Logistical instability is inevitable, but intellectual fugitivity is key to dwelling within its cracks and fissures to mobilize resistance. But, their form of organizing is whitewashed, insufficient, and parasitic on the legacy of the black radical tradition.

Returning to face the machine, which shifts and spreads ceaselessly across the globe, accumulating and disposing (the disposables, which increasingly seems as a category to increase), refusal seems a certain (im)possibility. Not naïve to the enemy, knowing its illusory incoherence, reminded all too often of the hard materiality of its unreal impositions, the decolonial insurgent refuses capitalism in service of a memory of something else, refusing to forget the (im)possibility of autonomous and shared living—refusing to forget, that is, what remains evident everywhere around them, the irrepressible interconnectivity and cooperation that remains both before and beyond (always under and around) enclosure (eternally as its condition of possibility, as that which enclosure follows to (fail to) enclose). Illusive though the enemy might be, it persists with force and fabrications of fatalism, false desires and fake stories that for some reason won’t fade away, foreclosing the future for those who thought they saw it first, frozen forever in the hold(s) of the here-and-now, the flat and frenzied fever-dream of neoliberal techno-capital. Refusing capitalism and the coerced and cursed containment it carries over all, the dominance it assumes over seemingly every facet of life and living, the commodification and territorialisation of all things it brings relentlessly—seems indeed to require more or less a step away (and towards) the world as we (un)know it. No wonder (for) the West, as the critical histories articulated at the outset assert irrefutably: no wonder. Denying before all else (the all but lost wonders of) his own insurgent and imaginative interiority, Modernity’s weary Man wandered out (from itself), emerging from Europe’s Dark Ages on an awakening predicated primarily upon consumptive constructions of whiteness and purity, on virulent ideologies of fungibility and flesh—that is, on anti-blackness—that came before and variously found their ways into Marx’s early and magisterial but nonetheless narrowly-conceived theorisations of capital, accumulation, labour and exploitation.

Put differently: if decolonisation remains our horizon, it is insufficient to refuse capitalism only to affirm communism, leaving untouched and unthought the hold(s) by which Marx was held, those by which our inherited Marxisms continue to hold even the idea of communal or shared living at all. Marx got a lot right, but he didn’t discover the idea of collectivism. Held by modernity, historical materialism, the universalist assumptions of bourgeois Europe, and the dream for better, Marx remains one of the most incisive observers of capital. His ideas have found widespread articulation, inspiring and overlapping with the freedom struggles of ‘colonised’ and ‘oppressed’ peoples around the world. However, his theories remain incomplete—worse, the exclusions at the heart of Marxism remain invisible, the unthought spectre of the Black (slave), the primitive accumulation of slavery that had kicked off years before the first capitalist.

Forged through decades of radical Black organising and class struggle in the Deep South, the Jackson-Kush Plan follows innumerable forerunners and forebears “from the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) in particular and the BLM [Black Liberation Movement] in general”. The self-determined and collective efforts of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) were central in instigating the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund in the face of total government neglect and indifference to the (predominantly Black) death and loss following Hurricane Katrina. The insurgent invention of the Jackson Human Rights Coalition in the 1980s was similarly pivotal in organising against police terror, white segregationist politics, and the other violent signs of the “the plantation bloc's restoration" in the contemporary South. Reflecting on Cooperation Jackson, the solidarity economy component of the plan, co-founder and co-director Kali Akuno references "eclectic sources of inspiration—Mondragon worker cooperatives in Spain, Zapatistas, cooperatives in the South going back 200 years in the Black community, projects in the early days of Tanzania, Algeria, Guyana.” The People’s Assembly, the model of democratic social organization at the heart of the plan, follows its roots “from the spiritual or prayer circles” of “enslaved Afrikans”, who (dis)organised in stealth to sustain and find each other and themselves, (de)forming community and resistance from the brutal (im)possibilities of the hold, an irruptive and eruptive refusal that evidently resonates today in the dreams and designs of Jackson’s Black, working, and poor communities.

