These leaders are creating a world in which access to basic necessities such as food, electricity, and housing are not at the whims of speculative markets. They are launching enterprises based on collaboration and employing business practices that sustain the environment. At the Living the Next Economy Convergence which was held in Oakland, California, we got a glimpse into how these visionaries are building democratic, equitable, and sustainable businesses — and what challenges they face.

Last month’s convergence, which sought to address the systemic, pervasive racism in the U.S. that robs people of their dignity and prevents them from achieving economic prosperity, brought more than 300 leaders representing over 100 organizations together for three days of panel discussions, hands-on workshops, and talks. Event organizers also brought 100 youth and grassroots organizational leaders on scholarships. Among the highlights of the convergence was the first public dialogue between Black Panther activist Ericka Huggins and co-founder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement Alicia Garza.

One of the key tracks of the convergence was alternative business models, so there was a lot of open and revealing discussions about cooperatives and employee stock-owned plans (ESOP). There were participants from both nonprofit organizations and for-profit enterprises who offered insights into creating business and implementing business models that value rights of workers. They also shared some of the complex social, political, and financial roadblocks they face while helping to build this new economy.

The core organizers of the convergence, including Shareable’s Tom Llewellyn

The Potential and Pitfalls of Co-ops

Many of the conference participants touted the benefits of cooperatives, which tend to value labor rights, environmental protection, and product quality. One of the attendees was from the Democracy at Work Institute, a project of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC). The organization looks to address what’s called the “silver tsunami” problem, which is that 70 percent of baby boomers in the U.S. don’t have succession plans for their small businesses. That means we are headed for a mass closure of locally-owned enterprises in the years ahead. To prevent this from happening, the group is organizing meetings in cities across the U.S. to find viable ways to help these businesses convert to worker-owned cooperatives. The organization believes this problem is connected to displacement and gentrification. Since ownership and leadership in a majority of existing small businesses do not reflect the diversity of where they are based, co-op conversions are one way to expand ownership and entrepreneurship to people from marginalized backgrounds.

Founders and representatives from several co-ops, including New Hope Farms, Loconomics, and Project Equity shared stories about how they organize themselves to divide wealth and ownership and promote community resilience. While much was said about the benefits of co-ops, there were also frank discussions about their limitations:

They can be slow and inflexible in ways that top-down companies are not.
They may not fully erase pre-existing forms of oppression, especially if their members are not actively addressing them.

To counter the second issue, the participants said co-ops can pledge themselves to equity and diversity by implementing organizational bylaws that embed such commitments into the DNA of the enterprise. They said written social contracts could go far in establishing community norms, which are so vital to maintaining a healthy collaborative environment at a cooperative.

Tara Marchant, event co-organizer and director of Emerald Cities Oakland with Oakland City Councilmember, Lynette McElhaney.

Mission Driven For-Profit Enterprises

At least two founders of traditional for-profit corporations gave presentations about their businesses. One was Bay Area-based House Kombucha, a family-run fermented beverage company. Their story centered around the challenges of maintaining a triple bottom line — people, planet, and profit — in an economically competitive region.

The Body is Not an Apology is another enterprise incorporated as a for-profit business, but is dedicated to its mission of cultivating self-love and body empowerment. It is a global network that disseminates information about how to love and embrace one’s body, and enables personal and social transformation projects through trainings and webinars. Its founder Sonya Renee Taylor spoke about the constant barrage of shameful and discriminatory stories about our bodies in the media, and how the $60 billion beauty industry exploits these insecurities for profit. She called all of this “body terrorism.” The company’s platform is a way for people to protect themselves from this negativity and learn about how to use radical self-love as a basis for social, political, and economic change.

In both presentations, the entrepreneurs expressed how they have been able to create good companies through a strong commitment to their respective missions. They admitted that hierarchical enterprises can sometimes be a much more nimble and flexible model for social enterprises.

