By this time many know about the hyper-exploitative business models of companies like Uber or TaskRabbit. Or about how AirBnB has heavily reduced housing stocks in cities worldwide. But in his new book, Keith A. Spencer goes further than just picking on a few high profile companies. He lays out an argument for why Silicon Valley, at its core, is a highly exploitative and problematic industry. With a look at the tech world from the vantage point of the marginalized and oppressed—those who have not benefited from the incredible wealth bubbling up in the valley—”A People’s History of Silicon Valley: how the tech industry exploits workers, erodes privacy, and undermines democracy” presents a damning thesis for why this new world of addictive gadgets and union-busting is increasingly undemocratic and dangerous.

The book is published by Eyewear Publishing.

Upstream producer Robert R. Raymond spoke with Keith A. Spencer at the offices of Salon in San Francisco, where Spencer is an editor.

Intermission music is by The California Honeydrops.

Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted. 

The post Upstream Podcast: A People’s History of Silicon Valley appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“That whistle was the ugliest I’ve heard in my life,” Rodriguez said. “A whistle that was never silent. It was endless. … I thought that my house was in good condition, at least I thought that. And as I woke up at 2:30am, I felt scared. The first scare was when the back door went flying off — a metal door in the kitchen.”

Like much of the island, the town of Cayey, where Rodriguez lives, was plunged into darkness for months, as winds reaching 175 mph destroyed power lines and tore roofs off houses. Already in the midst of a crippling debt crisis, and with no immediate relief in sight, communities like Cayey had to make due with the few resources they had.

“In my house I had a lot of plates,” Rodriguez says. “What if I donate my plates that are laying in a corner in my home?” She wasn’t the only one with that idea. In towns and cities all over the island, from Cayey to Caguas and Humacao to Las Marias, something began to stir. Plate donations grew into community kitchens which grew into community centers which grew into a movement. With its furiously whistling winds, Hurricane Maria had awakened something in the Puerto Rican people, something that storms, fires, earthquakes — and all manner of disasters and catastrophes — have awakened in communities all around the world.

“Human beings are a community. If we are in China, in Puerto Rico, in Japan, wherever,” says Rodriguez. “We are a community — we have to help each other here in Puerto Rico, which I call the boat. If this boat sinks, we all sink. I don’t sink alone, we all sink.”

In 2007, Naomi Klein presented her thesis of disaster capitalism to the world in her groundbreaking book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Klein’s ideas seemed to perfectly explain much of what was — and still is — taking place globally. The idea is fairly simple: Create market opportunities out of disasters. Klein sketched a picture of how powerful entities use political and economic crises to weaken the public sphere and strengthen the interests of private capital. The “shock” that comes after catastrophes presents the perfect opportunity for powerful interests to take advantage of disoriented communities with the hope of turning a profit.

Klein’s thesis has been helpful in contextualizing much of what we see happening around us, from the dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina to the privatization of infrastructure in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. But when we look closer, we see that the “disaster capitalist” isn’t the only character to emerge out of crisis situations. In these tumultuous times it is crucial that we remember disaster capitalism is only part of the story. There is another story taking place; one based on altruism, solidarity, and social responsibility — and when we look closely, we can see it happening all around us. This is the story of disaster collectivism.

There are innumerable instances where storms have swept in a flood of mutualism, where wildfires have sown the seeds of solidarity, and where earthquakes have strengthened collective values and brought communities closer together. We see these explosions of generosity quite often. It happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when an armada of boats that comprised the volunteer-run Cajun Navy descended upon waterlogged neighborhoods to rescue stranded survivors. We saw it again, on a smaller-scale, in November 2017, when dozens of New Yorkers spontaneously rushed in to help dig out trapped survivors from a collapsed scaffolding structure in Lower Manhattan.

Why do people do this? Why do we see such heroic acts of self-sacrifice and self-endangerment on such a regular basis? It certainly doesn’t seem to align with the story about humanity that dominates many mainstream narratives. This story describes humanity as Homo economicus, a species characterized by selfishness and competition.

“When a disaster strikes, like the flooding in Houston [after Hurricane Harvey], for example, you see everyday people pouring out all this generosity and solidarity,” says Christian Parenti, associate professor of economics at John Jay College in New York City. “Suddenly the idea that everything should have a price on it, and the idea that selfishness and competition are good, all that just gets parked. Suddenly, everyone is celebrating cooperation, solidarity, bravery, sacrifice, and generosity.”

