The Sôgmô Gaius Soergel Publicola has unveiled a new royal charter for Tellus, the coöperative now formally known as Tellus Horticultural Coöperative (THC). The reformed coöperative replaces Tellus Agrarian Coöperative that was founded in June 2013, after a proposal was recently submitted to the Sandum cabinet by Minister of Human & Environmental Health Jacob Barnet. In place of agrarianism, THC is now meant to encourage horticulture on a wider scale in terms of the plants grown and products produced, including ornamental and medicinal plants and those that can be used as dyes.
The new charter is based extensively off of the minister’s proposal. A new “dharmachakra” model, as the minister has called it, sees semi-autonomous work-groups (“gardens”) working independently with a centre, the Kropotkin Centre for Horticulture, that will provide technical and materiel assistance to workers and their gardens. A seed bank, for example, is housed at the Kropotkin Centre, where gardens can receive seeds for their own production. Workers, who include all gardeners and professional or hobby horticulturalists in Sandus, are enlisted into their local garden work-groups, which are also enrolled based on local pragmatic conditions.
The new charter provides for more structure and organisation in the coöperative and for worker’s democracy that makes the “dharmachakra” model a veritable model for all coöperatives in the State of Sandus. The worker’s democracy is made up of an assembly of all workers, who also elect a director for the coöperative as a whole and for the Kropotkin Centre. Individual work-groups may elect a local manager, as well.
The new charter provides a model both for local flexibility yet also meeting the ever-present demands of Sandus’s socialist system. According to the charter, the worker’s democracy can decide on the reception and implementation of the command economy’s economic commands and plans.
The new charter also encourages bilateral coöperation with other micronational horticultural projects, ventures, enterprises, and corporations through “Associate Garden Program.” Such horticultural labour in Common Economy and in the Social System also has suffrage in the worker’s democracy and the right to take part in the Tellus’s government.
The new charter also envisions a custodianship of the coöperative that rests with the Office of the Sôgmô at the beginning of the charter’s promulgation and during any extraordinary circumstances. Jacob Barnet has been offered and has accepted the Sôgmô’s offer of acting as director of the coöperative until a time when workers may take over the worker’s democracy.
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