Freeganism: A Portuguese Experiment

Wasted Waste

Directed by Pedro Sera (2018)

Film Review

This documentary is mainly about Freeganism, a Portuguese movement in which members opt out of the money system by spending their time growing or “recycling” food and other basic necessities, “occupying” homes instead of renting, and foregoing most consumer goods to avoid engaging in paid work.

The movement is a reaction against rampant consumerism, which Freegans reject. They view consumerism as an addition that’s destroying the planet.

The film’s main focus is western society’s incredible wasteful food system, in which one-third of the food produced is wasted. If this discarded food could be distributed somehow to needy families, global hunger could be eliminated.

In Europe 198 hectares of land (an area the size of Mexico) goes to produce food that’s never consumed. Up to 50% of food never leaves the farm because it fails to meet arbitrary supermarket appearance standards. The rest is discarded due to overcautious “sell by” dates ( enabling Freegans to scavenge it from supermarket dumpsters).

“Food travel,” whereby corporate food networks transport food halfway around the world, is also incredibly wasteful. It’s estimated to produce 750 times the carbon emissions as locally produced food.

In addition to examining various Freegan projects that prepare “recycled” food to distribute free on the streets, the documentary looks at other Portuguese cooperatives, social enterprises and charities that reduce food waste in other ways.

One coop collects “ugly” food directly from farmers to sell to its members. As Food and Good After are social enterprises that purchase (at a discount) expired supermarket food and sells them at cost in their own facilities. There’s also a bulk foods store which eliminates plastic packaging by requiring patrons to bring their own containers.

They also interview a Zero Waste advocate who has produced zero trash in four years; the coordinator of Portugal’s Time Bank Network (where members trade services instead of purchasing them); and a Portuguese legislator with a bill (similar to existing laws in France and Italy) requiring all outlets larger than 400m2 to provide for the allocation of food wastes to charities and social enterprises for distribution to the needy.

 

 

 

How to Have a Revolution

Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon (1961)

Free PDF:Wretched of the Earth

Book Review

Wretched of the Earth is a sociopolitical analysis of how revolution happens, based on the author’s personal experience in Algeria and his study of nationalist revolutions in sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam, Latin America and Cuba.

Many Marxist scholars consider Fanon’s work to be the first major expansion of Marxist theory after Lenin. His primary contribution is to delineate the potential revolutionary forces of third world countries. His chief disagreement with Marx concerns the revolutionary potential of the lumpenproletariat, the urban beggars, petty criminals, prostitutes and gang members who lack access to formal work. According to Fanon, the lumpenproletariat make up the majority of the population in third world countries (and increasingly, in 2017, the industrialized world)  thanks to first world colonizers who have driven them off their land.

Marx believed the lumpenproletariat were incapable of achieving class consciousness and thus of no use in the revolutionary struggle. In contrast, Fanon feels they help to instigate revolution owing to their high proportion of young people and their belief they had nothing to lose.

Unlike Marx, Fanon believes third world revolutionary struggles must originate with rural peasants (like the Chiapas uprising in Mexico), that city dwellers are too “colonized,” ie too invested in existing political and economic structures to want to dismantle them.

Wretched of the Earth also describes the phenomenon of economic colonialism, as manifested in Latin America (and later South Africa). In these cases, a country achieves political independence but continues to be economically (and militarily) oppressed by first world multinational corporations.

Fanon makes a number of recommendations for preventing this, including

1. immediate nationalization and decentralization (via the creation of wholesale and retail cooperatives) of the economy
2. mass political education aimed at enabling the masses to govern themselves,
3. rapid economic restructuring aimed at developing soil and other natural resources for national use (as opposed to first world benefit),
4. land reform to stem the migration of peasants to the city,
5. guarding against feudal traditions that view men as superior to women, and
6. avoiding the trap of political parties.

Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 of mixed heritage in Martinique. He fought with the French resistance during World War II and received a scholarship to study medicine and psychiatry in France. In 1953, he was offered a hospital position in Algeria, where he joined the Algerian National Liberation Front. He died of leukemia in 1961, shortly after the publication of Wretched of the Earth.

 

Populism: America’s Largest Mass Democratic Movement

 

The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America

by Lawrence Goodwyn

Oxford University Press (1978)

Book Review

The Populist Moment describes the rise and fall of the 19th century populist movement, the largest mass democratic movement in US history. At its zenith during the 1896 election, the populist People’s Party had two million members.

Author Lawrence Goodwyn credits the rise of the agrarian populist movement to two major factors: 1) the unwillingness of the Eastern banking establishment to issue adequate credit to small family farmers and 2) the sudden contraction of the money supply caused by pressure on the post-Civil War government to repay bonds it floated for $450 million of treasury notes (aka Greenbacks) Lincoln used to pay for the Civil War.

Goodwyn also blames the systematic failure of commercial banks to issue adequate credit for the ultimate consolidation and centralization of farming in the US, leading to the eventual rise of industrial agriculture.

