Part One: The Alter-Globalization Movement: From the Zapatistas to the Battle of Seattle

Margaret tells you about the rise of neoliberalism and the rise of its opposition and about better ideas about how to globalize society.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to cool People who
did cool stuff. You're weekly reminder that whenever there are
bad things happening, there are also cool people trying to
stop those bad things, or morally complicated people trying to
stop those bad things, or people I hate trying to
stop those bad things. There's always people trying to stop

(00:22):
the bad things. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
for this series I'm doing right now, it's just me
and you. You in this context is the microphone, but
you're also the listener. Isn't that weird. I'm alone in
a closet that's been sound treated, and yet you're here
with me. It's so strange. I've been enjoying experimenting with

(00:45):
these sort of scripted episodes as a way to break
up the format, and I've like kind of had this
idea of doing a particular series, and this is that series.
It's the series that I wanted to do with no guest.
Of course, we still have producers like our producer Sophie
Lickterman and our audio engineer Eva hi Eva, and everyone

(01:07):
who's listening has to say hi to Eva. You're not
off the hook just because there's no guests saying it too.
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. Our
topic these coming weeks is neoliberalism and the worldwide movement
that worked successfully to stem its spread. It's a bit
strange to think about nowadays because a core component of

(01:30):
neoliberalism was a series of free trade agreements that broke
down trade barriers between countries. Our problem right now, as
I record this is essentially the opposite. The Trump administration
has embraced trade war as a core policy. Tariffs are
one of their primary weapons that they are using to
make the rich richer. But you can also use free

(01:53):
trade agreements to make the rich richer. It's really just
about how you want to do it. They have so
many options about green US All over, Neoliberalism seems well
and truly dead, or at least taken a real long nap,
and you can go up and poke it with a
stick and be like, oh, it's totally just napping. And
what was born from its corpse or you know, sleeping

(02:16):
body who swear I'll wake up. Don't worry. Don't worry, liberals,
it'll come back. What was born from neoliberalism's corpse seems
even worse because it's fascism spoiler alert. That's what grew
out of its corpse. It is easy then to look
back and assume all those free trade agreements were good
things because the fascists want to get rid of them.

(02:37):
They were not good things. They did not help the
poor of the developing nations or the developed nations. This
series of episodes is going to take us on a
winding course of their history that explains the horizontal shape
of the global left during the turn of the millennium,
and along the way we're going to talk mostly about

(02:59):
the Zapatista, the indigenous bottom up leftists in Chiappus, Mexico
who have carved out an impressive amount of autonomy from
the state, as well as the Alter Globalization movement that
brought together a global movement of farmers and punks and
a thousand other types of people besides and ended, through creative,
mostly nonviolent direct action, the spread of a neoliberal world order.

(03:23):
These are some of the most successful movements in history
and some of the most successful experiments with direct democracy
and history at scale, but since none of them seize
state power, their accomplishments are often overlooked. It was the
Alter Globalization movement that swept me up into politics a
couple decades ago. And we'll see how much I do

(03:43):
or don't weave my own story into these episodes. This
whole series is a bit ambitious, so I'm going to
have to start with maybe even more than my usual
fair share of content. We're going to start by talking
about neoliberalism. What the fuck is neoliberalism. It's a word

(04:07):
that gets tossed around a lot, which a lot of
people assume they know it means. But many of the
people who assume that they know what it means are
wrong and are using it wrong. First and foremost, just
think to yourself, neoliberalism has more or less nothing to
do with being a liberal. They both come from the

(04:28):
same root economic and political concepts, but they're really just different.
It's a Venn diagram and not a circle. And they're
not just different because one is neo, because one's the
new of it. It is important to understand that political
terminology is and has always been a mess. If you

(04:49):
call yourself a Republican, for example, what you actually believe
as a Republican depends on where and when you're living.
If you're a Republican in Ireland, you might be a
militant socialist. If you're a republican in nineteen thirty Spain,
you might be one of the most diehard anti fascists
to ever live. If you're a Republican in the US, well,

(05:11):
in a nineteenth century you were vaguely progressive. During most
of the twentieth century you were a conservative, and in
the present era you're something closer to a fascist than
you are to a traditional conservative. You simply cannot look
at a political group and judge them based on the
labels they use, or you'll wind up with nonsense, like
the people who believe the National Socialist Party was leftist.