This idea is reinforced by author Rebecca Solnit in her landmark book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” in which she explains that, “in the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.”

We witnessed this recently in the aftermath of the Fuego Volcano eruption in Guatemala in June. In the face of inadequate government response, everyday people came together to take care of each other’s needs. On the night of the eruption, a church in a nearby town “immediately started sounding its bells at an odd time, calling the community to come out to the church where they started collecting materials, food and clothes, and other things,” says Walter Little, an anthropologist based out of the University at Albany at the State University of New York, who was on the ground during the crisis.

Most people won’t think twice when they hear the bells ring, Solnit says: “Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this.”

After the Storm

But what is it about disasters specifically that inspire such acts of altruism? There is a thesis put forth by writers like Solnit, Parenti, and others, that has arisen around this question. It goes a little something like this: We’ve come to accept Homo economicus as the truth, perhaps not always consciously, but it haunts our dreams, our imagination. It confines our sense of possibility and imposes boundaries as arbitrary as those that carve up ecosystems and communities into nation-states. But, as we’ve seen, artificial borders cannot contain the flow of flora, fauna, and human generosity.

When a firestorm blazed through the northern Californian city of Santa Rosa in October 2017, the community came together to form a fund designed specifically for the undocumented community. Undocufund, as it became known, stood in direct opposition to the divide-and-conquer rhetoric that has been a staple of the contemporary political climate.

Tubbs Fire in Sonoma (CC BY-SA 4.0)

“[In] the beginning we didn’t know if we’d raise $50,000 or $100,000,” Omar Medina, the director of Undocufund, says. “Never did we expect the $6 million we’ve raised so far. But the generosity of people as the disasters were happening, as the fires kept going. … and [as] people learned about us — they sympathized with the need. They understand the need based on everything that we’ve experienced lately on a national level as it relates to the undocumented community.”

This kind of human kindness — often hemmed in by the myth of homo economicus perpetuated by mainstream institutions — is bursting at the seams, just waiting for a chance to emerge. Could it be that the collapse of normality that arises during and after calamity awakens something deep within us? Perhaps these moments open up a space, however briefly, for new forms of civic engagement and public life. But when it comes to the every day grind, those chances seem few and far between.

But there’s a deep need to connect. According to research published in the journal American Sociological Review, 25 percent of Americans report not having close friends or confidants. We are also seeing the number of individuals living alone rise sharply in recent years. As we become more and more isolated and atomized in everyday life, our craving for connection only increases. “Our species is a group species,” Parenti says. “There’s something deep and quite innate in us as a species to stick together.”

We saw this innate drive towards connection occur in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City, New York, on Oct. 29, 2012, killing 53 people and leading to $32 billion dollars in damage citywide. Places like the Rockaways, an exposed peninsula within the borough of Queens on Long Island, were hit especially hard. Yet even in a megacity like New York, often viewed as uniquely disconnected and unneighborly, disaster collectivism emerged in full force.

One major example of this kind of collective approach was the effort put forth by Occupy Sandy, a grassroots relief network that grew out of the networks and strategies developed by Occupy Wall Street. Filling in a vacuum left by the official response, Occupy Sandy volunteers worked in partnership with local community organizations and activist networks. Their grassroots efforts focused on empowering poor and working class communities and were based on mutual aid rather than charity. With nearly 60,000 volunteers at its height, its own Amazon relief registry, legal team, medical team, prescription drug deliveries, and meal deliveries everyday, it was able to make a significant impact in the days and weeks following the disaster.

Occupy Sandy image courtesy of Sofia Gallisá Muriente

Sal Lopizzo, a longtime resident of New York City, became involved with the Occupy Sandy recovery effort when a group of volunteers showed up at his flooded nonprofit and asked if they could convert it into a recovery hub. “People just showed up, gutted the office out, got everything out into the street,” Lopizzo says. “We started putting up tables, trucks just started showing up with supplies. Any supply you could think of. If you walked into Home Depot or into a Target store, it was in this office.”

Lopizzo’s building was just one of many hubs that emerged in the days and weeks after the Superstorm hit. It was fed by a dozen or more distribution hubs, which were located in areas that were not as heavily affected.

“There were churches in Brooklyn that were gathering supplies to put on vans and trucks and bringing them in here,” he says. “One time I saw a Greek Orthodox priest pull up in a minivan with a bunch of kids, and they had about one hundred pizzas. And he just showed up here, you know. I was like, ‘Holy mackerel’ — it was amazing.”

