FAITH & ECONOMICS
NUMBER 76, Fall 2020
Owning Up to It: Why Cooperatives Create the Humane Economy our World Needs
Jamin Andreas Hübner
LCC International University,
Western Dakota Technical Institute,
The University of the People
This paper is part of a symposium organized in cooperation with the AEI Initiative on Faith and Public Life titled: “In the Contemporary United States What Would a Truly Humane Economy Look Like?“
Abstract: The negative outcomes of industrial capitalism and neoliberalism continue to grow in the twenty-first century, causing many social scientists to look for solutions and alternatives to the status quo. Major ideologies gravitate towards collectivization and statism on the one hand, and anarcho-capitalism and the “commodification of everything” on the other. There is, however, a growing movement towards decentralization by democratization. This article examines worker’s cooperatives and the framework behind the cooperative movement (distributism and anarcho-socialism) as a robust solution to the central problems of our economy. Worker’s cooperatives, while still not common in many industries, are both theoretically sound and have been concretely tested.