I’ve spent a lot of time recently (aka the past year and a half or so) thinking about rural electric cooperatives (RECs), electric utilities, energy democracy, and socialism. I’ve published two pieces so far on this: “Parliaments of the Earth” in Logic Magazine, and “Co-ops, Climate, and Capital” in Science for the People Magazine.
The first piece gives a general introduction on RECs, and gives a pitch to support them as a progressive alternative to the dominant investor-owned utility (IOU) model, based on their democratic and non-profit status. The piece also gives a few examples of grassroots movements making use of RECs’ democratic structures to push governance reforms and decarbonization initiatives. But this piece ultimately acts as a simple introductory text, and probably gives an overly rosy and one-dimensional portrait of the world of RECs.
The second piece thus serves as a sequel to the first piece, by focusing more on the limitations of RECs, as seen in the context of their origins in the 1930s, as well as in the nature of the reform movements that have sprung up around them in recent years. Special shout-out to Abby Spinak and her 2014 PhD dissertation, which is the single best thing I’ve read about RECs. If you’re gonna spend a few hours reading about these matters, read her dissertation, or at least the introduction and conclusion.
Parliaments of the Earth is fairly straightforward and goes over the obvious benefits of the cooperative form for electric grids, so I’ll summarize here the more nuanced arguments of Co-ops, Climate, and Capital. RECS seem like a radical and potent institution, but in practice they largely function as boring, technocratic institutions that are run by a small, insulated group of experts and managers, and have done so from their very beginnings. This is a result of how they were designed by the Roosevelt administration and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) in the first place – their purpose was not to create a community institution that could expand anti-capitalist, communal values and forms of living, but to revamp rural capitalism, unlock a new source of aggregate demand for electrical machinery and appliances, and push forward the industrialization of agriculture. Consumption was the priority, not cooperation. Hardly surprising, given that this was a program by the US government – but still worth spelling out.
Reform movements started springing up around RECS in the 1970s. Here, the structure of RECs gave social movements an advantage, since co-ops can’t accumulate capital as can IOUs, which limits the resources that management can draw on to defend and entrench themselves. RECs are also supposed to be democratically controlled via direct elections. So there ends up being a lot of interesting case studies of co-op reform movements, usually fighting against some combination of mismanagement and reliance on fossil fuels, and for some combination of increased transparency and increased renewable energy. Thus, these movements are relevant for the modern climate movement, and related movements fighting to reform and even nationalize/municipalize modern electric utilities.
But the flip side of these movements is their limited class character. Most of them are largely based in middle-class professionals – the exact kind of people you would expect would have the time, energy, knowledge, and interest to involve themselves in these kinds of local government battles around wonky policies. And if they can get the job done, fine – but it presents a problem for socialists who want to create a mass, working-class movement against the climate crisis and fossil capital, and for public institutions.
The solution to this problem I start to pose, is that co-op reform movements – and any movement for energy democracy that targets electric utilities – should develop a wider program of intervention into the conditions of day-to-day working class life, that can remove the obstacles to mass participation and organization that are set up by capitalist society. But this commentary is limited, and does not address the point of how to organize and mobilize a mass working-class movement that could enact such a program in the first place. (This relates to a hunch I have that simply having a cool working-class-focused policy program does very little to create and mobilize a working-class base – which is why Bernie lost in 2016 and 2020 – but more on that some other time.)
Further Commentary and Points of Interest
There are many interesting and noteworthy aspects of RECs and their history that I have left out of the two published essays. Perhaps some of this can be put into a third essay.
