Upstream - Prefigurative Politics and Workplace Democracy w/ Saio Gradin and Nicole Wires

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse-responsive co-learning network that hosts free, online, weekly eco-gatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some upstream episodes to life. This is one of those episodes. Find out more, including the date and time for this EcoGathering, in the show notes, or by going to www.eco-gather.ing. I think it's such a scam that in mainstream discourse and in liberal discourse we speak of a country as being democratic even if it doesn't have

Starting point is 00:01:12 democracy in the workplace. I don't know how they've managed to pull that one off or I guess we all know exactly how right but the fact that people aren't outraged you know generally that most people work in what are essentially fascist authoritarian organizations and still think that we live in a democratic society when people spend most of their waking life not at all in a democratic organization. I find that absolutely remarkable. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you

Starting point is 00:01:46 thought you knew about economics. I'm Robert Raymond. And I'm Della Duncan. Pre-figurative politics. Building the new within the old. Exercising our muscles of collectivity and collaboration. Muscles that have grown weak and atrophied under capitalist hegemony. These are all ideas and practices that play a crucial role in our revolutionary movements,

Starting point is 00:02:12 and examples of prefiguration can and do take many interesting and inspiring forms. One of these forms is worker self-direction, or worker cooperatives. In today's episode, we're talking prefiguration and worker self-direction, and we've split the episode up into two parts so that we can dive deeply into both. Part one of our conversation takes a deep dive into the concept and practice of prefigurative politics, which is, simply put, the attempt to implement the world that you want to live in, now. And we've brought on the perfect guest to talk about it.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Syo Graydon teaches politics at King's College London and is a community organizer and educator who has spent 20 years running workshops, campaigns, and organizations for global justice. They are the author of the book Prefigurative Politics Building Tomorrow Today published by Polity Books. Part two of our conversation is going to take a deep dive into one specific form of prefiguration, worker self-direction. Specifically, we'll be exploring the ins and outs of working at a self-directed not-for-profit, which is structurally similar to a worker cooperative, but we'll get more into those details in the conversation. The point is that we'll be talking about

Starting point is 00:03:39 what it's like to work in a democratically run organization, and to have that conversation, we've brought on Nicole Wires. Nicole is an organizer and the network director for the Nonprofit Democracy Network and a worker member of the Sustainable Economies Law Center. In this episode, we'll explore the concept of prefiguration and how it compares and contrasts

Starting point is 00:04:04 to other revolutionary strategies. We explore examples of prefiguration in history and today, and why prefigurative politics are an important component of our revolutionary movements. In part two, we take a deep dive into the process and practice of prefiguration, specifically in the context of worker self-direction. Exploring the benefits and challenges of being part of a self-directed organization, the different types of decision-making processes utilized by certain worker-run firms, and how worker cooperatives, and the many forms they take, fit into a broader ecosystem of individuals and organizations striving to live their values

Starting point is 00:04:47 in a world dominated by the logic of capital. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We could not keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. And you can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one-time donation on our website

Starting point is 00:05:27 upstreampodcast.org forward slash support Through your support. You'll be helping us keep upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now, here's part one of our episode, Syogradin in conversation with both myself and Della. Sayo, it is great to have you on. It's nice to be here. So I'm wondering if we can just start with an introduction, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself for our listeners and maybe just talking a little bit about the work that you do.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Sure. My name is Sayo Gradyn. I live and work in London, England. And for a lot of years now, I've been looking into the concept and the practice of prefigurative politics. I've been involved in loads of different groups and organisations for probably almost 20 years now and a little bit less than that I've been interested in the academic study of it. I also am a part-time academic. I work at King's College London teaching on a foundation course in global politics there and I'm also a union rep as well for the Lecturers Union, UCU. Yeah, so I've been involved in lots of groups and then also done a lot of reading, a lot of interviewing people, talking to

Starting point is 00:07:11 people for a lot of years, which doesn't mean that I know everything by any means. I still come across lots of new things and things I don't know about it, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I don't know about it, but I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Amazing. Thank you so much. And so we're here to talk about prefiguration, which like you mentioned is a theme that's quite central to your work and your thought and your life, I would imagine. So maybe just to start, you know, I'm sure most of our listeners have have at least heard the term prefiguration if they're not already quite familiar with it. But let's pretend that we're talking to somebody who is unfamiliar with the term and might need a refresher. What is prefiguration and why is this a central theme in your work?

Starting point is 00:07:57 Why should we be talking about this? Prefiguration is at its most basic trying to implement the world that you want to live in now. So, for example, if you wish that the world was full of workplaces that treated their staff humanely, you join or set up a workplace that treats the staff humanely. If you wish that we lived in a world that was environmentally sustainable in terms of energy production for example, you join or start energy production that is environmentally sustainable. So this can be seen as in distinction to other forms of political

Starting point is 00:08:37 strategy like protesting for example or reformism where you try to enter the state through the inside, or electoral politics, and many other types of strategy. So it's a political strategy basically. In terms of why I think it's important, I would say that if we want a radically democratic, egalitarian society, there's no way that we can do that without prefiguration. It's only a part, but it's a necessary part of revolutionary work. So that idea that you said prefiguration is living in the world you want to live in now. I want to talk more about that temporal dimension to prefiguration. And actually, before the call, Robert, you made me think about the actual word prefiguration and how that is a

Starting point is 00:09:32 temporal idea in itself, prefigurative. So tell us a little bit more about the temporal nature of prefiguration and how, as you write in Could Prefigurative Politics Provide a Way Forward for the Left, published in Open Democracy, that prefigurative politics is the politics of organizing in the here in the now, the way that reflects the society we want to see in the future. So talk a little bit more about that. I think all revolutionary strategies or practices try to envisage a specific future. You know, whether you're protesting against something, whether you're trying to make a change, you have a kind of vision probably in your head or collectively of what you want to achieve. But what's I think different about prefigurative politics

Starting point is 00:10:20 is that you're putting together that future with the now. So you're trying to bring that future into now or you're trying to bring the now into the future and so it's quite a specific way of working because it forces you to bring together what we have around us right now, what the situation is, what resources we have, where we're at, together with that vision of what you want the world to be like. Yeah, and I'm really hearing how empowering this idea is to practice the future that we want to live in now, and particularly because it's not about waiting for the governmental or state or systemic changes that would bring about those conditions.

