"In Lumumba’s successful campaigns for city council in 2009 and for mayor in 2013, “Free the land” had been a common refrain of his supporters. His platform, too, echoed the vision he and his fellow New Afrikans had harbored for their new society on Land Celebration Day. He pledged that his office would support the establishment of a large network of cooperatively owned businesses in Jackson, often describing Mondragon, a Spanish town where an ecosystem of cooperatives sprouted half a century ago. In debates and interviews, he promised that Jackson, under the leadership of a Lumumba administration, would flourish as the “Mondragon of the South”—the “City of the Future.”...
In 1988, when the couple’s daughter, Rukia, was nine, and their son, Antar, was five, the Lumumbas relocated to Jackson, Mississippi. In the following years, Chokwe and Nubia would often tell Rukia and Antar that they’d come to the South because there was work to be done there and because they wanted to give their children the struggle... Years later, among the hundreds of pages of documents that emerged from a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI reports on Chokwe Lumumba, Antar saw his high school graduation photo. The sight of it there didn’t unsettle him because it confirmed what he’d always been told...
in 2005, MXGM’s national membership determined that Mississippi was the best staging ground for the experiment in society building—the same conclusion the PG-RNA had come to in the 1970s. The eighteen contiguous counties that run along the Mississippi River on the state’s western edge are all majority black (except one, which is 47.8 percent black). The MXGM new-society drafters referred to this line of counties along the Mississippi Delta as the Kush District, as PG-RNA leadership had, named after the ancient civilization built along the banks of the Nile, in what is now Egypt and Sudan. MXGM members began moving to Jackson from all across the country. In 2012, after roughly ten years of refining their blueprint, the think tank posted a draft of its Jackson-Kush Plan to the MXGM website. The document detailed steps to build a socialist, majority-black, eco-focused model society within Mississippi’s shrinking capital city, as well as initiatives to mobilize communities in the Kush district, and expand from there...
Like the PG-RNA vision, a central pillar of the new society would be economic democracy based in cooperative ownership. Another would be the embrace of fully participatory democracy through the organization of self-governing organs called People’s Assemblies, which would be the loci of real decision-making power in the communities where they operated...
when I arrived in Mississippi, a line from utopian scholar Ruth Levitas rattled in my head: “Utopia’s strongest function, its claim to being important rather than a matter of esoteric fascination and charm, is its capacity to inspire the pursuit of a world transformed, to embody hope rather than simply desire.” If I wanted to plot for myself the coordinates of the line between fantastical and real societies; between unheard-of ambitions for change and perfectly familiar ones; between a fable told for comfort and a plan for real change on the ground somewhere, I felt that I needed to better understand what was happening in Jackson...
As the majority-white suburbs expanded, they turned into a kind of sticky ring around the city center, pulling economic development out of Jackson. The Mississippi Department of Revenue reports that the city of Jackson brought in approximately $117 million in gross sales tax in fiscal year 1990 and $177.6 million in fiscal year 2016—worse than stagnant when accounting for inflation. And as the tax base has crumbled, so has the city’s infrastructure. The Clarion-Ledger wrote in March 2017 that a report from an engineering firm in 2013 found that more than 60 percent of Jackson streets had four years or less of serviceable life left. In 2017, that life is about spent...
The moderator, Pastor CJ Rhodes, took a seat toward the center and called the candidates to the stage one by one. Along with his brief introductions, he noted each person’s placement in the polls—Antar was in the lead—until a woman of grandmotherly age in one of the front pews called for him to stop it with the polls. “Yes, thank you, ma’am,” Rhodes said, admonished, and followed her directive as he welcomed the last three men...
his voice was climbing stairs, building up to something higher... He went on, “And the reality is that we haven’t found ourselves in the condition we’re in because someone has been too radicalfor us.” He inflected these last few words. “I would argue we haven’t been radical enough.” The applause carried on like an unbroken wave...
In Kali’s mind, Cooperation Jackson is an experiment; his hypothesis is that living and working in fully democratic communities will change the people involved. One of the experiment’s first steps, he believes, is for people to realize how capitalism has shaped them and to recognize how alternatives could refresh their perspectives.
FB: "Radical economic experiments have proliferated in the U.S. since the 2008 collapse—but then, they feel radical only if you’ve lived your life, as most of us have, believing that profit maximization, endless economic growth, and the individual’s mandate to consume are circumstances as intrinsically human as hunger and childbirth. I count myself among those who struggle to imagine living within any other economic arrangement, but by the time I called Saki Hall I was starting to understand that other people’s imaginations have granted them more leeway, and some were living out economic experiments that embody alternatives."
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