows that practical and emotional drivers co-exist and interact with one another.

Relationship to democracy

As stated above, discussions of populism tend to categorise it as radically democratic or counter to the spirit of democracy. Anthropologists have thus explored the relationship between populist movements and democratic politics. Both privilege the concept of popular sovereignty, which positions ‘the people’ as the foundation of political legitimacy. In populism, ‘the people’ is the political actor par excellence, viewed as having a rather unmediated relationship to power even beyond the sphere of electoral politics. In deliberative democracy, ‘the people’s’ power is mediated, mostly by elections and state bureaucracies, which is meant to protect minorities and temper populist decision-making via a rule of experts.

The classic image of popular sovereignty is the crowd—a group of people that has come together through a common cause or grievance. The Jacobins, who emerged in the late 1700s as part of the French Revolution, represent the crowd’s raw democratic potential and potentially sinister dimensions. Once in power, during the early 1790s, they carried out a wave of political violence known as The Reign of Terror (la terreur), which resulted in thousands of executions of political and ideological enemies. Yet, they also represented a plurality of social forces dedicated to anti-royalist republicanism. The Jacobinian phase of the French Revolution thus positions the crowd as both the embodiment of democratic spirit and the anarchic overturning of an existing order (Mazauric 2014). The mass of the revolution is violent, unpredictable, and destructive—yet it is this mass action that challenges the monarchic notion of the sovereign by demonstrating the bare power of popular sovereignty. And so, within the history of modern democracy and republicanism, we have a reification of ‘the people’ as the political actor par excellence and as the mercurial and temperamental mass that can tear down an existing order through organising around particular demands as well as through brute force. As follows, some political theorists have argued that the crowd embodies true democracy while others consider it true (i.e. deliberative) democracy’s ‘shadow’ or ‘mirror’ (Canovan 1999; Panizza 2005).

Crowds are arguably both celebrated and feared by deliberative democracies, who view popular sovereignty as fundamental yet often insist on its mediation through institutional mechanisms. Within liberal democracy resides a tension between the Jacobinian, evolutionary spirit of popular sovereignty and the requirement for institutionalism, the latter often being viewed as cumbersome to the former (Canovan 2005; Sánchez 2016). In populism, this tension comes to a head as the crowd may potently shirk institutions associated with the status quo. Obvious examples from recent history would include the January 6^th, 2021 riots that sought to overturn the results of the US 2020 presidential election, as well as the January 8^th, 2023 protests in Brazil, which also challenged the outcome of their presidential elections.

As some scholars have argued, the crowd is both necessary for democratic support in the context of republicanism, but also poses a threat to the stability of a republic. Thus, the state must transform the unruly crowd or masses into the disciplined ‘people’ of republicanism. Popular sovereignty makes republican politics possible and constantly challenges its perpetuity. The same is true for populism, which creates ‘the people’ out of a broad coalition of social sectors and political interests. As a result, even in its democratic iterations, populism is ultimately authoritarian because it is so focused on controlling the masses by containing them as ‘the people’. Some have argued that this tension exists in republican democracy as well (Sánchez 2016), but it is more obvious in populism due to its more brazen celebration of popular sovereignty as ‘the people’ (Canovan 1999, 2005; Panizza 2005).

Anthropologists have long been aware of this uneasy relationship between populism and democracy. While some have been critical of populism’s allegedly inherently authoritarian tendencies (Sánchez 2016), several ethnographies argue that populism is the most radically democratic form of political organisation, which is precisely why it seems so threatening to any status quo. Its capacity to unite diverse factions of society makes it a particularly efficacious brand of political mobilisation (Samet 2019).

A major question that these debates raise is what the relationship between populism and fascism may be, as many right-wing populist movements clearly resemble or have components of the latter. Populist movements, in the Global North in particular, represent democratic as well as fascist reactions to liberal paradigms of governance, which favour models of deliberative democracy. In these contexts, popular support for populist movements and parties is, in large part, due to their platforms’ espousal of anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. Scholars studying these cases have shown how neoliberal economic policies, combined with liberal political discourse, have alienated rural and post-industrial contexts (Holmes 2010, 2019; Kalb 2023). These movements, such as the British National Party, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, Brexit, Trumpism, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, as with many Visegrád region nations, articulate national sovereignty and citizenship in ethnonationalist terms (Kalb 2009a; Malewska-Szalgyin 2021a, 2021b). This fascistically ethnonationalist and racist populist illiberalism unites those who feel devalued by liberal multiculturalism and the patterns of capital accumulation that have historically accompanied it in the post-WWII era.