Starting point is 00:11:06 It's what can we do right now to live in that world? And another quote that you've written is, even the most socialists of governments can only go so far. It's we, the workers, residents, and community members who must organize on the ground to truly change society. Social hierarchies and oppressions aren't caused or abolished by government policy. They are upheld both through formal arrangements like laws and through the daily behaviors, assumptions, and relationships of the general population." So again, I'm hearing not just waiting for that systemic change, but actually there's work to be done

Starting point is 00:11:48 at the interpersonal, the community, the behavioral, the assumption, the relationship level to create this change. So can you talk a little bit more about the importance of prefiguration at this grassroots level of like, something we might call like DIY politics or the politics we can engage in every day.

Starting point is 00:12:08 Yeah, I think a lot of political movements in history, especially ones that have been very successful globally and that have seized power of the state have had quite a specific and I would say probably a bit too simplistic of an understanding of how power works or where power lies in society. Most socialist movements, at least ones that are well known in the world today, have been focused around taking control of the state, right, seizing the means of production, seizing control of the state and then changing ownership of the means of production as much as possible by nationalizing companies, taking them into public ownership and public power. All and then changing ownership of the means of production as much as possible by nationalising

Starting point is 00:12:45 companies, taking them into public ownership and public power, all orchestrated centrally through the states. So that's a very particular understanding of how the world works. They don't tend to say it, but it kind of implicitly, there is a belief there that things come from the state, like power sort of emanates from the state. And so we go about our lives, go to work, we hang out with our friends and our families and all of this is kind of influenced mainly by what the state is doing. So that if we want to change all of our social relations, change our work, change our family lives, change our friendships, the place to go in that worldview is to change the state. I don't want to simplify too much or be too unfair to those types of socialism, but I think there's definitely a strand in that way of thinking and acting, to see that there is a centrality to the state,

Starting point is 00:13:42 and if you can just seize state power then you can change most important things from there and also on a more philosophical level that there is a centrality to certain logics or structures of power. Most classically in Marxism who owns the means of production and a lot of Marxists, not all, but a lot of Marxists have believed that if you can seize control of the means of production, then you can change our relationship to work. So that's a kind of centralist or statist understanding of how power works. Empiric figurativism is completely different from that.

Starting point is 00:14:19 It has a much more dispersed understanding of how power works and who actually holds power. And so power is not just understood as sitting within the state or sitting within certain or one of a few basic structural logics in society. They do sit there, but not only there. Power is also much more spread out. To get really philosophical, Michel Foucault calls it capillary power, like capillary veins in your body that are really spread out and really small. So the idea there is that even if you change something at state level, it might not change things across society because the state is not such a strong centre of power. It does have power, but it's not such an overbearing centre of power. So for example, the state can write laws to outlaw sexual harassment,

Starting point is 00:15:12 for example, which in the case of the UK where I live, it did, like about 40 years ago. But that doesn't mean that sexual harassment stops, you know, because sexual harassment is not something that we can just legislate away. We can't just say, hey, everyone, let's have a rule not to do this. And then it just stops, you know, or loads of other things work in exactly the same way. Racial discrimination, for example, most obvious forms of racial discrimination were outlawed in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, or even later. But racial discrimination still very, very much happens later, but racial discrimination still very, very much happens because the state doesn't have such a high level of control over our day-to-day behaviours often. It has a high

Starting point is 00:15:52 level of control of certain things, formal decisions that we make, formal structures, formal procedures, but there's so much more to human life than that. And so prefigurative politics sees the project of revolution or the project of changing society as a much bigger project than just changing those centres of power or those central logics of power. It's a bigger project in learning new ways of being and practising new ways of power. It's a bigger project in learning new ways of being and practicing new ways of being. And I say practice, practice is with an S. I don't know if you have this distinction in US or North American English but practice with an S to me means that you it's like you practice like

Starting point is 00:16:38 playing the piano or like practice shooting basketball shots, you know, like practice, you do your practice. Because like, for example, a non sexually harassing way of living is not just something that we can think and decide, it's something that we have to practice. We have to change quite a lot about ourselves, about our gender assumptions, gender norms, gender roles, assumptions about what makes a successful person or what makes an assertive person. Like we have to change all of these things in order to be able to not do sexual harassment. So it's actually quite a big, profound change. And it's not something that we can just go to the state and ask them to do for us. Yeah, thank you so much for that. There's so much that you covered in that response and there's many threads and I'm going to

Starting point is 00:17:32 try to pull on a couple of them just because we've got this sort of flow going. And I do think it's a really interesting question that you bring up because, so the actually existing socialist states that I think that you were referring to earlier in your response, just to go back to the top there, these states in the world were very much responding to like concrete conditions that were part of the world that the revolution grew out of, right? And we could take a lot of different examples here. and grew out of, right? And we could take a lot of different examples here. I'm just gonna, off the top of my head with the USSR. It's interesting because I remember reading that they did experiment with worker cooperatives.

Starting point is 00:18:13 There was an effort to cooperativize some businesses. It didn't really take, it didn't really work. And this brings in an interesting question about like the culture that, you know that each place, each region, each country is going to have a different concrete condition, a material condition, and a cultural condition that's a part of that, that they're working out of. And when you're thinking about Russia,

Starting point is 00:18:36 this was a very backwards country. This was a place where I think life expectancy for adult males was in the 30s in 1917, something around the 30s, centuries of monarchism. And this was a semi-feudal society. And so if you're thinking, you know, you're going to flip the light switch, and all of a sudden, worker cooperatives are going to sort of like blow up and take off. That's kind of a lot to ask of a society. And I don't think anybody here would expect that, of course. But it's interesting thinking about this question that you bring up.

