 There are short presentations about yourself that you sent to us. It's you. I think so. I don't think we did. Details about you to introduce you to me today. Um, I'm going to... It's your copy now. Okay. For sure. I'm really excited to see you here. Do you know who you are? Okay. Okay, these are the two in the... Okay, we're about to start. You can also sit on the front if you don't have enough space in the corner there. All right. So, welcome everybody. We are very happy to have you here for this other exciting session within our seminar series in Development Studies. We are also very honored to have Professor Michelle Williams and Dr. Vishvash Satgar that came all the way from South Africa for us. So, please welcome them properly. They will be talking about transformative politics and the solidarity economy. They will discuss in particular about a very hot topic like emancipatory alternatives to capitalism and whether the solidarity economy can actually represent a proper path to transformative politics. This talk draws on a book they are currently working on, which is based on six years of fieldwork across 13 countries. A project where they have worked on, like to study on worker cooperatives, worker cooperative-led economic networks and tried to develop a new theoretical approach to transformative politics. Michelle's work relates to social movements and alternative economic political systems. She has worked on a comparison in between India and South Africa, India on the state of Kerala. In her book, The Roots of Participatory Democracy, she has provided a comparison of the role of solidarity economies, labour and social movements in these two countries. She was a member of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa in between 2007 and 2011 and is now also the chairperson for the Global Labour University programme in South Africa at the University of Wodersrand, where she is also a senior lecturer. This bus is currently the executive director of the Cooperative and Policy Alternative and also a senior lecturer at the University of Wodersrand. He has worked for three decades as grassroots activists in South Africa, focusing on a wide range of issues, including the improvement of township communities, food sovereignty campaigns and campaigns around climate, jobs and popular democracy in South Africa. The talk will last about 40-45 minutes, then we will have plenty of time for a discussion, so we welcome your questions and we really hope you will engage with their talk. Just a few reminders before we start. If you haven't attended our seminars before, in case you want to tweet, our hashtags are saw as Dev Studies and ESRC. For your information, there is someone taking pictures that will be posted on our website. There will also be a sign-up sheet, I think, or yes, there. And the talk will be followed by a short reception in the staff-commer room upstairs. You are all welcome. So is there a microphone here? No. Can you hear me? Okay. All right, first let me just say thank you. Is that better? Can you hear me? Okay, great. Okay, first, thanks very much. It's an absolute honor and pleasure to be speaking at SOAS. In particular, thanks to Alfredo and Faizi who invited us and organized and dealt with logistics and we really appreciate the generosity and nature in which they did it. So thanks very much to them and to SOAS and Vishnara, delighted to be in London. I'm not sure we're delighted to be here in winter, though I hear it's a mild winter, but we're coming from sunny South Africa right now, so we're freezing a bit. But we're delighted to be here. We've divided the talk into two parts. The title of the talk is Transformative Politics and the Solidarity Economy. And basically the building blocks of the Solidarity Economy are worker cooperatives. So in the first part of the talk, I'm going to discuss worker cooperatives and then Vishnara's going to cascade up from this and talk about Solidarity Economies and transformative politics. I want to stress that our theoretical thinking is in deep conversations with our empirical work. The empirical work comes out of six years of field work in 15 different countries where we did over 300 interviews and have visited over 100 cooperatives, worker-owned factories and worker-owned enterprises of various types. We are currently, and we stopped, well, we're hoping we've stopped the research stage in November last year, 2015, but as most of you know, research seems to go on and on. But we're supposed to be writing, we have a publisher willing to publish our book, we really have incentive to get it written, and we're in the process of writing. This is the first time we're speaking about it publicly, so we really welcome feedback, questions, you know, engagement that will help us push our thinking further. Okay, in the first part of this talk, I'm going to go over worker cooperatives and I'm going to first talk about just what our worker cooperatives and then some of the exciting rethinking going on around worker cooperatives and then give you a few empirical examples of what I'm talking about in the theoretical sections. Cooperatives have figured very prominently in the left imaginations for over 150 years. Today, however, worker cooperatives are not just defensive struggles against capitalism, but what we're finding is that they're also prefigurative moments that lay the basis for a future egalitarian society based on democratic social organization. So we are rethinking worker control using ideas of power, the idea of the commons of democratic self-management and linkages with communities. Okay, so first, what are worker cooperatives? The most basic characteristic of a worker cooperative is the transformation of work at the point of production. So there are four main features of a worker cooperative and the first is that they meet member needs. This is one of the things that they usually have in their constitution. It's a primary definition. They meet member needs. The second is that they practice direct democracy at the workplace in which worker owners democratically make decisions based on one person, one vote. So not on shares, not on power, not on your place in the hierarchy, but one person, one vote. Three, workers collectively own the means of production, whether it's a factory, a farm, a bakery, or any other enterprise ownership. And it's interesting, there's been some experimentation with ownership, but historically collective ownership of the means of production has been a defining feature. And fourth, that worker owners collectively decide how surplus is distributed and how losses are managed. So in all the key features, there's collective democratic decision-making. So the idea of worker cooperative is that they challenge capital structural power at the point of production. They challenge structural power through their economic activity. And they also challenge our notions of labor beyond a wage earner who bargains over the price and conditions of work. And they do this by changing the way in which work is organized and owned at the point of production. So this has been vital and a hallmark of worker cooperatives. And today's worker cooperatives though are taking this further. So what we're finding in the rethinking of worker cooperatives today is that we have seen over the last few decades a new ethos and wider practices beyond the shop floor. Worker cooperatives today are not just looking to change the point of production. They are still doing this and it's obviously still crucial to them. But they are also transforming the wider social relations in which their enterprises are embedded. They are sinking linkages to other enterprises, communities and social movements and not just cooperative social movement, cooperative movements. They are looking to other movements as well. And they are doing this in an effort to create alternative economies in which we are calling the solidarity economies. So worker cooperatives still operate on principles and values of collective ownership, though as I said they have experimented with this from state ownership, social ownership, worker ownership, community ownership. So they have kind of experimented beyond just worker ownership but they are still collective ownership of some sort. They still practice one member, one vote, deliberative and democratic decision making but now they also include ethics of cooperation and solidarity. These principles take worker cooperatives beyond the individual enterprises to create flows of mutuality, solidarity and economic exchanges with other cooperatives. In linking up with communities and social movements they also take on broader issues such as the environment, social issues and developmental issues. So in contrast to capitalist enterprises that put profits at the center and work through hierarchies worker cooperatives today, genuine worker cooperatives today place human needs at the center of their activities even if they have to make profits to survive profits are a means to an end. They are not the end in themselves. And so the point is that profits for cooperatives are not the primary goal. And I think Mondragon's insistence that capital is at the service of labor, capital is at the service of labor rather than the capitalist formula which is that labor is at the service of capital is an example of a cooperative system placing human needs at the center of organization, the Mondragon example of labor, capital is at the service of labor. Many worker cooperatives are practicing without naming it the idea of the commons and I think actually it's fantastic she just walked in. Hilary Wayne writes work, helps us understand this when she highlights the central role of workers' creative capacity and envisioning and creating alternatives. Through their collective creative capacity worker cooperatives are re-embedding economic activity into the social realm. They are re-embedding the economy which in the larger social relations. And in this collective process the idea of the commons is vital. And the commons comes out of struggles against processes to commodify resources that have previously been held in common. And so worker cooperatives are engendering creative labor commons through their individual and collective creativity. And I think this is really well demonstrated again by Mondragon's knowledge commons. They have a knowledge commons. They have research and development centers and they have education and training programs that are all about common education, common knowledge, indigenous knowledge that kind of gets at this creative labor commons. What we're also seeing in worker cooperatives is that they do not primarily focus on activities they do not primarily focus their activities on defensive protests or disruptive protests