The fascist discourse of many populist movements has led some scholars to argue that they are intrinsically interrelated—in other words, that populism is always related to fascism (Finchelstein 2019). While the abovementioned ethnographic work looks at populisms that are blatantly ethnonationalist, xenophobic, and racist, anthropologists have also argued that because populism is a political logic with drastically varying ideological content, it is important to evaluate different populist traditions based on the ideas they promote, rather than stigmatising all political forms that are labelled as ‘populist’ (Samet and Schiller 2017).

Charismatic leadership

One of the most important and controversial themes of inquiries into populism is the relationship between ‘the people’ and the leader. Because of its emphasis on popular sovereignty, some anthropologists have underscored the importance of people’s mobilisation in populism. They consciously move away from attributing the appeal of populist politics to personal charisma, arguing that depictions of charismatic leaders presiding over a passive mass reinforce stereotypes of socioeconomically precarious sectors as lacking in agency or as being intellectually incapacitated (Aciksoz 2019; Cody 2015; Lazar 2017; Samet 2019; Tambar 2014). These thinkers have sought to underscore the bottom-up dimensions of populism, demanding that we not simply credit the charismatic leader for creating the basis of populist organisation and showing that local and grassroots organisation are central to its appeal and success.

Recent studies of modern-day Peronist labour unions in Argentina have shown them to be far less oriented towards personalist political representation than one might assume. Instead, these unions are primarily spaces of negotiation. For Sian Lazar, labour unions allow for decision-making and debate that do not follow a strictly top-down structure by which a leader gives a command that is then carried out without deliberation or debate (2017). Such work stands in tension to a widespread concern that leaders and their charisma may be a chief organising force of populist movements. Anthropologists of populism elsewhere have also emphasised the importance of populism’s supporters by focusing on crowds and grassroots political organising, showing that populist mobilisation is not purely explained by the pull of a charismatic leader (Cody 2015, Tambar 2014).

The work on Eastern European populism emphasises sentiments on the ground as the source of populist cohesion more than shared loyalty to a single figure (Buzalka 2021; Kurti 2020; Malewska-Szyalgin 2021b). These studies underscore how populist discourse speaks to practical concerns of citizens who feel excluded, unmoored, and disenfranchised by economic and social transformation.

Many scholars of populism have focused on the nature of its conceptions of leadership. They contend that populist notions of political representation often fetishise larger-than-life figures (Finchelstein 2017; Wedeen 1995). Such figures can play a generative role in populist movements, as they help absorb the differences between the diverse social sectors that constitute ‘the people’ (Laclau 2005; Müller 2014). This was famously argued by Sigmund Freud in his examination of crowd psychology. For Freud ([1921] 2001), the leader is a love object. While the crowd is turned against others outside of itself—others whom it has come together against—its attention is also lovingly turned toward the leader, who is held to be a surrogate father figure (Derby 2009). Because populism depends on a coalition between diverse social sectors, the charismatic leader functions as an ‘arbiter of contradiction’.

Of course, the personality and even body of the leader are relevant to other political paradigms beyond populism: Monarchical leaders represent a classical notion of sovereignty in which they are above and beyond the laws that constrict their subjects. German historian Ernst Kantrowicz famously examined how divine right monarchs both embody and represent the divine and the human. He studied the genealogy of political leadership in Europe, examining the king’s two bodies as both divine and human, reflecting the doubling of Christ as, at once, both flesh and blood and godly (Kantrowicz [1937] 2016). Fetishism of a political leader—the reification of a human into a deified figure—has been part of political traditions far before the first populist party even emerged. It should thus not be surprising that followers of populist political leaders may consider them both eminently human and inherently not human, even divine (Coronil 1997; Derby 2009).

Scholars of regimes that are cults of personality, but not necessarily populist, also often have leaders that are both intended to be relatable and incomparable—their fetish quality is essential to their capacity to bring together diverse populations (Wedeen 1999). In the anthropological literature, the role of fetishised political leaders is conceived of in symbolic and psychoanalytical terms. Studies of totalitarianism and dictatorships have drawn on structuralist theories of the ‘master-signifier’—a signifier that does not refer to specific content (or ‘signified’) but is the anchor for a whole symbolic system—to understand how certain figures occupy singular symbolic functions. Thus, work on the Soviet Union has shown how certain historical figures like Lenin come to be reified as beyond reproach and critique, serving as master-signifiers that serve as an anchor through which subjects make sense of themselves and the world around them through a shared official discourse (Yurchak 2006). Scholarship on social uncertainty in times of political upheaval has shown how the deposal of brutal dictators, whose larger-than-life presence had previously served as a constant point of reference for their citizens, leads to a state of social ambiguity in which people feel the loss of a referential anchor (Siegel 2006).