Starting point is 00:19:10 If there was some kind of prefigurative politics, and I know this is like completely abstract, but like if there was some kind of prefigurative political movement, and there were, of course, but like a mainstream one in Russia prior to the revolution, how would have that impacted things. But then it's also important to remember that I don't think that the Bolsheviks necessarily prioritized those forms of transition. Again, the concrete conditions that they're working out of, they didn't really have the space to breathe, right? Like their priority was to throw off the yoke of their semi-colonial conditions and like the ferocious counter-revolution by the monarchists and the fascists and the 14 countries

Starting point is 00:19:51 that invaded them after the revolution and then leading up to World War II, they were trying desperately not to be colonized by the Third Reich and thus they had to industrialize. So I think it's important to look at both sides, which is how prefiguration could have had an influence on the way forward that the the Bolshevik revolution took and also recognizing like the concrete conditions that they were working under. And I think the question about the state is a very interesting one too because Marxist-Leninists, the understanding there is that the state is an instrument to be used, right? Like it's like a tool to be used. And I think that when we're thinking of the revolution and the transition to socialism and the transition to communism, the difference between say an anarchist and a Marxist-Leninist, or even a Marxist,

Starting point is 00:20:46 not just a Marxist-Leninist, definitely Marxists, most Marxists would feel this way as well, is that seizing the state is a step along the way, right? It's a tool that can be used for revolution and thus to, in a top-down way, changing a culture in a way as well. If the laws that we construct and the priorities are we prioritizing capital in these laws, are we prioritizing workers in these laws? Those can then have an effect on the culture. And it's dialectical, of course, and the culture will have effects on the material aspects of the society. And the base and the superstructure sort of dialectically communicate in that way. So it's interesting looking at both sides, right?

Starting point is 00:21:31 Like looking at both sides and thinking about how prefiguration fits into the way that the dialectical connection between the base, like the economic conditions, the working conditions, let's say, the relations of production, and things like the state, the superstructure, and the kind of laws that are being passed. So I know I just like said a lot right there and I am happy to give you any space if you want to respond to that or if that brought anything up for you, or we can also just move forward with the line of questions

Starting point is 00:22:01 that we had in the document. It did bring a couple of things up, but that might cover things that are in other questions. I think you're absolutely right that the Bolsheviks played around with or experimented with different forms of worker-owned, localised democratic governance in different forms of organisations. And I completely agree with you. What was so limiting for them in that particular context was they were facing world war, they were facing world wars even and they were facing counterrevolution and this is kind of one of the big crux questions I think about prefigurative politics, prefigurativism, that if you are

Starting point is 00:22:48 being attacked by the state or by a militarised counter-revolutionary force, which in many cases you will be, how do you then defend yourself in a way that is congruent with your values? And that's a really tricky question. And as someone who's really into prefiguration, it sort of bothers me on one level. At the same time, many of the really successful prefigurative movements have been militarised as well. Like think of the Zapatistas in the southeast of Mexico, which have a militarised branch,

Starting point is 00:23:26 like an army. They're in a long ongoing, low intensity, quote, conflict with the Mexican federal state. Take the Kurds and Rojava in northern Syria, also a military famously fought ISIS very successfully. There are so many examples of that. Yeah, on the one hand I think there's a tension there and on the other hand I think it depends on what you want to prefigure in a way. If you believe that people should defend themselves against counter-revolution then I think it is part of a prefigurative way of being to do that, especially if you organize your army and you're fighting in a way that is more democratic, more humane, more peace-seeking, not in a colonial empire, imperial kind of way that a lot of normal armies tend to be, or pretty much exclusively are.

Starting point is 00:24:21 This reminds me a lot of an episode that we did on pirates and how like pirates, society, and there's like a lot of baggage with pirates that I'm not going to get into. We're not romanticizing it in any way, but there was this dynamic between, okay, like we are splitting profits, you know, so to speak equally. We're like, we're communal. We make collective decision making except for when it comes to battle. Then we switch to a militaristic, hierarchical, there is a captain and then there's hierarchy under it. So it's just a very interesting, there's lots of different ways to

Starting point is 00:24:58 look at that question and explore that question, which's a profound and important one. How do you wage violence in defense of your movement in a way that reflects the society you want to live in? It's, it's, it's a question that we could probably spend hours on, but we won't because we have a lot more to unpack here with prefiguration. And so you mentioned the Zapatistas, you mentioned Rojava. Prefiguration and so you mentioned the Zapatistas you mentioned Rojava. There's a lot of different examples of movements that have Centered or at least included prefigurative politics in their theory and practice and I'm wondering if you might want to trace a bit of a history for us and maybe highlight some examples of groups and track the idea of

Starting point is 00:25:42 prefiguration through history for us. Yeah. So I have definitely been, maybe all of us stumbling over this word a little bit is not the simplest of words, you know, prefiguration, prefigurative politics. So the person that we can blame that for is a guy called Carl Boggs, who came up with a concept in the late 1970s. came up with a concept in the late 1970s. He wrote a couple of articles in 1977 that were critiquing Marxist-Leninist thoughts and practice and especially he was critiquing them for believing that you can use hierarchically organized state-centered movement to achieve a non-hierarchical, non-state communist society. And so he kind of formulated this idea of having your desired outcomes be embodied

Starting point is 00:26:36 in the activism that you do, the movement that you have. So he is the first person in academic writing to use the term prefigurative politics in this sense. But I think he's a white man. And so that's why he gets to be the person who, you know, who gets to be heard in academia, especially in the 70s, who got to be heard, whose language got to be used. The concept has existed much, much longer than that, using lots of different words and lots of different terminology. And the practice has existed, you know, as long as humans have existed probably. But academically the concept came about in the late 1970s. And then other authors within academia took it on and toyed with kind of slightly different