but rather are engaged in creative forms of resistance through prefiguratively supporting alternatives. So for worker cooperatives the idea of symbolic power not just structural movement or direct power is increasingly important. And by symbolic power we mean struggles that are framed in such a way that wins broader support from the public even for issues that might not directly affect this public. So symbolic power seeks to build legitimacy both moral and discursive legitimacy and it's in the realm of the public. The law obviously can facilitate this but moral legitimacy is crucial in what they're after. So we see this in the recovered factories in Argentina where the cooperatives consciously build links with communities, they made films and hosted concerts, they run exchange visits in the cooperatives all in an effort to gain public support and legitimacy for their struggle. The symbolic power also facilitated emergence of solidarity economy relations. In this process classification struggles to define legitimacy are vital. For Bardu it is the elite and the state who engage in classification struggles. What we are suggesting is that worker cooperatives are also engaging in classification struggles that redefine the way work is organized, who a worker is, who makes decisions, the nature of work is very important for our work what constitutes an economy. So there is classification struggles from below and Bardu's work is all about classification struggles from above and that they don't happen from below and what we're seeing is that they're actually happening from below as well. Okay, so what I said is that what is especially noteworthy in today's experiences is that they're scaling up these isolated individual cooperative experiences that we've seen over the last 150 years but they're scaling this up now into solidarity economies which Vish is going to talk more about. Now I'm going to focus on a few empirical cases to flesh out some of these ideas and just to give you a sense of some of the empirical. So we decided there's been a lot of work done on Mondragon and the Argentinian factory, recovered factories. So there are cases that we have also in the book but we're not going to talk about them today. We chose less well known cases to give you some exposure to other places. Because of time, they're necessarily brief and just sketches of these places but we're happy to elaborate more in the questions. Okay, so now we're talking about pathways, basically worker cooperative pathways to solidarity economies. Case number one, Secca Sassola in Barquise in Mento, Venezuela perhaps best captures the importance of creating an alternative cultural value system that is engaging in classification struggles in an effort to build solidarity economy linkages. Secca Sassola started in the 1970s as a worker cooperative of 480 people that holds weekly cooperative markets. They link up with cooperative network system that brings together agricultural producer cooperatives in the rural areas around Barquise in Mento to the urban based worker cooperatives and in this process they've created a cooperative movement that includes clinics, laboratories for blood tests, insurance, savings and loans, a hospital and other cooperative markets so that throughout the entire city there's these cooperative markets. So today there are 60 organizations, 20,000 members and 1,000 worker owners who together make up a thick network of the Secca Sassola system. It has pioneered a processional understanding of individual collective and organizational creative learning based on trust and mutual cooperation. It spends a great deal of its time making decisions and all decisions are made collectively. This is just a schematic diagram to try to show what they, all the different types of overlapping decision making. So they start, they basically have all the different decisions get first made in small groups and they scale up to a collective bigger group so it's a very much process. It takes a lot of time but they value this a lot and they've nurtured values and a culture of solidarity and trust and self and collective growth and caring and sharing and these are the adjectives that they would use to describe themselves. It has also helped to create a solidarity economy among the cooperatives and this is really vividly demonstrated in the 2003 food crisis that Venezuela experienced. Barquisa Menta was the only region of Venezuela that did not have food, a food crisis. It actually was basically food secure throughout the entire food crisis in large part because of Secca Sassola cooperative network being able to feed people and not letting people hoard and making sure that they got food out to the necessary areas. So Secca Sassola demonstrates the solidarity economy success by redefining work and economic relations based on human needs, solidarity and trust as well as building a locally based regional network of production, consumption and finance based on popular ownership and control through democratic principles of self-management. So it shows the solidarity economy moving beyond isolated cooperatives it's not just these markets but actually scaling up into a movement based on interconnections and networks and basically creating solidarity economy linkages. My second case demonstrates a thick network of different cooperatives transforming both political and economic relations. So the Trentina cooperative movement in the northern Italian province of Trentina is an excellent example of a 100 year old movement creating a network of alternative forms of production, consumption and finance. Finance is always crucial what we have found for solidarity economies to emerge and thrive. Trentina was home to 600 cooperatives in 223 villages. Over 235,000 people are members of cooperatives which is 50% of the population so there's a very dense presence of cooperatives. There are 23,000 worker owners in 293 cooperatives 21,000 members, farmers in 101 cooperatives 1,000 retail members 108,000 members of banks and what's interesting in the 2008 crisis they were not affected at all because they never engaged the kind of financial markets at most other banks so they actually were secure and they had solid investments throughout the period, solid returns. Not over the top but solid. So over 80% of land in Trentina is owned and farmed collectively and the strength that the cooperative hits you at every turn. And what is interesting about Trentina is that it shows the importance of cooperative banks and cooperative supermarkets in creating pathways to the solidarity economy. Worker cooperatives are important but they're just one aspect of it. In every village square there are two central institutions where there are actually three but we focus on two. The two that we focus on are the cooperative bank and the cooperative store. The third one is the church but we weren't studying the church. And over 60% of its products, the store 60% of its products are sourced from the cooperatives in the region. The cooperatives feature in every sector of the economy for example 90% of agriculture consumed in the main town of Trento is produced by the cooperatives in the region that's 90%. There are 69 banks with 341 branches that provide 60% of total credit in the province and there is a central cooperative wholesaler that supplies the local cooperative shops and 38% of consumer goods are sold through cooperative stores. There's also through the shops 8% of all local cooperative agricultural produce including wine and cheese are sold so and the rest is exported to Italy and abroad. And so like many cooperatives the cooperative movement originally formed due to dire poverty in the region but now 100 years ago now Trentino is one of the wealthiest regions of Italy with some of the lowest inequality and what's interesting is the cleanest government in Italy as well and they think it has something directly to do with the cooperative and the kind of vibrancy of the population in Trentino. So central to its success has been creating alternative values that challenge capitalism's dominant values of competition and possessive individualism and allowed it to develop solidarity economy relations. From its very beginning it believed that cooperation is a universal value and insisted on tolerance and openness to all social religions and political formations. Okay now I turn to my third case that demonstrates solidarity democratic decision making a culture of sharing and commitment to community development. Yeah? Okay. In the southern state of Kerala India there is a remarkable 90 year old worker owned cooperative that is the oldest worker cooperative in India. Yurilungul labor contract cooperative society is a 2,000 member strong worker owned and worker controlled construction cooperative that has completed over 3,700 large infrastructural projects such as roads bridges and building complexes. Yurilungul has pioneered local level alternatives alternative production and epitomizes many of the qualities of the solidarity economy. These principles are encoded in the fabric of the cooperative and the primary objective of the cooperatives to service the interests of its members through secure, rewarding and well remunerated work but also to provide a service to the community through its public infrastructural projects. To do this it has pioneered democratic workplace organization, egalitarian redistribution, ecological approaches to resources and symbolic power in relationship to the state. At the center of its success is a commitment to participatory and direct democracy. In this you really have to appreciate is not something easy to maintain over 90 years and also such a complex organization that at any given time it has 80 construction sites happening simultaneously which could lead to the erosion of democratic decision making. But it's worked very hard to not let this happen so what it does at every construction site at the beginning of a project the workers elect a site leader, they have site meetings every day all the site leaders at all 80 construction centers meet every afternoon with the board and then there's weekly meetings and then there's monthly meetings with all the workers so there's constant process of democratic spaces for there to be real input. And interesting all board members have to be construction workers and have to they get assigned to a construction site and have to work at least one day a week at the construction site so they're very much linked to the construction process. The approach to the environment is really interesting with Eurolingual as it decided early on that it needed to own its own land to use in the construction process so it can mine queries and have many of the important inputs for construction. But what