(05:35):
Part of the problem is that world politics don't actually
map well to a simple left right to dichotomy. Anarchists
and stalinists are both leftists but believe in fundamentally opposing things.
The nationalist right and the pro globalization right are fundamentally
different things, as we're seeing now that the nationalist right

(05:56):
is ascendant over the neoliberal right. Classical liberalism, which is,
you know, sort of the origin of the word liberalism.
It's an old timey belief structure that basically says we
should be free from government interference in most things, including
our business dealings, and I'm not trying to downplay it

(06:19):
is it is the belief structure that brings us capitalism.
But when people talk about being a liberal in the
US these days, they usually mean it in contrast to conservative,
or if you're far enough left, they mean it in
contrast to you know, progressive or leftist or radical. But

(06:39):
in general it's liberal versus conservative, and so a liberal
will tend towards believing in social liberty the freedom to
have or not have a religion, for example, and is
less specifically concerned about the economic stuff in capitalism. Though
most liberals have been generally supportive of capitalism, that starting

(07:00):
to change as well. The Cold War has been gone
long enough that people are starting to actually have breathing
room to critique capitalism, which is very nice neoliberal in
contrast to being a liberal. It's the capitalism side of
liberalism without any real thought given one way or another,

(07:21):
to the personal side of it. Neoliberalism would ostensibly be like, sure,
you can be gay or not believe in God, or
believe in God or whatever. I guess, but that's not
what neoliberalism is about at all. It is about capitalism.
Neoliberalism is an ideology built around the spread of free
market capitalism and how that needs to spread around the world,

(07:44):
and not just in like a nice way, like hey,
I have some beans, would you like to buy them?
We should set it up so that you can buy
the beans. You know. It's not a like Timu utopia.
Maybe it is, but Timu is probably actually a dystopian. Instead,
neoliberal is around using aggressive programs to gut the social
services of various countries and specifically force places to privatize everything.

(08:10):
Many many cultures around the world have ancient histories of
keeping many things in public ownership. We've talked about this
a lot on the show. It's almost like you find
a place and you will find that the traditional structure
for people to you know, work the land or whatever
is essentially communal, and neoliberalism is like, nope, none of that.

(08:35):
Everything's a business now. And look, I know it's a
little early for an ad break, but how can I
not use that as a transition to an ad break
Because one of the things that's a business is this
very podcast, and we are in the business of selling
advertisers the time on our show, and here is that

(08:59):
happening everyone feels great, everyone's having a good time, and
we're back. Neoliberalism is absolutely not the only version of capitalism.
It presents itself as the only version of capitalism. And

(09:19):
I'm not even like trying to defend old timey capitalism,
but like neoliberalism is, like, this is what capitalism is,
and it's just not. It's only in the past fifty
years or so that neoliberalism has gained much traction at all.
Around the end of World War Two, as the world
really decided to get settled into a nice, long, cozy

(09:42):
cold war with proxy wars that are not cold, the
dominant strain of capitalist politics was Knesyan politics. Kaynesyan politics
comes from a nineteen thirty six book written by this
British guy, John Maynard Keynes. The book is called so
the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. And I

(10:03):
will be honest with you, I am not an economist.
I spent way too long this week trying to and
even sometimes succeeding, at learning the difference between mercantile capitalism
versus classical economics versus Kenzian understandings versus neo classical versus
neoliberal and I still could not tell you everything about

(10:27):
the difference between classical and Knesy and understandings of like
long run aggregate supply or whatever the fuck. I can
tell you that Knesy and economics, the economics that was
dominant during the World War two and afterwards for several decades,
is pretty into government intervention in the markets. It's pretty

(10:47):
much like, well, we want markets, and we want capitalism,
but we want them to do what we want to do.
We want the government to be in charge of capitalism,
and so it would have more of an attempt to
fight unemployment and things like that. Neoliberalism was the underdog
ideology back then for decades. It took a really long

(11:11):
time for it to gain popularity. They present this as
this like natural evolution, where people just figured out it's better,
but they did not luck their way onto the world stage. Instead,
they spent all kinds of money. I read the transcript
of a speech from someone pointing out that they spent
hundreds of millions of dollars developing think tanks and institutions
and foundations and shit. To present the idea of neoliberalism

(11:36):
as like the natural world order. They claim that unfettered
capitalism is the natural way for humans to interact, and
that indeed, the only moral way for people to act
is in fierce competition with each other. This has been
a key component of neoliberalism since probably the start, not
just the competition thing, but that this is the natural thing.