Conclusion: A political question of our time

Ethnographic inquiry makes anthropology uniquely suited to give insights into why populist politics are so popular in today’s world. Anthropological work on populism has centred on its highly diverse manifestations. It generally avoids labelling populism as inherently left or right, but, instead, views it as a discursive style that can be adapted to many different ideological programs. The discipline makes sense of populism by focusing on themes including sacrifice, scapegoating, ritual, and the nature of group belonging. A major topic of investigation is the nature and importance of emotions at play in populist movements. Another main topic concerns the complicated and dynamic relationship between liberal paradigms of deliberative democracy and populism, which demonstrates that democracy encourages mobilisation in the name of popular sovereignty and yet seeks to contain it. While anthropology considers the importance of charismatic leadership, it errs on the side of highlighting the agency of the subjects who engage in populist politics. What unites much of the anthropology of populism is the nature of political representation. Who should or should not be represented, how emotional or direct this representation should be, and who really defines the nature of representation are pressing questions that we need to keep asking against the rapid rise of populist parties globally.

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Note on contributor

Julia Fierman is currently Lecturer on Anthropology at Harvard University. Starting in 2025, she will take up the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to complete her monograph on Peronism—the world’s most enduring populist movement. She has previously published articles in various journals on the topics of populism, Peronism, and Argentine political culture.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Cooperatives

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 19:23:57 +0000

Theodoros Rakopoulos

University of Oslo

Initially published 20 Aug 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20coops

Abstract:

Cooperatives are a main means of organization for economic activity, generally operating on principles of equal membership and members’ democratic control of their means of livelihood. Co-ops have developed as modern institutions aiming to tackle problems created by contemporary capitalism and its associated dependency on wage work. Co-ops operate and interact in context, mobilising ways of human contact that anthropologists usually study (kinship, community, ethnicity, and local belief systems). Anthropologists have expressed interest in co-ops since the origins of their discipline. They tend to investigate the ways that members interact within co-op organizations, as well as the ways co-ops interact with and within broader social frameworks. Key issues arising in understanding cooperatives are how co-ops negotiate industrial democracy, how they respond to market influences, and how they interrelate with broader civil society and social movements. Anthropological critiques of cooperatives distinguish between cooperative ideology and praxis, and highlight cases where institutional cooperation does not work in favour of local communities. However, anthropologists have equally celebrated cooperatives as institutional forms that shield communities off from exploitation and promote social solidarity.

Introduction

While cooperatives (co-ops) often stand in the shadow of private companies and state institutions, they do in fact constitute a major organizational form around the globe. According to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), a staggering ‘12% of humanity’ are cooperative members, and thus have an immediate livelihood relation to different forms of economic cooperation.^[1] The ICA defines cooperatives as ‘an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise’.

Although there is mindboggling variation as to what principles co-ops around the world actually follow and to what extent they do so, there are some main ideas permeating the cooperative movement globally. More specifically, cooperatives tend to adhere to a set of organizational beliefs and practices, often identified as ‘the Rochdale principles’. They were set out by the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844 in Rochdale, England, where the first recognised cooperative operated (in that case a consumer cooperative). These principles can be summarised as follows: in terms of members, a co-op has to have voluntary and open membership, as well as democratic member control and members’ economic participation; in terms of operation, a co-op has to have autonomy and independence, while pursuing the education, training, and information of its members; lastly, in terms of its broader social ties, a co-op has to express concern for the community as well as cooperation with other cooperatives. The Rochdale principles are normative, if open to some interpretation. What is important to note are that their key ideas pretty accurately summarise the main issues that cooperatives face, as well as summon the key terms that social analysis has associated with cooperatives: democracy, autonomy, community, common needs, participation, and joint ownership.

Cooperativism can include a variety of free forms of association and common ownership of some means of production, distribution, or consumption. A good first way to classify cooperatives is thus to divide them into three sorts: cooperatives of production, worker cooperatives, and cooperatives of consumption and distribution. Co-ops are often producer-based, where autonomous holders – for example, farmers – share one asset, such as a winery. Such cooperative forms may focus on just one aspect of agrarian production (in this example, vinification) and they may not engage farmers in the whole year in a cooperative setting but only during the harvest and distribution period (Ulin 1996). Co-ops are sometimes worker-based, where workers co-own an asset such as land, or where they work on an asset owned by the state (Rakopoulos 2018). In industry, a workers’ co-op would own the whole array of the means of production, most often a factory (Azzellini 2015). Finally, co-ops can operate as consumption and distribution institutions: there, the members commonly own an asset, for instance a supermarket, and collaborate with producers that provide them with products. These consumer co-ops are particularly common in large cities of Europe and elsewhere, as well as in local food movements (Durrenberger 2018). They very often promote products of producer co-ops. This creates an ‘ecology of cooperation’: cooperation among co-ops, and thus implicit promotion of the principles of cooperation in wider society.