it does it has constant environmental impact assessments on its own land and when the land gets to a certain point it turns it into plantations which it uses then to plant food that it feeds the 2,000 members of the cooperative and the chefs are members of the cooperative as well so it feeds breakfast and lunch to all members but it also then provides food to local schools and it has the added advantage that it actually greens queries after they've been mined. It is also very aware of the importance of providing good public works it feels this is one of the things it provides to the community. It's in a highly competitive and corrupt sector and it's had 90 years of basically clean audits and no corruption but it also doesn't do the things that private contractors do of minimizing wages and cheating on materials. It sees its responsibilities to good public infrastructure as sacrosanct and so its assets or its competitive edge, what it would argue is that it has higher labor productivity and this is because it has really good skilled committed workers who are committed to finishing jobs on time but also to not wasting resources such as tar and metal cement and their cooperative successful completion of projects on time is on large part because of the workers themselves. So the cooperative says that its commitment of worker owners and not simply supervisors or managers is a major asset of the cooperative. The cooperative also exemplifies principles of solidarity economy when it comes to the community development in the rural areas. It has, because it owns queries, what it's also done is been able to use its raw materials to build rural schools that would normally rural schools, rural roads distribution stores old age homes, community centers and these are things that normally wouldn't be built or they wouldn't have access to. So it's built a lot of these things just in terms of giving back to communities and making sure they have the needs that they they need. So your Lungal cooperative provides an excellent example of principles of solidarity democratic decision making culture of sharing and commitment of community development. I didn't talk about all of those because I don't have time but take my word it does demonstrate these. So these examples demonstrate particular worker cooperative pathways to solidarity economy. They're different all of them are prefigurative practices involving new forms of power, the reproduction of the commons and democratic self-management. So they represent crucial alternatives within contemporary transformative politics that Vish will now talk about. Well, thank you to all of you for coming and braving the cold. But also thank you to the students for occupying and pushing back austerity. That's what's happening at our university as well. Students on the march. Well done. Thank you. Thank you to Faizi and Alfredo as well for having us and organizing but also thank you to the Rosa Luxemburg foundation that funded this research project and wants the book. So I'm just going to say a little bit about transformative politics and solidarity economies and try to situate the empirical. What's at stake in what we are trying to do? The first issue is about what it means to be anti-capitalist today. What is the identity of an anti-capitalist? What do anti-capitalists stand for? The other issue at stake is ontological. In capitalist reality, where do we look? Where do we understand change? Is it within the interstices of capitalism? Is it outside of capitalism? The third issue of course is how do we defeat this thing? Is it possible? It is so interpolated with who we are. It shapes our desires, our dreams. We are dependent on it and so on. Can we beat this thing? These are some of the issues that are at stake here. Now, I just want to briefly digress to say something about where this project comes from. I know Latin America has gained a lot of attention with the rise of an institutional left, a social movement, but this project comes from Africa. It comes from an attempt to rethink alternatives, rethink the post-national liberation left in the African context. This is an earlier book on the solidarity economy, reflecting on practice also from different parts of the world that we worked on. Hillary was one of the contributors to that book. The Democratic Marxism Series, which I edit and which comes out of South Africa, this is the second volume, is an attempt to also rethink and renew Marxist left and anti-capitalist perspectives. The other place this all derives from and emerges from is practice. These are activists from the South African food sovereignty campaign founded by the Solidarity Economy Network in South Africa, protesting outside our stock exchange and telling food corporations to leave our food system. They want space for another pathway. So, what are Solidarity economies? There are two ways of answering this question and the one is historical. In the 19th century we saw the emergence of modern corporatives. Here in the UK, you have the Rochdale pioneers. In the time of the Paris Commune, you also saw the emergence of worker corporatives and so on. But in that history in the 19th century there were two tendencies. There was also a transformative tendency that was reaching for something more. But there are also national histories that help us appreciate the emergence of Solidarity economies. In Brazil, from what we've learnt, it was runaway slaves that pioneered Solidarity in communities. In my own country mine workers in the 19th century formed burial societies to get dead mine workers back to rural communities and they use Solidarity for that. The other thing about Solidarity economies is that they are contingent anti-capitalist practices. Paul Sincher from Brazil talks about an alternative mode of production. It translates differently in different contexts. We talk about people's economies, at least during the military dictatorships in Latin America, that was the language used. It's also referred to as alternative economies and alternative civilization and so on. But it's in the making. It's in process. It's in the state of becoming. It is not a blueprint. It is not finished. And I think that's very, very important for us to keep in mind. It's located in contexts, in conditions, and in agency. It's about spaces within capitalism. So if you really look around us there are non-capitalist spaces and logics and so on at work. It is also outside capitalism. And, you know, we're living on a planet of slums. Feminism has taught us the invisibility of household labor. All outside capitalism. There's a lot of stuff outside of capitalism. And Solidarity economies are taking root in these spaces. There are also systemic alternatives that are based on values and institutionalizing values. The left of the 20th century, I believe, hasn't got it right to build institutions, okay? Alternative institutions. And I think if we look at the cases and we look at what has been achieved it's really about a new pattern and logic of production, consumption and spatial ordering and so on. So there are different institutional forms that come together inside the Solidarity economy. And this ranges from worker corporatives, barter clubs, cooperative banks, communal land associations, savings clubs, and so on. So a variegated kind of set of institutions. Now, where does transformative politics come from? Well, I'm glad Hillary is here because she's been one of the people that's been pioneering this idea. When I worked for the Labor Movement in South Africa one of the first books I read was on Lucas Aerospace. And then subsequently I read a book on arguments for a new left where transformative politics was linked to union politics and the search for alternatives. So it's an idea that emerges in the context of the global restructuring of capitalism. And, you know, we know the sins and we know the contradictions and I'm not going to belabor it in this audience. Financialization, commodification, regimes of primitive accumulation, and so on. So it actually is something that is articulated and expresses itself in the counter movement to all of this. In the cycle of resistance that has also accompanied the global neoliberal restructuring. And different people punctuate the cycle differently. I started the Caracazo in Venezuela in 1989 and then, of course, 94, the Zapatistas, 99, the rise of transnational activism 2001, World Social Forum and then 2011. Very, very important punctuation point in the cycle of resistance. But in all of this what we've seen is is an expression and articulation of alternatives, systemic alternatives. Participatory democracy, food sovereignty, climate justice, socially owned renewables, degrowth, universal basic income grant, climate jobs, right to information, de-globalizing of finance. I mean, when all is said and done, I mean, this basically means we can have a better world and a better society and a better civilization than what we have. And these alternatives have come to the fore. And solidarity economies and worker corporatives are one of these systemic alternatives. Now, sorry, it's important for us to keep in mind a few distinctions. Because on the horizon are also competing narratives and propositions that are imilirative. And there are three I just want to spend some time on. The first is philanthropy. And, you know, we've seen the rise of billionaires and foundations and so on. And of course, the old anthropological idea of gifting and giving. But even notions of horizontal giving have been brandished and presented to us as one way forward. A more human face to things. The other is the social economy. But again, I must use it in a very guarded way because in Europe, social economy has particular inflections in Quebec. I would argue it's much more solidarity economy, but the language of social economy is used. But in the context of neoliberal restructuring, social economy is considered a residual third sector. Very much functional to the logic of capital. And then, of course, there's a localization discourse. Your transition towns in the UK. So you aggregate all these little alternatives and you have one big alternative. But localization discourse is a blind to power. They are blind to class and so on. So the new anti-capitalism that's emerging is very, very important for how we think about transformative politics. It's very much post-vanguardist. When I talk about post-vanguardist, I mean it's very different from the sovietized centralized monopoly of power that was there in communist parties in the 20th century. It's very different from the national liberation movements and the patronage machines they developed. But it's also very different from the technocratic practices of social democratic parties. It's also not