The Call to Prohibit Private Banks from Issuing Money

The populist movement started in Texas in 1878 as the Alliance. At first the group focused on forming cooperative buying committees, trade stores and crop insurance schemes to circumvent the crop-lien system that caused so many farmers to lose their land. Their chief organizing strategy was to send farmer-lecturers throughout Texas and eventually other parts of the South, Midwest and West. The banks, railroads, grain elevators and supply merchants responded by secretly conspiring to freeze them out. In turn the Alliance formed the People’s Party, whose main platform called for ending commercial banks’ ability to issue money.*

Goodwyn provides a detailed state-by-state history of the leadership struggles in the Alliance and in the People’s Party. Both made concerted efforts to reach out to Negro farmers and tenant farmers and to industrial workers, represented by the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, in the cities.

Overcoming Cultural Oppression

The book concludes by tracing the rise of the liberal and progressive movements that followed the demise of the People’s Party. The primary focus of these later movements has been to “humanize” industrial capitalism – as opposed to attacking the fundamental structure of capitalism (like populist movement). Goodwyn blames the absence of comparable mass movements in the twentieth century on the profound psychological oppression that occurs in modern industrialized society.

According to Goodwyn, the values of the corporate state totally dominates modern American intellectual life, as citizens of industrialized society are taught rules of conduct (in schools, churches and the media) that intimidate them and condition them not to rebel.  The Alliance overcame these cultural barriers by training and dispatching farmer-lecturers to teach farmers collective self-confidence and self-assertion – ie that the banks, rather than farmers themselves, were responsible for their predicament. Up to this point in time, no democratic mass movement has attempted a similar program of mass education.

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*Contrary to popular belief, money used to run the global economy isn’t issued by governments but by private banks. Although most people think banks only loan out money they hold on deposit, loans are actually  created out of thin air via a bookkeeping entry.  Because this is where roughly 97% of money comes from, private banks have ultimate control over the amount of money in circulation. They exert enormous political power by shrinking the money supply to cause recessions and expanding it to cause inflation. See How Banks Invent Money Out of Thin Air , Stripping Banks of Their Power to Issue Money and 97% Owned

Europe’s Co-op Movement

Together: How Cooperatives Show Resilience to the Crisis

CECOP/CICOPA Europe  (2012)

Film Review

Together examines how the cooperative movement enabled tens of thousands of European workers to survive the 2008 downturn. As of 2012, there were 1.5 million co-op workers in Europe. The filmmakers interview workers from French, Polish, Italian and Spanish worker cooperatives. All agree that the traditional capitalist model – in which a financial group loots an enterprise for a few years and abandons it – is obsolete because it inevitably predisposes to financial crisis.

In France, workers converted 150 failed businesses to cooperatives between 2008 and 2012. The first co-op featured is a foundry workers converted with the help of a French organization that specializes in this type of conversion.

The Polish example is a bottling plant that survived Poland’s transformation to a “free market economy” in the 1990s. There were many so-called worker cooperatives in communist Poland, but they were controlled by the state, rather than workers themselves.

The Italian example features the “social cooperatives” enabled by Law 381 in 1991. These are worker-run public-private ventures that provide social services and work integration schemes for the disadvantaged. Italy has a total of 10,000 social cooperatives, and they increased, rather than decreased, staff following the 2008 downturn.

The documentary also showcases the world-famous Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque region of Spain. Mondragon, which was first started in 1943, is actually a consortium of 100 worker-owned businesses. Ninety-four are located outside of Spain.

Mondragon workers believe they survived the 2008 downturn due to their heavy emphasis on research and worker upskilling. They’re especially proud of the Mondragon electric car project. After the global economic crash, 500 Mondragon workers moved to a new co-op when their original work area shut down.

A Film About Economic Democracy

Can We Do It Ourselves? A Film About Economic Democracy

Patrick Witkowsky, Jesper Lundgren, Andre Nystrom and Nils Safstrom (2015)

Swedish with English subtitles

Film Review

“Economy democracy” describes a system in which workers control the workplace and determine the policies under which it runs. The workers cooperative is the best known model of economic democracy.

The filmmakers begin by differentiating capitalism from a free market economy and economic democracy from socialism – as many people confuse these terms. Under capitalism private capitalists own the capital to run a business and enter into a rental contract with workers to perform the labor. Under this system the capitalists own and control the business and keep all the profits.

With a worker cooperative, workers own and control the business and enter into a rental contract with labor to provide capital. They pay the capitalists for using their money but maintain ownership of the business and control of production. They also decide how profits will be distributed.

Under socialism, the capital is “socialized.” Theoretically this means workers own an equal share of the entire economy. In practice, this has generally translated into state control of the workplace, as opposed to worker control.

This film focuses on the day-to-day operation of two 30-year-old American cooperatives. The first is Massachusetts-based Equal Exchange, founded in 1986. The second is New York-based Cooperative Home Care Associates. The latter was founded in 1985 and has 2,300 member-employees.