Co-ops can operate in agrarian or industrial contexts, as well as in the countryside or in the city; they can be gender-based, for instance by creating women’s co-ops (Stephen 2005), or focus on class or ethnicity. The variety of cooperative forms is therefore wide but what they tend to have in common is that they work on the premise of, as a minimum, two pillars regarding control. The first pillar is democratic control: co-ops employ a one person-one vote system in their member assemblies. These meetings organise their inner workings, and are foundational for any kind of cooperativism. The second pillar is collective control: co-ops work on the grounds of sharing an asset collectively across members – be it a factory, a shop, a plot, or even a set of practical ideas.

A history of anthropological and sociological interest

Anthropological interest in cooperatives has been evident since the early twentieth century, when Marcel Mauss wrote about them. Mauss, an anthropologist most known for his analyses of gift-giving, was actively involved in cooperativism. His participation in cooperative socialism is well-documented and remains relevant to this day (Hart 2014: 35; Graeber 2014: 67). In order to fully comprehend the political project of Mauss, we need to read his most famous work, The gift in tandem with his political writings (Hart 2007: 5, Hart & James 2014). In those, we encounter a person of action, who takes an active interest in cooperation (specifically, a cooperative bread-making factory), as he sees a horizon of social emancipation and egalitarianism in the phenomenon of co-op development in France.

Mauss insisted that cooperatives brought about ‘practical socialism’ (Fournier 2006: 125). This engaged relationship with a social organization that strives for workers’ rights and a fair distribution of resources is at the heart of his view of economic anthropology. After all, the anthropology of the economy explores the idea that different but possible ways of organising economic activity can not only be imagined in theory but can be brought to fruit in historical reality. This drive brought Mauss to engage with cooperatives in France and address the English Cooperative Association across the Channel. Speaking before the First National and International Congress of Socialist Cooperatives (in July of 1900), the young anthropologist-cum-activist stated,

We will educate him [the citizen] for his revolutionary task by giving him a sort of foretaste of all the advantages that the future society will be able to offer him. ... We will create a veritable arsenal of socialist capital in the midst of bourgeois capital. (Mauss cited in Graeber 2001: 151)

Mauss’s appreciation for the cooperative movement, which marks anthropology’s first engagement with the phenomenon, is not too different from the erstwhile take of Karl Marx on the issue. Like conventional wage labour, cooperativism commenced in Marx’s area of ‘ethnographic’ expertise – Northern Britain in the mid-nineteenth century (as noted, the first co-ops had come to life in Rochdale in the 1840s). Co-ops aimed to do away with distinctions between capital and labour, while Marx, then a young revolutionary yet to engage with Britain, was studying alienation from work (1844). Marx saw in cooperatives the dialectics of capitalism’s present contradictions and the seed of future social developments, a sort of future that is present already in current circumstances.

Marx, anticipating this future-in-present, criticised but did not denounce the cooperative movement. He saw, in the movement’s attempt to bridge capital and labour, firstly a preliminary victory of the latter over the former and, secondly, ‘the husks of the old system and the seeds of the new’ (Bottomore 1991: 111). However, for that victory to be complete, political power, and not localism, was required. Marx’s interest in cooperativism was underpinned by a belief in a dialectical relationship among state, society, and market. However important the particular local cooperative struggles, they needed to articulate upon a wider reality of mostly antagonistic politics. Therefore, an attention to scale is important for understanding cooperation. For Marx, cooperatives were founded upon a historical contradiction:

The cooperative factories run by workers themselves are, within the old form, the first examples of the emergence of a new form, even though they naturally reproduce in all cases, all the defects of the existing system, and must reproduce them. But the opposition between capital and labour is abolished here, even if at first only in the form that the workers in association become their own capitalist, i.e. they use the means of production to valorise their own labour. These factories show how, at a certain stage of development of the material forces of production, and of the social forms of production corresponding to them, a new form of production develops and is formed naturally out of the old. (Marx cited in Bottomore 1991: 571)

That historical reality that engaged Marx and Mauss astounded the socialist and member of the Fabian Society Beatrice Potter Webb, who toured Lancashire in the late-nineteenth century and realised that co-ops were part of local culture (2016 [1920]). By then, Webb had already written a classic book on what was the reality of the vivid cooperative movement in Britain (2013 [1896]). She was a proponent of cooperative federalism as a political and economic system. It was to be a system of ‘cooperative wholesale societies’, in which all the members of federated cooperatives are cooperatives themselves. It might sound complicated but, especially among consumer cooperatives, it is very much a reality in many places: in Britain, for example, the Co-operative group (founded in Rochdale in 1844) is a cooperative wholesale society composed of hundreds of retail co-ops in over 3.700 locations. They employ more than 60.000 people, and amount to over 4.5 million members overall.