state-centric. There's clearly a different understanding of power. Power is not sitting in some building. You smash the building and then you rebuild. There's a very sophisticated understanding of how power works in the new anti-capitalism and you've got to constitute power. Different forms of power that Michelle spoke to. Symbolic, movement, structural, etc. It's deeply anti-authoritarian and there's an awareness of process. There's an awareness of how we deliberate and how we make decisions. And it's actually living the alternative now. There's a utopian imagination at work. And this is not utopia in the idealistic sense or in the derisive sense. It's a utopian imagination that is looking at historical material possibilities in the here and now for us to move forward in a different direction, different pathway. And then of course the subject of history is a big issue in the new anti-capitalism. Is it the precarious? Is it the outsiders of capitalism? And I think in this project that we are journeying on, we are increasingly leaning towards the notion of the outsiders of capitalism as the subject of history. The millions that are living in the planet of slums. The unemployed and so on. The permanently unemployed that are never going to get jobs again. So solidarity economies and worker corporatives are located within the new anti-capitalism and this new imagination and conception of politics. It is a transformative politics that is also anchored in a very important premise. That capitalism today has reached a historically unprecedented place. It is experiencing systemic crises of accumulation. Now generally we think that capitalism has all the fixes. It is flexible, it is adaptable and it wins all the time. But given what is converging today in the gridlock of financialized chaos which is systemic, climate change, oil peak, food crises, securitization and hollowing out of democracy. Capital today is a geological force. It is shaping everything. All the conditions of life on planet earth. But it is driven by a systemic logic of imperial ecocide. In other words it is destroying everything at the same time. It is undercutting itself. And I think this is a very, very important premise for transformative politics as anti-capitalist but also systemic politics. But I don't want to talk about it as though this is anti-strophism. That it is all going to come to a grand end. Or on the other hand that it is just going to fall flat and something new is going to come out of that. It is clearly going to be around. And it is resilient and it is strong in some ways and weak in other ways. But it is clearly I would argue an end game stage of capitalism which further underpins and underlines the imperative of building systemic alternatives to exit the systemic contradictions that are there. That are part of this logic of ecocide, of destruction of everything. So the crux of transformative politics is the banner, slogan, system change or systemic reforms. So we are really in the interstices, in the interstitial spaces, in the outside of capitalism building something different. This is my last slide. So what does this mean concretely? What are the strategies of transformative politics? And Alfredo and I were having this exchange about the dead end of the PT and the ANC. And what is it? Is it still about reform versus revolution? Which was very much the 20th century Mehmed, the idea of what left politics is all about. Reform has reached its limits and it has been assimilated into neoliberalism. Revolution has a lot to answer for. We produced a lot of tyrannies through this kind of politics. It has to reflect, in a self-reflex way about its own horrors and so on. So we are talking about a different kind of politics and it's a politics that's transitional. It relates to us going beyond capitalism and really rethinking another way of sustaining life, a logic to sustain life, a post-productivism. It's not just growth and it's not just endless accumulation and so on. But what are the strategies to get us there? So very quickly four strategies of transformative politics in which we locate solidarity economies and particularly worker corporatives. The first strategy is to build from outside of capitalism. And this is where food sovereignty economies become important. In the context of the society I come from, where 14 million people go to bed hungry. You build a food sovereignty economy in a township community that is about producers controlling that economy and consumers controlling that food economy. You are building something that's alternative to a corporate control food system. It's outside of capitalism. You're building worker corporatives outside of capitalism amongst the unemployed, socially owned renewables coming together in communities and putting up their own infrastructure renewable technologies, the cyber commons these are all practices and these are all systemic alternatives that can be built from outside of capitalism. We can build from within capitalism and go beyond capitalism. So this is another transformative strategy worker run factories in Argentina symbolic and represents this kind of strategy. So we were there in October recently, our third visit and we were in a workshop with various people and the number of worker run factories has grown to 300 now in the context of the 2008 crisis hitting Argentina and so on. In 2001 they were about 200 worker run factories and they are more networked, they are more connected and so on. Reclaiming the public university so what you are trying to do here what the students at my university are trying to do with the fees must fall movement reclaiming the public universities building from within and going beyond capitalism. Okay. Corporative banks, another example of that where you de-globalize finance and you relocate it in the hands of members and then of course the third strategy is pushing back capitalism from above and I'm sorry to my anarchist friends I still think the state is important and I do think that the state particularly the state that's been remade in the context of Latin America the new constitutionalism we've seen in Ecuador for example in which there's green citizenship, there are ecological rights and so on. These things are also very very important to push back capitalism alongside first and second generation civil and political rights and socioeconomic rights and so on. These are very very important participatory planning and bringing the state in to play that role. So in Kerala a lot of de-centralized planning going on in villages etc. which have enabled this undergrowth of amazing corporatives including enabling and facilitating Uralangals work. Regulation is very very important. Worker corporative laws are important. Corporative bank laws are important. Laws to demarcate spaces for a solidarity market. When we were in Brazil a few years ago activists were talking about well we have fair trade but we want our own market inside Brazil for the solidarity economy. And then of course the last and final strategy is transnational solidarity and this is really about movement to movement exchanges so in all the world social forum spaces we've sat in and learned from there have been many many exchanges of ideas on practice on theory on concepts and diffusion happening in this way between movements and then of course state to movement relationships. When the worker run factories emerge in Argentina and then eventually when Chavez rises in Venezuela what's interesting is that the Chavistas invite the worker run factories to come to Venezuela and they have numerous exchanges around what's happening in worker run factories to learn lessons to draw them out for for their own project. But having said all of this there are still massive challenges and their limits around all of this which I'm not going to get into. Thank you. Okay, so thank you very much Michel and Vishbas for this very theoretically and politically inspiring talk. We now look forward to reading your book and sharing it with our students so let us know when it's finished I will now open the floor to your questions we will take rounds of three and we will give them the chance to answer. Please One there. Two and three. Fine Okay. My question is really about there's a lot of things you mentioned that you might gain from such a solidarity, such a justice as a democracy that will lead to more equality and stuff like that but I wonder if you've also thought about this thing you might lose by stepping away from a capitalist such as productivity looking at a global population or an example that I just came up with pharmaceutical I mean far from defending the pharmaceutical industry as it is at this point but it takes a lot of gaps to develop a type of drug that helps putting out diseases how would you tackle this kind of situation Okay. There is a request here for people to introduce themselves before you ask your questions so please if you can say who you are what was the second here Hi, my name is Jared I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the idea that so much emphasis on worker co-operatives do not feel that sometimes full victim to kind of small minded thinking and very much the only needs and wants are really only those focused on those that they work with and they're kind of geographically kind of situated there as well looking beyond workplace Hi, my name is Sofa I'm from Queen Mary usually she and I in fact I just had my fly by this morning congratulations I was talking very similar to this actually so I'm very excited to be here I have a question for Michelle as I understood you was describing a shift or maybe I misinterpreted you I'm not sure in either the co-operative movement or the co-operative movement literature towards some kind of increasing fliticisation or solidarity or something like that so my question is within co-op theory or within the co-op movement if there is one and what might have caused this shift is it a kind of is it a case that co-ops are organising more and have coordinated the shift or is it just a trend that you've observed Please, we can start answering this three Oh, start with these, okay I'll do a pharmaceutical Okay, go first we're not really going to divide we'll just speak to whatever so the first thing about what you might lose I'll let Vish speak more to that but the pharmaceutical is a good example of how very large very wealthy corporations control it and it doesn't actually get to a lot of people I mean we know that in the global south very much Taiwan is a great example of a state that tried to actually get involved and they ended up becoming the research and development wing of these major corporations because they just couldn't break into this so I mean I think that something like that would actually