(11:57):
It's like, honestly kind of religious. It's really easy to
point to an ideology don't like and be like, it's
basically religion, and I do it every now and then.
But that's because people structure their ideologies in similar ways
as religion, and the two things are not as distinct
as atheistic ideological adherents of the right or the left

(12:19):
wants you to believe. Neoliberalism says that the market is
the ultimate decider of well everything. This is part of
why it's so at odds with any kind of nationalism.
It basically hates the concept of government outside of desiring
for there to be systems that can use violence to

(12:40):
defend the private property of the wealthy, like in an
ideal neoliberal situation. Literally, the government exists just to make
sure that capitalism stays in charge, and that's the only
thing it does. To quote the activist and author, the
one who's transcript, I was talking about earlier Susan George.
Neoliberalism says that quote, the economy should dictate its rules

(13:04):
to society, not the other way around. Neoliberalism really got
its start in England when returning villain of the Pod
Margaret Thatcher aka the only bad Margaret. There's probably other
bad Margarets too, but you know, she's the worst of them.
I actually feel pretty confident about that because she's kind

(13:27):
of one of the worst people who's ever lived in
terms of just sheer destruction of environment, traditional ways of living, work,
or protection people's lives. Bad Margaret just a real bad
one in contrast to the best Margaret. Margaret Thatcher stepped

(13:49):
onto the world stage in nineteen seventy one when she
became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. If you
want to hear more about how she gutted the working
class of England, smash unions, started bullshit wars and accidentally
engendered a pretty sick punk scene. Listen to our episodes
about the band Crass, and there's actually in those episodes

(14:11):
some origin to what's going to become the ultra globalization
movement that it's probably a thread we won't trace as
much again during this time, So it's probably worth going
and listening to whether or not you like the band Crass,
because that's the fun thing about history stuff, is that, like,
it's not me just listening to the band Crass, it's
talking about all of the things that happened during that

(14:33):
time in place that is pretty fundamental because this is
where neoliberalism got its start. Anyway, Margaret Thatcher, her slogan
was Tina Ti na there is no alternative, because yeah,
neoliberals are not convinced that their way is the right way.
They're convinced it's literally the only way. Before she took power,

(14:57):
ten percent of people in Britain lived low the poverty line.
By nineteen ninety six, it was one in four and
one in three children. It's got a little better in
the thirty five years since she left office. It is
one in five now. So you know, bully to that,
I don't know a bully to that means I'm trying

(15:18):
to speak in British slang, but all I know is cheerio.
I don't know anything British. Never mind, But don't worry.
We don't just stay in the UK. America got its
own neoliberal very shortly thereafter in Ronald Reagan and I
probably know the eighties America slang rad I don't know.

(15:41):
Under neoliberalism, money fled the public sector and poured into
the coffers of the wealthy. By design, public services were
gutted and privatized. Unions were attacked on every front and
in many cases destroyed. The first time I spent any
time in West Virginia, I spent a lot of time
talking union coal miners who had, you know, fought during

(16:05):
the death of the coal mining unions in the eighties,
and just like them describing how this culture that they
had built up, you know, for generations that you know,
coal mining's not the best thing that's ever happened for
anyone involved, but at least they had built these incredible
unions after an incredible amount of conflict, and they were

(16:27):
just destroyed in the eighties. And it's so funny to
me because then conservatives come in are like, well, we
care about the coal miners. The liberals are trying to
get rid of it, and you're like, motherfucker, all those
coal miners used to be all liberal as hell, like
progressive as hell. It was one of the most heavily
unionized industries until you all destroyed it. Anyway, I'm not bitter.

(16:51):
I am bitter. Unions were attacked on every front and
in many cases destroyed. The strong welfare state that saw
the West through the Cold War was beginning to disappear.
So in an odd way, it was the working classes
of the US and the UK that were the first
to suffer under neoliberalism, at least as I've been able

(17:14):
to track down. But don't worry. Soon it'll be destroying
the entire world. But first, all of history needs to
come to an end, at least if you ask the capitalists.
The other thing the capitalists will say if you ask
them is that you should buy the stuff that advertises
on this show. Although I talk all this shit, but

(17:37):
sometimes we get advertisements for like genuinely good things like
get your flu shot, or go outside or don't talk
to cops. So I don't know what if you had
to use your own judgment instead of listening to what
I said, and decided how you felt about these things,
wouldn't that be wild? And we're back. I promised you

(18:05):
the end of history. See. The Cold War eventually ended famously.
It came to an end when the Western liberal democracies
won in nineteen ninety one with the collapse of the
Soviet Union, or maybe in nineteen eighty nine with the
fall of the Berlin Wall, and that, according to a
popular idea at the time, was the end of history.

