Frequently Asked Questions
There are three main kinds of cooperatives: producer co-ops, consumer co-ops, and worker co-ops. The difference between a cooperative and a publicly traded company is that a co-op is owned by its members, rather than by shareholders.
The owners of a producer co-op are individual producers, typically farmers, who all combine forces to sell their products as a single entity. Consumer co-ops are owned by the people who shop at the co-op. Many grocery store cooperatives follow this model.
Worker cooperatives are owned by the people who work there. Rather than hiring employees to work for wages, each worker owns an equal share of the company and has an equal say in the decision-making process. They function as an example of a direct democracy where workers retain control over the vision and mission of their company.
The marketplace is a one-stop shop for purchasing products online from local cooperatives. We intend to expand and eventually offer a nationwide market where you can shop at any cooperative and have the products shipped directly to you.
If you'd like to make it a reality, sign up for updates and you'll be first in line when the platform goes live.
Open source may be one of the most important ideas the software world has produced and we try to live up to it where we can. We host our non-sensitive projects publicly on Forgejo, and we prefer open infrastructure over proprietary defaults when the tradeoffs are reasonable.
The marketplace is a different story. It remains proprietary for now. Open sourcing it isn't off the table forever, but it would mean taking on real obligations: maintaining a community, keeping dependencies secure, and accepting that our rough edges would be visible to everyone — including people looking for vulnerabilities. We're not ready for that yet.
There's another tension we don't gloss over: we want workers compensated for their labor, and unrestricted open source doesn't always serve that goal. We're trying to build something sustainable for the people doing the work, not optimize for ideological purity on every axis.
Yes. We use AI in our work, and we think you deserve a straight answer about that.
We recognize the real harms associated with AI: environmental costs, labor exploitation in training data pipelines, and especially the impact on artists whose work has been used without consent or compensation. We don't dismiss those concerns — we share many of them.
We also use AI because, at our scale, it lets us do things we couldn't otherwise afford or staff. The videos on our site were generated with Sora. Much of our code has been written with assistance from tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex. We don't have the budget for paid actors or a large dev team, and AI helps us move faster on work that still requires human judgment.
We treat AI output the way we'd treat submissions from a capable but inexperienced intern: useful starting points, never trusted blindly. Every line gets reviewed, edited, and owned by a human on our team.
We're watching ethical providers — such as Thaura.ai, which hosts open source models — and we'd prefer to switch when those tools are genuinely useful for our day-to-day work. Today, they slow us down more than they help. That's a practical constraint, not an excuse, and we'll revisit it as the landscape changes.
AI is a tool, like many tools in modern life that were built under conditions we'd rather not endorse. Cars, smartphones, local utility companies — we use imperfect systems because opting out entirely isn't realistic if we want to build something that reaches people. We try to use these tools thoughtfully, stay honest about the tradeoffs, and keep improving as better options become viable.
Right-wing political forces have bottomless pockets, backed by a line of capitalists ready to fund them and keep the state propping up their failing system. The left—the real left—needs a constant, reliable, and legal way to finance itself, and a cooperative economic sector or ecosystem is the path to achieve that. Cooperatives are not some wild experiment; there are massive, successful examples, such as Mondragon in northern Spain, a thriving enterprise making annually over 1.2 billion dollars. So if you're wondering whether it can be done, look no further.
Beyond that, capitalism itself emerged through a series of small, gradual changes that, over many years, created a new kind of economic actor. By exploiting moments of weakness in the feudal system, these actors gained traction and pushed for change—sometimes violently, as in the French Revolution. Although the Paris Commune was a remarkable example of ordinary people's determination to confront injustice in pursuit of "liberté, égalité, fraternité," it also reminds us that even the most inspiring efforts can face immense challenges. We must learn from its experience and continue striving to ensure that our movement—the left—is not merely a force of transition, but the true economic engine driving us toward a fairer society.