The deep and dark cuts of such broad (an)origins—which to be clear, even staying within the Black South, predates the birth of Karl Marx—gives the Jackson-Kush Plan not only its vision, but the vision also to recognise that in order to achieve that dream of self-determining, radically democratic, autonomous living that moved Marx and Malcolm alike, a “critical break with capitalism” would be essential but insufficient without “the dismantling of the American settler colonial project”. This is not simply to reorient our political and ethical focus, although indeed this is often necessary; rather, it is the Jackson-Kush Plan’s explicit (ap)position with(in) and against the “American settler colonial project” that is of most significance (to their organising, to this thesis, to all of us). The plan’s historical (and ecological and spiritual) scope and all the struggles and memories and traditions that it holds and is held by is key to its visionary, unsettled and unsettling demands as it affords to the communities and individuals working from or towards the plan the fugitive standpoint (of no and every standpoint). In other words, in recognising the illegitimacy and illusion of (the) settlement, the Jackson-Kush Plan discloses the (im)possibilities that eternally remain internal, under and around the hold(s) of (the) settlement, gesturing from and towards the ruptures in (the past that fracture) the here-and-now, suppressed socialities and runaway dreams of communal living that continue to pierce the present with splinters of hope and (im)possibility, (in)complete plans of productive fugitivity and fugitive productivity.

Self-described as a “vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership”, Cooperation Jackson emerged in 2013 from the vision(s) of the Jackson-Kush Plan to develop a (re)generative solidarity network in Jackson, Mississippi (and everywhere else) across and through four interconnected and interdependent institutions: a federation of local green worker cooperatives and mutual aid networks, a cooperative incubator and sustainable development centre, a communal school and training facility, and a community-owned and controlled bank. The cooperative is maintained democratically through a People’s Assembly, a model of participatory self-governance and Black (and brown and poor) self-determination, organised without hierarchies via democratically determined agendas and working bodies. Linking with already existing regional and national solidarity economy networks (like the Southern Grassroots Economics Project and the US Solidarity Economy Network), and drawing on a wealth of theory and praxis elaborated in struggle through the 1980s and 90s in Latin America, Cooperation Jackson works for (and through and with) the multiplication of solidarity networks of mutually reinforcing cooperative initiatives. It seeks “a regenerative economy…. that not only restores and replenishes the resources it extracts from the earth, but aids in the actual restoration of our earth's ecosystems”. What it might (and indeed in places like Detroit, New York, and Atlanta is already beginning to) look like is a regenerative network of mutually reinforcing yet interdependent and localised eco-villages self-sustaining via community production (of energy, food, life, and so on), enmeshed with urban and regional farms, farmers markets and community land trusts held by and holding communal financing and collective and ecologically-constrained enterprise, eventually evolving an autonomous public sector providing communal health care, transportation, education, housing, and whatever else the people themselves decide they want or need, according to (democratically determined and ecologically constrained) ability and need—elaborating and embodying an unsettling, dynamic, “all-embracing and class-oriented” model of community and worker unionism, centering the need to “build genuine worker power from the ground up… as the core transformative force to democratize the local economy and society”.

Not afraid to push the vision to its (im)possible limits, Cooperation Jackson has already started towards what Akuno describes as “a critical initiative to own and control the means of industrial production”, which are increasingly represented by digital and automated—3D printing, quantum computing, procedural and artificially-intelligent—production technologies that are distributed and decentralised yet collectively and democratically owned and operated by “members of geographically and/or intentionally defined communities”. These ideas—described broadly as Community Production—serve as the foundation for Cooperation Jackson’s ultimate campaign to transform Jackson into “an innovative hub of sustainable manufacturing and fabrication”, a kind of model “city of the future” guided by “zero-emission and zero-waste” principles, a ‘Transition City’ anchored by not only cooperative 'fab(rication) labs'—able to produce "build-to-order, high quality, high volume 3D-printed products... from toys to medical aids and tools” as well as serving “essential production needs” of the community such as green housing or other services—but also an education division to train local workers and community members in distributed fabrication, open-source design and coding, and sustainable development. This is all guided by a commitment to democratising technology in general but particularly those technologies that increasingly constitute means of production, (pre)figuring such collective and visionary efforts as “a prelude towards the democratic transition to eco-socialism.”