(18:27):
There was this author and political scientist, an American named
Francis Fukuyama, who wrote an essay in nineteen eighty nine
called the End of History in an international relationships journal
put out by a think tank. The journal is called
The National Interest. Later, Fukiyama developed these ideas into a book,

(18:48):
The End of History and the Last Man. And basically
in this work he argues that, well, there's a one
sentence quote by him that sums it up. Well, what
we may be witnessing is not just the end of
the Cold War or the passing of a particular period
of history, but the end of history as such. That

(19:10):
is the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization
of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
You will not be surprised to know that Fukuyama was
a Reagan advisor, and for a while he was one
of the principal theorists of neo conservativism. What's neoconservativism, You

(19:33):
might ask, Surely that would be the opposite of neoliberalism, right,
it is not, To be honest, the easiest way to
understand neo conservativism is that it's sort of the militant
wing of neoliberalism, or its militant cousin. This isn't quite true,
and the two do have some differences, and there's people

(19:54):
who would identify with one and not the other. Neoconservativism
is the idea that we should use military terry force
to spread western capitalist democracy. I actually think that it
maybe started just as like we should spread western capitalist democracy,
and the military force thing just sort of was a
very logical extension of that. But neoliberalism is more concerned

(20:15):
about spreading capitalism, but is more excited about free trade
agreements than bombing places into accepting democracy, and neo conservatives
are a bit more into strong government, specifically a strong
defense sector, big government, guns and nothing else. All taxes
go towards guns, but not fun ones for you and

(20:39):
your friends. Does that sound familiar? It's because we live
in a world that was created by neo conservativism and neoliberalism. Anyway,
our guy Fukiyama, who declared the end of history, was
a theorist of neo conservativism, but he actually balked once
the second Bush started the Iraq War because he realized
that neo conservativism just led to unrestrained militarism. I think

(21:02):
he was kind of a true believer or biz. I
think he's alive, you know, in like Western democracy rather
than specifically like military supremacy. By two thousand and eight,
he endorsed Obama and believes in a strong welfare state
as part of a liberal democracy. So he's actually not
a neoliby either. But this idea the end of history,

(21:24):
is more important to my story than its author's own
political arc. History was over after the end of the
Cold War. There was just this thing in the air
that that's it, We're done. Nothing new is going to
happen politically, and for a few years that felt almost true.
The war was over and capitalism reigned over the field

(21:46):
of the glorious dead soldiers of the Cold War. But
it's worth understanding that by and large, excepting the last
decade or so of the war, the sort of liberal democracy,
the capitalist democracy that won the Cold War, was actually
a bit economically progressive. It certainly emphasized a strong welfare state.

(22:06):
One could even say, and it has been said, I
believe multiple people in my long source list, that it
was the welfare state that defeated the USSR. In a
welfare state, anyone who can do so is self sufficient.
Under capitalism, anyone who fails at that is kept from
falling to rock bottom by a strong social safety net.
While some people in the West did complain here and

(22:28):
there about welfare being like halfway to socialism, the welfare
state basically provided an essential pressure release valve that kept
actual socialism, which involves workers owning the means of production,
from taking hold among the disenfranchised of society. With actual
socialism and ideological threat like during the Cold War, the

(22:50):
welfare state did well as an alternative. You also have
the social democracies like those in Northern Europe, which combined
a strong welfare state with moderate attempts at actual public
ownership of services. But after the Cold War, the welfare
state and social democracy started to fall out of favor because, well,

(23:13):
to borrow from the capitalist view of things, when capitalism
itself had the ideological monopoly with no competition, it had
no incentive to care for its customer citizen. When the
Soviet States fell, capitalism and its roused and most corrupt
form fled in to fill the vacuum. This is actually

(23:34):
pretty specific evidence of how this was not a democratic process,
because that's not what people wanted in the former Soviet States.
One of my favorite authors and one of my favorite
people to quote on this show is the anthropologist David Graeber.
His ethnography of the Alter Globalization movement, direct Action and Ethnography,
is one of my main sources for these episodes, and