require very strong state involvement and probably wouldn't be done by worker co-ops but actually would be so this is where Vish was saying the state is still important, there's these mixes and I think that but it doesn't have to be based on capitalist relations and I think Taiwan's experience actually really captures what's wrong with it and how hard it is to get in and then the global south the end users who don't get it unless we just make illegal generics okay on can worker co-opers fall victim a small mindedness I mean that's an interesting thing so what we've seen that's certainly the shift that I was trying to describe and it definitely was a shift is that historically they very much were about their isolated enterprises at the point of production and what we're seeing now is they're realizing to survive they need to be more than that I mean Mondragon made this point very strongly because you know they've been critiqued often that they're still operating within a capitalist economy and stuff and they were saying you know every linkage we can we make you know give us alternative economies we're trying but they're very aware of this it's not to say every single co-op we interviewed over 300 people and went to over 100 co-ops so there were some that were more inward looking but it was quite extraordinary how many actually were making linkages beyond their own isolated enterprises I mean that's what we empirically found and that goes directly into sofa's question this is I said at the beginning that our theoretical work is very much in engagement with our empirical this is what we saw it's not in co-op theory it's actually what we saw completely and at first we weren't sure what to make out of it but there is this shift I mean and they are talking I mean maybe this is a positive side kind of globalized relations but there's very much an awareness that they need to actually make these linkages they need to embed the economy in larger social relations so it was it's completely out of the empirical work that we were theorizing these things I mean just on the point of inward looking co-operatives by themselves little islands they can degenerate very easily or they can try and maintain some kind of survivalist presence in difficult situations but I think what we've been learning from the empirical and from the practices that we've observed is that the moment they start reaching out replicating the moment they start working with others networking and so on a completely different logic takes over now you know if these are serious co-operatives it will be inbuilt into the DNA of how they function they wouldn't just be inward looking they would look to make connections and so on and that's very crucial to the solidarity economy the point about what we lose with capitalism I mean I think there's two sets of issues here I mean the one is we all have to come to terms with the ecological limits of capitalism today and that means existentially we really have to ask some very serious questions about the quality of life what is a good life what is a happy life the progress and the wealth that's been achieved of capitalism cannot be reproduced in the same kind of way so that's one big issue that we have to grapple with is that we are not arguing for an anti-technology view or we are not arguing against institutional progress and so on I mean not everything in capitalism belongs to capitalism so let me give you an example of what I'm talking about the displacement of indigenous agroecological farming is a very serious battle line on the planet right now and what's happening there is that despite the expansion of transnational agriculture and so on you still have a billion people that are hungry, 2 billion food insecure despite the high yields and the expansion of this Frankenstein on the other hand you have indigenous farmers like La Via Campesina 200 million peasants and so on who are protecting biotic resources their seeds etc and in that way they are continuing to feed almost two thirds of the world's population so in Africa for example we have a food policy group at the university and we've been looking at how food economies work in Africa it's amazing just north of the Limpopo most major towns and cities are actually fed by small scale farmers in Africa but yet of course the retail chains are coming in, the large corporations are coming in etc so I think there's something to think about there and how we go forward okay so Alessandra three and then another round please Alessandra thank you so much that was pretty inspiring in the background our message of solidarity for your student movement has been greatly inspired for us as well as the one in Delhi and in so many other places I guess my question relates to knowing a bit more about some of the GCC sketch in terms of particularly the political conditions the initial conditions that you feel they're just set the terrain for some experiments which are successful and some others and I'm thinking about the 28th in Italy myself it's a region that is flooded with money because it's what we call special statutes region which we try to buy off by border areas that wanted to belong to another state in a nutshell by just inflating a huge amount of money that went in different places so I'm not surprised that you will have this and so in a sense there are conditions in your own work that you find among conducive and others that perhaps have to go to look outside the cooperative experiment itself and related to this when we talk about the different institutions that are crucial for cooperative I'm wondering also if we can also say something about the desirability or lack of desirability of different institutions because again you did not mention the church or we shall mention the church that is in terms of the exclusionary politics that can permeate certain cooperatives that might even have an anti-capitalist message but still are built on institutional and non-informal might still not be after progressive politics so I'm wondering in your different cases what you can say about diversity thank you my name is Sarah my two short questions first is related to what is the relation between leftist organizations, political parties and these cooperatives like what are the most interesting examples I mean I know a communist party who didn't piner a hundred years old cooperative but for instance in Venezuela was there a relation between them also in terms of like this cooperative influenced like political perception of the population there and the second question is about like workers who are not traditionally understood workers but they have cooperatives for instance as far as I know there is a big cooperative in India from basic figures like and this is an interesting example it can be had in similar ways or they have their own characteristics I used to think that the traditional development sector during this in India is what role could they play in reimagining and young in doing something new something different in this state okay okay great all great questions partly why I chose the three cases is to show that they're very different political trains so there's not one I mean Vish said there's no blueprint and so we see it in variety I mean what's interesting about Trentino it wasn't the wealthiest province when it formed it was the poorest 100 years ago it was actually widespread dire poverty it's interesting we see co-ops and solidarity economy linkages coming from two sectors one it's either survivalist what we see often in Africa but and then often in the global north especially in the last 40 years what you see are kind of middle class people who want an alternative life so you see those two but Trentino and just like the Basque country they actually were poor when they started so it actually might help explain some of the dynamics today but it doesn't help explain its emergence but that doesn't really get to the conditions that you're asking and I think that what we saw is that there's a huge variety and this links to your question as well that some are actually able to work with a state when we were just in Argentina we were very surprised to see that the worker run factories have been able to actually push the state to provide some kind of supportive mechanisms and for example one of the things that they did the unions had won a a kind of condition or concession from the state that instead of laying off workers in factories that the state would then help companies in distress by giving them six months to a year wages rather than laying off their workers right so what the worker run factories did is they actually pressurized the state and said hey we need that too so they actually got the state involved but in other places the state has been completely out of the the realm and hasn't been present at all in Trentino it's interesting because the state wasn't ever very involved and it was the power the structural power of the cooperative movement that got the state to actually they were able to pressurize the state and get the state to then be supportive and then they've taken over some of the social functions of the state by social cooperatives in I mean the question around so you know about leftist organizations and co-ops it's interesting I mean the communist party in Kerala is very supportive of these kind of things in fact when it was in power in the I think it was the 70s it passed a law that basically said any of these infrastructural state projects that a cooperative bids for if it's within 10% of the lowest bid it has to be given the chance to compete and it actually the state the local government has to give the work to the cooperative so they've actually been able to they've been supportive of the cooperatives partly because the cooperatives have actually shown like the Uralungul as I mentioned it hasn't had any corruption it hasn't it has actually delivered every it's never not delivered on a project and has very close to on-time delivery so it has a good reputation so it's but then you have places that the left isn't that interested and you have places where so Secasa Sola is an example that it completely did this outside it started in the 70s and was not in a progressive space in Venezuela at all but yet they actually started building these this is one of the examples of outside of political structures but also in many ways outside of the main capitalist structures it was by progressive highly educated middle class who linked up and this goes back to the role of the church a radical liberation theologist priest who actually had organized the rural areas into cooperatives and it was these work these rural producer cooperatives linking up with the progressives in the middle in the urban areas that created the