Indeed, this might sound like the communist dream, but it remains a dream, an impressive but nonetheless impotent economic plan of reform so long as we remain held “within a capitalist framework of social production governed by a bourgeois social order”. Cooperation Jackson therefore recognises the strategic necessity of what they call ‘dual power’, differentiating between autonomous power—the collective efforts of building solidarity power “outside of the state” primarily through People’s Assemblies and Solidarity Economies—but also strategic and fugitive engagements with “electoral politics on a limited scale” in refusal of its legitimacy and with the goal of subverting its logics and social relations, diluting its strength, and containing “the dictatorial power and ideological influence of monopoly capital”. In ‘dual power’ we see an unsettling and unsettled site of contradictory and compromising movements, a fracture in the walls and halls of the state, through and from which fugitivity flows, under and around the hold(s) of the here-and-now, moving to and for a different kind of beat altogether.

Cooperation Jackson are certainly awake to not only the changes and challenges that characterise the contemporary moment—the dominance of the tech giants and their unholy union with the state and the police, their violent and impersonal imposition into every inch of our lives—but also the fugitive potentials that such technologies disclose, revealing contradictions that appear on the surface like splinters to be exploited and exploded. In its unsettling embrace of what might be called ‘fugitive development’, given and taken in their wild and wide-eyed plans for a future city amid a regenerative network of productive and cooperative local enterprises, Cooperation Jackson refuses capitalism as it unsettles it from within, from underneath and around and beyond, strategically leaning in to the language and (il)logics of the enterprising ‘developer’, however for goals explicitly opposed (and apposed) to those of neoliberal extractive capitalism. By assuming this unsettling (ap)position of the fugitive entrepreneur, the forerunners of the Jackson Kush Plan recognised not only the productive potential of the working class population, but also the ‘untapped’ industries and interests in and through which they hoped to thrive. In the face of the economic, industrial, and infrastructural neglect that characterises many cities of the Deep South, Cooperation Jackson instead sees this as opportunity, the “relatively sparse concentration of capital in Mississippi” affording a degree of “breathing room on the margins and within the cracks of the capitalist system”, in which a radical and visionary project of self-determination for Black and working-class people might manoeuvre, experiment, and thrive, building upon “a tremendous degree of pent up social demand waiting to be fulfilled”. The potential of ‘green energy’ and sustainable development is similarly viewed, identified as an opportunity to “get ahead of the curve” amid an increasing awareness of the viability of renewables. The explosions of the Internet and the digital era more generally revealed certain (im)possibilities of connection and communication with(in) the hold(s) of the here-and-now, the contradiction of feeling so alienated in a world so connected, bringing fugitive communities together across distances previously unimaginable—but the progression of (capital and its) technology notably also reveals, as it did to Marx so many years ago, the very real possibility of working less, of working differently, of working not at all or for or with or as something else entirely, “making a dramatic new orientation to work and labor possible”. These are the contradictions identified by Cooperation Jackson that they work to exploit, unsettling the circuits of capital from within and against the hold(s) of (the) settlement, guided by a commitment first and foremost to “regenerating the bounty of life on our planet, in all its diversity” but yet nonetheless welcoming “non-extractive, patient capital to move on many fronts”, such as by investing in the future of cooperative, ecologically-constrained solidarity initiatives. This suggests the emergence of potentially unusual alliances and contradictory movements, navigated strategically and dynamically with a view towards the decolonial horizon, unsettling any coalitional interaction or exchange it moves with—the invocation of ‘patient capital’, for example, suggests an interesting refusal and reconfiguration of taken-for-granted ideas about the role, value, and meaning of capital.