One of the panel discussions

The Environment and Disenfranchised Communities

The relationship between climate change and capitalism is undeniable. An economic system that prioritizes profit leads to reckless extraction of natural resources. At the convergence, many participants pointed to renewable energy as a way to disrupt this economic cycle that’s destroying the planet. Whereas fossil fuels require massive centralized infrastructure to extract, transport, and process its energy, solar and wind power can be decentralized. The representatives from energy enterprises emphasized the potential of clean energy as a means to exercise economic and political empowerment for disenfranchised communities.

Staff from several renewable energy enterprises talked about their models for democratizing access and governance over energy infrastructure. Shiva Patel, the founder of the Energy Solidarity Cooperative (ESC), an Oakland-based multi-stakeholder co-op, discussed how the organization designs and builds solar energy projects and political education programs. The group’s mission is to build community-owned clean energy systems in underserved communities and mobilize non-extractive financing for these projects. ESC works on helping communities move their renewable projects forward, from the initial energy auditing stage through installation and developing financing strategies.

Founder of Native Renewables, Wahleah Johns.

The founder of Native Renewables, an indigenous-led organization working to promote affordable clean energy for Native American communities across the U.S, shared a stunning fact: More than 18,000 homes on the Navajo reservation in Arizona don’t have access to electricity. To address this problem, the organization’s aim is to for tribes to own, manage, and provide renewable energy for themselves. Through partnerships with federal agencies, utilities, foundations, and investors, Native Renewables deploys solar energy projects where it’s needed the most. The group’s mission is to not only provide clean energy to Native Americans and creative sustainable economic models for power, but also strive to champion the sovereignty and the socio-economic and cultural values of tribal nations.

The discussions about community-controlled energy systems also touched upon how to finance the infrastructure. The current financial system prioritizes investment in big oil projects rather than in decentralized community-oriented renewable initiatives. In order to fix this, the general consensus was that there is an urgent need for more creative models of financing and community financing programs, such as investment crowdfunding, to make renewable power projects viable in the coming years.

A New Way Forward is Possible

Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and author of “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,” often refers to the economy as society’s operating system, in that it determines how the main components of our social systems function and establishes the basic rules about how we all relate to each other. Many already recognize that our current operating system is broken, but many cannot imagine what could be put in its place.

To most people, this is an alarming problem. But the Living the Next Economy Convergence demonstrated that the failures of the current economy creates an opening. It is an opportunity to apply creative and imaginative solutions to create a better system from the ground up. These leaders are showing the way forward with community-based alternatives, one mission-driven enterprise at a time. They are building them based on a new operating system that runs on trust, resilience, and sustainability, and are showing that everyone can shape the future of the next economy.

Please consider making a contribution to support the growth of next economy initiatives in Oakland. Every little bit helps.

The post Lessons on Creating an Equitable and Sustainable Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the last few months I have been focusing on the ways in which the category human has been applied across time by human governing systems – in particular white-supremacist imperialist capitalist systems – as a lens through which to think about the resurgence of anti-blackness that is currently sweeping the world (in continuity to the well-erased profound historical contexts).

This trail of thought ensued in November 2015, when I joined the Black Women’s March in Brasilia. The march was part of a feminist global organizing platform for movement building, strengthening solidarities and critical rethinking of alternatives in relation to emergent post-capitalist rhetorics. The diverse conversations around Afro-Brazilian women’s rights to negotiate their thoughts, bodies and roles in Brazil’s democratic state were all underpinned by narratives of the racist structures that are silencing, commodifying (not metaphorically, there is a history of black bodies being circulated as commodities), overexploiting, victimizing and killing the Afro Brazilian population – dating all the way back to slavery.

In the conversations building up to the march, community workers from across the Americas and the African continent met to share the contexts of their different geographies and collate new organizing principles. What became apparent in this conversation was the similarity in the lived experiences of young black people in these different contexts. Young black people find themselves faced with a (non)choice which comes down to either assimilation into capitalism (with an understanding that assimilation can, but does not necessarily mean benefiting i.e. we see black elites who assimilate and benefit and we also see the majority of black people assimilated as labor to be consumed) or, if one refuses assimilation, disposability through criminalization of poor black youths usually resulting in imprisonment or death.

