CO-OP

The basic principles of the organization of agricultural cooperatives.

This work meets the moment of reflection and practice in which the pandemic confronted us to look at a way of life that we often do not know if coincides with pre-industrial times, or we are building a collective imagination linked to non-Western practices.

The Covid-19 pandemic evidenced reflections that we had already been doing about consumption and food. However, if we consider that the spread of the virus is directly related to speciesism in food culture, and the mutation of the SARS-COVID-2 virus could possibly be linked to the creation of animals for fur production, there is no way for us not to stop to reflect on the production line and food consumption. Therefore, it would be necessary to put into practice the knowledge acquired from local, sustainable, anti-species and healthy production as a response to the new way of life.

Here I present two diagrams from the book “The Theory of Peasant Co-Operatives” by the agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov, first published in 1919.

These are diagrams that illustrate the crossing between territories through the organization that involves food production, from rural to urban areas, from agricultural centers to other sectors, whether associative, union, service, conviviality or marketing.

By bringing these diagrams in risographic print, I chose to present them in color, unlike the original black-and-white version. This is to emphasize the rhetorical variants of the design and, consequently, enable new arrangements of systems that can contribute with unique specificities, particularities of places, diversity of food and people.

This diversity of rhetorical possibilities in drawing allows us to reflect on the modes and languages of production that are at the limits of paradoxical problems of knowledge, for example, between phenomenology and positivism. However, it also reinforces limiting aspects existing in the epistemological production of Western knowledge of translating the world of social and environmental organization through lines, graphics and color palettes.

“Diagram TBPOOOAC-O 01”, 2020, 42 x 29,7 cm, risography on Munken paper.

“Diagram TBPOOOAC-O 02”, 2020, 42 x 29,7 cm, risography on Munken paper.

Therefore, I ask, in which world do forms appear and to which world does raw material belong?

Spontaneity when not articulated with other organized sectors of society, as a political project, loses strength. The knowledge behind food production is multiple and many have been erased from the History of Culture. This has been the greatest response of 21st century social movements to society: the need to organize ourselves to keep bodies and knowledge alive! In this way, traditional medicine healer and human rights activist Marichuy faced the structuring of social strata as a capitalist project of the democratic state. In 2017, then a candidate for the presidency of Mexico, she said:

“Then it is clear that for them the people from below do not exist. And what do we have to do? Get organized!”