perfect kind of vortex of conditions to create an alternative local economy and that links to the role of we said we didn't look at the church partly because in Trentino what was very interesting is that unlike other areas of Italy it didn't it from early on said we're not going to get divided between the communists aligned the red aligned co-ops and the white the church aligned and they were tolerant of all and they've worked positively with the church in so many places that we've seen the church Catholic radical liberation theologist Catholicism has been very supportive of many of these initiatives but it's not the church as in the Vatican it's local priests on the ground who have been very progressive and pushing these alternatives is what we've seen I'll let this talk about the waste pickers and the development the traditional development sector I mean I think that's a really interesting question and you know I mean one of the things we talked about is we focus on the solidarity economies but we when we talked about this had the slide that talked about transformative examples and then ameliorative I mean we would put these development things often in ameliorative case right so they're not trying to transform capitalism but they are trying to make deal with the effects and negative externalities of capitalism and that's important that's absolutely important for the immediate term it might not get us beyond it but it is important for the immediate as you're building these alternatives so you know I think it's what we've seen as it's context specific Oxfam South Africa I think is more progressive than Oxfam UK I don't know if there's any Oxfam UK here but what we've seen is that certainly the South African they I mean they invite us they want to hear these things there's you know some space there from traditional so I think it depends probably on the local conditions and which probably can say more because he's worked a lot more in these spaces and against these spaces okay I mean I think you've covered it I mean I think I think NGOs funders and so on I really trying to understand the front line where to position themselves given the nature of crises today I mean I was invited to a meeting by the not the birth foundation was the other one one of these big billionaires trusts and they have a lot of money and they don't know where to put their money basically okay and well I was talking about the crises of capitalism and this is what's going on in the world you know and I don't know if that went down well but these are the honest discourses we need to start having if we want to start reimagining from within those spaces the stakes are very high in the world we're living in today I mean on the waste pickers I mean I think it's again context specific we interviewed a lot of waste pickers in Brazil we met waste pickers in Argentina I mean most of them have embraced the worker cooperative model and I think how this gets institutionalized is determined by various conditions so you know we've seen big massive worker corporatives that have very complex internal decision-making structures deniations of policy-making and strategic decision-making and complex divisions of labor and so on but we've also seen much more simple ones and that's been some of the life world of waste pickers that we've encountered I mean obviously it also depends on where they fit into the whole context of the waste value chain what's going on there the conditions, the dynamics, how they are able to leverage their own structural and movement power to open up spaces and lots of conflict and contestation happens there with others on the question of parties and movements just to say this that in the 20th century a very state-centric vision of development took hold you know whether it was national liberation or soviet or social democratic and in many ways it displaced the autonomy of corporatives and corporative movements some of the movements we've researched kind of existed on the margins of some of that and nurtured their own identities their own institutional capacities and so on and so on but as we know I mean we're living in a time now where the state is being remade I mean Africa has had over 300 structural adjustment programs and the control of corporative movements has gone it's opening up different kinds of spaces for agency in villages and communities in Africa and to re-shape and reimagine corporatives which takes parties which takes controlling influences away in Argentina we saw a very complex situation from left groups raising the flag for some worker corporatives to the unemployed people's movements raising the banner on some corporatives trade unions the metal workers union raising the banner on some worker run factories and so on so very complicated in how those relationships unfold so we have two rounds one, two and three and then these other questions please some of them are rural corporatives but the food doesn't get to the city because the distribution is controlled by tablets and the whole question of how much solidarity economy is like a conscious recreation of the value change not a commodity change and it just seems to me that the whole question of food is going to be a kind of very interesting what you're saying about that I mean are there urban groups trying to construct urban situations that seems to me to demand a very conscious strategy rather than just it's just that it's got to link the city with the urban side the first question the way in which corporate systems are taxation thank you where was the third, there I had it on me from my alumni school of economics university I've got a bit of a dilemma really I don't know what my dilemma is this I don't know whether you've thought about this whole view issue around new technology and job discussion so if you bring that into the analysis is it threat or opportunity or corporate to network and solidarity great okay I'll go again can you go yeah I mean the issue on food sovereignty you're exactly right and that's what makes it so exciting it's not well known it's 10 hours from Caracas it's exactly because they linked urban cooperative markets to rural cooperative production and they got rid of the capitalist agriculture production line and it success and what it did instead of growing itself it helped foster a lot of other cooperatives throughout the whole city making these linkages so there are a number of these rather than them themselves becoming much bigger that's exactly what that case tries to and that's when we would say it's solidarity economies when they start making those linkages if it's just worker cooperatives in the rural areas not making the linkages it's potential to become solidarity economies but it's not yet solidarity economies and so that's exactly right that's what we wanted to get across so co-op actors and co-opted and reshaped by the state you know so some of our earlier work we wrote a couple things we wrote a popular thing where we were also showing a lot of the weaknesses and the problems and then we were kind of disappointed so we widely those things were cited to give examples how these things can't work and then we thought oh shit this is not what we meant we want to actually be honest and like show that there are challenges and there are very real challenges but then we did a popular manual which is on co-op co-packs web page that's just about 20 successes in Africa look at they work trying to actually say these things do work we've seen lots of co-optation especially we've just mentioned over 300 structural adjustment programs on the continent what you had is you had very strong environment cooperative movements in many places on the continent and through structural adjustment or through state socialism of the post liberation periods they were killed so these two dynamics one of the two killed almost all of them now they're trying to re-emerge and many some are doing great some are struggling I mean it's really hard to re-emerge so we started a market environment that we're now in so unless they have state support they're not they often struggle but we didn't talk about that because this book isn't about that without denying that there's challenges and we do talk about challenges but more challenges around how linking up into these solidarity economies into transformative politics rather than the isolated individual enterprises I'll just talk about the relation because he sat for eight years on the Department of Finance Cooperative Banks Development Agency so he can talk very specifically about some of your other questions the issue of new technology it's really interesting and it's not something we've totally come to terms with I mean part of the exciting part is the commons that gets created the cyber commons, the knowledge commons and that's what we're seeing and that's a very exciting part but you know what's interesting as Mondragon is a very good example you can see this wonderful diagram over the last 30 years as the manufacturing sector has mechanized and in most capitalist enterprises employment has gone down and Mondragon they've also mechanized but employment has consistently gone up so they've been able to still create jobs different types of jobs but they're using technology not as a way to eliminate labor but to maybe make them more efficient and competitive without eliminating labor and in Kerala the Uralungo Construction Cooperative they also have been able to mechanize and what they've had to do is retrain but what it's been so successful that it's not just the second generation they've been around 90 years the kids now are educated they're no longer construction workers they're engineers and architects and all sorts of things so what the co-op has done it's also now taken on many more functions the board still has to be a construction worker so it maintains worker control because they don't want the young educated kids coming in just dominating but they do actually they've used the mechanization and stuff to re-skill existing they educate existing or also creating more functions within the cooperative itself so that's another example where they've kind of creatively tried to engage and this might have more to add to that I mean I think the technology issue is a dynamic in capitalism and it does displace and so on and probably we're going to see more of that but I think it's in this context we cannot think about the solidarity economy and worker cooperatives in isolation from other systemic alternatives I think this is where we got to start talking about the basic income grant in our societies and so on I mean how do you reproduce life I mean once you break that link on wage earning you cannot reproduce yourself as a human being we are all wage dependent if you like so we