I was listening to a Christian theologian friend of mine
speaking about the Messiah’s,
and St. Paul’s,
original intention when singing praises of God’s here/not-here Kingdom,
and potential as a multiculturally inclusive Church,
as a countercultural extending family,
creolizing out to encompass all human natures
to conjoin and rejoin Earth’s cooperatively-owned
and self-other governing GoldenRule thrivalist nature,
bountiful nature,
Beloved Cooperative Community global nature.

Which got me thinking
about the difference between totalitarian state ownership
of all cooperative enterprises,
devised by Stalin and Lenin and Mao Tse Tung
and whatever mess is still continuing in North Korea,
as compared to the cooperative network culture of the Basque Region
in Spain,
and perhaps elsewhere.

This difference between cooperative ownership
and communist ownership
is that cooperativist WinWin feedback loops
extend up from grassroot enterprises with authority
to govern the full range of their consumer-producer balance
within interdependent ecopolitical authorities;
whereas communist authority centralized autonomous ownership,
so all local cooperative enterprises,
including schools and hospitals and tractor factories,
were servants owned by the National Communist Mob,
which itself functioned less as a democratically self-governing,
collectively responsible party,
and more like a plutocratic private club
for internally disintegrating WinLose strategies,
more like dis-organizing crime
with military conscription powers
than a cooperative coordinating national team
of and for governing healthy consumer-producer co-ownership,

Which seems to be
more or less
what my theologian friend sees
when he looks at the early Christian post-Messianic extending out family
self-regeneratively creolizing
counterculturing church,
originally composed of those who rather too radically advocated
for most anything victimless,
and not holding preferences
for what today’s Christian fundamentalist understands
as traditional family values–
clearly not mentored
by the Messiah or by the single and celibate advocate St. Paul.

The way the Mondragon cooperative network
controls this tendency for money and power to become swept up
into the top of a central governing body
begins with local democratic self-governing ownership
and management of cooperative enterprises;
a cooperative guild structure.

I wonder what our educational system would become
if the State did not own the school system
but the parents and students and their paid staff
owned local educational environments,
some inside and some outside,
to learn how to cooperatively learn
our healthy wealth cost-effective lifestyles together,
as both consumers and producers,
each equilaterally associated as a cooperative education state department,
composed entirely of our rotating in and out cooperative member constituents.

I wonder what a cooperatively owned and managed health service would look like,
and feel like,
and whether we might find a richer therapeutic environment
of profoundly creolizing grassroots enrichment there,
among staff and other hurt and temporarily co-dependent patients
and our pets and extending family visitors,
surrounded by trees and frisky squirrels
and lettuce-addicted rabbits,
therapeutically growing out our family tree toward God’s cooperative household
of healthing cooperatives.

I wonder if educational cooperatives
would begin to sound more like health consumer-producer cooperatives,
and vice versa,
and if all this cooperative ownership,
and not anti-communal centralizing totalitarianism,
might feel a bit more like God’s ecotherapeutic Church.