Starting point is 00:27:27 definitions of the concept. So Karl Boggs' concept was quite broad. It referred to any mirroring basically of the society that you want in the way that you organise for it or the things that you do in order to achieve it. But then another famous text was by someone called Winnie Brinus in 1980, which talked about the concept much more narrowly as just being about organisational form. So just about having specifically your movement organisations being democratic and being non-hierarchical. And then people have gone through ever since then kind of through using it broadly, using it narrowly. And in the book that Paul Reichstad and I wrote came out in 2020 called Prefigurative Politics Building Tomorrow Today. We prefer a broad definition I think is much more useful in the way that Karl Boggs intended it in his articles,

Starting point is 00:28:24 although we use a slightly different definition from him. But yeah, as I say, the concept and the practice has been so widespread, goes very far back in history. Some big examples I think that we can look at include the Indian Liberation Movement from British colonialism there. A big figure for example is Rabindranath Tagore, who fought against British colonial rule by... he was particularly not happy about the education system that was being imposed on people in India by the British colonial rule. And so he just set up his own school and set up his own several different schools actually. And some of them still exist, where people could learn in their own native language instead

Starting point is 00:29:10 of having to be taught English. People could learn a broad variety of skills rather than just a particular trade that the British wanted people in India to learn in order to become exploitable basically. And that were democratically run to different extents. It was a pretty big part of the Home Rule movement in India. Of course people tend to talk about Gandhi. A lot of people think that that Gandhi was kind of at the centre of that, which maybe he was to an extent, but he also did a lot of things in his life that were not prefigurative at all, as I'm sure we know he's not a really good

Starting point is 00:29:46 spokesperson for that I think. And around the same time, so this was in the 1910s, 20s, there was the Pan-Africanist movement and one big example is Marcus Garvey in Unia, his organisation Unia, who did things like encourage people to buy black and black owned products and they even for a while ran their own shipping line that traded goods from the African continent to the North American continent and Enabled people to travel across as well for example another big example Black Panther Party and it's interesting that they're called the Black Panther Party because it shows how, you know, you wouldn't think that a radical left, prefigurative organization would call something something party, right, because we don't tend to believe in the state and reformism and voting in kind of capitalist democratic, supposedly democratic systems. But what I think is so good and useful

Starting point is 00:30:47 about the Black Panther Party was that they had a real diversity of tactics. They did stand political candidates and they also had an armed group as well because they simply had to, to stay alive. And they also did a lot of more traditionally like prefigurative projects as well. Like their breakfast program, for example, where they were feeding thousands of kids breakfast, hot cooked breakfast before going to school. Kids would normally not be fed anything in school

Starting point is 00:31:21 throughout the whole day. And, you know, as the kids were sitting down eating their breakfast, they would kind of hear speeches from party activists talking about black history and black liberation. They ran health care research projects as well on sickle cell anemia for example, things that have been completely neglected by the US state. Yeah, those are some really good examples, I think. So that's just to show how broad and wide the tradition of prefigurativism is. And only certain people's thoughts about it have made it into, you know, into print and into like academia because of just the exclusionary nature of academia. Thank you for those examples. And yet from your book, the Black Panther Party example

Starting point is 00:32:12 was a really good one for me to understand prefigure to politics. This idea that if their politics was that they wanted an economy where people could have free health care and access to meet their needs, right? They demonstrated that through their way of party organizing and providing the meals and the health clinics, etc. So that's a really great example. And thank you both for your dialogue earlier about the means and the end is what I really took from that. And one quote that came up for me, we interviewed someone named Sarah Corbett, who's a craftivist also in the UK. And she uses craft for activism. And one of the things I remember she said was,

Starting point is 00:32:58 if we want our world to be beautiful, just and kind, we need our activism to be beautiful, just and kind. So just speaking about the way or the process, the means as well as the end. to be beautiful, just and kind. We need our activism to be beautiful, just and kind. So just speaking about the way or the process, the means as well as the end. So just wanted to uplift those points. And one thing I really heard from both of you as you were sharing were maybe these ideas of different types of power. There's that kind of state or institutional power, but then there's the interpersonal power,

Starting point is 00:33:25 the way we relate to one another. You have this great quote in your article where you say, an egalitarian group or party isn't one in which the members come to write policy about equal pay, but do so in a competitive or elitist decision-making style, while leaving the women to wash and clean up after everyone else when

Starting point is 00:33:45 the rest goes home. It's this idea of how is that interpersonal power negotiated? Even when we have a worker cooperative or a worker self-directed nonprofit, for example, we interviewed a worker in Aresmendi Bakery in the Bay Area who works at a worker cooperative. They described very patriarchal structures and even white supremacist structures, even though it was a cooperative. So, yeah, I really love this idea of the interpersonal and the way we relate to one another and the way that we are organizing with and from one another. And I want to ask you a little bit more about is that distinction of power helpful?

Starting point is 00:34:28 And also, is there a play of gender around this? Cause it also, the patriarchal and hierarchical patterns of behavior feel important. And one more anecdotal story is the Transition Town Movement which started in Totnes, England. They were starting to do all these amazing projects, a share shop, a community fridge, a cooperative brewery, a local economy center. And then it was the women who said, hey, we need to not only focus on the doing, but also

Starting point is 00:35:02 on the being. And so they created the Heart and Soul Group and they ended up exchanging every meeting. One meeting would be a doing meeting and the next meeting would be a being meeting. Because they wanted to bring in what we might call like soft skills or interrelational skills. But yeah, how are we working with each other? How are we dealing with power on that more cultural or subliminal plane? So can you talk a little bit more about these different forms of power and also if or what play a gender has to do with this?

Starting point is 00:35:33 To me, the different forms of power are kind of the same. I would just say that they exist in different places or in different, like, if we want to make a decision or make a change in society we can write a rule or a policy or a law but that will not guarantee that exactly what we intended by it will come to pass and so the way I would put it is that some of the power sits within the policy but a lot of the power sits with like how it's implemented or the language we have around it or the thoughts that we have around it and the practices. So in order to make change if what we want is more than just a formal legal change it's necessary to change our behaviours, our beliefs, our cultural imagery and ideas, our norms as much as it is necessary to change the formal policy or law.

