Dru Oja Jay is joined by Kevin Harding, one of the organizers of a spirited, hail-mary attempt to save Mountain Equipment Co-op from being sold off to a US private equity firm.  Before its assets were sold (and the member list apparently destroyed), the outdoor supplies cooperative had reached an estimated 6 million members and $700 million in annual revenues. Kevin is a public policy professional who works with cooperatives and community enterprises. In this episode, he shares about how tens of thousands of members mobilized to stop MEC's sale, and came very close to being successful.  Dru and Kevin also discuss the situation that led to the co-operative's demise, what could have prevented it, and what became of the effort to save MEC.   * * *   Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism  Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism  Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/HalfPastCapitalism  Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay  Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

Dru Oja Jay is joined by Mo Manklang of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives to discuss recent changes to federal legislation championed by various cooperative organizations, and how laws can be changed further. Mo is the Communications Director and Policy lead at the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, a board members of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance and the Sustainable Business Network of Philadelphia. CHIPS act update: https://www.usworker.coop/blog/the-usfwc-applauds-the-spotlight-on-worker-co-ops-in-the-chips-and-science-act/ Other policy updates from USFCW: https://www.usworker.coop/blog/category/policy * * * Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/HalfPastCapitalism Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

Dru is joined by Carmen Marcuello and Anjel Errasti, authors of some interesting publications about Mondragon's expansion abroad. We talk about why the cooperative model hasn't taken root in Mondragon's overseas operations, and what makes Mondragon different from multinational conglomerates of similar size that are not owned and democratically managed by their workers.   Carmen Marcuello is a professor of Business Management at the University of Zaragoza. Anjel Errasti is a professor at the Institute of Cooperative Law and Social Economy, University of the Basque Country.   Read their 2018 paper here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0019793918779575   * * *   Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism   Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism   Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay   Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

I've been working on a Ukraine episode for a while. After an interview with Yulia Yurchenko (whose book Elliot recommends at the end) was unusable due to wartime internet, I turned to Elliot Dolan-Evans in Melbourne.  In addition to being the author of the timely article "Why Ukraine needs foreign debt cancellation now,"[1] Elliot has spent time in Ukraine's Donbas region during the civil war that has been ongoing since 2014, where he conducted dozens of interviews on the subject of women's work and how it was affected by IMF-driven privatization.[2] 1. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/why-ukraine-needs-foreign-debt-cancellation-now/ 2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2021.2012223 * * * Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism Subscribe on Youtube; https://www.youtube.com/c/HalfPastCapitalism Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

Organizer, teacher, co-founder of Movement Generation and co-organizer of Seed Commons and Peoples' Solar Energy Fund, Gopal is a key facilitator, convener and thinker in the climate justice movement. He has been involved in Climate Justice Alliance, ETC Group, Ruckus Society, Cooperation Richmond, and the Center for Economic Democracy, and he teaches Ecological Systems Thinking at Antioch University, and in Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University.   You can find Movement Generation at https://movementgeneration.org/ and Seed Commons at https://seedcommons.org/  * * *   Podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism Subscribe on Youtube; https://www.youtube.com/c/HalfPastCapitalism Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajayHalf Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

Dancer, bodyworker, somatic educator and Art.coop co-organizer Marina Lopez joins us for episode 8 of Half Past Capitalism. Marina has been involved in solidarity economy organizing through Cooperation Humboldt in Northern California, and more recently in organizing an educational series following the release of the Art.coop report, "Solidarity Not Charity - Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy".   We discuss the role of art in the solidarity economy movement, the reception to the report, and what it's like to dance about an economy.   Read the report: https://art.coop/report/ Follow @_artcoop on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_artcoop and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_artcoop/  * * *   Half Past podcast links: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism Subscribe on Youtube; https://www.youtube.com/c/HalfPastCapitalism Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/druojajay Half Past Blog: http://halfpast.dru.ca/

Justin Podur has been poring over the details of world history with his comrade and former teacher, and sharing the results on the Anti-Empire Project podcast's "Civilizations" series (https://podur.org/). I asked Justin about the insights and shifts in perspective from this fascinating in-depth study, which covers the era of colonialism and imperialism, and the various responses to it.   It was a fun conversation, and I hope you enjoy it too!   LISTEN: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism DONATE: https://patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism

Evan Henshaw-Plath was one of the key organizers of the Indymedia network, employee #1 at Twitter, and started two worker co-ops and a bunch of other companies. He has worked at Fortune 500 monoliths and in anarchist collectives. In this episode, we discuss how software is a commons, what the cooperative movement can learn from Silicon Valley, and how cooperative tech projects can scale up. Evan is at @rabble and www.planetary.social (part of a larger attempt to create a decentralized social media platform) is his current project. * * * Follow/support Half Past Capitalism:    • Support HPC on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapit...    • The Youtube show is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOkK5IDHxpJ3YBiOCBJttGg​​    • Dru is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/druojajay​​

Historian-activists Kassandra Luciuk and Saku Pinta join us to discuss the "hall socialism" that flourished in communities of Finnish and Ukrainian migrant workers in the early 20th century. Though much of this incredibly vital social, political and cultural activity was successfully suppressed by anti-communist purges in the post-war period, the legacy and lessons of these networks lives on. About our guests: -- Kassandra Luciuk is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She is broadly interested in the history of Ukrainians in Canada. Her dissertation uses the community as a case study to investigate how anti-communism was entrenched in Canadian political consciousness throughout the twentieth century. Kassandra has also written several books and articles on the internment operations of the First World War. Most notably, she is the author of a graphic novel, Enemy Alien: A True Story of Life Behind Barbed Wire, which was published with Between the Lines. Kassandra’s most recent article, “More Dangerous Than Many a Pamphlet or Propaganda Book: The Ukrainian Canadian Left, Theatre, and Propaganda in the 1920s,” was awarded the Jean-Marie Fecteau Prize from the Canadian Historical Association. -- Dr. Saku Pinta holds the Errol Black Chair in Labour Issues at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and occassionally works as a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Labour Studies at the University of Manitoba. As an independent scholar, his research is focused on two areas: the intersections between anarchisms and Marxisms and the history of the Finnish North American left and the membership of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union in the twentieth century. Pinta is a co-editor and contributor to Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red (PM Press, 2017) and his essays appear in the anthologies Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (PM Press, 2012) and Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (Pluto Press, 2017). He is a proud memeber of the Winnipeg General Membership Branch of the IWW, Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3909, Unifor Local 567, and the Association of Employees Supporting Education Services. * * *   Follow/support Half Past Capitalism:   • Support HPC on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism • The audio podcast is here: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism​​ • Dru is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/druojajay​​

Nav Kaur (@north_kaur) joins HPC to talk about child care, how capitalism and colonialism are taught from an early age, and the conditions under which the people who care for children for a living might be less alienated. We talk worker cooperatives, landlords, boards and languages. * * *   Follow/support Half Past Capitalism:   • Support HPC on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/halfpastcapitalism • The audio podcast is here: https://anchor.fm/halfpastcapitalism​​ • Dru is on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/druojajay​​