(23:57):
in that book he wrote quote, with st. Jallenism dead,
most Marxists expected to see a renaissance of more humane
forms of Marxism. Social democrats believed that they had finally
won the argument with the revolutionary left and expected to
shepherd the former subjects of the Soviet Bloc into their fold.
A reasonable expectation since when polled, most of the population

(24:20):
of Central and Eastern Europe said that they wanted to
model their new economies on Sweden. Instead, they got shock
therapy and the most savage form of unrestricted capitalism. End.
So the end of the Cold War wasn't the beginning
of peace. And prosperity, but the beginning of capitalism developing

(24:40):
into an even more evil beast. The end of history
had been announced. Liberal democracy is the final form of
human organization. All that was left was to mop up
the pieces on the board and to do the work
of spreading capitalism and one specific understanding of democracy all
over the globe. Co Of course, if you grew up

(25:01):
entrenched in the winning side of the Cold War, you
grew up being told that democracy and capitalism are synonyms.
But nothing could be further from the truth. If you
want to listen to me talk about one of the many,
many other origins of democracy, including influencing our legal structures today,
listen to my recent episode with kat Abogazala talking about
the origins of English common law and the pre Roman

(25:22):
indigenous traditions of the Britonic speaking Celts. So that doesn't
mean that the USSR was a bastion of freedom or
anything either, just that more than one thing can be
bad at once. So neoliberalism is all the rage among
people who are rich and want to get richer. Now,
the version of capitalism the neoliberals wanted to push all

(25:44):
over the world is something called the Washington Consensus, much
like how our End of History guy wound up distancing
himself from the neo conservative movement that he helped build.
The Washington Consensus, Guy John Williamson wound up pretty sad
about how directly his ideas were tied to neoliberalism and
economic imperialism and walked back a bunch of his own

(26:08):
points in retrospect in a very defensive and kind of
amusing way. Basically, he put together a list of ten
points to say, this is what Washington DC economists largely
think is the plan for all countries. I e. It's
the Washington Consensus, and it's a list of things like

(26:29):
privatize everything and remove economic regulation, and poor countries have
to tighten their belts and be more fiscally responsible, and
property rights must be enforced. The organizations most heavily involved
in spreading neoliberalism are the International Monetary Fund in the
World Bank, which both started back in the nineteen forties.

(26:53):
They both exist to try and keep international trade flowing,
and both ostensibly work to help their member nations become
more economically active and wealthier, and the difference between them
is annoying. I'll just say that I have read many
articles about the difference between them, and they work hand
in hand. Is honestly the easiest way to think about it.

(27:16):
To skip ahead a little, I was a teenager living
near DC during some of the protests against the World
Bank and the IMF in the year two thousand and
I had no idea what any of that shit was.
I remember I was on the Metro in DC, where
I've been off to a youth Pride day. I thought
I was straight and I was just a good ally.
I spent most of my time organizing LGBT stuff. What

(27:40):
a surprise. Anyway, I took the Metro into DC to
go to youth Pride Day and it was the same
day as a sixteen, the April sixteenth protests in DC
against all this shit, all the neoliberal world order, and
the train car was full of alter globalization protesters, and
there's this woman dressed up like a faery and she
comes over and it's like, hey, are you kids going

(28:01):
to the protest against the IMF? And I was like, no,
what's that? And at least as I remember it, what
she said was they loan money to developing nations, but
it's bad. And I remember I was like sixteen. I
remember just thinking like, man, fuck off, lady, Like that's
not a like. I was not convinced by this argument.

(28:26):
Two years later, I would get arrested at a protest
in DC against the IMF and the World Bank. I
think how we talk about these things matters because you
can tell a version of the IMF and the World Bank,
and you still can. They're still around. You can go
to their websites and read their history like I did
while researching this episode, and they're just like, oh, we're
like saviors of the poor. Basically the world exists because

(28:48):
of us. But that's not true, right, And so I
don't want to just tell you the IMF loans money
to developing nations and it's bad. Though, in all fairness
to the fairy on the Metro, it is factually correct.
They do loan money to developing nations, and it is bad.
The IMF loans money to developing nations the same way