Starting point is 00:36:28 And usually what that means is, like if you're in an organisation, quite a small grassroots community organisation for example, it will usually mean that maybe you pass a policy and you try to word that as clearly as possible, but you probably also have to run some training on it for example, or to think a bit more broadly but you probably also have to run some training on it, for example, or to think a bit more broadly around what do we have to change within our organisation in order for this to be possible, in order for this behavioural change to actually come to pass. Some things are easier than others but when it comes to gender inequality, and I want to connect to the second part of your question there, is

Starting point is 00:37:07 I don't think it is random that the people who came up with statist understandings of revolution and understandings of revolution that locate change within a small number of logics of social power and particularly capital, that those people were men and especially white men and often kind of slightly wealthier white men because I think those identities are situated such that they kind of tend to favour certain ways of thinking. I don't want to get too complex or deep into this here, but I think a big part of masculinity and a big part of whiteness is to try to unsituated perspective on the world, and for other people of marginalised identities to be constructed as they are the ones who have a different perspective, you know, like sort of women are the ones who have a gender, or black people and people of colour are the ones who have a race. And I think this way of thinking that we live in a somewhat mechanical type of society

Starting point is 00:38:30 where there's a specific logic that you can change or flip a switch in who owns the means of production or make a change in the line of a law, almost like it's code, you know? And then change will follow from that. I think, not to get too abstract, but I think that that's linked to the very positionality of being a man or being white, especially in the historical context that people have had state power as socialists. Yeah, so I think that's why prefigurative movements have been quite strong in the feminist

Starting point is 00:39:08 tradition, in feminist organising, and a lot of thought as well as a lot of activism around prefiguration has come out of feminism. Because feminists have been very, and first it was white feminists, at least in academia, and then it was much more broadly, feminists of colour, black feminists and queer feminists, at least in academia, and then it was much more broadly feminists of colour, black feminists and queer feminists, who kind of looked at the ideas that socialist parties, Marxists, Marxist-Leninists in particular, had come up with and kind of said, oh wait, there's no room here for other things in society that need to change other than just the things that these people want to change because of their positionality and their interests. And that's when the shift started, I think, to start to look at informal power relations as well and start to look at how

Starting point is 00:39:58 there's a lot more that needs to change other than to just write a law differently or write a policy differently about who owns the means of production. Very helpful. Thank you. And as you were sharing about Karl Boggs, who came up with the term or who is known for that term, you were talking about that this idea has been around. And in your writing, you talk about anti-racist and feminist practitioners and theorists, activists who have coined the idea, the personal is political. And that is another way that we can talk about prefigurative politics. So I just want to bring in that frame and thank you for that answer. Robert, over to you.

Starting point is 00:40:44 So I want to revisit parts of the dialogue that we had a little bit early on, but maybe sort of try to frame it into a concrete question for you. One thing that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, I'd say in the last few years, is this idea of power when it comes to revolution. And I mean, we can get into like the more theoretical

Starting point is 00:41:07 and philosophical conversations about dialectics and about how power accumulates. And I would agree with you on this. I think you'd agree with me here that reforms aren't, like the accumulation of reforms aren't necessarily going to be a successful path to transition. Maybe you don't agree with that, but from what you said it sounds like you might. But I think a lot of people who followed this podcast for some time, like they'll know

Starting point is 00:41:35 that we definitely like started and cut our teeth in a way in the solidarity economy world and thinking deeply of building the new within the old and focusing on things like worker cooperatives and land trusts and other ways of like prefiguring the world that we want to see and of course you were featured in our worker cooperatives two-part series so that was awesome that was many years ago now and I just want to emphasize I really feel like prefiguration is an extremely beautiful thing. And I find it to be an essential strategy because we need those lights, right? Like we need those utopian visions.

Starting point is 00:42:17 And I know oftentimes utopian can be used in a pejorative way and I don't mean it in that way. I mean it in a very literal, like, utopian visions allow us to feel what it would be like in a post-capitalist or a communist or a socialist or however you want to call it in one of those worlds. Of course, this is sort of calling back a little bit to our conversation with Kristin Gottse on imagining utopias. And I also do have trouble with and I'd say fairly deep critiques of prefiguration as a political strategy. And I know you mentioned

Starting point is 00:42:55 up top that you see prefiguration as being part of a revolutionary political strategy and I can sympathize with that into the extent that like I just talked about where I feel the importance of prefiguration lies I think in terms of building power I don't know that I can like really fully square this idea that prefiguration actually builds material power and I don't know that like building and if this is a scarecrow argument, please feel free to knock that scarecrow down and respond to the actual part that you want to. But I don't know that building enough worker cooperatives and practicing that culture is in and of itself going to be enough to face up to really the

Starting point is 00:43:38 ferocious capitalist state that has and will continue to allow these islands of prefiguration to exist until they pose a problem and then utterly crush them. Or in the case of Mondragon in Spain, which we explored in part two of the worker cooperatives episode that I just talked about, they become completely depoliticized. And then internally, they have to function under capitalism in one way or another. And thus, we see all of the the sliding from the Mondragon Corporation into more exploitative forms of practice. And if anybody wants to get more into that, check out that episode. I won't get into detail here. But so yeah, I think a lot of worker cooperatives struggle deeply with the issue of scale. And I don't think that this is an accident.

Starting point is 00:44:23 And I think it's because the laws and those in power who write the laws are not going to allow these forms of alternatives to thrive and so I'm wondering if you have anything to respond to that with and I know that you do so I'd love to hear what what how you respond to that critique which is kind of the classic you know it's the classic critique between anarchists and Marxists, I'd say part of it, and what the theory of change is for you in terms of prefigurative politics. What is the theory of change there? I think my answer to whether prefigurative politics can realistically build power to take on the state when it comes to economic structures. It depends on what

Starting point is 00:45:08 sort of power we're trying to build. I think if we're talking about a physical seizing of the means of production away from a capitalist elite, perhaps physical force, or probably, unfortunately, probably a physical force is going to be necessary. Perhaps all sorts of strategies that are not prefigurative are necessary. And I do think that prefigurative politics can only play one part in a bigger range of strategies if we're going to radically change society. But I also think that there is a lot there in that understanding of taking power or building power that it falls outside of it, that gets missed.

