Making and unmaking co-operative subjects in the Oklahoma Food Co-operative

This paper sketches the history of a food co-operative to understand the challenges of cultivating co-operative sensibilities, viewpoints, and practices in geographical locations dominated by largely capitalist economies. The founders of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative (OFC) placed inordinate emphasis on mobilising social and political differences to change their own perspectives on food systems and social justice, environmental stewardship, and economic sustainability — the co‑operative’s stated core values. To make sense of how this approach played out over time, I orient my analysis around critical conceptions of subjectivity, exploring via qualitative fieldwork and analysis how OFC members sought to transform their own subjective experience of food systems, economy, community, and other figures via sustained encounters with difference. This case illustrates the importance for co-operatives of attending to subject formation via practices that cultivate non-capitalist subjectivities while grappling with forces that undermine such efforts, some of which may seem unrelated to the market in which a given co-operative operates. For the OFC, these forces included not only food system dynamics but also urban redevelopment, catching members in a double bind of capitalist subjectivity that I argue contributed to the co-operative’s closure after 15 years.