got to start thinking about those kinds of things but on the positive side I mean we've seen numerous instances of how Michelle's mentioned Mondragon technology in a particular way consistent with its philosophy but we've also seen other examples of how technology has been harnessed to ensure that that cooperatives are more efficient and they're able to work better and so on I mean in the US context we came across some very exciting cooperatives worker run cooperatives in the Bay Area for example and they've brought in serious technology in the bakeries for example and they've brought in web pages they've brought in all kinds of creative social media stuff to embed to re-embed those institutions so you can harness the new technology differently it doesn't have to be the negative the other quick point is that in South Africa where we're trying to build a cooperative banking system the big debates we've had is because the banks are wanting to capture the unbanked we've had big debates about how do we position cooperative banks in South Africa to work with ATMs and get on to this big IT infrastructure and so on and we've pushed government to a point where yes it's going to invest so that cooperative banks in South Africa are on the ATM system in the country and so on so all those things are not inconsistent if you like with dynamic robust corporatives the taxation issue I mean I think in South Africa again it comes down to the power of capital and the corporate tax rate company tax rates I mean those things have been coming down consistently and I'm sure in this country as well and other places in the world and there's always been a push at the same time to push up tax rates for SMEs and corporatives and they conflated with that and so that's been the debate in South Africa and I think that the tax issue is important I mean some of the debates that have been happening around local economic development also relate to how can you resource and enable and facilitate corporatives differently providing spaces for them to incubate and emerge and find a pathway providing certain resources for them so it may not there might be financial taxation on one side but there might be other enabling conditions that the state also creates for dynamic emergence of these institutions what else I mean my final point is that the state is not just shaping corporatives today it's also corporative movements themselves the international corporative movement in the world the international corporative alliance is the voice is the is the platform of corporatives in the world it claims a billion people on the planet belonging to corporatives and so on but it is not a dynamic radical corporative movement I was invited to engage this scenario planning when they came to South Africa a few years ago and my intervention was why doesn't the ICA work with La Via Campesina why doesn't the ICA work with the emerging climate justice movement but I just saw in the newspaper the other day the ICA was at the World Economic Forum so there's all of these issues that we also got to think about that are shaping corporatives how many we have we will have a last round so all these questions please if you would like to go online I have a university supported water movement in Mexico and I was just wanting to mention really quickly two phenomenon there that are really important that I was just wondering if you could help with water context one is across Latin America probably I suppose in the world there's a local ownership management of water systems outside of any sort of urban area and the way that this is and they're not always called corporatives but this is the way that users and the local inhabitants are controlling any basic resource is a route for this prefigurative process and another one in Mexico is a phenomenon that I don't know people know about it outside but when the Army took over the system in the center of the country since then there's been a struggle on the part of that union which has as part of it converted itself into a cooperative and it's just recently gotten ownership of 100 of the major workplaces and will be generating electricity as a cooperative in the central Mexico and this breaks all the old lift it just breaks a lot of stuff and they've done this by being incredibly out there on national issues and supporting other movements and just by working with users, electrical worker users in a payment strike saying nobody has a contract for this private company that got there to the military so I'm just wondering if these kinds of when you're talking about the new new emergence of forms where we're kind of having something that's been brewing into new kinds of spaces and the new kind of forms yeah literally way back from the plan and so it's been a brilliant talk and really taken a lot of things that I mean think about the way forward in the example because you know in a way that's so interesting so my question is rather it's very sort of a modest low key and it's really to do with the idea of pathways of transition and transformation and the idea of potential you know I'm living now in Manhattan and I find my daily life I'm just having constant experiences of spaces and pathways so without one of all you know I fight when I go in the mud get my bike sorted says on the front you know ride a bike and be free you say you know your mudguard broke and they mend it and they then can't do certain things but you know and then they'll say slightly not so much but they'll say we're working with people so I haven't yet interviewed about where do they get their money and why aren't they co-operative but in a way that's basically a question of how well there are many other examples of social spaces social initiatives I wouldn't call them social enterprises because that's got further different resonance but they're not exactly co-op you know it would be interesting to try and sort of assert them but this you've raised to me in the context of Corbyn and the new possibilities maybe is what can be done now by the sort of quasi movement of how we figure you know the kind of support that they could give so I feel a bit nervous could I try saying to them why don't we don't talk to all these guys all these social initiatives and say well you know get no more about them and also say well what could a Corbyn government do what you're doing how could it spread it in a sense when you talk about kind of small mindedness I mean there's two sides of small mindedness it's also the nature of the wider environment and the way you could say that a lot of the left has been self rather if not small minded but rather closed so pathways of potential and so this raises questions of what role the agency in bringing out this potential of clearing the space and you know you talked about co-operatives as pathways into transition well what about these messy social enterprises which are not I mean I don't quite categorise their plants character I mean they are mostly somewhere probably people a bit on the outside precarious that reasons to be ethical and what are meaning in their lives so doing something that both something good at bicycles or you know software tech but I thought there is a kind of generational of people young people particularly but not just who are trying to take initiatives in their daily lives economic that are prefigurative so what is the potential there what would the prefigurative political movement be like to enable that potential to be that's your mundane question I said and that's your mundane question morality because I was wondering as you were pushing towards scale and creating linkages and creating the economies I wonder whether the trust that bonds you know on a smaller scale gets lost and then with sort of the other side of the with elites and people taking leadership and sort of creating these linkages and growing in these cooperative movements I mean do these elites then you know observe the movement so have you seen examples of that scale sort of you have grew that trust and because of you know the desire to grow as an economy you know you had to create some vanguards and sort of then around the trust so maybe have any examples or sort of anybody else yeah okay so these are the last two please my question is about the linear calculator to discomfort about who waits on a cooperative it's not wrong it started at the time of Sangam in the 1920s also started by people from youngsters who were inspired by the teachings of an anti-caste leader called so it's more coming back to the question of Alessandra about the political context of such a function so in the movement from Sangam to a cooperative I'm just wondering what happened to the caste thing are we talking about it at all I find it quite interesting that the children have now moved on to other occupations so is there a kind of caste component there what kind of mobility have they had so I feel it's difficult to talk about just the cooperative and disconnecting it from its history particularly from members who are economics so thank you for this inspiring about that I was thinking about initiating the situation in China so my question is what kind of environment will be conducive to these alternative initiatives besides the political space or is this thing the population in college and initiated has to be inclusive in the environment so that it can become a solidarity movement so that it can create to start to create images so in that case if isolated can they develop or other words if so if population ecology is important for this environment of this movement I believe a new future of this alternative movement in certain regions in the world I don't know let's try the examples of Mexico I think it's exciting that's the whole idea of the commons Germany has also taken back ownership of electrical spaces I didn't know about the Mexican one we were in Mexico in 2010 or 2011 we hadn't heard about that so that's very exciting and it's great to hear there's other examples socially owned renewables that's a very popular concept in South Africa among the metal workers union actually is really championing it which is quite astounding given that it's a union from a dirty industry manufacturing actually trying to get the government to retool and say let us be at the forefront of socially owned renewable energy the government is not really listening but they're actually doing a lot of good stuff and trying to get the ideas out there so there's lots of examples like that that's exactly what we're trying to get at Hillary, pathways, potentials, your daily spaces your life is always exciting it seems so yeah how to prefigure I don't know how to answer this this is a conversation we'll have over a drink because I think it's so complicated we don't know