Lorena Giron, a Rockaways resident who was also part of the broader grassroots relief effort that emerged after Sandy, was similarly moved by what she saw.

“Just immediately seeing neighbors being worried about their next-door neighbors was something that really touched me, as well as the quick mobilization of the church and the willingness to bring in people into the church and then provide resources — whatever kind of help would be available,” Giron says. “Just seeing that and just the feeling of the fact that we were all watching over one another.”

Recovery hubs popped up all over the city, including at the Arverne Pilgrim Church, just a few miles from where Lopizzo’s converted nonprofit was located. Pastor Dennis Loncke, the owner of the church, explained how Hurricane Sandy created a space for the community to come together in a way that it hadn’t before.

“The storm really did unite in breaking some of the barriers down,” Loncke says. “Because most of us was living on opinion. We assumed that the other person had the grass greener on the other side, so they had no need for this one, and that had no need for the other one. But when the storm came everybody’s opinion just disappeared. We recognized that there are lots of people that had all different types of issues after the storm, and it was not just only the financial loss, or the the property loss. It awakened the community to what is going on inside the midst of us — what we have as neighbors.”

Once the door to another world is opened, it’s often difficult to close it. There are many instances of how the bonds and collective vision that are formed during the immediate aftermath of disasters have grown into broader projects that stretch far beyond immediate disaster relief.

For example, the focus around community empowerment encouraged by the Occupy Sandy relief efforts and organizations like The Working World, also based in New York City, inspired folks like Giron to help organize what has now become a worker cooperative incubation program that has helped to launch four cooperatives in New York City.

“This was very important and very exciting because the Rockaways and Far Rockaways [were] a very poor area, even before the storm,” Giron says. “The idea of a different way to promote work and promote employment [is] exciting. So my life, I feel it’s changed. The important thing for me has been this ability to help my community and to work with my community members.”

Another clear illustration of how grassroots disaster relief can lead to larger initiatives comes out of Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria, where what started in the town of Caguas as a volunteer-run community kitchen soon transformed into an island-wide network of community centers, known as Mutual Aid Centers. Today, these centers provide more than just meals — they offer all sorts of services related to art, education, and therapy.

Puerto Rico image courtesy of Juan C. Dávila

Giovanni Roberto, one of the founding members of the original Mutual Aid Center in Caguas, helps organize weekly acupuncture clinics for community members.

“This [clinic] happens every Tuesday,” Roberto says. “We work with acupuncture in the ear. We work with stress and post-traumatic syndrome, addictions, and other related issues — health issues,” adding that all services are provided for free.

The chaos wrought by Hurricane Maria went even further than the loss of life, injury, and property destruction — the storm had an impact on the Puerto Rican psyche which has had lasting and dire consequences. There are growing reports of a mental health crisis quietly unfolding on the island. It’s turning into a disaster of its own, especially since Puerto Rico’s already struggling healthcare system was weakened after the storm, leaving adequate healthcare inaccessible to many. But as Roberto’s work with the Mutual Aid Centers demonstrates, communities are coming together to tackle this epidemic in their own way. Roberto recounted the story of one of the regular volunteers at the center where he works who had been dealing with depression and post-disaster trauma.

“The first day she came here she was almost crying, you know, in a really stressful way,” Roberto says. “Since that day, she has never missed a single day of volunteer work. She has changed. She’s not crying anymore. She’s sleeping better. She says today to me that when she came here she feels that she’s in paradise.”

As Omar Reyes, another organizer at a different Mutual Aid Center in the remote town of Las Marias, says “we started our center as a community kitchen because that was what was going on in an urgent moment. People needed to eat. But once the problem changed the instrument changed too. It transformed. And now we have a center for the development of education, recreation, cultural skills, and opportunities.”

The same sentiment was expressed by Astrid Cruz Negón, an organizer at the Mutual Aid Center in the town of Utuado. “The Mutual Aid Center definitely does not want to stay in the emergency mindset of surviving Maria,” she says. “We want everything we do to build towards a new world, a new more just, more equal society.”

The first step to building a more just world might be guaranteeing that communities have the power to keep the lights on, but the ultimate goal is to ensure that communities have the power to begin growing a broad movement with the strength to make serious demands on a government that has largely abandoned them. But until then, they’re taking things into their own hands.

