On Koperasi

A conversation between farid rakun and Arief “Arman” Rachman

farid rakun and Arief “Arman” Rachman are both active in Gudskul, an informal educational platform initiated at the end of 2018 by three collectives from Jakarta: Grafis Huru Hara (GHH), ruangrupa and Serrum. This conversation on koperasi 1 originally took place on 3 March 2021 in Gudskul, and was conducted fully in Bahasa Indonesia. It has been transcribed, translated and edited for clarity by the writers themselves.

farid: Let’s delve right into the matter at hand… As collectives, ganging up together, why do we think that koperasi deserves to be revisited by us? How can our sensibilities be translated into an economic model koperasi has potential for?

Arief: For me, as individuals, we already have a platform for our financial transactions: banks. Now, we want to push collectively in order for us to be able to own our platform. For our friends who have been putting working together as a requirement of their practice, we want to have a rekbar 2 . We have that habit in creating projects, no? When we say to each other, “We cannot afford to do something, let’s have a collective pot”, we are in principle creating this rekbar.

farid: Because up until now, what we have implemented is something that we can understand as ekonomi berbagi (sharing economy), in short. Each of us, every collective, makes financial reports of their respective accounts available, transparent for everyone to see. For our monthly expenses, these accounts function as shared pockets that are co-owned. What is koperasi’s advantage compared to our current system?

Arief: I am not an expert of economic models, for sure. I have my understanding of koperasi from teaching in public schools. These are comparable to banks, where they function as bearers of people’s money. Both the koperasi and the bank hold customers’ money and release it back when it is time. In koperasi’s language it is understood as SHU 3. A collective decision is made whether it is to be shared annually, bi-annually, and so on. The interesting thing, in the framing of working collaboratively, the difference between a koperasi and a corporation is that a corporation has a revenue target. In a collective, this is difficult. What we have is expenses, while we never mention revenue in our conceptual discussions. We do not even speculate on this. Koperasi is a bit more like us, more “let’s try something and then see where it is taking us.”

farid: Yes, we never have a meeting where we state, “this year, we have to generate x amount of revenue.”

Arief: Of course not. That is the language of a corporation.

farid: So it is about ownership. It is like saying to those working with us… If we generate income in the end, we will have SHU to share. We own and sail this ship together. Everyone who contributed to this sailing will be taken into account. This will be reflected in the percentage of the SHU share. Those who profited from the sailing will not only be the owner of the ship or their shareholders. Let’s get deeper. What is a koperasi multi pihak (KMP)4? What is our stake in this model?

Illustrations by Arief Rachman.

Arief: It started slowly a long time ago for me… when we were all still playing with the concept of lumbung 5 in 2016. Around 2018 and 2019, when you got the position for documenta fifteen, I read more about the concept, and found a notion of koperasi being the economical translation of lumbung. I then made my first video about koperasi in 2019, punking the term into “kok pera sih 6 ?”to present about koperasi for our own team of finance. I learned through the process that the mandate of a koperasi is to ensure its members’ welfare… just like a collective, no? I can say that welfare is not financial income, but more than that. Although delivered as a joke, it was clear for me that when we talk about koperasi, we are not talking about a “fresh-money economical modus”. We could think of it as work-life balance, or in Islam, we have this notion of berkah or a blessing, which is the condition when you are paid appropriately as a worker, and also as anticipated by the person who is paying you, based on the process and the result. The value is in the ownership that each member has in the koperasi and their ability to influence future decisions.

We knew KMP from friends of friends, our local UMKM 7 activists. We had people who understood more about koperasi present their ideas to us. We had the State Minister for Cooperatives Small and Medium Enterprises talk to us about practical problems we might face if we wanted to adopt this system for ourselves. For example, a one-man-one-vote system is very difficult for us to implement. It will take too much time to arrive at any decision. Different types of koperasi were then discussed, such as the construction chain store company Ace Hardware, which was built as a koperasi originally. We discussed how something in the scale of Ace Hardware has koperasi values at its foundation. The problem is that the Indonesian legal system has not been updated to cater to modern or multistakeholders koperasi. It still cannot implement the ownership system where buyers of Ace Hardware have also distributed ownerships among themselves.

Then we continued to get to know KMP from different groups of people. There was also this incubator programme which offered Gudskul a place because of the resources we seem to own. In the South Jakartan district itself, how many UMKMs are operating? These numbers make Gudskul an attractive entity. Can we campaign for koperasi values based on the Minister’s guidelines? This is the mandate of an incubator entity.

We eventually learned that in order to take the role, there are a lot of requirements that we are not ready to fulfil yet. I asked whether it would be possible for Gudskul to take part as a participant through another incubator instead. Before we campaigned for koperasi, could we learn thoroughly about the model first? The answer was positive, and we are now in a process led by an incubator entity in Purwokerto, Central Java. We are not the only one, but one of the most exciting ones, according to them. We are uniquely from Jakarta. During this eye-opening process, Gudskul was challenged to identify and categorise our actors as Founders, Management, Creators and Supporters.