A context of rural radicalism
Its interesting to muse about the wider political context of the Roosevelt administration’s heavy support for rural electric co-ops. There was a sense running through US elites at the time that the countryside was a a dangerous place, whose underdevelopment, isolation, and poverty was becoming a breeding ground for radicalism. Electricity was seen by some as a kind of pre-emptive counter-insurgency strategy, to “civilize” rural America and stave off growing discontent. Consider the many radical movements that had been springing out of rural and small-town America. The post-Reconstruction era saw the Knights of Labor organizing workers and co-ops across the country, often in an agricultural context. The Populist movement was largely an agrarian/farmers’ movement in the south. The later IWW was more urban based, but had plenty of rural roots with their network of wandering “hobo” workers and their bases of support in far-flung mining and timber towns, and other frontiers of extraction. In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, there were incredibly violent battles between miners and corporations in states like Colorado and West Virginia.
It was around this time that the Country Life Commission was established, which reported on the widespread socio-economic problems plaguing rural America [PDF]. Its report did not touch upon political dissent, but at one point it did warn that “the incubus of ignorance and inertia is so heavy and so widespread as to constitute a national danger”. President Roosevelt, in a special message commenting on the report, specifically identified cooperatives as the ideal means by which rural residents could work together for self-development and to overcome the stagnation of rural life. In any case, political dissent continued. In 1915, the Plan de San Diego, a program of armed insurrection spearheaded by Tejano separatist militants, was exposed and defeated in Texas. Two years later, the Green Corn Rebellion broke out in Oklahoma. Three years after that, the Battle of Blair Mountain took place in West Virginia. And by the 1930s, the Communist Party was growing, and had major bases of organization in places like Alabama, among Black sharecroppers.
Maybe too much of a reach to draw a direct line between these currents of radical rural organizing, and the initiation by the federal government of cooperative-driven rural electrification. Still, its probably a piece of the puzzle, which overall in the 1930s is a picture of US elites pulling out the stops in order to prevent economic crisis and social upheaval from destroying the country. And all this would have pre-empted later theories of counter-insurgency and anti-communism, that pinpointed “development” as a key means to stave off unrest and make the ground less fertile for revolutionary upheaval.
Social movement organizing via the federal government
The flip side to the decidedly capitalist nature of the Roosevelt administration, the New Deal, and RECs, is the fact that key officials in the REA did view rural electrification efforts as requiring at least some aspects of a grassroots social movement. Rural people had to be contacted, persuaded, organized, and mobilized to actually form cooperatives, apply for REA loans, put up the poles and wires, and maintain the infrastructure in a democratic and professional manner. To this end, a large number of REA workers were specifically engaging in basic organizing tasks: roaming around the countryside, knocking on doors, coordinating town hall meetings, holding informational sessions, and most importantly, training locals to take on these tasks themselves. It looked like what modern NGO or electoral campaigns might look like, or even union organizing, except the REA was organizing with the weight of the federal government behind it, and was organizing to build up material infrastructure.
REA organizing was also not simply a purely technical venture, of the sort you see today with get-out-the-vote campaigns or other modern state-adjacent efforts. The project was overtly seen as a political movement, that was in opposition to IOUs and right-wing business interests in general. As such, anti-IOU agitation was part of the REA playbook, as was wider propagandizing about the benefits of cooperative power versus dependence on private utilities (who didn’t want to run lines out to the countryside anyway). This political battle even carried over after cooperative-driven rural electrification was well underway, as some IOUs tried to step in and buy out co-ops, with the REA serving as a nerve center to coordinate battles against privatization. (I can’t track down exact citations for this stuff, but I recall reading about this across many pieces on the REA and early RECs, so it seems to be a canonical part of the history, and easily found in any writings about rural electrification or the public power movement).
Socialists are a long ways off from having any comparable power in federal or state-level government, as did advocates of public and cooperative power in the 1930s, but the REA could still be a template for how a segment of the state could become politicized and even radicalized, and operate in a way that blurs the lines between the state and social movement, especially in the context of a Green New Deal and climate policy. It is also perhaps an example of how “top-down” organizing can be productive. It would be interesting to compare this against the ongoing efforts to foster communes and co-ops by the radical governments in Venezuela and Bolivia.
