All Things Co-op

In this episode of All Things Co-op in honor of National Co-op Month, Kevin interviews Priya Chatwani, a software engineer and organizer at Politics Rewired, a tech cooperative which grew out of the 2020 Bernie campaign that aims to build technology for Left organizing. Kevin and Priya speak about how Politics Rewired got started, the technology they’re currently working on, Big Tech and the role of tech cooperatives, cooperative decision-making, the relationship between technology and organizing, and how technology can support and grow the Left.

About our guest: Priya Chatwani is a technologist and organizer who centers anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and intersectionality in her efforts to redistribute privilege and build political power on the Left. She’s currently a worker-owner at Politics Rewired, previously worked on public transit planning tools at Remix, and interned at Twitter, Google, and Infosys. While at Stanford, she co-taught "Coding for Social Good" and worked with the Haas Center for Public Service to curate "public interest tech" panels, career newsletters, resource guides, and summer and post-graduate fellowships.

Politics Rewired is a worker-owned cooperative designing human and technological solutions for organizers. They work with organizers to streamline workflows so that they can focus on what they do best: building systems and relationships. They work with political campaigns, unions, and movement organizations, with a deliberate emphasis on supporting Left insurgents and building independent Left infrastructure.

To learn more: https://www.politicsrewired.com/

Welcome to Season 7 of All Things Co-op! In this special episode in honor of National Co-op Month, Kevin speaks with Kevin O’Brien, co-founder of the union co-op Worx Printing. You may have seen Worx Printing at the Democracy at Work online shop at https://democracy-at-work-shop.myshopify.com/. In this interview, O’Brien discusses his path to starting Worx, globalization and its effects on the apparel industry, the benefits and importance of the union-coop model, best practices for running and sustaining a business, and more. You can find more about Worx and support their work at worxprinting.coop.

About our guest: Kevin O'Brien is the co-founder and Managing Member at WorX Printing Cooperative, in Worcester, Massachusetts. For the past 20 years he has focused his career on understanding and working within supply chains. He has worked with Merchandising, Design, Manufacturing, Imprinting, Fulfillment, Distribution as well as Finance and Ecommerce. The foundation of Kevin's experience comes out of the New York City and Los Angeles Garment Centers and from manufacturing facilities throughout the country. His experiences have brought him in contact with the creative and technical genius, as well as the shortcomings, of ethical manufacturing practices. Kevin worked with Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s on Worx’s predecessor, sweatX, trying to right the wrongs of the predatory cut-and-sew arm of the merchandise industry. SweatX shuttered in 2004 after two years of production due to exploitative pressures. In 2014, carrying hard-learned lessons from the closure of sweatX, Kevin co-founded Worx, a union co-op printing shop, to ensure that cutting-edge print technology was coupled with the highest bars of manufacturing and fair trade standards.

In this special All Things Co-op season finale, Kevin traces a brief history of international relations, discusses the rise of international law and the failure of the UN to address our current global dilemmas, and speculates that a cooperative, rather than competitive, international order is necessary to create a sustainable, peaceful world.

In this episode of All Things Co-op, Cinar and Kevin discuss the issue of the environment, its destruction, the cause (spoiler alert: it’s capitalism) and the only true way we can address this looming crisis. They discuss the underlying reason why we have global climate change, its reverberating effects, the potential for revolutionary responses, the danger of eco-fascism, and how a cooperative response could save us.

Polls show that most Americans think economic inequality is a problem, but if you listen to right-wing capitalist apologists, you’ll hear that economic inequality is either not that big of a deal, a consequence of economic freedom, and/or actually a good thing. In this episode of All Things Co-op, Cinar and Kevin pick apart these arguments, look at how wages are distributed in co-ops today, and talk about how inequality could be handled in a cooperative society.

In this episode of All Things Co-op, Larry, Cinar, and Kevin celebrate Democracy at Work’s 10 year anniversary by reflecting on their history and involvement with d@w. The ATC guys discuss the value of d@w, their own political histories and perspectives, their path to becoming co-hosts of this podcast, the nuts and bolts of planning, recording and producing episodes, and what they are looking towards in the future.

In this episode of All Things Co-op, Cinar, Larry, and Kevin talk with Terence Courtney, the Director of Cooperative Development & Strategic Initiatives at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization focused on land retention, cooperative development, and advocacy for small black-owned farms in the Southern United States. Terence and the ATC guys discuss the unique history of black farming in the south, institutional and ideological barriers to growth, and what cooperative associations can mean for historically marginalized communities.

About our guest: Terence Courtney began organizing with the Service Employees International Union to improve economic conditions for working people. He led union campaigns and later became the union’s State-wide Representative in Georgia. He’s co-founded and led coalitions such as Atlanta Jobs with Justice and the Atlanta Public Sector Alliance, a community group focused on the public sector. While working with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Terence organized both US-born and immigrants of African descent to educate and raise consciousness about immigrant rights and mass incarceration from a Black Diasporic perspective. He co-developed the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy and served as the Director of Organizing overseeing campaigns against school privatization, as well as its spin off project: Cooperative Atlanta. Terence currently serves as the Director of Cooperative Development & Strategic Initiatives for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

In this episode of ATC, Cinar, Larry and Kevin talk with John Hayes of MyCoolClass about the rise of educational platforms and online learning. MyCoolClass aims to give power back to the teachers as they navigate the online teaching world and show how cooperative principles can shake up the space. John and the ATC guys chat about what cooperative cultural values bring to education and how an education system run by teachers could be truly revolutionary.

In this episode of All Things Co-op, Cinar, Larry, and Kevin talk about the issue of innovation under both capitalism and a possible cooperative economy. The innovation we’ve seen over the last 250 years has been so immense that people often believe if we changed our economic system, we’d lose the drive for innovation. Though the innovation achieved under capitalism has led to a decrease in needless death, greater standards of living, and massive economic growth, it has also created immense inequality and has led to ever more frequent recessions. As we approach the era of artificial general intelligence and irreversible climate change, how do we account for and justify the costs associated with capitalism?