Cooperatives have a global history as a way of organizing economic relations to ensure and achieve social goals, including that of basic reproduction and protection against larger monopolistic actors. They have a particularly long-standing history in the global countryside, where cooperative production has been a nearly perpetual aspect of agriculture. Yet their formalization as part of state planning has been more fraught, and at the same time, in the Arab region, seriously understudied. From Syria to Palestine to Egypt to Tunisia to Yemen, cooperatives were an elemental component of “Arab socialism” and sometimes of insurrectionary episodes or revolutionary state construction. This panel treats cooperative experiments in Tunisia and Palestine in a broader perspective, considering them as two manifestations of the experiments with national or collective planning during the dawn and dusk of the Bandung era.
This paper considers Tunisian cooperatives and economic planning through a paths-not-taken approach. In Tunisia, in the rural sector, cooperatives were largely implanted from above, with minimal consultation with the peasantry. Their impact and reception varied widely: amongst northwestern proletarianized rural day-workers, cooperative labor was familiar and ownership of the land was minimal, lubricating their success. Elsewhere, as in the Sahel, petty commodity production and small-scale land ownership were part of the traditions of the region, and cooperatives encountered considerably more friction. This paper considers an aspect of the cooperative thinking extant in Tunisia by considering it from the perspective of its critics, both those endogenous – within the ISEA-AN planning bureaus – and exogenous, namely the Perspectives Movement, the leftist student grouplet. It examines their critiques, based largely on a more systematic engagement with peasant knowledge and participatory technological development, partially based on the experience of China. It places those critiques within a broader political sociology of bureaucratized Tunisian planning, emplaced in a broader macro-global sociology of the push to state planning in Tunisia, to elucidate why the path taken, was taken, and then to use that as a background to consider the various untaken paths traversed during the apex of Tunisian socialism until its disintegration in 1969.
This paper is part of a larger research project on Tunisian cooperativism that addresses the question of how the history of planning represented an attempt to resolve agrarian questions of economics, politics, and industrialization. This paper sets out to understand the ambitions that drove economic planning and the impact it had on Tunisia’s past. The politics of cooperatives in Tunisia during the 1960s reflects a pivotal era in the nation’s history characterized by ambitious state-led development initiatives, social transformation, and the pursuit of economic and societal modernization. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the political dynamics surrounding the establishment, management, and impact of cooperatives in Tunisia during this transformative period. State intervention played a crucial role in creating rural cooperatives as a component of a “Tunisian socialism” and with the goal to address socio-economic inequalities and stimulate agricultural productivity. Viewing cooperatives as instruments for achieving national development goals and consolidating political control, this paper traces the “roads taken”, by Tunisia’s post-independence governments. We highlight the ideological underpinnings of the cooperative movement – cooperatives as vehicles for advancing socialist principles of collective ownership, solidarity and rural empowerment – as well as their material supports – financial backing, technical assistance, and regulatory frameworks for cooperative formation as well as the significant influence over cooperative governance structures and decision-making processes.
In the 2010s in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank (WB) several initiatives of collective labor and property emerged, they built on similar initiatives from the 1970s-80s. Dominant local literature and institutions perceived them through a narrow definition of cooperatives and came to analyze them as predominantly income- generating economic initiatives. I propose reading these initiatives through the broader concept of the commons: collectively held resources put to the service of a community through the collective labor of its members. By doing so we can more accurately place these cooperatives along a spectrum of other practices to which they belong and by whom they were influenced: societal solidarity practices, and importantly the productive collectives of Palestinian liberation struggle. This paper contends that these cooperatives are political institutions and that their economic role is closely intertwined with their political outlook. By political I mean that they are concerned with contesting, directly or indirectly, power within Palestinian society and against the Zionist colonial project. They contribute to struggle over resources, values, and norms in Palestinian society. They do so through contributing to mass movements that lay claim to representation of the Palestinian people, through direct wresting of resources from the market and colonization, and through cultivating values and norms that facilitate the latter. At the same time, these cooperatives practice an everyday life that reflects what their members desire as an outcome to their struggle. These initiatives correspond to the political and economic condition aforementioned, and relate to the concept of “resistance economy” which reemerged in the same decade as an intellectual response to this reality. They build on the heritage of the 1970s-80s grassroots committees in the WB, particularly agricultural and women committees. The cooperatives’ roles in facing these conditions are: facilitators of broader mobilization, spaces for economic experimentation, income-generation, and land defense.