The filmmakers also interview various academics, activists, business leaders and trade unions officials regarding their research and experience with cooperatives.

The part of the film I found most interesting was an analysis of how monopoly capitalism distorts the free market. Our present economic system actually consists of three markets: the consumer (goods and services) market, the labor market and the capital market. Only the consumer market operates democratically, in being driven by consumer choice. The goal of economy democracy is to democratize the labor and capital markets, which are controlled at present controlled by a tiny capitalist elite.

Because workers have virtually no say into their work and receive minimal direct benefit from it, capitalists must use the fear of being fired to force them to work. This is only possible in economies with high levels of unemployment and poverty. Historically the corporate elites have deliberately manipulated monetary and fiscal policy to keep unemployment rates high.

Once workers own and run their own companies, unemployment and poverty are no longer necessary to motivate them. Thus full employment is one of the most important benefits of economic democracy.

Unemployed? Broke? How to Start a Co-op

Own the Change: Building Economic Democracy One Worker at a Time

GritTV (2015)

Film Review

Own the Change is a documentary about how to start a worker cooperative. The inability of the global economy to provide a living wage for millions of Americans has prompted a surge in the formation of cooperatives, where workers own and run their own business and share equally in the profits. I expect this will be an extremely inspiring film for people of any age who are unemployed or earning a wage that is too low to survive on. The biggest problem in starting a coop, as with any small business is start-up funding. Most new coops rely on individual members’ savings for capital, as major banks no longer offer small business loans. Members with no upfront cash can contribute their buy-in as a payroll deduction. Sometimes new coops can access grants and low interest loans from non-profit groups and government agencies. Crowdsourcing* is another increasingly common option. The second most difficult aspect of coop formation is learning to make decisions collectively. Democracy is a foreign concept to most people. Many are more comfortable with someone in authority telling them what to do. It takes practice to learn how to make decisions by consensus. As one coop member explains in the film, a good coop uses horizontal (equal) decision making at the board level to make basic operating decisions. Vertical decision making works better in the field, where people with technical knowledge and skill need to be in charge of how the work product is delivered. The most inspiring coop depicted in the documentary is a Bellingham Washington cooperative started by caregivers fed up with their extremely low pay and lack of input into working conditions. For people thinking of starting a coop, the best place to start is the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, a national grassroots organization for worker cooperative businesses. Their website is a fantastic source of legal and business advice, including funding options: https://www.usworker.coop/ *Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G1-SYMatNc

The Worker Revolution in Cleveland

In 2008, the Cleveland Foundation approached Democracy Collaborative co-founders Gar Alperovitz* and Ted Howard* about revitalizing Cleveland’s decaying inner city.  With the help of the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, and Cleveland’s municipal government, they formed Evergreen Cooperatives (EC)

EC is a network of for-profit, employee-owned, green businesses. Network-based worker cooperatives have several advantages over independent worker cooperatives. In addition to their ability to attract funding from foundations, philanthropists and investors, they are more likely to enhance buy-in from “anchor” institutions. “Anchor” institutions are large businesses, such as hospitals, universities and hotels, that are permanently linked to the community.

Belonging to a network also makes it easier for worker cooperatives to resist pressure to cut corners (in competing with investor-owned companies) on environmental and work safety standards.

Creating Jobs and Revitalizing Cleveland’s inner city

EC’s  goal is to create ten living wage, environmentally sustainable jobs in six low-income neighborhoods (43,000 residents with a median household income below $18,500). Each worker-owner purchases a $3,000 stake in the cooperative, with wages adjusted to allow a 50% payroll deduction until the buy-in is paid off.

They have create three so far and plan to create many more:

• Evergreen Cooperative Laundry – serves Cleveland University, as well as Cleveland hospitals, hotels and other “anchor” institutions.
• Evergreen Snergy Solutions – designs, installs, and develops PV solar panel arrays for institutional, governmental, and commercial markets.
• Green City Growers – produces leafy greens in a 3.5 acre hydroponic greenhouse (America’s largest urban  greenhouse) for Cleveland’s “anchor” institutions, as well as local hotels, supermarkets and restaurants. It sells sustainably grown produce at the same price as factory farmed vegetables imported from other states and countries. Yet because it’s produced locally it has a 7 day longer shelf life.

Atlanta, Washington DC, Pittsburgh (Amarillo) Texas are launching similar non-profit schemes to use worker cooperatives to create jobs in low income neighborhoods.

It’s extremely gratifying to learn that neighborhoods and communities are finding real life solutions for income inequality and the extreme economic distress in our marginalized communities. Imagine if this stuff were headline news, instead of the idiotic garbage John Kerry spouts about Ukraine.

*Gar Alpervitz is an historian, political economist, activist and author of The Next American Revolution and What Then Must We Do.

*Ted Howard is a social entrepreneur, author, and co-founder and executive director of the Democracy Collaborative.