Race
A major under-discussed aspect to rural electrification, which I regret not at least touching upon in my two essays, is race. The stereotypical image of rural America as mostly all white rednecks or whatever isn’t quite true today, and was substantially less true prior to the two waves of the Great Migration, when there were large numbers of rural Black communities in the South. Several of the radical rural movements mentioned earlier had prominent participation by Black militants, such as the Knights of Labor, the Green Corn Rebellion, and the Alabama Communist Party.
The REA, like the New Deal in general, had tendencies that reinforced racialization and white supremacy; Black households were often excluded from initial electrification efforts. One factor in this was the institutionalization of racism via market-oriented logic – since RECs were meant to be self-sufficient business entities, potential co-op members had to have a certain level of income and wealth to qualify for membership and electricity, which excluded many poor Black households, who were still entrapped by the post-slavery sharecropping systems and Jim Crow laws. There is a good academic paper on this that examines North Carolina’s rural electrification process during the 1930s. Overt racism also played a role, given that the hyper-localism of co-ops meant that it would often be local, Klan-adjacent elite networks who dominated co-op boards.
RECs thus became a target for the civil rights movement and related campaigns in the 1960s and onward. Unfortunately, there does not seem to have been much in the way of detailed pieces on this phenomena, just scattered reports and remarks. But one particular success story is that of Roanoke Electric Cooperative, in north-east North Carolina. Roanoke EC had a majority-Black membership for most of its history, however for the first few decades, the board of directors was controlled by an elite White network. Organizing campaigns in the ’60s fought and eventually succeeded in winning more expansive voting rights and mobilizing members to become engaged with co-op issues. Today, Roanoke has some particularly innovative programs that push beyond the framework of an electric co-op as being solely about selling electricity, such as a land management and conservation program that looks to help Black farmers and land-owners – although, since this program is about turning “unprofitable family farms and forests into economic assets”, this doesn’t exactly represent a radical cooperative-based break with capitalism. Today, there are similar struggles still ongoing, such as in Mississippi, where Black organizers are fighting to reform RECs to become more democratic and more representative of their members, and invest more into programs like cooperative broadband. However, its unclear how rooted these campaigns are in the local Black working-class, and it is likely these are still the kind of professional-based advocacy groups that defines most non-socialist and non-union activism today.
Techno-scientific knowledge & the public sector
An important plank of not just the cooperative power movement, but the public power movement in general, was the cadre of engineers who had the techno-scientific knowledge and skills necessary to design power grids in the first place. The first director of the REA, Morris Llewyellyn Cooke, was himself a mechanical engineer by profession. He commented on the role of engineers in the public power movement in a 1948 paper for the American Political Science Review, which discussed various political dynamics during the early days of America’s efforts toward rural electrification. The movement to set up municipal utilities was taking off in the first decades of the 20th century, but in the beginning it was a challenge to rally the technical expertise necessary to actually design and build municipal utilities. This wasn’t just a matter of employment and government planning, but rather, political and social opposition from the entrenched corporations. Cooke reflected that “it was not easy in those days to get electrical engineers who would burn their breadwinning bridges behind them by testifying on the public side”.
It was a slow process to build the kind of pro-public power networks that could concentrate and distribute the necessary techno-scientific knowledge needed to build the state capacity to build and run power grids. A major boost came from World War 1, during which the state took a more direct role in certain areas of power systems, bringing along a number of engineers who gained experience and increased interest and confidence in publicly-owned power. Cooke also identified a series of major studies done by various municipalities and state institutions on grids, rates, and engineering, which enlisted many electrical engineers to carry out the research; and of course the actual establishment in the early ’30s of major public power institutions:
“REA is the lineal descendant of the Philadelphia Electric case (1914-16), the Giant Power Survey (1923-1927), the distribution cost studies of the Power Authority of the State of New York (1932-34), the passage of the TVA Act in 1933 after years of study and struggle, the report of the Mississippi Valley Committee (1933-34)…have a thought for possibly two score indispensable men and women down the line without whose willingness to work skillfully and conscientiously, with plenty of overtime, and sometimes in the face of biting scorn of the opposing commercial interests, always at modest compensation and often without any compensation at all, such accomplishments would have been impossible” (447).