The instances of disaster collectivism outlined here did not happen in a vacuum. They occur oftentimes in an ongoing tension with the forces of disaster capitalism. New York City was a battleground of opposing forces for years after Sandy hit, as communities and power brokers fought for very different types of recovery. The Mutual Aid Centers in Puerto Rico are up against a set of forces — the United States government, the Puerto Rican government, and corporate interests — whose power leaves the future of their project in the balance.

In the best case scenario, disaster collectivism occurs in conjunction with government support, at the local, state, and national levels, for small and large-scale intervention that is essential in relief and reconstruction. The challenge, however, is that as the decisions driving policies fall more and more into the hands of a powerful few, official disaster response will, without social and political intervention, likely reflect preexisting stratification often shaped along race and class lines.

Yet hope lies in the vast repository of history documenting that in times of disasters, communities take care of each other and often form new solidarities that can lead to political engagement. Recovery hubs emerge spontaneously. Religious institutions step in to help. Improvised kitchens emerge, preparing not just meals, but a new vision of public life.

In these tumultuous and divisive times, amidst both the acute and chronic crises our society faces, we see glimmers of hope — a possibility for us to come together to take care of the most vulnerable within our communities.

“It’s trying to create solidarity in the midst of chaos,” Davin Cardenas, an organizer at Undocufund, says. “Trying to create a semblance of purpose in the midst of not knowing exactly what’s happening.” After the fires in California, “everybody had a feeling of like, ‘oh my gosh, what do I do? I’m not doing enough. How am I serving the people?’ You know, we’ve heard that so many times over. [Undocufund] gave people a sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose is critical in the midst of chaos — people’s instinct is to demonstrate love, to demonstrate care, and to demonstrate solidarity.”

With an uncertain future ahead marked by deepening divisions and climate change, the many examples of collective relief and recovery efforts can serve as a blueprint for how to move forward and rebuild with a radical resilience. They can also provide a glimpse of another world, one marked by empowered communities filled with more connection, purpose, and meaning.

We are interested in learning if you’ve been involved in any disaster relief efforts in your local community. No matter how small or large the extent of the disaster or your level of involvement in recovery efforts, we believe sharing these stories about how people collaboratively uplift their communities in the aftermath of natural disasters will inspire many others to do the same. Please take a few minutes to fill out this form.  

Republished from Shareable. Paige Ruane, Juan C. Dávila, and Ninna Gaensler-Debs contributed research and reporting for this piece. Some of the interviews were done in Spanish and have been translated to English.

This story is part of a series on disaster collectivism, which includes a podcast (The Response) exploring how communities respond to crises, both in their immediate aftermath and over a period of months and years.

For more information about the series or to listen to the podcast visit: www.theresponsepodcast.org 

Header image by Kane Lynch.

The post Disaster collectivism: How communities rise together to respond to crises appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But above the surface, islands dot the horizon. Green, lush sanctuaries. Islands of alternatives. Movements and communities rethinking ownership, dismantling hierarchies, prioritizing cooperation and generosity, and putting people and planet before profit. The islands are there, if we know where to look for them.

In Episode 2 of this highly-acclaimed 2-part series on Worker Cooperatives, the Upstream podcast builds on the conversation started in Episode 1, which explored how co-ops can serve as a force to widen spheres of democracy within our society. Episode 2 shifts the focus outward, exploring how cooperatives navigate the tumultuous waters of global capitalism.

The episode takes a deep dive into the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, the largest network of federated cooperatives in the world. The Upstream team takes listeners on a journey through the Basque region of Spain where Mondragon is located, and explores Mondragon’s successes and challenges through candid conversations with several worker-members at Mondragon Headquarters and at various cooperatives within the federation.

After presenting an in-depth exploration of the recent and mixed history Mondragon, Upstream takes us across the Atlantic to Jackson, Mississippi, where an ambitious iniative is just getting underway. Cooperation Jackson is part of the same trans-local organizing movement that inspired Cooperation Richmond—which was featured in Episode 1. Cooperation Jackson aims to be the Mondragon of North America, and in doing so has learned many lessons that will hopefully help them to succeed in their broad economic and political vision of Black liberation and the eco-socialist transition away from capitalism.