Starting point is 00:45:52 So, for example, all of the informal inequalities that still exist, even if the means of production is held, you know, on paper by the workers. And so just having, like us, having us, the working class, say, or marginalised people, as the new people who are in the position of the elite who hold on paper the ownership of the means of production, is not necessarily going to change actual access to power for a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:46:23 It might do for some people who are more relatively privileged, but it might not for, it probably will not for, you know, other people. And so I think that speaks to the necessity of also starting to enact and explore what other things need to change other than just changing the ownership on paper. So that would be, I think, a challenge from a prefigurative politics point of view on what building power actually means. Because when, say, Marxist-Leninist or when the Russian Revolution happened, what happened was a transfer of ownership of means of production. What didn't happen was the withering away of patriarchy or state repression or like the end of racism and the end of ableism and all of this stuff, right? And so I don't think it's sufficient to seize control of the state or to transfer the ownership of the means of production only.

Starting point is 00:47:24 So that would be one answer. to transfer the ownership of the means of production only. So that would be one answer. In terms of whether in a meaningful way, we can say that prefigurative organizations like cooperative, non-profit cooperative, or other kind of non-profit work around company or business form can meaningfully survive in capitalism. I think that also depends on how you understand

Starting point is 00:47:46 capitalism and how you define capitalism. What I did in those episodes actually, back in the very, very early days of Upstream, was to offer a definition of capitalism that was very simple. I talked about three main traits, traits of a relationship that is capitalist. I think it was something has a profit motive, there's a distinction between is capitalist. I think it was something has a profit motive, there's a distinction between the owner on the one hand and the people who work for the company on the other hand, and it's about competition and trying to obliterate your opponents. That's a very light definition of capitalism. A lot of people prefer a much more definition of capitalism. A lot of people prefer a much more holistic understanding of capitalism as like a system or as something that can survive challenges that you throw at it or something that

Starting point is 00:48:32 can change and like a logic that can sustain itself. Something much bigger than just those three different criteria that I talked about. And I'm not so sure that that second way, that bigger understanding of capitalism is such a useful way of understanding capitalism because for me that's a bit disempowering honestly. I don't see why we should use that broader definition of capitalism essentially because I think the outcome is that, I mean sure we could say we could define capitalism as everything that is happening in the economy right now or we could define capitalism as everything that is happening in the economy right now, or we could define capitalism as any kind of logic that is hierarchical or something like that, but I don't see how that's useful and I don't see why it's more correct than to use a narrower understanding of capitalism.

Starting point is 00:49:20 Because if you have a narrower understanding of capitalism, then it's very possible to stand outside of it and to meaningfully pose an alternative to it, which I think nonprofit cooperatives do. Don't know if that answered your question though. Oh, there is like so much that I would, I feel like I could talk about this for hours and I'm not gonna do that because I know that Della has some more questions to ask. But yes,

Starting point is 00:49:45 that was really helpful. And this is one of the most interesting questions for me right now. So I really appreciate you engaging with it. When I was listening to both of you, again, I was really hearing both and. Both we need to address the capitalist state and have, you know, seize the means of production and we need to deal with, as you said, Zio, these other forms of power. And I really do think you made a great point in looking at actually existing socialism and tracking gender. And I do know that there is a definitely a spectrum of gender amongst actually existing socialist states and also socialist parties and movements around the world, varying degrees of egalitarianism and inclusion of feminist and ecofeminist perspective and thought. So

Starting point is 00:50:39 I don't want to be sweeping there, but definitely really interesting points. And another thing I'm hearing too is, you know, when we go upstream from the problems of our time, the first stop on this journey upstream are these types of supremacists. And there is capitalist supremacy, but there's also human supremacy, white supremacy, patriarchal supremacy, and even certain religious supremacies. And so one thing I'm hearing again with this both and is Marxist-Leninism, revolution, the Vanguard party, really does address some of those forms of supremacists, particularly the capitalist supremacy. And I would even say the white supremacy piece because we see it as racialized capitalism

Starting point is 00:51:25 and prefigurative politics really brings to the importance also the patriarchal supremacy, possibly even the human supremacy aspect and just the other ways of power and power over and supremacy that can show up in the ways that we operate with politics, politics as the personal. So any response to any of that before I move on? I think that was really well put.

Starting point is 00:51:53 And yeah, I think which strategy one uses is probably shaped by what goal one has. So if you want a specific legal change or if you want to change the ownership of something, then a protest movement or an armed revolutionary uprising can be really, really useful, really helpful for that, maybe even the only way to do it. If you want substantial change to eliminate patriarchy from our culture, then a protest movement or an armed uprising is probably not going to make that happen. We need to use the tools for the outcome that we want. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:36 Or again, the both and. Right? I'm thinking of the Me Too movement and what is the unlearning masculinity I know that you're working on, or at least like addressing a little bit more about, you know, what is gender, what are these forms of oppression, and how do we even embody them and enact them. So thank you for that. And, you know, we want to dive into an example here. So the example that you both have already touched on, but worker self-direction. So worker cooperatives or in the nonprofit space, but worker self-direction. So worker cooperatives or in the

Starting point is 00:53:06 nonprofit space, the worker self-directed nonprofit. So we want to explore that in our last bit of time as this worker self-direction business organization form as a form of prefiguration. So do you see worker self-direction as a form of prefiguration? And if so, how? And what's the importance of that form in the work that you're doing? So first of all, I just want to say I think it's such a scam that in mainstream discourse and in liberal discourse, we speak of a country as being democratic, even if it doesn't have democracy in the workplace. I don't know how they've managed to pull that one off, or I guess we all know exactly how, right? But the fact that people