This process I was referring to before entails offline, online and video streaming formats. We, from Gudskul, then invite other collectives in Gudskul’s networks to listen to some of these presentations, so the knowledge of KMP can be spread even further. It was also because

Gudskul Council gathering, including the writers, on 12 December 2018. Photo by Jim Panji. Image courtesy of Gudskul.

Gudskul communal dinner. Photo by Jim Panji. Image courtesy of Gudskul.

Gudskul, public lecture by Tania Bruguera, 2020. Photo by Jim Panji. Image courtesy of Gudskul.

Gudskul’s auditorium when it was functioning as a mini-factory for Hazmat suits and face covers, in the early days of the pandemic, 2020. Photo by Jim Panji. Image courtesy of Gudskul.

Gudskulians kept on mentioning KMP this, KMP that, so a lot of other people were curious about what we were talking about. It is better to connect them to the direct source, no?

There are a lot of koperasi practice in our society that cannot be accommodated by our legal system which still considers koperasi traditionally. There have been some practical attempts to push this agenda, but as I said before, from our partners, we know that Gudskul is the most promising one so far. We have actors that function both as creatives as well as administrators here. Our number of followers8 also plays a role in this hopeful view.

Further about KMP, what we imagine is actually an economical platform that is owned collectively by multiple parties, correct? Like traditional koperasi, members own it. The difference is where traditionally actors in koperasi consist of manajemen and anggota (members), and in KMP, manajemen can be split to Founders and Managers, while anggota become Creators and Supporters. Usually what happens is that manajemen holds 51% of the decision-making power, while anggota holds the other 49%, so whatever anggota aspires to, it will act as a mere suggestion for the manajemen. This power structure doesn’t hold anymore in KMP, as we can ideally assign 25% for each element.

farid: Yes, so because the number of real individuals in each element differs, each person’s vote gets calculated differently under this math, correct?

Arief: Yes, what we understand is no one gets…

farid: … left behind?

Arief: Yes, but it sounds so harsh. Let’s say that no one holds an absolute decision-making capability in this system. Founders do not hold right to veto, for example. They have to partner up with other elements. This is the fundamental difference between KMP and the traditional koperasi model.

We continued with more details in mechanism, but I do not really understand this yet as they have not been put into practice. My imagination has been captured so far. This mechanism talks ended in discussions on currency. If we have our own currency, it would be ideal.

Further, in Gudskul itself, even I, who have been talking about this back and forth, am not an expert yet on this. Lastly, as we discussed before, our legal system is not acknowledging, let alone supporting this model.

farid: Do we need the legal umbrella, really?

Arief: Yes, we do. For conflict management and mitigation at least. But to start, it is ok. Like when we formed our collectives, we didn’t go straight to building a legal foundation, right? For me, the succession goes something like this… from being an individu, there’s self-improvement needed or wanted, that could be reached by being a part of a kolektif. This trajectory will form an ekosistem. If the ekosistem we are providing is KMP, then this platform will produce nilai tukar (currency). This way, KMP should be nilai tambah (added value), and not beban sosial (social burden).

farid: Explain more, please…

Arief: If KMP becomes beban sosial, just kick it out of the ecosystem. That is social burden, no? We have to do it, but we don’t get anything in return by doing it—merely doing it for the sake of doing it. Gudskul’s trap is here… we’re still considering koperasi as a social burden. Back to the subject at hand, KMP should regulate kepemilikan (ownership), menentukan (decision-making) and tanggung jawab (responsibility). If these values are not held on an individual level, it will be difficult. In order to make sure that it will work, we should be meyakinkan. 9 That is why Koperasi Multi Pihak is not a programme, but a meyakinkan project instead, which means it’s both a project to persuade, but also a project that in itself is convincing.

farid: Software revamp?

Arief: (laughter)

farid: Software upgrade, then… maybe?

Arief: When someone here asked me, “So, what is the future of this collective?”, that’s the right direction. Only a few have asked me that, to be honest. My explanation in addressing this question would go into the logics of gaming and our gamification attempts…

farid: Wow. Hold on, that is for another time…

Areif: To be continued?

Notes

1. Koperasi is an Indonesian word that can be officially translated to cooperative (or co-op), but we decided to keep the Bahasa Indonesia version intact, as in our limited knowledge, we are not exactly referring to co-op model as understood globally. 2. Slang abbreviation for rekening bersama, or joint account. 3. Official abbreviation for Sisa Hasil Usaha, or net income. 4. Roughly translatable to multiple stakeholders koperasi. 5. At the time of writing, lumbung, or rice barn or granary, has been widely recognised as the working concept for documenta fifteen. 6. A pun in Bahasa Indonesia, from koperasi to the informal “kok pera sih?” which means “why is (the rice) not sticky?”. 7. Official abbreviation for Usaha Mikro, Kecil dan Menengah or Micro, Small and Medium

Enterprise. 8. The term “followers” here refers to our audience, not exclusively in a social media understanding. 9. Meyakinkan in Bahasa Indonesia is a term that has double meaning: convincing (adjective) and persuading (verb).