(29:10):
the mafia loans you money to start a business, except
actually the mafia is probably a lot nicer because I think,
as long as you pay on time, it probably works
out alright. Obviously, I've seen a lot of movies where
it doesn't work out all right, But you know, loans
from the IMF actually look an awful lot more like
every bit of folklore you've ever read about making a
deal with a literal devil at a crossroads somewhere. In

(29:34):
order to pay back these loans, countries are forced to
restructure themselves and to be more economically productive, but not
productive for themselves, but for the purpose of paying back
these predatory loans. It's more like, Oh, you want to
pay me back, You're gonna have to work how many
hours a day? Well, how many you got? And social services,

(29:57):
environmental protections, and labor rights all gone austerity measures for everyone.
These were called structural adjustment programs, so they didn't even
have to elect neoliberals. With these new democracies that they're
blowing people up into having, right, they literally can force

(30:18):
all kinds of even sort of socialist politicians into accepting
these structural adjustment programs. I don't know whether we're going
to get into that more on the show or not,
but that's happened time and time again. It's actually one
of the major problems with using electoral politics and developing
nations to confront these issues is that the issues actually

(30:39):
aren't coming from the developing nations, and there are examples
of people successfully defaulting on loans and things like that.
But overall, basically all of these people would get voted
into office on a like to hell with the IMF,
we want economic prosperity for ourselves and no structural adjustment programs,
and then like within a year they're all like, well,

(31:03):
the rest of the world has a really big stick,
and so austerity for everyone. This is comparable to the
system that has left Haiti one of the poorest countries
on Earth after the Haitian Revolution throughout the slavers and
broke the country off from France. Listen to our episodes
about that the Western powers impose so much interest bearing
debt onto the place that its wealth has poured out

(31:26):
of the country ever since. You basically always have to
remember that when communities or nations are poor, it is
not because they don't produce wealth, but because that wealth
is extracted. It is for this reason that neoliberalism is
seen as a fundamentally colonial enterprise, a neo colonialism, if

(31:48):
you will. In poor communities here in the States, you
can physically see the institutions that extract value from them
like take a chain start. If you go and spend
your money at a McDonald's or whatever, whatever community you're in,
that money now leaves that community unless the people at
the very top also live in that community, because like, yeah,

(32:09):
it makes jobs, but literally it wouldn't be worth it
for the chain store if people working those jobs didn't
produce more value, then you give them, right. This is
the sort of basis of well Marxist understandings of the world.
But also just like the way that the modern capitalist
system works is that like, if you make two dollars
worth of stuff an hour, the boss can give you

(32:31):
a dollar and you go home with a dollar, and
the boss goes home with a dollar, and so the
boss gets a dollar or the owner really is a
better way to think of this than the boss, you know.
And then if you have ten employees, the boss is
now making ten dollars and et cetera. Right, And so
chain stores extract wealth no matter how many jobs they
put into an area, they extract wealth from an area.

(32:55):
You can also see other institutions that extract value from
poor neighborhood. It's like ones that keep people trapped in
a cycle of debt, like payday loan sharks and the
cash bail system of the prison industrial complex. And when
you've stripped away a regent's social safety net, and I
could be talking about a country, or I could be
talking about an impoverish neighborhood in America, people become desperate.

(33:21):
And that's where soft power comes in the USAID, which
is because in the news a lot I now know
it's called USAID. I would have called it USAID because
it looks like USAID and it's AID. But anyway, whatever,
the USAID that is currently being stripped away was a
big part of this soft power, as were a ton
of other non governmental organizations or NGOs within the States.

(33:43):
You could talk about nonprofits doing the same thing in
poor neighborhoods. Not all NGOs and nonprofits participate in soft power,
but plenty you do. Because when you remove a country's
ability to be economically productive internally and force them to
provide you with things instead, you can show up and
be their savior and make them reliant on you simply
by keeping them from starving to death. Whereas actual economic

(34:08):
justice is about reversing the flows of economic extraction. And
if you want to see a really sweet example that
I've actually never done episodes about directly here in the
United States. I want to push people towards it's technically
a nonprofit, I believe. I want to push people to
look towards something called Seed Commons, which I think we

(34:28):
talked about. Actually we did talk about this a bit
in the Argentinian Worker Cooperative episode. Basically, a lot of
what I understand about reversing economic extraction comes from some
of the thinkers who work at this organization called Seed
Commons that helps build worker cooperatives in all kinds of
places and does so specifically to say, like our communities,

(34:53):
you know, it's largely run by people of color. Our
communities create wealth and then that wealth is extracted from us.
But by creating worker cooperatives, we not only build workplace democracy,
but we also keep money and what we produce within
our own neighborhoods and we enrich that and we stop
economic extraction. And it's not even about like isolation either.