the answers we couldn't say how exactly for movements to prefiguratively get the state to engage them but I think actually the solidarity economy form in Brazil is instructive in this way in that they were able to get the Brazilian state to form a solidarity economy secretariat but they said on the condition that the secret of the kind of membership are from the solidarity economy form and most importantly the secretary of the secretariat so the director of the secretariat they choose not the state and the state first felt uncomfortable about this because normally the state likes to appoint its own people and that was the condition and they chose Paul Singer as their who comes out of the movement and then what was very interesting as soon as he became part of the state they told him now don't come to our meetings we trust you so it's interesting it's engaging them but if you're going to engage them you got to listen to them and I think that might be prefigurative stuff so Vish might have more to say on that I haven't really thought about the role of migration we have I can't remember who asked that question but what we did here in many places like in Brazil many of the exciting stuff that was going on there was from early migrants from Scandinavian countries and we've seen this in various places that there'll be links to places that had some kind of collective histories but in terms of we haven't I don't think we've we've actually come across a lot of these cooperative or solidarity economy enterprises that have primarily been out of issue areas of migration thanks but something we need to actually think more about and I haven't thought about it Vish may have this issue of trust and legitimacy and morality and the issue of growing on scale I think there's two things one about trust that's within the cooperatives themselves it's about trusting each other the issue of morality and the public power is about getting the public out there to somehow align with your with your endeavors and we haven't from the ones we've seen we haven't actually seen the problems that you're talking about I mean, Secas de Sole is 20,000 members and yet they remain committed to this incredibly elaborate laborious processional model you know I mean they said in 30 years their record meeting lasted three weeks most of their meetings actually last an entire day because they won't jeopardize that you know I mean it takes an incredible amount of a stamina and personal growth to be able to to engage that and middle class members definitely let go they were not the leading lights any longer you know the examples we made they've actually really been very conscious of not letting that happen and I mean to the original point we kind of self-selected what we wanted to find in this project is examples that are working not the examples that aren't working so we eliminated those just because that's not the project we're doing not because there's not stuff to learn from them but rather we decided we want to actually see these pathways that are working and not the pathways that fail so partly it's just case selection that we don't have examples of a lot I mean we know they exist but we haven't studied them so we can't speak with any real authority on them yeah you're right but you know so well you're kind of right it does come out of social reform but it started as a cooperative right away so it was actually the not just social reform it was a radical 20s of India so it was also the radical anti-colonial movement and the anti-cast movement at the same time and this area of Malabar of Kerala was a kind of hotbed of this radicalism so these ideas of collective ownership these ideas of democratic decision making of anti-castism they are all faeces from a particular lower caste group was definitely part of what they were doing so they were partly so from very early on they saw themselves as more than just a cooperative they were also trying to overcome these caste class and caste boundaries and I don't think that that makes it any less exciting I mean I think that's actually quite interesting because it actually has that embedded in its DNA almost and just to be clear the children have moved out I mean that's what I said that they've moved out because they've been successful but many then and it's like to all sorts of issues because suddenly the co-op didn't have enough workers in its community and they had to bring in I guess this is the migrant issue they brought in workers from the rest of India and these guys didn't want to be members of the co-op because they're saying no we just want to be here for like the ten years that we're going to be working here and then we want to go back and then Akoba said you have to be members and they're like but we don't want to be members so they created and it's brilliant they created new categories of membership so they have a class which is the people who are all the benefits of cooperative then the C class which are these migrants they get all the same financial benefits they get paid the same they all these things but they don't have decision making authority around long-term planning right but they for all their immediate they're treated as equal members and they don't have to invest in my savings and loans to the same degree as the long-term folks right so but yet they've still made sure that they have democratic decision making around their immediate needs so they've been actually quite extraordinary when that goes back to an earlier the other question they've been quite extraordinary in trying to make sure that they're keeping their values at the center of this and I think that they're kind of progressive social space actually facilitated that is not a hindrance and again it goes back to the question we've seen a plurality of emergence we can't actually say there's one and to us that's hopeful you know if we all needed the same conditions we probably wouldn't go very far so that's a hopeful thing for us and what kind of environment is conducive to these spaces I guess that's kind of what I just said there's lots of environments that are conducive and not conducive the US which you would think is not a conducive environment it's kind of the belly of the beast and not really a sensitive state to any kind of radical alternative and yet we've seen the most unbelievable radical worker-owned controlled cooperatives in the US I mean those guys are unbelievable the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives they're thinking and they've created solidarity economy linkages they're thinking they're theorizing and they have just jacked up people we've just become incredible fans and we didn't we didn't expect to find you can hear from my accent I'm originally from California I did all my education at Berkeley I know all the co-ops there I'm a big fan of them but they're way beyond what I actually ever knew just as a kind of consumer of their services so that's a place that you wouldn't think and they they're kind of anarchist so they think the state probably in their context the state is a waste of time they don't try to engage the state because they know they're never going to win anything from that state but then you have other places where the state isn't as hostile and they do engage the state you know we flirted with the idea of trying to look at China and you know you know you know we then thought about maybe Hong Kong but it just we it's just China China are you know try 10 books on its own so we we don't we can't talk I mean in the you know the village enterprise stuff that it's too complicated for us to try to work into this project I'll just make three quick points thank you for flagging the Mexico example we're constantly building up our roster of cases and alert our radars alert to all these different exciting examples because it's all beneath the surface it's all there it's it's happening and we need to unearth it the the point that Hillary raised just the quick one Hillary and we grappling with it as we work through this book is actually the space within social movement theory to really think about this kind of practice and and how we're going to bring that in and what are the conditions and what are the in not an abstract way too right thinking about agency but to use the empirical and to theoretically work through that around a new way of thinking about social movement practice I mean how do you construct systemic alternatives from below so that's beer drinks later I mean just very quickly final point around migration one example that came to mind was in Italy in Trento what we found was a social corporatives and this is a new generation of corporatives emerging in Italy and they really about integrating migrants they have a very complex membership structure they have migrants who work in them they have finance members so people in the community who want to support the integration of migrants become finance members and they make a financial contribution to the corporative and build up a capital pool and help the corporative grow and develop and they have volunteer members as well so the volunteers come in to impart skills to the migrants help train them etc it's a very interesting example or model if you like of bringing in migrants but as Michelle said wherever we went and we found these fascinating examples and when you do historicize them there is a migrant connection somewhere in some of these cases and you know the Italian liberation theologian sitting in the mountains in Venezuela in the 70s he wasn't carrying AK-47 but he had his bible and he had a strong belief in radical change and he came from Italy and he worked with local people and he brought a tradition from Italy similarly the agrarian corporatives in rural America a lot of them the electricity corporatives and others that we encountered came with migrant traditions and diffusion and practice so yeah there's something there that needs to be learned from and unpacked wow definitely an excellent passion debate I'm very happy thank you all for staying for raising such like interesting questions I'm sure they really appreciate it thank you again Vishen, Michelle for your accurate for your insightful answers but also for your time and for coming here again we are very happy if you still want to leave your contacts to stay updated about our future events you can write them here we will have a reception upstairs final thing you're all warmly invited to our next event which will be a big event after the week so on the 16th of February Tuesday we will have Tariq Ali on the extreme center how the neoliberal project has reshaped the world in the Brunei gallery theater in the other building all invited you will be informed about it thank you very much for your question thank you Sarah