While Mauss’ life and work illustrate that economic emancipative experiments are not imagined or planned but experienced in the present, and Webb was interested in describing what we could call an actually existing cooperativism, Marx took a critical distance from this focus on the present. He favoured a more historical approach. Meanwhile, the sociologist Emile Durkheim, while investigating the division of labour in society (1891), established his own understanding of the idea of solidarity, a key principle in cooperativism. According to Durkheim, social solidarity is stretched across the distribution of labour in modern institutions and is part of the collective consciousness of members of society. This notion of solidarity is far more encompassing and general than common-sense versions of it. It can be seen to present a macro version of the social principle on which cooperatives operate. Durkheim has been described as ‘a kind of guild socialist’ (Morris 2005), that is, someone who does not favour class conflict but general cooperation according to trade skill. He is also known to have sympathised with cooperatives, seeing them as associations of social solidarity.

Key issues

Cooperatives have posed a variety of interesting questions since social theory first began engaging with them. They seem to supercede the antithesis between bosses and workers, something associated either with dreams about an egalitarian future (as in Marx) or with an original affluent society of people that work together in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Cooperatives have also been identified by many, including anthropologists, as a form of ‘industrial democracy’ (Holmström 1989), an idea that points to the desire of making an economy democratic, egalitarian, and participatory. They equally seem to work best within a wider ‘ecology’ of cooperative associations and federations (Ingram & Simmons 1995). There is a holistic aspect to the efficiency and influnce of cooperation: the more co-op units exist, and the more cooperation there is among them, the better this is held to be for social equality and democratic participation. A web of cooperation may allow, for example, to control as much of our own time and everyday experience as possible: working in cooperation with others in conditions we collectively choose, or shopping and consuming produce we collectively choose with other cooperators. This goal, of gaining greater democratic and egalitarian choice over the means of our social existence, suggests both an attention to local economic and social facts and an attention to how these scale up towards larger markets and networks of political power.

One way to understand how anthropology has dealt with cooperatives and their wide spread around the world is to consider three key issues: movement, scale, and egalitarianism. Anthropologists tend to discuss them with reference to the real, empirical realities studied through ethnographic work. Major findings arising from their studies include: that scaling up has been challenging for co-ops around the world; that there is indeed a tendency for co-ops to fuse within broader social movements; and that internal democracy in cooperatives is heatedly debated and contested.

Ethnographic attention to cooperatives has mainly focused on two regions, where many cooperatives operate today: Europe and Latin America. Latin American studies began already in the mid-1970s (Nash 1976) and stretch from Mexico (Ferry 2004) to Argentina (Bryer 2012). In Europe, as noted earlier, cooperatives were seen in the context of a variety of local claims, often in tandem and in dialogue with debates on ethnicity, political ideology, and worker mobilization. Contributions came principally from Spain (Kasmir 1996, Greenwood & Gonzalez 1992), as well as Italy (Holmström 1989, Sanchez-Hall 2019), France (Ulin 1996), and Greece (Rakopoulos 2014).

Democracy and egalitarianism

Co-op politics tend to be born of practitioners acting together in a collective fashion. They are less based on blueprints of overarching ideologies but instead they inform such ideologies through practice (Whyte 1999). The widely-discussed cooperativist experiment in Mondragón, the largest cooperative in the world, attracted much scholarly attention. Mondragón is based in the Basque country, and is active in a number of industries, including manufacturing, retail, and services, while emplyoing c.80.000 people today. Since its inception in the 1950s, the cooperative avoided being encompassed by totalising ideological systems: it was ‘a reaction against -isms’, like ‘socialism’ which was perceived as an ideology rather than a practice, but also Taylorist specialization and division of labour. Workers referred to the verse of poet Antonio Machado, ‘the path is made walking’ (‘se hace el camino al andar’), to explain their processual pragmatism (Whyte & Whyte 1991: 257). In that way, ‘cooperativism was true socialism—not just one way to achieve it’ (Whyte & Whyte 1991: 253). The difference to much political socialism lay in its model of practice: cooperation was defined as being about doing and experiencing a social reality, rather than applying or running after an idea.

