Socialist in a Capitalist World w/ Stuart Keating

Today’s episode features Earthbound Brewery co-owner and lawyer Stuart Keating. Stuart is an active member of DSA and provides pro-bono legal representation to activist. We discuss his ideology as a socialist business owner, the ethical constraints of capitalism, and much more!

Beliefs:

Dodge v. Ford (a case that shaped institutional thought on corporate responsibilities). This is a link to a scholarly paper about the case because the case is boring as hell:   https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1013744

Animal Spirits: A book by George Akerlof (a Nobel prize winner!) about the irrationality of economics: http://media.economist.com/media/pdf/animal-spirits-akerloff-e.pdf

Systems Theory/Systems dynamics:  Thinking about things as “systems” rather than problems to be solved.  I am only acquainted with the basics of the field but as a conceptual framework it’s useful:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics

People:

Murray Bookchin (his forms of grassroots organization can be directly applied to business organization) https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/murray-bookchin-ecology-kurdistan-pkk-rojava-technology-environmentalism-anarchy

Lincoln Electric: A publicly held company with unique labor practices like guaranteed employment and a very flat organizational hierarchy: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/15/business/the-way-that-works-at-lincoln.html  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/23eb/556b0636c87e9c3429444c8c90e484232228.pdf

Oneida. An intentional community with all sorts of interesting beliefs that eventually became a global flatware company.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community