Featuring:

• Kali Akuno — Co-founder and Co-director of Cooperation Jackson
• Gorka Espiau —Senior Fellow at the Agirre Lehendakaria Center at the University of the Basque Country
• Sam Gindin — Writer, Director of Research at the Canadian Auto Workers (retired), Professor of Political Science at York University (retired)
• Ander Exteberria — Cooperative Dissemination at Mondragon Corporation
• Izaksun Ezpeleta — Worker/member at Fagor Electronics
• Andoni — Worker/member at Fagor Ederland

Music By:

• Chris Zabriskie
• Will Stratton
• Mississippi Sheiks

This is part 2 of a 2-part series. Listen to Episode 1 here.

Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted.

For more from Upstream, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher Radio. You can also follow Upstream on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to get daily updates.

Header graphic by Phil Wrigglesworth

A version of this blog post was originally published by Shareable.

The post Podcast: Cooperative Islands Within a Sea of Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nobody gets to vote on the decisions made in the workplace, on who their boss is, on what they’re company produces or how it’s distributed. When it comes to democracy in modern society, economic control is notably absent. The Sustainable Economies Law Center is an organization based out of Oakland, California, that puts economic democracy front and center in its mission to support community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment. The organization provides legal tools, such as education, research, advice, and advocacy with the aim cultivating a new legal landscape that supports economic democracy in the broadest sense.

Robert Raymond spoke with Ricardo Nunez (Cooperatives Program Director) and Chris Tittle (Director of Organizational Resilience) of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) about the organization’s work and the broader context within which it exists.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: What are the goals of the Sustainable Economies Law Center?

Chris Tittle, Sustainable Economies Law Center: The Sustainable Economies Law Center exists to cultivate a new legal landscape that supports communities to create and control their own sustainable sources of food, housing, farmland, water, renewable energy production, livelihoods — all the things that communities need to live thriving, resilient lives. We work at the intersection of economic, legal, and cultural change, and position ourselves at that sweet spot, realizing that the economy and legal system are mutually causative — that they are highly interrelated and that we actually can’t change one without changing both. And that ultimately, beneath both of those are cultural norms and values that are deeply tied to the type of world that we want to see. So we work to create equitable economies, cooperative cultures, and popular law and policy making. Everything we do is about enabling people in communities to come together and meet their own needs in ways that are just and that build local wealth and resilience.

Can you talk about the idea of economic democracy as it relates to the goals you just outlined? And what role do worker cooperatives play in this vision?

Ricardo Nuñez: Currently we live in a system where capital uses labor as a tool — labor as a mechanism to be exploited and to extract as much capital out of as possible. It’s holdover of a feudal perspective of how we should treat people — you know, this vestige of the corporation is basically a feudal system that continues into our democratic age. And so really figuring out a way to invert that, where instead of capital using labor as a tool, labor is using capital as a tool. I remember going to a lot of protests and marches when I was in college, and everybody was saying, you know, “People over profit.” It’s a great slogan. At the time I didn’t really know how we were going to actualize that, and so, that’s where cooperatives fit in. They are a structure, a tool that actually puts labor above capital in a real way. And so that’s what I believe economic democracy is, it’s really putting the economy back in the hands of the people to meet the needs of individuals and communities as opposed to what is legally mandated,which is if you’re a shareholder of a company the company’s legal obligation is to maximize your financial return. It’s not to protect the environment. It’s not to build wealth for communities. It’s to extract as much capital as possible from the people that you’re exploiting.

Something that underlines a lot of the work that the Sustainable Economies Law Center does is to think about the economy in the terms of the commons. And that not only are natural resources common pool resources for us to collectively manage, but that workplaces are too. Workplaces are commons of the community, and so we should figure out different ways to think about that. So, when we talk about worker cooperatives and worker ownership, you know, that’s something that I think a lot of people can understand. People understand generally what that means. But hopefully what we can move towards is stewardship, so that the workers are stewards within their workplaces. That they steward it not only for themselves but also for the people who are going to come after them. And so it’s that type of thinking that I think underlines a lot of the work that we do at the law center.

How is SELC plugged in to a broader national or even international movement?

Chris Tittle: It’s kind of an exciting moment in this broader movement of movements, that include things like the solidarity economy and the new economy, but also the Movement for Black Lives and Indigenous sovereignty movements. There’s sort of been, I think, over the last couple of years particularly, since the financial collapse, this blossoming of a thousand flowers. People are really open to rethinking some of the most foundational assumptions that the current society is based on. And with that there’s a lot of ways of thinking and framing and talking about it. As an organization we don’t necessarily subscribe to one framing around this. Certainly our organization has been associated with the sharing economy,back before that term was used by Uber and Airbnb in some of its more capitalist formations. But I think what we’re really interested in is a world in which all people and the ecosystems that they depend on are equitable, self-determined, resilient in the face of change, and free from oppression.