Indeed, one of anthropology’s main contributions to cooperative debates has been to distinguish between cooperative ideology and praxis. Ethnography is an empirical and realist approach to knowledge, one that does not primarily apply theory to reality, but that aims to be inspired by reality. This has proven ideal to witness the practical and hands-on economic democracy that cooperativism suggests. In many ways, ethnographies have provided ‘test cases’, fact-checking whether co-ops actually live up to ideals of social equality and worker democracy. While some research embraces current cooperativism as ‘horizontalist’ (Sitrin 2012), that is, being radically egalitarian as opposed to working on labour hierarchies, many other contributions are critical. Some have presented a ‘disenchanted’ vision of cooperative practice – including two important books that came out in the same year: Sharryn Kasmir’s classic study The myth of Mondragón (1996), but also Robert Ulin’s book Vintages and traditions: an ethnohistory of French wine cooperatives (1996). Kasmir’s study, focusing on a workers’ cooperative, presents the Basque experiment in Spain as a ‘myth’. The co-op’s leadership trumped labour rights but considered union representation to lie at odds with cooperative membership. This stalled the potential for social egalitarianism. Ulin, focusing on producers’ cooperatives in the Southwest of France, notes that there has been an anti-elitist tendency in winemakers’ cooperation. However, their internal division of labour is nothing short of capitalist, marginalising smaller wine growers. These insights from France and the Basque country have significantly nuanced our understanding of co-ops as institutions, shining light on the ways in which their immediate livelihoods are not necessarily egalitarian and might indeed reproduce capitalist exploitation. Anthropologists have accounted for the different cleavages caused across different lines of order and normativity in members’ lives (for instance, the schism between those who share common interests with management and those who do not [Kasmir 1996: 198]).

What is more, research has shown that co-ops can include practices that are outright socially and physically destructive. In Sicily, a co-op form has been created, as a group of Mafiosi decided to form their own wine-making cooperative and in so doing conjured autonomous producers around them (Rakopoulos 2017b). Reaping social consensus through co-op participation proved very beneficial for the local Cosa Nostra, until the co-op disbanded when its leaders were arrested. Catalonian examples also include a murky undercurrent to the local cooperative history, as the Franco regime saw in the cooperative the desirable work equivalent of the ‘home’ – a corporatist, close institution (Narotzky 1988). In Catalonia, fascism found in the ideology of the casa and the cooperativa two pillars of social cohesion that complemented a Francoist vision of society as an organic field, with no social upheaval or internal contradiction. In this picture, cooperatives worked well as institutions of further worker exploitation (1997). In these examples, co-ops do bring about labour democracy and egalitarianism because they never sought to do so: they were founded by hierarchical, violent institutions (the fascist state and the Mafia), to seeking to create sense of worker cohesion and a lack of class conflict.

Other critical analyses were initially not concerned with cooperatives, but focused on kinship (Ferry 2003), ethnicity, and struggles around identity instead (Kasmir 2002). These issues might, in the first instance, seem to draw attention away from cooperative forms. Yet, kinship and ethnicity can in fact be inherent aspects of how cooperatives function and how they are experienced. Cooperatives may pool from the immediate kin group to recruit members, and people may see the house as a cooperative. Both examples show that close interconnections between family and co-op life exist (Rakopoulos 2017a). The study of cooperatives may thus point out that efforts for greater democracy and egalitarianism can be based on communitarian and family-based underpinnings.

Other encouraging studies exist: in a recent book on the fascinating history of forty years of ethnographic engagement in a ‘Red’ area of Romagna, Italy, cooperatives have been celebrated as a great achievement for social equality and progress (Sánchez Hall 2019). As the author notes, ‘I came to feel like the first anthropologist in the history of the discipline whose informants thought she came from a backward culture to study their most advanced ways’ (2019: 2). Similarly, Mark Holmström presents a story of utter fascination with Italy’s industrial democracy (1989). He sympathised with cooperatives and went on to investigate them further in the Spanish context (Holmström 1993). Investigative journalist Robert Oakeshott even went so far as to marry his life commitment to cooperativism with making the ‘scholarly case’ for co-ops (1977).

Scale and markets

Engaging with world markets reshapes not just cooperatives themselves but also the localities in which they are situated. Markets may affect the very cosmology that surround resources and people. Mexican cooperative miners, for example, have been shown to attach a varied array of signification to the precious metals that they unearth, depending on where these metals are in the ground, in their homes, or in a global exchange circuit. Thinking about how co-op members in Mexico conceptualize the silver deposits they mine, as well as the ways that this mineral enters international markets, shows that idioms surrounding family and patrimony may help make sense of the deposits they work on (Ferry 2003). Their language that presents the silver they mine as inalienable, however, coexists with its commodification. When the silver enters commercial circulation, its exchangeability eventually triumphs over its inalienability, and relations of exchange trump relations of production (Ferry 2002: 342-3). These mutually exclusive idioms and tensions between lived community (with its environmental sensitivity) and abstracted market brings us to the core of current and, potentially, future anthropological concerns with cooperative worklives and industrial democracy.

