Building Alternatives

The Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society (ULCCS) in northern Kerala is a remarkable institution, founded as part of the early 20th century anti-caste movement. The Cooperative’s raison d’être – as enshrined in its bylaws – is to ‘promote the economic interests of the labourers of the Society’. Despite ups and downs over its 90-year history, the ULCCS is a highly successful cooperative, both in terms of its profitability and in its enhancing the lives of its worker-owners. This, despite the neoliberal policies that have suffocated much economic activity that lies outside of monopoly capitalism’s interests. Building Alternatives provides an honest appraisal of a heroic venture of a cooperative enterprise, demonstrating that cooperatives are not only able to survive in a small niche, but are able to grow into substantial institutions within the social life of a region. The book does not gloss over the problems that come with this history, providing a rich empirical account that helps us learn from the challenges and successes. The story of ULCCS is not merely an inspiration to the world, but a guidebook to the resilience of cooperatives as alternatives within capitalism. T. M. Thomas Isaac is the Minister of Finance of Kerala, an office he previously served from 2006 to 2011. Author of numerous academic papers and books, he was Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. During his tenure as a member of the Kerala State Planning Board, he was in charge of the People’s Plan Campaign, a landmark in decentralized planning. He is the author, with Richard W. Franke, of Local Democracy and Development: People’s Campaign for Decentralised Planning in Kerala (LeftWord 2000) Michelle Williams is Associate Professor at the Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa and is the Chairperson of the Global Labour University (GLU) Programme, also at Wits. Her publications include The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala (2008), and the edited volumes The End of the Developmental State? (2014), Marxisms in the 21st Century (2013), South Africa and India: Shaping the Global South (2011), and Labour in the Global South (2012).