Half Past Capitalism

Venezuelan communes—where productive activities are controlled by a range of community assemblies—are fascinating examples of socialist forces experimenting with the creation of new social forms.
Venezuela's communes are an attempt to address some of the shortcomings of cooperatives and state-owned socialist factories by addressing not just economic production but other social relationships like parenting and gender relations at the grassroots level.
Chris Gilbert, author of the forthcoming book Commune or Nothing! Venezuela's Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project and co-author (with Cira Pascual Marquina) of Venezuela, the Present as Struggle, joins us from Caracas to explain the theoretical basis for communes.

Cuba’s thousands of agricultural cooperatives are responsible for about 56% of Cuba’s growing land, and employ an estimated 300,000 cooperative worker members. Some observers say the cooperatives more efficient than the state-owned parts of Cuba's agricultural production.

Federica Bono is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography at Christopher Newport University joins Dru Oja Jay to discuss her observations of Cuba's vast network of agricultural cooperatives. Dr. Bono has written about food access, the concept and practice of solidarity, and border relations. In 2015, she spent time living with agricultural cooperatives, and interviewed dozens of worker-members.

Two interviews with Camila Piñeiro-Harnecker

https://geo.coop/articles/cubas-new-cooperative-legislation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpgM80xLF9I

Spatializing Solidarity: Agricultural Cooperatives as Solidarity Transformers in Cuba, by Federica Bono and Maarten Loopmans

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ruso.12386

Half Past Capitalism is a show about alternatives to capitalism as if they were possible.

Produced with the support of the Solidarity Economy Incubator for Zero Emissions (SEIZE): http://www.solidarityeconomy.ca

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Dru Oja Jay is joined by Kevin Harding, one of the organizers of a spirited, hail-mary attempt to save Mountain Equipment Co-op from being sold off to a US private equity firm.  Before its assets were sold (and the member list apparently destroyed), the outdoor supplies cooperative had reached an estimated 6 million members and $700 million in annual revenues.

Kevin is a public policy professional who works with cooperatives and community enterprises. In this episode, he shares about how tens of thousands of members mobilized to stop MEC's sale, and came very close to being successful. 

Dru and Kevin also discuss the situation that led to the co-operative's demise, what could have prevented it, and what became of the effort to save MEC.  

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Dru Oja Jay is joined by Mo Manklang of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives to discuss recent changes to federal legislation championed by various cooperative organizations, and how laws can be changed further.

Mo is the Communications Director and Policy lead at the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, a board members of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance and the Sustainable Business Network of Philadelphia.

CHIPS act update: https://www.usworker.coop/blog/the-usfwc-applauds-the-spotlight-on-worker-co-ops-in-the-chips-and-science-act/

Other policy updates from USFCW: https://www.usworker.coop/blog/category/policy

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Dru is joined by Carmen Marcuello and Anjel Errasti, authors of some interesting publications about Mondragon's expansion abroad. We talk about why the cooperative model hasn't taken root in Mondragon's overseas operations, and what makes Mondragon different from multinational conglomerates of similar size that are not owned and democratically managed by their workers.  

Carmen Marcuello is a professor of Business Management at the University of Zaragoza. Anjel Errasti is a professor at the Institute of Cooperative Law and Social Economy, University of the Basque Country.  

Read their 2018 paper here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0019793918779575  

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I've been working on a Ukraine episode for a while. After an interview with Yulia Yurchenko (whose book Elliot recommends at the end) was unusable due to wartime internet, I turned to Elliot Dolan-Evans in Melbourne. 

In addition to being the author of the timely article "Why Ukraine needs foreign debt cancellation now,"[1] Elliot has spent time in Ukraine's Donbas region during the civil war that has been ongoing since 2014, where he conducted dozens of interviews on the subject of women's work and how it was affected by IMF-driven privatization.[2]

1. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/why-ukraine-needs-foreign-debt-cancellation-now/

2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2021.2012223

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Organizer, teacher, co-founder of Movement Generation and co-organizer of Seed Commons and Peoples' Solar Energy Fund, Gopal is a key facilitator, convener and thinker in the climate justice movement. He has been involved in Climate Justice Alliance, ETC Group, Ruckus Society, Cooperation Richmond, and the Center for Economic Democracy, and he teaches Ecological Systems Thinking at Antioch University, and in Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University.  

You can find Movement Generation at https://movementgeneration.org/ and Seed Commons at https://seedcommons.org/ 

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Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajayHalf Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

Dancer, bodyworker, somatic educator and Art.coop co-organizer Marina Lopez joins us for episode 8 of Half Past Capitalism. Marina has been involved in solidarity economy organizing through Cooperation Humboldt in Northern California, and more recently in organizing an educational series following the release of the Art.coop report, "Solidarity Not Charity - Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy".  

We discuss the role of art in the solidarity economy movement, the reception to the report, and what it's like to dance about an economy.  

Read the report: https://art.coop/report/

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Justin Podur has been poring over the details of world history with his comrade and former teacher, and sharing the results on the Anti-Empire Project podcast's "Civilizations" series (https://podur.org/).

I asked Justin about the insights and shifts in perspective from this fascinating in-depth study, which covers the era of colonialism and imperialism, and the various responses to it.   It was a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it too!  

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Evan Henshaw-Plath was one of the key organizers of the Indymedia network, employee #1 at Twitter, and started two worker co-ops and a bunch of other companies. He has worked at Fortune 500 monoliths and in anarchist collectives. In this episode, we discuss how software is a commons, what the cooperative movement can learn from Silicon Valley, and how cooperative tech projects can scale up.

Evan is at @rabble and www.planetary.social (part of a larger attempt to create a decentralized social media platform) is his current project.

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