Thinking about co-ops as part of wider markets highlights questions of scale and how cooperatives as local, community institutions relate to broader systems in which they and their members operate. This tension between local thinking about cooperative environments and the global changes influencing labour, work, and co-op products animates other Mexico-focused studies (Stephen 2005). In the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Mexico had signed, co-ops offered a shelter from global capitalism in its neoliberal form. Similarly, work drawing on Mexico (Chiapas), as well as Italy (Sardinia) shows how cooperatives can be both in dialogue with large-scale corporate forms and an expression of a more community-based economy (Vargas-Cetina 2011). They can provide their members with some engagement with the market, whilst attempting to improve people’s living conditions by protecting them from the market’s unbridled forces, standing in opposition to exploitative market pricing and protecting labor rights (Vargas-Cetina 2009: 128). Thereby they have historically provided buffer zones of sociality to abjure capitalism’s aggressive individualisation (Vargas-Cetina 2005; cf Curl 2009), and indeed shaping notions of collective selfhood (Stephen 2005: 254; cf Nash et al. 1976). The idea is that practices of cooperation are conducive to sentiments of belonging to forms of a ‘collective’ rather than an individual self.

While co-ops thereby often stand in opposition to market logics, this is not always the case. European food cooperatives, for example, both need markets and scale back from them, focusing on self-sufficiency during times of austerity (Homs & Narotzky 2019). While coops are most often aiming to reinvest locally only (indeed, they are at times legally obliged to do so), they can also be active proponents of global capitalism, investing in companies that are located offshore (Kasmir 2016).

In actual fact, then, there is a variety of praxes and different logics informing cooperatives: from self-sufficiency and an anti-capitalist, even anti-market tendency, to one that redirects co-op priorities from egalitarianism to a corporate logic. Having a clear understanding of this multifaceted nature of cooperatives is particularly pressing, as capitalist commodification often hinges on community economics, at times turning cooperatives into so-called ‘coopitalist’ institutions (Errasti et al. 2016).

The relation between cooperatives and the expansion of capitalist production is thus tenuous and open to modifications. On the one hand, cooperatives have become a key strategy of grassroots movements to improve the livelihoods of local populations. On the other, they are part and parcel of public policies in favour of growth-based development, rising productivity, and higher employment rates. The adaptability of cooperatives has become particularly obvious in Latin America during the decade of the 2000s, as cooperatives like unions had a great deal of interactions with politically progressive governments of the ‘Pink Tide’, an array of left-leaning yet often growth-based governments.

Movements and civil society

As the introduction has made clear, cooperatives are political institutions as much as they are economic ones. Frequently, they are therefore close to social movements, endorsing for example ‘postcapitalist and anticapitalist politics’ (Miller 2015). Co-ops may unite and fuse with other social movements or even antagonise them, as has been the case with the trade union movement (Kasmir 1991, 2000). Their explicitly political nature requires attention to the values co-op members and contractual workers endorse, not just at work but also in their lives and livelihoods. Co-op members’ attempts to better their livelihoods have been rooted in specific concepts, of which ‘community’ has been one of the most important. This is not least due to the fact that co-ops are tightly linked to the notion of ‘community economies’ (Gibson-Graham 2006: 110-27), expressing broader concerns and representing wider local interests, rather than those of their stakeholders as in the case of conventional corporations. Yet, relying on the notion of community can also be problematic, when it describes actual praxis that is is in fact detrimental to egalitarian principles (as in the Sicilian mafia, see Rakopoulos 2017b: 167-172).

The practicality of cooperatives is important, as co-ops are active parts of what has been recently called the solidarity economy (see, e.g., Laville 2010). Promoting social solidarity, they are potential channels of social change in times of crisis (Gibson-Graham 2013). Their capacity for ‘prefigurative’ politics, that is, to show how economic life beyond corporate capitalism and labour exploitation is indeed possible, brings them in coalition with social movements (Maeckelberg 2012). It is the social relations that are produced within and around cooperatives that inspire both a need to liaise with other movements and a need to survive by forming coalitions (Rakopoulos 2014). Cooperatives as community paradigms (Nash 1976), coalesce with similar grassroots collective organizations to become part of the broader milieu of movements galvanised in areas such as the Mexican Chiapas. Here the co-ops’ issues start taking the shape of wider civil society issues.

This broader influence of the cooperative movement speaks to the issue of whether, and to what extent, co-ops are resilient institutions. Anthropologists have been useful in pointing out that we need to see co-ops not only as institutional associations with innate durability, but actually as ephemeral associations in a state of flux and volatility (Vargas-Cetina 2005). For example, cooperatives tend to be associated with crises. They frequently come into being to salvage jobs that would otherwise be lost in economic downturns. This was the case in Argentinian recuperated factories, post-2001. The fluctuating nature of cooperatives may be one of the reasons why this institutional form has persisted over time.