(35:17):
It's just literally about not getting ripped off. And so yeah,
you should go watch their videos and learn more about them. Anyway,
this economic extractive process, the idea that like, oh well,
sure you could produce wealth for yourself, but instead you
have to produce wealth for us. Is exactly what genocided

(35:38):
the Irish in the nineteenth century in the so called
potato famine. There was no potato famin. I mean, yes,
there was a potato blight that happened, right. I actually
managed to recreate the potato famine that sounds really bad
at my own house last year because I grew a
lot of potatoes and they all got the potato blight
that I think my friend was explaining is the actual
potato blite of what destroyed everything like these all my

(35:59):
potatoes came out bad, with like bugs in them and stuff.
My sweet potatoes came out okay, because actually the thing
that solves this is growing a diversity of crops. And
the Irish were quite capable of growing non potato food,
but the English were forcing them to export that stuff
because it was a colony. And the soft power that
England sent in return was like nearly an edible corn

(36:19):
and shit like that. And Ireland still doesn't have the
same population it did before this genocide. So I don't
like the system of economic extraction very much. You might
have figured that out by now. So history has ended
and neoliberalism is sweeping the globe, and country after country

(36:40):
is watching its public sector privatized and its labor rights demolished,
and its natural resources extracted and shipped off to the
global North. But people didn't like that. And some of
those people, well, they'd been fighting regular colonialism for about
five hundred years, so they knew a thing or two
about fighting this neo colonialism them too, And they lived

(37:01):
in Chiappus, Mexico. And they are going to rip open
a wound in neoliberalism for everyone to see and for
everyone to pour through. And they're called the Zapatistas. And
we'll start talking about them on Wednesday. That's my cliffhanger.
Thanks for listening to the whoops All Context episode. But

(37:22):
don't worry. It's not a whopsal context series. It's just
a whipsal context episode. And I don't know if I
have any plugs. I might just plug seed comments again.
I'm gonna plug worker cooperatives. Like people when they think
of cooperatives, they're like, oh, you know, they often think
of customer cooperatives, right, like when you go to a

(37:43):
grocery store and it costs too much money, which actually
doesn't even need to be the way that that kind
of cooperative works either that. We did a whole series
of those with food historian Ren Awrye talking about the
history of food cooperatives. But fire your boss, or if
you're the boss, sell your business to your employees and
become one equal with them. Worker cooperatives are they even

(38:04):
are fairly competitive economically, But that's like kind of less
the important thing. We get told every day of our
life that we're supposedly, you know, in the liberal world order,
we're in charge of ourselves, but we are not. Because
we go to work and democracy stops at the door
to your office, and you have a boss, and you
have an obligation to produce more value for your boss

(38:28):
than they give you back. You are personally economically extracted
from and that sucks. And one of the ways to
stop that is by building worker cooperatives. And building it
is a fantastic way to build worker power. Unions are great,
but I am far more interested in creating our own things.

(38:50):
So that's my pitch for worker cooperatives. Oh, I could
turn that into a pitch for my own worker cooperative.
I am part of an anarchist publishing cooperative called Strangers
in a Tangle Wilderness, and we put out a bunch
of stuff, books and zines. We mail out a zine
every single month to our Patreon backers at ten dollars
or more a month, and it could be all kinds
of things. The most recent one that I got in

(39:11):
the mail from us I'm not in charge of this part,
is called I Don't Know. It's about how to throw
DIY parties and shows and stuff. But we also do
like fiction, and we do poetry, and we do all
kinds of how to's and fun things. And we have
a bunch of different podcasts. We have one that I
am a co host of called Live Like the World
Is Dying about individual and community preparedness. We have one

(39:32):
called The Spectacle, which is for people who love movies
and hate cops. And we have one called Strangers and
Entangled Wlderness, which is actually the monthly zine read to
you by a voice actor and then an interview with
the person who creates it. And so you can check
out all that stuff. Almost everything we do is available
for free as well. Books we make available digitally as
cheap as we can. We have some audio books and

(39:55):
including some of my own books, Strangers, Entangled, Wilderness, That's
My Plug, a Order Cooperative, and see you Wednesday. Cool
People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit
our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on

(40:16):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.