Personally, I think increasingly for our organization we’ve really been inspired and are taking leadership from frontline communities — the people who have sort of been under the boot of empire for a long time and who therefore actually know the solutions that need to come about in a much deeper and personal way. And so whether we call it the Solidarity Economy, or the Just Transition, or the Movement for Black Lives, think we all share some common commitments to justice and to democracy. Those two things inform all of the work that we do with transforming legal and economic structures. As Ricardo was saying, cooperatives are one way of embedding democracy into the workplace, and our organization tries to embody that too even as a nonprofit organization. To quote Richard Wolff, the Marxist economist, “If we want the economy to work for people, we have to put people in charge of the economy.” So that’s what we’re committed to at SELC. There’s a lot of different pathways to that vision and this is a particularly transitional moment in history. The end goal is something different than what we’re actually seeing right now and there’s going to be a lot of different pathways to get there.

What are your ultimate hopes for the work that you do? What is the transition that you are looking to be a part of?

Ricardo Nuñez: My day to day life is trying to figure out: How do we move away from that system that is fundamentally not reformable? That we need a different type of relationship with each other, and with ourselves. We might not have all the answers right now, but we have to do something better than what we have right now. We are not looking at climate change, for example, as something that’s going to be happening in a hundred years.We are in the midst of a climate catastrophe that is already affecting communities, and because of our privileged positions we might not feel it as much as others, but it’s real and it’s profound. And so I think there is a global context to remember and to think about, but also to really be living those values, to be figuring out different systems in our day to day experience to transform this system. And also to take people where they’re at and to realize that this isn’t something that everybody is going to jump on board with. There’s going to be different ways that people are going to engage with it, and the goal is really to understand where people are and how to get them to understand why it’s necessary to fundamentally transform how we live, how we work, how we relate to each other.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Ricardo Nuñez and Chris Tittle by Robert Raymond.

This article was originally published by Shareable.

The post Workplaces are commons: a conversation with Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Ricardo Nuñez and Chris Tittle appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The 21st century has seen an explosion in interest around Worker Cooperatives—particularly since capitalism’s 2008 crisis. In Part 1 of this 2-part series, Upstream explores how worker coops present a radically different kind of ownership and management structure—one that has the power to transform not only the workplace—but perhaps the economy as a whole.

The episode tells the story of Rich City Rides, a cooperatively owned and run bike & skate shop in Richmond, California. Through candid conversations with one of the founders, and drawing from the wisdom of community organizers and thought-leaders, Upstream explores how worker cooperatives can transform workplaces into commons that strengthen cooperative values and begin to bring social and racial justice to marginalized communities.

Upstream also take a brief trip to the Basque Country of northern Spain to explore how the rich cooperative environment there compares to that of the United States and the San Francisco Bay Area specifically. What challenges do co-ops in the United States face as they continue to bump up against the dominant, capitalist economic system? What can the movement learn from the successes and challenges of the Basque model?

Join Della Z Duncan and Robert R. Raymond, Upstream’s producers, as they take you on an informative and inspiring exploration through one of the most important movements that is challenging the extractive and exploitative economy: the Worker Cooperative movement.

Featuring​

• Richard Wolff – Economics professor emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, founder of Democracy at Work, and host of the weekly radio show Economic Update
• Gopal Dayaneni– Co-founder of Cooperation Richmond & Staff Member at Movement Generation
• Doria Robinson – Founder of Urban Tilth and Co-Founder of Cooperation Richmond
• Esteban Kelly – Executive Director of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives
• Gorka Espiau – Senior Fellow at the Agirre Lehendakaria Center at the University of the Basque Country
• Najari Smith – Worker/member of Rich City Rides bike & skate shop
• Roxanne Villaluz – Worker/member of a cooperative bakery & pizzeria
• Sofa Gradin – Political Organizer and Lecturer in Politics at King’s College in London

Music By:

• Jerry Folk
• Antwon
• The Roots of Orchis

Header Artwork by Phil Wrigglesworth

Part 2 of this 2-part series will be out in May, 2018, and will take a much deeper dive into the Basque Country and the Mondragon Cooperatives.

Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted. 

The post Podcast: Worker Cooperatives – Widening Spheres of Democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

How did we get here? What happened 10,000 years ago to put us on this path of expansion and ecological devastation? This is the question guiding the research of Lisi Krall — an economics professor at Cortland University whose research blurs the lines between anthropology, economics, and evolutionary biology. She believes that the advent of agriculture was a turning point in human evolution, and that we can learn a lot about our modern societies by looking at ant and termite superorganisms.

Upstream spoke with Krall about her eclectic research that has brought together an odd mix of disciplines and a lot of uncanny comparisons. We also explored the ramifications of her findings, which pose much deeper, philosophical inquiries into the existential, environmental, and economic challenges that human societies are facing in our modern era.

Intermission Music: “Human” by Mount Eerie

Cover art by Robert Raymond

Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted.

For more from Upstream, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher Radio. You can also follow Upstream on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to get daily updates.

Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn’t keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation — Thank you! www.upstreampodcast.org/support

The post Podcast: How did the advent of agriculture impact humanity? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We often say that we couldn’t keep this project going without your support — well, this is LITERALLY TRUE. The laptop and the audio software that we use to produce our documentaries are now out of date and no longer working properly. As a result, we cannot begin to produce our 2018 season of episodes until we upgrade our equipment.

Please help us raise money to purchase new equipment so that we can produce our 2018 season and beyond.

We have a limited budget to make this project happen and it takes a certain quality of resources to produce in-depth, high-quality audio documentaries. Because we provide all of our content for free, we need to ask for your support to keep things going.

The work we are doing through Upstream is more important than ever. Our documentaries help give voice to the most pressing issues of our time. By supporting us in this crowdfunding campaign with your tax-deductible donation, you’ll invest in us to continue to tell the stories that we hope will lead us to a better world — one that puts people and planet over profit.

Over the last three years we’ve grown and deepened our impact immensely, producing eleven full-length documentaries and dozens of stand-alone interviews reaching thousands of listeners.

And we’re really just getting started! We have big plans for 2018, with several documentaries already in the works (including a series on worker cooperative and an episode on feminist economics). But we will not be able to produce these documentaries without your support.

Thank you for contributing anything that you can. Every donation helps. And if you cannot afford to chip-in, you can still help by sharing this crowdfunding campaign with your networks.

With deep gratitude, thank you again. Together we can bring about the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

In solidarity,

Della & Robert

Photo by tixyvix

The post New economics podcast Upstream needs your help! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The world is undergoing a radical social, ecological, and economic crisis. This radical crisis demands radical solutions.

What are the dominant worldviews and stories that underpin the field of economics? Where are the most effective places to intervene in order to address the suffering and harm caused by global economies that put profit before the well-being of people and the planet? How can we build economies that reflect, as writer Charles Eisenstein says, “the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?” In this evening talk, we will journey together upstream from the political, economic, and social crises of our time to understand the root causes and their possible systemic interventions.

Della Z Duncan is interested in returning the field of economics to the realm of moral philosophy. She co-produces the Upstream Podcast, which tells stories about the economic challenges of our time through diverse voices and a rich soundscape. Della also facilitates and convenes courses on Economics for Transition, Buddhist Economics, and Gross National Happiness at Schumacher College in Devon, England. Outside of the classroom, she serves as a 21st-century economics mentor and consultant for individuals, local governments, and organizations working to untangle themselves from the stranglehold of capitalism and work to co-create more beautiful, sustainable, and just alternatives.

£5 Suggested Donation (get your tickets here)

• Friday, Nov 10th
• 7pm
• 42 Acres Shoreditch, London
• 66 Leonard St, London EC2A 4LW

All are welcome!

More about the Social Change series at 42 acres:

“At 42 Acres we believe we can change the world, from the inside out and through our work to change the system. We are constantly being shaped by our environment and influencing reality with our thoughts. We are in the midst of a crisis in consciousness, whereby the economic crisis is a moral and ethical crisis more than a physical crisis — we have more than enough resources to feed everyone, and not just that, but to distribute evenly  – and through this we could create more social cohesion and stability.   Our new range of programs, Social Change from the Inside Out, explores that conjunction between science and spirituality, between contemplation and innovation. From grassroots activist to leading thinkers we want to spark conversation and be a space to prototype the beautiful alternatives. Why don’t you join us?”

