Half Past Capitalism – Details, episodes & analysis

There's a lot to learn from Sweden's Meidner Plan, which would have phased in worker ownership over 30 years. As a followup to our episode with Joe Guinan, Dru Oja Jay spoke to Shannon Ikebe about some of the new archival materials about the Meidner plan, and insights it contains for current efforts to plan beyond capitalism.

Read Shannon's dissertation on Sweden's wage earner funds here: https://escholarship.org/content/qt4sk7w0r0/qt4sk7w0r0.pdf

Yuill Herbert, a co-founder and long-time worker member at Sustainability Solutions Group, joins us to talk about life in an expanding co-op, and the 100-acre land trust he also helped start.

Sustainability Solutions Group: https://www.ssg.coop/ Podcast links: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/halfpastcapitalism Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/druojajay

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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Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism 

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism 

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/HalfPastCapitalism 

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay 

Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

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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Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/HalfPastCapitalism

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay

Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

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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Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism  

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism  

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay  

Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

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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Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism

Subscribe on Youtube; https://www.youtube.com/c/HalfPastCapitalism

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay

Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

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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Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism

Subscribe on Youtube; https://www.youtube.com/c/HalfPastCapitalism

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism

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/
Follow @_artcoop on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_artcoop
and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_artcoop/ 

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Half Past podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism
Subscribe on Youtube; https://www.youtube.com/c/HalfPastCapitalism
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay
Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

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!  

LISTEN: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism

DONATE: https://patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism

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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Follow/support Half Past Capitalism:

   • Support HPC on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapit...

   • The Youtube show is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOkK5IDHxpJ3YBiOCBJttGg​​

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