As each person gave their organizing backgrounds from the Favela’s in Brazil and the urban- poor youth in Kenya to black communities in the US, there was a realization that the common denominator in the shared experiences of extreme violence and criminalization, was being black and unwanted within white- neoliberal- systems.

In Rio, 2012 preparations for the World cup put a lime light on the persistent racism that affects the Black Favelas. The documentation of the “clean up” process to make the city “safe” for the games brought out the concentration of Black Residents more heavily in the substandard, precarious urban spaces effectively reserved for those without full rights

Perhaps one of the most well known campaigns around this has been #BlackLivesMatter which ensued after the outrage over the number of young black and brown men criminalized, imprisoned and killed by the police in the United States. With the last mapping being, the profiling, abductions and killings of poor black youth in Kenya to control and protect property.

Grounded in these conversations, it seemed fundamental to map out the collective psychosis of white supremacist thinking in late-stage capitalism within the global socio-political and economic formations. Amongst the many deployed strategies to maintain power, was (has been) the over assertion of control and silencing of the autonomy and voices of the majority of a people. The methods have varied from economic marginalization, creation of poverty, instigation of deep inequalities, eradication of diversity, excessive dispossession of the poor from their homelands for business ventures, investing in war economies, immigration restriction, and murder – through state and militarized violence etc. The use of these tactics is most ignored and prompts least consequence when used against and over the lives of a) poor and particularly b) black people.

The pervasiveness of anti-blackness across the globe suggests that whiteness is not only spread through white peoples bodies but as a system that comes to work through various bodies. It is a system that functions to primarily benefit white bodies, but also one that has realized its survival depends on the assimilation, to different degrees, of other bodies.

For instance, the language of development in the African continent is one of assimilation. It has required African states to “move on from” the doings of colonialism to maintain good relations that in return “secure” economic growth. The frenzy of “Africa Rising” has allowed the re-possession of land and exploitation of resources by different foreign interests, and their local proxies- through whole strategies, relations and tactics to dispossess, divide and rule over the lives of African peoples. These interests may no longer walk in the same bodies, as in the colonial regime, but emulate the same cultures that reinforce anti-black and anti-poor sentiments*. Take for instance the collusion between state and capital in the Marikana massacre of 2012 where police killed 34 miners for protesting the over- exploitation of their labor. Or the linkage between the U.S. war on terror rhetorics and tactics with the Kenyan state’s desire for economic and hegemonic domination, to extract resources in Somalia. Or the vicious cycle of civil war in the Congo, which has been instigated, controlled and funded by imperial powers to mine the world’s richest minerals.

As a result of this, the societies and most importantly, the land has become unbearable for African peoples to nurture and exist in, forcing immigration into foreign lands~ where the same conditions of erasure, exploitation of disposability continue. Many people do not survive the passage out of the continent. Last year only, the deaths resulting from immigration of Africans from Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and other war torn countries- attempting to cross the Mediterranean was unfathomable. Those who do survive the passage face increasing levels of immigration restriction into Europe, paired with a cycle of deportations that amount to sending people back to their deaths. African migrants across the world face anti-black violence the most notably being the slave like conditions of exploiting labor from and murders of domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Many of whom only return through the repatriation of their dead bodies.

There is a lens that is largely being ignored in attempts to imagine post-capitalist- futures- this missing link is a result of the evasion of the reality that capitalism is born of white supremacist thinking and domination- and is therefore directly linked to anti blackness, and consequently the erasure of black lives and futures. Unless capitalism’s origins in the project of Empire are acknowledged we will continue to hold the flawed assumption that humanness is universally agreed upon. The current circulating prescription of being human is one offered by white capitalism- and is highly fueled by control, greed and need for constant accumulation. As different societies, across the globe, increasingly invest in these structures and relations, we risk narrowing the potential for nurturing of alternative (less cannibalistic) versions of being human.

Written by Gathoni Blessol, Decolonization movement builder, Community Organizer with /TheRules.org Originally published in Pambazuka News.

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here.

Lead image by Francisco Goya.

The post Seeing Wetiko: White Supremacy as Cultural Cannibalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.