The blend of co-ops into networks of similar grassroots organizations of care, provision, self-help, and mutuality has been called a ‘social economy’ (Bryer 2012). Co-ops in Argentina, for instance, have established this social economy by taking over factories and other corporations that had gone bust (see Lewis 2004), inspiring people in Italy to follow suit (Orlando 2019). The ‘social responsibility’ that cooperatives take on board is at once a source of inspiration and a struggle for their members (Bryer 2010), who wish to show that they are part of ‘something bigger’. The movements that inspire them can be historical utopias whose present residues have taken new paths – like Zionism in contemporary urban Israel (Russel 1995). They can even be residues of a utopian past, like collectives that still operate in the face of the Soviet Union’s collapse (Humphrey 1998). At any rate, cooperatives have necessarily always operated in a broader climate, an ‘ecology’ of mutual and necessarily political associations (Lomi 1995).

Conclusion

By mobilising participation and community engagement cooperatives teach us two interesting lessons. Firstly, they play a salvaging role for labour, land and its produce, in the name of local communities and in the name of democratic ideals. These protective features of co-ops are twofold: against external forces, such as the market or the state, coops are meant to salvage local life, while internally, they aim to protect their members and their means of production. They provide shelters from globalising, un-redeeming powers of greater scale (as, e.g., per Stephen 2005; Vargas-Cetina 2005) and save jobs in transition and crises (Sitrin 2012). Thereby, co-ops often play the role of enclaves from which people can defend themselves against dispossessions of all sorts. Security of people, safety for work, protection of labour rights and the environment, as well as a relative decommodification of some cooperatively-held assets are the main aspects of this protective function.

Secondly, co-ops elucidate important debates about political economy and social life at large. They enable people threatened by unemployment to procure labour, grounded in an ethos of self-help and often building on existing social relations. They thereby have evolved from a set of ideas that recognised the conflict of capital and labour, aiming to bridge what may be unbridgeable (Restakis 2010). It is for these reasons that the anthropological literature, by and large, is committed to questioning whether cooperatives actually promote egalitarian values, and why anthropologists are often sympathetic to co-ops. This entry has focused primarily on topics to do with democracy, scale and social movements. By way of concluding, it pays to reflect on how social science has possibly helped the actual development of cooperatives.

In criticising the distinction between civil society and the state, anthropologists have asked how cooperatives became a technology of government for working people and poor populations. This critique has helped some cooperative organizers reflect on how they should not lose sight of the egalitarian principles of Rochdale when developing their co-ops. What is more, the importance of ethnicity, kinship, gender and identity in shaping cooperative practice cannot be underestimated. People participate in co-ops as gendered persons and often through their kinship networks, and co-op practice cannot take place without accounting for these realities. This empirical insight has helped contemporary cooperative movements to embrace local kinship idioms, belief systems, and community forms. Highlighting local practices in similar movements has been part of engaged anthropological thinking (Durrenberger 2018). Thus anthropologists have been avid developers of participatory action research, which allows for exchanging knowledge and expertise between researcher and interlocutor, often both members of the same cooperative organization (Gibson-Graham 2006).

Cooperative platforms also exist in anthropological thinking and practice: the online forum known as ‘Open Anthropology Cooperative’ worked for a few years to bring together thinkers and practitioners of the discipline from around the world in a digital platform. Cooperative open access publishing has also been widely thought about and informally practiced, creating online scholarly communities that render their work available to the wider public. Locked behind paywalls, anthropological publishing is, like that of all academic publishing, under the control of corporate entities. Yet, cooperative open access publishing has been democratising knowledge to a good extent, even if often through informal means. It is this spirit of cooperation that characterises anthropology, a discipline that works not with ‘subjects’ or ‘samples’ but with ‘interlocutors’ and ‘research participants’. In many ways, anthropology is cooperative by definition.

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Note on contributor

Theodoros Rakopoulos is associate professor in the Social Anthropology department of the University of Oslo. His research has focused on cooperatives: antimafia co-ops in Sicily and co-ops in the Greek solidarity economy. He has also published on silence, conspiracy theory, austerity, and mafia. He is author of From clans to co-ops: confiscated mafia land in Sicily (Berghahn 2017) and editor of The global life of austerity (Berghahn 2018), while his new book project is on the commodification of citizenship (“golden passports”) in Cyprus.

Theodoros Rakopoulos, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. theodoros.rakopoulos@sai.uio.no

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