John Curl

Purchasing Links

For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America, 2nd ed.

$29.95

It is the cooperation of working people that has brought the best of the United States to life. Cooperatives have played a vital role throughout the American saga, starting in its formative years. A staggering 120 million Americans belong to cooperatives today--yet the existence of such a movement, and its dramatic and stirring story, remain all but ignored by most historians.

For All the People seeks to reclaim this history.

The very survival of indigenous communities and the first European settlers alike depended on a deeply cooperative style of living and working, based around common lands, shared food and labor. Cooperative movements proved integral to the grassroots organizations and struggles challenging the domination
of unbridled capitalism in America’s formative years. Holding aloft the vision for an alternative economic system based on cooperative industry, they have played a vital, and dynamic role in the struggle to create a better world.

In this groundbreaking, scholarly, yet eminently readable study, Curl surveys the vast range of cooperatives that have shaped America's past and continue to inform, and transform, our present. With an expansive sweep, and breathtaking detail, For All the People examines each of the definitive cooperative movements for social change—farmer, union, consumer, and communalist—that have been all but erased from our collective memory.

John Curl, with over forty years of experience as both an active member and scholar of cooperatives, masterfully melds theory, practice, knowledge and analysis, to present the definitive history from below of cooperative America.

The Buzz

"It is indeed inspiring, in the face of all the misguided praise of 'the market', to be reminded by John Curl's new book of the noble history of cooperative work in the United States."
--Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States.

“This new edition is greatly welcome, because we need a cooperative movement and spirit more than ever before. Curl surveys all, and explains much. New generations of readers will find this a fascinating account, and aging co-opers like myself will understand better what we did, what we tried to do, where we succeeded and where we failed. Get this book and read it, Curl will do you good.”
--Paul Buhle, coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, founding editor of Radical America (SDS).

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Events

For a calendar of speaking events, please click here

Blog Posts

• New Interview on TruthOut
  There is a new interview with me by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers in the web magazine TRUTHOUT. The article is entitles, "Cooperatives and Community Work are Part of American DNA." Check it out! http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14076-cooperatives-and-community-work-are-part-of-american-dna   

• Another New Radio Interview
  Last week I did a live interview with Kevin Reese on his radio show Clearing the Fog. Here is a link to it online, http://clearingthefogradio.org/john-curl-on-the-history-of-cooperatives-and-communalism-in-the-us/.It is currently the top story on their web page, http://www.ClearingTheFOGRadio.org.They have a near final draft of an article based on my book For All The People and this interview, which will be published in Truthout next week. Kevin Resse and Clearing the Fog are part of It’s Our Economy, which  seeks to educate, organize and mobilize Americans to shift the power from concentrated capital to the people.

• New Interview with John Curl
  You can read a deep interview with me by Michael Johnson of Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO), called "Lessons for Building a Co-Operative Movement" http://www.geo.coop/story/lessons-building-co-operative-movement http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12922-lessons-for-building-a-co-operative-movement  

• Tom Bates and the Secret Government of Berkeley
  This is an article I just finished about Mayor Bates, a career politician posing as a progressive, and his destructive effects on the city.

• Interview with KALW radio City Visions
  On April 30, 2012, I did an hour-long interview on the City Visions radio show on station, KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco, titled, "Cooperatives: Workers in Progress," along with representatives from three cooperative organizations: the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops, the Network of Bay Area Cooperatives, and WAGES (Women's Action to Gain Economic Security)You can listen to the podcast of the interview from their web site:http://kalw.org/post/co-operatives-workers-progress

What other people are saying...

• John Curl on Professor Richard D. Wolf's Economic Update
• Lessons for Building a Co-operative Movement, and Interview with John Curl: Grassroots Economic Organizing
• For All the People: Znet
• Living in the U.X.A: CounterCurrents
• John Curl Video Interview

• Cooperatives and Community Work Are Part of American DNA: Truthout
• Hidden History of Cooperation: Peak Oil Blues Blog
• Book Review: P2P Foundation
• Passion for Community Revealed in Curl's History of Co-ops: Berkeley Daily Planet

Book Review: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America 
By Kevin Carson
P2P Foundation

Curl’s history of cooperative and communal movements in America is set against the backdrop of one overpowering trend:  the transition from an almost completely self-employed work force at the time of Independence, to a present-day labor market in which self-employed workers are almost as much of an anomaly as free blacks ca. 1850.  Two hundred years ago, wage labor was viewed as a form of bondage, something submitted to only when absolutely unavoidable.  The majority of wage laborers were apprentices and journeymen, who viewed their status as a temporary stage on the way to the normal status of self-employment.

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Passion for Community Revealed in Curl's History of Co-ops
By Richard Brenneman
The Berkeley Daily Planet
Thursday August 27, 2009

Though his hair has turned white, John Curl’s passion burns undiminished by the passage of nearly seven decades.