 In the capitalist system, they've gotten ahead by having haves and have nots and making sure that the have-nots stay in their place and that the haves have the power, and so that's why I keep talking about needing to liberate ourselves from that. Capitalism and market economies have been really detrimental, especially to African-American communities, but really all what we call subaltern communities, communities that don't have the power, don't have whatever. Capitalism is about maximizing profit and the way you maximize profit is to minimize costs and what are your costs? Your costs are hiring human beings, paying for resources, et cetera. So if the human beings that you're hiring are people who first you just totally decimated because you took them from their homeland and made them slaves, then even when you quote unquote emancipate them, they're still at the mercy of the people who already have something. You need a job from someone, et cetera. So as long as you need a job from somebody else, that person gets to say what they're going to pay you, how they're going to pay you, and as I said, in capitalism, it's all about maximizing the profits or keeping all the costs low so that the person who does have a little bit of capital can make more of it. So if we want to look at that very specifically, we know that people of color, especially African-Americans, are usually the last hired, they're in the worst jobs. We know from COVID experience that we have underlying horrible health conditions, lack of access to health care. We also know people of color, particularly blacks, again, work more hours and get paid less and are still poor, have higher poverty levels. People say, oh, you have some millionaires and that kind of thing, but it's such a tiny little amount. When you look at the overall numbers and actually capitalism was built on racism and the slave trade, that's how the Industrial Revolution and capitalist system actually developed on this whole notion of division and hurting other people. So you really can't have a capitalist system if you don't have people to exploit and you don't have land to exploit. So that's why I say that capitalism and market systems, because they're all based on somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. And of course, the losers are the people that already have been either losers in the past or been deemed as not adequate or inadequate. Whereas the kinds of solidarity cooperative economics I'm talking about doesn't depend on losers. In fact, again, their whole purpose is for everybody to benefit and to find ways to solve community problems in ways that everybody benefits. Capitalist electric companies will not wire rural places for electricity because there's too much space between users and they can't make a profit. Pretty much our whole rural electric system in the United States is a co-op, is rural cooperatives, because cooperatives are not trying to make the profit by wiring people. They're trying to make sure everybody gets electricity. And so when everybody who needs electricity pools it to create a cooperative business that will get them electricity, then you can electrify everybody. You don't have to worry about the profits. And actually the rural electric co-ops have been very profitable, but they were able to both electrify and have enough surplus and other things left over that they do other things with their money. And now they're also trying to make sure everybody has wireless internet and things like that. So you can see once you have a different perspective, you can still do the economics. But in the capitalist system, they've gotten ahead by having haves and have knots and making sure that the have knots stay in their place and that the haves have the power. And so that's why I keep talking about needing to liberate ourselves from that. So when I talk about economics of abundance, again, actually it's a reference, it's an anti-capitalist reference, because in capitalism and what they call neoclassical economics, which is the theory that explains capitalism, the notion is that there's a zero-sum game that economics is about managing scarcity. And that's also why they talk about competition and this and that. The notion is that there are scarce resources that you have to figure out who's going to use them the best way. And that fair competition is what makes capitalism work, supposedly, and that if you have fair competition, you can figure out how to manage scarcity. But again, when you flip things over and when you look at economics as a human-centered people-centered solidarity, cooperative endeavor that's not trying to make excess profits, but it's trying to make life better, trying to make sure human beings survive and thrive, then there isn't scarcity because it's not one group trying to get all the power or make those maximized profits. It's about a whole bunch of people putting their heads together to make sure they can all survive and prosper. And so that's what we talk about in economics of abundance. There's an abundance. If you're thinking about economics as how people work together, how people reproduce themselves, produce things that will make their lives better, produce innovations that will help humanity, that's abundance. There's not a zero-sum game. There's not a scarcity there. When everybody's sharing, everybody's working together. They're pooling ideas, they're pooling resources, and they're creating enough for everybody. I like to talk about and actually I got the term from a colleague of mine, Curtis Haines, who's at Buffalo State University. He was the one who first started talking about economics of abundance, and I was like, oh, yes, that's exactly what we're looking for. That's the goal. And to me, it also helps us, again, to understand we're not talking about pitting people against each other. We're not talking about people having to fight over crumbs. That happens again in a capitalist system where you have people who take the spoils and run and leave everybody else with nothing. When