Similarly, it is important to think about what role techno-scientific workers, and the rest of the energy workforce, can and should play in today’s movements to decommodify and democratize the energy system. Compared to the 1920s and 1930s, we have the advantage today that there is a large public power sector. On the flip side, this sector is largely depoliticized, and is in most areas not an organic part of any kind of public power movement, let alone a more radical socialization movement. Progressive-minded expert and techno-scientific knowledge tends to be concentrated in the non-profit/NGO sector, which mostly draws more on academic researchers, rather than industry workers, and tends to be weighed down by liberal ideologies. The general workforce of utilities in certain regions (not RECs!) tends to be unionized, but these unions tend to be largely defensive and either disinterested or hostile to the idea of public power – not without reason, since many public power union contracts can come with no-strike clauses. Bridging these gaps and radicalizing the public sector will be crucial, particularly for the nuanced and in-depth high-level planning necessary to rapidly decarbonize the energy system. In many ways, it is a much more challenging technical feat to transform an existing system, than to build out a totally new one – triply so for a system that is the basis for modern human life, which must be kept up and running 24/7.
Capacity & activism
The question of techno-scientific knowledge also gets at fundamental matters of class, organization, and mobilization around utilities and climate. In the last section of Co-ops, Climate, and Capital I reflect about how campaigns around RECs, and other utilities, seem largely limited to educated professional-class people, with conclusions that apply in general to matters of local government and civic participation. My main point is that basic democratic activity – let alone more militant campaigns – requires time and knowledge: time to go to meetings, talk to neighbors and friends, attend town halls; and knowledge about the technical and social aspects of government (which in turn requires time to accumulate). And knowledge is especially relevant in the context of a sprawling and complex technical system like the power grid.
“However, both of these resources—time and knowledge—are valuable and scarce resources under capitalism. Workers spend much, if not most, of their time laboring for corporations, limiting their ability to substantively participate in social and political activities that aren’t grounded in day-to-day life. On a more fundamental level, capital is constantly deepening the division of labor, concentrating knowledge amongst a small class of professionals and managers, and further alienating the working class from the production process, and science and technology in general. Thus, in a capitalist society, the average worker is functionally excluded from democratic institutions.”
This fundamental problem of a lack of capacity (time + knowledge), as driven by the dynamics of capitalism, can also be extended to the general problem of why many activist campaigns seem so limited in class character – with the exception of workplace and tenant union campaigns. What makes the latter different is that they are directly intervening into the lives of working-class people, helping people attack constraints on their capacity (low wages and long working hours, or high rents and lack of maintenance, etc.), in a way that is immediate and concrete. This is a very different matter than fighting for more abstract and immaterial goals around reforming a utility, or really any kind of reform at the level of government. Even if its a worthwhile reform, its hard for people to put limited time and energy into work whose payoffs are uncertain and far down the line – especially when there are more pressing day-to-day problems to worry about. In other words, I don’t think the solution is to simply have a progressive, worker-oriented policy program – even if people agree with the program, that isn’t going to automatically inspire people enough to become organizers, activists, and cadre to actively fight for the program. (I would also argue that this is one of the key lessons from the 2020 Bernie campaign).
I don’t say it in the piece, but my hunch is thus precisely that you can’t really organize a mass working-class movement around utilities, energy, and climate, without there first being a reconstruction of more fundamental proletarian organizations, that can attack basic problems of the class, and build militant networks on that basis. In other words, the analysis put forward by the DSA’s Communist Caucus, “Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time”.