Made possible with support by the Bertha Foundation.

The post EVENT: Reclaiming our Economy with Della Z Duncan in London, 11/20 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Alex Vitale’s work is based on a deep examination and structural critique of the fundamental nature of policing. Vitale stresses that it’s not enough to enact superficial reforms to a system of policing which was, at its core, designed to maintain systems of oppression and inequality. Vitale argues that instead of our current approach of inhumane and ineffective punitive force, we should be going upstream to focus on the root causes of problems, focusing our attention on addressing inequality and providing community and social programs for those in need.

In the first half of our Conversation, Vitale walks us through the dark origins of policing, beginning with the eras of colonialism, slavery, the early industrial capitalism. How did early policing grow directly out of the militias and military units that were used to exterminate and expropriate colonized peoples and lands? What role did the police play in maintaining the oppression of African-Americans during slavery and also during the post-slavery era in the south, where vagrancy laws and convict leasing systems proved to be just as bad, if not worse, than slavery itself? And how did vagrancy and vice laws, again enforced by the police, help to culturally shape an emerging working class during the rise of industrial capitalism, forcing a the new system of wage-labor onto a population that fiercely resisted it?

The second half of our Conversation brings us into our modern neoliberal era, where policing has really exploded into one of its most brutal and all-encompassing forms yet. Here we explore how the rise of neoliberalism has led to all sorts of societal and community crises which have led to a startling increase in the scope, funding, and militarization of police forces that are now being used to enforce failed drug-war policies, crush social movements, criminalize poor and African-American communities, and maintain the systems of inequality required by austerity-driven neoliberal capitalism.

Upstream co-producer Robert Raymond interviewed Alex Vitale at his home in Brooklyn, New York. For more on Alex Vitale’s work: http://www.alex-vitale.info/

The End of Policing can be purchased through Verso Books.

Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn’t keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation — Thank you! www.upstreampodcast.org/support

The post Podcast: How is policing being used to maintain racial and class inequalities? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

More and more people are falling out of love with capitalism. And is it really all that surprising? Capitalism has failed to achieve most of its promises and many are now beginning to dream about what a different, better world might look like. Well, in this second episode of our 2-part series on Universal Basic Income (UBI), we’ll explore what role UBI might have in transitioning to that different world.

There is an exciting and lively debate taking place among the left right now exploring whether Universal Basic Income would do more to dismantle capitalism or, rather, to prop it up and help to keep it going. For this episode, we’ve assembled another all-star cast of economists, journalists, and authors — we asked them to share their perspectives and to envision what the long-term societal effects of giving everyone a Universal Basic Income might look like.

Would a progressive UBI act as simply another form of welfare, temporarily propping up a fundamentally flawed system, and just serving as another concession to eventually be eroded and gutted by the capitalist class? Or could it be more than that — could it actually fundamentally challenge the current capitalist system and help to dismantle it?

We’ll explore these questions — and many more — in this final episode of our 2-part exploration of Universal Basic Income. Don’t miss it!

Featuring:

• Erik Olin Wright – Marxist scholar and sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
• Kathi Weeks – Marxist-feminist scholar, associate professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University and author of ‘The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries’
• Matt Bruenig – Writer, researcher, and founder of the People’s Policy Project
• Richard Wolff – Marxist economist, economics professor Emeritus University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Founder of Democracy at Work, and host of the weekly radio show Economic Update
• Doug Henwood – Journalist, economic analyst, and writer whose work has been featured in Harper’s, Jacobin Magazine, and The Nation
• Martin Kirk – Co-founder and Director of Strategy at The Rules
• Rutger Bregman – Journalist and author of ‘Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders and a 15-hour Workweek’
• Manda Scott- Novelist, columnist, and broadcaster
• Juliana Bidadanure – Assistant professor in political philosophy at Stanford University
• Sofa Gradin – Political Organizer and Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London

Music:

• American Football
• J. T. Harechmak
• Pele

This is the second in a 2-part series on Universal Basic Income. Listen to Episode 1 here.

This blog post was originally published by Shareable.

Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted. 

For more from Upstream, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher Radio. You can also follow Upstream on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to get daily updates. 

Many thanks to Benjamin Henderson for the cover art/header image.

The post Podcast: Could Universal Basic Income Spell the End of Capitalism? appeared first on P2P Foundation.