you have people who are working together, they're looking at how they can do the best for everybody. And then also the other thing about cooperatives is you get the decisions for what to do, what to make, how to pay for it, what to do with it, even how to protect the ecology, how to protect human beings. All those decisions get made jointly in the interest of the common good, but also the decisions about what to do with the profits, with the surplus gets decided jointly. And worker co-op is employees own the co-op, and the co-op means that all the employees are co-owners and make the decisions together, run the co-op as well as work in it. So instead of having owners and board of directors who are separate from the workers, the workers are either the board of directors themselves or vote on the board of directors, and they're all, no, so the owners and the workers are all the same people. And in worker co-ops, you can see the decisions at the meetings, right? When you first become a worker co-op, especially if you've converted to one and were in a regular hierarchical capitalist business before, you're not even used to thinking like an owner. You're used to thinking like an employee who's got a scramble for as much as they can get. But as the years go by and as you have more and more meetings, people start to learn how to make decisions together, how to address conflict and use conflict as a way to make better decisions. They learn how to think about what's better for everybody. And they also learn how to decide things like, okay, we made this much profit this year. You know, we can distribute such and such amount of this percentage back in bonuses so our families do better, but we also can keep a certain amount in the business so the business will thrive and we'll do even better next year. And so people get to make those kind of decisions together. That's abundance, right? That's, and that to me is the goal of what economics should be. There's several benefits to co-ops addressing human and community problems in a way that's going to benefit the majority of people. So that's what we talk about co-ops being values-based and needs-based organizations. So most co-ops are formed because a group of people came together and had some kind of need or some kind of project they wanted to do. And so doing it together makes the community able to benefit from that thing. So that kind of community level benefits. The second thing is running an enterprise collectively and democratically means that people get to actually practice real democracy. It's not just superficial democracy. You vote for somebody or you have representative democracy. This is real direct democracy where people are learning to speak up, to be heard, to hear other people to listen well and to figure out how to come to decisions that are going to benefit everybody. So you have a bunch of different benefits from that that are actually what we call non-market benefits are not even necessarily always economic, but they're human benefits. So people learn how to make decisions together, how to come to consensus, how to work in groups, how to listen to other people. Again, the conflict resolution. So you have a bunch of those kind of skills and leadership development comes out of this. So people learn how to speak up, be part of a conversation, be part of decision making. The third piece is all that participation means you also need education. One of the other downfalls or problems with capitalism is there's what we call asymmetric information, meaning that people, the managers, and the owners have information that the employees don't have and that the managers and owners have information that they withhold from other people in the same business with them because they're trying to keep their edge or whatever. But again, in a co-op, everybody's sharing information again because that's what's gonna make the co-op strong. So you're sharing information about your industry. You're also sharing information just in terms of how to make decisions together and that kind of thing. So the education level is much higher in a co-op because more and more people are involved in all the different kinds of economic and industry decisions that have to be made. And so they have to learn those things. So they learn the level of education. I've talked a lot about, in some of my research, a lot about co-ops that are run by young people. One of the really important things about that is it helps keep them in school. It helps keeping them to understand the skills that they need so they understand why they need to know math because now they have to run their own company and they have to understand how to read the financial statements and how to make financial decisions. So math matters to them. Writing right matters because they have to be able to market their business. They have to be able to write about it. They have to be able to take minutes at a meeting, things like that. And so there's all kinds of skills that then get developed that normally people, especially workers, wouldn't necessarily have. And then I would say the final piece is how important co-ops and solidarity economics are to longevity, I guess I would say. Also because of the way they engage people and they're really about human relationships. We know that most of the data shows that cooperative businesses actually last longer than other small businesses and corporations. There was some data done about 10 years ago that showed that cooperatives, 80% of them last more than a year, whereas only about 20% of regular businesses last more than a year. And after five years, it's like 90% of the co-ops are still in business when only one or 2% of the regular businesses are in business. That longevity, stability is also important because then that also creates stable community asset. So those are some of the benefits of any kind of co-op. And then of course, worker co-ops have the most benefits because they're businesses that are run by the employees and help everybody who's a worker.