Of course, one solution could be the basic, orthodox-Marxist position that we need to center utility workers when strategizing and organizing around utilities. I don’t really disagree with this, but I don’t think this actually gets around the basic problem of working-class disorganization, given how much existing unions have stagnated, and their general lack of interest in fighting for serious reforms – let alone taking up a vanguard position to democratize, decarbonize, and decommodify the grid.
Utility workers and utility socialism
Despite the lack of real militant organizing among electric utility workers, it is still worth brainstorming about its potential. Electricity is arguably the foundational infrastructure of the modern world, and as such, electric utilities are essentially layered underneath the entirety of socio-economic life. A map of electric infrastructure is a near-complete map of capitalism. Electric utilities thus have unrivaled insights into the pulses of capital accumulation, industrial trends, settlement patterns, etc. There is a good reason that Lenin said that “communism is soviet power plus electrification”, and that the first five-year plan of the USSR centered on national electrification.
This also has implications for what a radical group of utility workers can do. In my experience, utility workers in many different roles have ready access to both information, aka maps of the grid, info on upcoming developments, demographics data, as well as autonomy, aka freedom to roam around the territory, respond to calls, plan inspections, or just mill about and talk to people (this experience may be heavily biased by my old role as a utility engineer, and not a lineman or other kind of supervised field personnel – but I dunno, the linemen and techs I knew seemed relatively free too!). Utility workers thus have enormous potential as organizers and agitators, with their access to a wide array of data, and their ability to “steal time” to roam around and talk with people, spread propaganda and conduct inquiries, and in general as people who can be first-contact to find and confirm organizing leads across the entire spectrum of a territory’s working class. This is especially true with RECs, whose workers are generally held in high esteem by locals.
At a more advanced stage of revolutionary struggle, we can also start to think more about how utilities can be instrumentalized as a weapon of the proletariat. The fact that electric utilities are dynamically interconnected with the whole of capitalist political economy means that even absent full state control, radical influence over electric utilities could be used to weaken and overcome bourgeoisie forces.
In many ways utilities are already a class weapon in a soft sense, albeit for capitalists, not workers. Here is an example and personal anecdote. I used to work at a publicly-owned wastewater treatment plant. Part of the plant recycled wastewater into non-potable (non-drinkable) water, and at one point, the plant decided to embark on two new infrastructure projects, to build pipelines and pumping stations to deliver recycled water to two customers: a local oil refinery, and a local country/golf club (can’t make this up!). These projects took place at the same time as the water rates were “rationalized”, which included disproportionate hikes on lower-usage users, as well as on schools (seriously – can’t make this shit up!). To be fair, the oil refinery and country club projects were going pay for their projects – but still, it was a net drain on our engineering and labor personnel, and presented added maintenance costs in the future.
Now, imagine a scenario where the plant – or an electric utility – was under the control of a socialist movement, instead of MBAs. The above logic could be flipped on its head. Instead of subsidizing oil refineries and golf clubs, utilities could deny resources to refineries and golf clubs, and instead subsidize schools and cooperative housing, perhaps in coordination with their unions. And this could be taken well beyond rates, into a militant direction – electricity could be routinely cut off to workplaces whose workers are on strike, or hookups could be denied entirely to environmentally-destructive subdivisions.
The book Recharging China in War and Revolution has some fascinating examples of this general framework of seizing control of electric utilities and infrastructure playing out during the Chinese Revolution, in the most extreme scenario of armed revolution and civil war. A key part of the Chinese Communist Party’s war strategy was to seize control of power plants and substations, and deny power to the Guomindang’s industrial production bases and logistics networks, and to use power access and grid maintenance as a negotiating chip to gain better military positions, and to win over hearts and minds of urban residents. It was as much a social strategy as a military strategy; taking over the grid wasn’t just about sending in troops, but winning over the workforce and the professional-managerial class to the communist project (see Chapter 6).
Fingers crossed, we won’t see a full-scale civil war in the US….but regardless, case studies like this are good food-for-thought when thinking about how utilities can be a weapon of class war, and an important organizing target for socialists.
Jnana Yuddha 