Starting point is 00:53:49 aren't outraged, you know, generally, that most people work in what are essentially fascist authoritarian organisations, and still think that we live in a democratic society when people spend most of their waking life not at all in a democratic organization. I find that absolutely remarkable. But yeah, I very much see worker self-directed nonprofits and other forms of worker self-directed companies as part of prefiguring a completely different economy. I think they play a really key role there. So on a more local level, it not only creates a material change on a very small scale where people literally take over control of the means of production, take over the finances of their organization and actually have ownership of that. And so there is a transfer of resources to workers, but also more generally, and I think this is a really key part of prefigurativism, is

Starting point is 00:54:46 federalism and organising across different organisations. This is not to do specifically with worker self-directed non-profits, but one organisation on co-ops that I have studied quite a lot in my work is a British organisation called Radical Roots. Roots as in R-O-U-T-E-S, and that's a mutual aid organization between different co-ops. So they allow those 40 or something, 40 or 50 cooperatives to share financial resources between each other, share like if someone has a, like if there's a flood for example at someone in

Starting point is 00:55:25 someone's basement another one of the co-ops can lend a van or lend some equipment to help them clear it out and there's also skill sharing so people will help to train each other up and just improve their work together so I think this way especially when organizing together in different forms of Federation, self-directed nonprofits can be a really important necessary part of changing the economy, changing the economic structure of a society. As I say, not the only part, but I think it would be basically impossible to do it without them. And yeah, if we go back to your, you know, definition of capitalism, the simple definition,

Starting point is 00:56:08 you know, workers self-directed, nonprofit, one doesn't have that distinction between the owners or the bosses and the workers. So that alienation or that separation of the workers from their labor and from the decisions of their work. And then it also doesn't have that for-profit motive. Just on those two points, it is a part of post-capitalist prefiguration. Then I love what you said about democracy. We've had Richard Wolff on the show. One of my favorite quotes that he said was, how can we say we live in a democracy when anytime we walk into a corporate

Starting point is 00:56:43 or capitalist business, we leave democracy at the door. So just emphasizing your point. I would say as someone who's been a part of creating a worker self-directed nonprofit, I want to say soft skills. I hope that's not a pejorative term, but the skills that I've learned around self and peer accountability, around shared decision-making, about shared responsibility, I think that could better equip me for the post-capitalist economy that I would like to see more broadly and particularly in vanguard party organizing. Just to illustrate your point about what is it that we're learning and training within these spaces and how they can serve these larger movement organizations and transitions. So I know you both touched on this, but I do want to ask it again.

Starting point is 00:57:32 Talk about how workers self-direction in the cooperative and the nonprofit space. How do you see that as a part of our movement or our theory of change, our direction to a post-capitalist economy? I think in order to have a truly egalitarian post-capitalist economy, we need new skills, we need new knowledge, we need new culture, as well as new formal rules and forms of ownership. And non-profit cooperatives, worker self-directed non-profits, I think are a really key expression of that in practice. When you are part of, say, a worker-owned cooperative, you have to learn a bunch of new skills. It's actually quite a different kind of role often from working for a boss who tells you

Starting point is 00:58:25 what to do or working for some organization where you don't have decision-making power because suddenly you start to become responsible. You only have one part in it of course with all of your comrades and colleagues but you start to become responsible for the survival of the organization as a whole and the sustainability of the organization. And so that means, at least for me, it has meant I've been a part of a few different nonprofit cooperatives myself. And that's meant that I've had to learn quite a few new skills and learn more about the environment in which the co-ops existed and the market, for lack of a better term, unfortunately, you know, we live in, as Robert pointed out, in this capitalist economy now. So to get more specific, I've worked in a

Starting point is 00:59:11 couple of different vegan, environmentally minded cafes that are non-profit cooperatives. And so I've had to learn more about what it is like to run a cafe and how do you establish yourself? How do you get people to come and buy things from you and be part of your community in a way that I would not have done if I had just worked for some boss who just told me when to turn up, told me what to wear, told me what to do. And I also had to learn team building skills and communication skills to make decisions together with 10, 20, 30 other people on a daily basis. We all had to know about the finances of the corporation so that we could make decisions day to day that would sustain us economically. So I think that that builds a completely different set

Starting point is 01:00:00 of skills that allows us to construct a non-capitalist economy. Because I don't think that we can just jump from going into work being told what to do by a boss, not necessarily knowing the ins and outs of exactly how your company or organisation is managed. Jump from that to like a truly horizontal egalitarian economy. So exactly what worker ownership does is to build these skills. And I think that's an amazing thing. That really makes me think of a really interesting piece of history that I came across when I was originally researching about the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, which I think I read in John Reed's book, Ten Days That Shook the World, the classic like first-hand account, or it might have

Starting point is 01:00:52 actually been in China Mayville's book, October. Well, both really good books, by the way. So the point is, so after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, there was like the whole process of actually taking control of the machinery of the state and like running things, you know, and like just, you know, the basic functioning of the state machinery, the banks, et cetera, et cetera, were in such a disarray after months of chaos. months of chaos and also the fact that many of these sort of like skilled administrative positions were held by those in the classes that were opposed to the revolution. So the bourgeois and you know oftentimes reactionary individuals in these positions abandoned the positions, refused to continue to work on behalf of the Bolsheviks and they oftentimes actually sabotage things for them, which created a whole bunch of big problems. And so there was this skill gap, this period of like deep intense chaos and learning that had to take place among the revolutionaries, most of whom

Starting point is 01:01:59 were just like regular ass working people, right? Like peasants, factory workers, soldiers who had abandoned their posts. And you know, they of course had certain types of skills, but they weren't trained in the specifically administrative labor necessary to run a state apparatus. And so, yeah, I think it's just interesting when we bring in this question of like skills and skill building and skill learning as a tool, right? And in the sense of prefiguration specifically, I mean, it's obviously purely an abstract thought experiment with with Tsarist Russia, because in that example, we're talking about what was a brutal police state. So there wouldn't have been a whole lot of space for that kind of experimentation, at least on a mass level at all. But it is, I think, at least just interesting and worthwhile to think about. And I think it really does illustrate the importance, like you're saying, of building more holistic skills as people, which is something that, you know, under capitalism,