The workers' movement aims to make jobs better and fairer. While there's always room for improvement, what counts as "better" can mean different things to different people. In the end, the best possible working condition is when workers have full control.
However, if you work with other people, your desire for independence can sometimes clash with theirs. The fairest way to handle this is through direct democracy, where everyone has an equal vote in decisions. This is one of the key ways worker cooperatives operate.
We believe that a truly successful workers' movement will lead to every worker being part of a cooperative, instead of working for someone else who controls their job and working conditions. By supporting and creating more cooperatives to take the place of traditional companies, we can reach the main goal of the workers' movement—equal power and voice for all workers—more directly, without having to rely on slow negotiations with company owners.
Cooperatives are the economic system of the future. Even though they may be smaller today than traditional corporations, they are quietly growing and gaining strength. Cooperatives have many different tools to compete with corporate or traditional capitalist enterprises. For example, employees can run a cooperative that performs the same work as a corporate competitor but chooses to forgo profit, taking only fair wages for a time. This allows them to lower their prices, attract more customers, and eventually drive out exploitative corporations that depend on extracting profit from workers and consumers. Meanwhile, traditional corporations rely on an endless stream of tax cuts and government bailouts—clear signs of how dependent they are on taxpayer money, also known as your taxes.
Another challenge is that most people don't know what cooperatives are or why they matter, so they don't think to support them. The SolidarityEcono.my marketplace aims to fix that by making co-ops easier to find and understand.
We believe that if more people learn the difference between a cooperative and a profit-driven company, they'll choose to support co-ops. Our job is to make shopping from cooperatives simple and convenient, while each co-op's job is to offer products and services that match or beat traditional companies in quality and price.
By working together, we can make things easier, more affordable, and better for everyone—and that's how we can succeed in the free market.
Read more about dual power from the DSA: Dual Power: A Strategy To Build Socialism In Our Time
Capitalism has several defining characteristics, such as:
Cooperatives address the first point by removing the two class system in favor of co-operators that are both the owners and the workers -- leveling the playing field through democratic management and ownership.
Co-ops also address the second point by emphasizing cooperation among cooperatives as one of the ecosystem's core values. Cooperation allows prices to fall naturally down to the cost of production and distribution. Competition which seeks to undercut others is inherently harmful, though under Capitalism it's considered "just business".
Although we are proud that our marketplace has the potential to address some of the characteristics of Capitalism, we also must recognize its current limitations. Cooperatives are still privately owned, and they can still possibly be motivated by profit. Our marketplace complies with applicable laws, and does not at this time seek to affect the level of government intervention for society in general.
We are building something real, and will remain realistic in how this ecosystem can affect society. It's not perfect, but it aims to be better than the alternative we've been forced into thus far.
Working at a cooperative helps protect people from suddenly losing their jobs. In a regular company, an employee might get fired for joining a protest or taking part in political activities. This often forces workers to hide their beliefs or risk unemployment.
In a worker cooperative, people can take part in activism without worrying about being punished. Most of their coworkers likely share similar values, and even if they don't, they are usually more understanding because they care about more than just profit.
It's also harder to be fired from a cooperative because decisions like that require a group vote, not just one manager's choice.
Although cooperatives alone may not instantly create a perfect society, we are confident that expanding organizations where people share decision-making power and have a genuine voice in their work will bring us steadily closer to the world we envision.
They're not just a first step—they're a powerful foundation for a fairer, more democratic society. When workers share power equally, it sparks broader equality and lasting change. Every effort counts in building a better world, and supporting cooperatives is a strong, tangible way to start shaping a thriving alternative to capitalism today.
We don't think you have to choose between supporting unions and worker co-ops — you can support both.
Unions help workers come together to negotiate with their employers for better pay and conditions. If you take that idea as far as it can go, the fairest outcome would be a workplace where everyone owns an equal share and has an equal voice — in other words, a cooperative.
That's why we focus on supporting co-ops as the ultimate goal, while still standing in solidarity with unions, especially when they're on strike.
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