Starting point is 01:02:58 we're deprived of. So yeah, just just a thought I wanted to share on that point that you made. Yeah, really interesting. And I don't know if I know enough about the Russian case specifically to be able to say much about it. And I also have, yeah, counterfactuals are difficult because it, you know, depends on so many other factors. But a big part of me thinks that the Russian revolution could have gone quite differently if prefigurativism was taken seriously with all of that comes with, right, with all of the

Starting point is 01:03:38 different kinds of perspectives on what power actually is and what structures actually need to change beyond just economic structures in the formal sense, as well as with an eye to how just economic structures in the formal sense, as well as with an eye to how we need to learn new skills and behaviors and change our norms. As part of revolution, I would like to think that that things could have gone quite differently. Yeah, who's to say? Who's to say? It was a very specific context. It was quite a militarized context. So yeah, who knows? Maybe a different example could be the Black Panther Party that you mentioned, or even I'm thinking about Cooperation Jackson, where there's actually a really strong emphasis on scale building on like, how do we grow food? How do we feed people? How do we operate these free clinics? So that if that were needed, I mean, if there was the opportunity to scale that up, it could be.

Starting point is 01:04:27 Both the resources and the skills would already be there. So that just speaks to the importance of mutual aid and food sovereignty and skilling ourselves. I'd love to move to just our conclusions, our invitations for listeners as we go forward. So I'm going to share a few and then I'm going to turn to you, Robert, and we're going to close with you, Sio, for just anything you're coming to at the end of our conversation and any invitations you have going forth for our listeners. So I'll just say if folks are curious to learn more about worker cooperatives and our exploration on this topic, I would definitely recommend that Worker Self-Directed two-part series which we'll link to in the show notes. And then the second part of this conversation, I just invite folks to continue listening because we'll be going into Worker Self-Directed in the form of the not-for-profit Worker Self-Directed

Starting point is 01:05:17 nonprofit as an example and speaking with an expert and someone who really helps cultivate and create these. So I invite folks to stay on for that. And then, yeah, more generally, I'm really feeling the invitation of both and thinking and really thinking about our movements holistically, that it is both the material changes, the policies, the laws, the revolutionary acts that need to happen and to uplift and support and be cognizant of the cultural power shifts that also need to happen. So to continue to do our work to dismantle white supremacy and undoing white supremacy within ourselves and others, addressing, calling in, you know, patriarchal systems of oppression as well as also human supremacy.

Starting point is 01:06:08 So just being holistic in our movement organizing and seeing the value of people who are doing all of that work to move us towards a better world. So those are some of my concluding invitations for folks. Robert, I'm going to hand over to you. No, I just want to say that I really do, and this is not like a plug, yeah, I'm not saying it is like a plug to like get more listens for this old episode that we did years ago, right, but like I do think that any listeners who want to get more deeply into this conversation like really do check out the two-part

Starting point is 01:06:41 documentary that we did on worker cooperatives. SIO is featured in it. And it's really fascinating to me that I believe we did it in 2018. So six years ago, we were actually, without knowing it, having this exact same dialogue that SIO and I have been having in a way through this documentary. Part one focuses on all of the beautiful, important skill building and equity and all of the great things about worker cooperatives. And then part two asks the question,

Starting point is 01:07:14 are they a path towards a post-capitalist society? And we get really deeply into that question. And without knowing it, without having the language of prefiguration or without having sort of my current understanding of Marxism, Leninism, and really understanding the theories of anarchism and all that stuff, we had that conversation in a really accessible way. So I would direct folks there and and if you want to hear more from Sio, they're featured in part one of that documentary as well. So that's a good place to go. And of course, our upcoming conversation after this part two is a really interesting deep dive into what

Starting point is 01:07:52 it's like to work at a worker self-directed not-for-profit. And I do feel like maybe one of the challenges that we have are the tongue-twisting titles that we're giving some of these things. Worker self-directed not-for-profit. Okay, but yeah, that's all I had to say. I think you both put it really, really well. I don't know if I have that much to add. But what I would say is, think of prefigurativism as one part in a broader range of different strategies for achieving humane, sustainable, egalitarian societies. Think about how we can all make changes and implement changes where we are right now. That would mean really different things for different people. Some people will have capacity

Starting point is 01:08:42 to like start their own non-profit co-op and federate it together with other non-profit co-ops. Most of us will not quite have that capacity right now. It might be about trying to join with others to learn new skills together. For example, I'm in my university where we're running some anti-racism training next week, where we're going to try and work our way through our whole department, which is over a hundred people in smaller groups, to try and have serious and deep conversations about how white supremacy lives on in the university and how we can challenge that and resist that as much as possible. And it can look in different ways for different people,

Starting point is 01:09:27 but always try to organise with others because individual action is very limited and it's amplified so much when you organise with other people in a coordinated way. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Syo Graydon. We'll be right back with the second half of the episode with Nicole Wires. I work in a garbage factory It's a really nice place to be And the garbage industry is really booming I make a decent salary Every year I get two weeks pay beef I am a value employee employee I hope one day they promote me Tell your congressman don't let a ship all trash jobs overseas They say

Starting point is 01:10:59 It's cheaper to buy trash from the Chinese Yeah they say Music Tell your congressman don't let him ship all trash jobs overseas They say, they say it's too burnt to buy trash from the Chinese Yeah, they say I really do love my company I just wish I had some job security And I hope you'll think of me That was Garbage Factory by Bobby Frith. Now to our conversation with Nicole Wires.

Starting point is 01:12:42 Nicole, welcome. So happy to have you have you on the show. We always start with a introduction from our guests. So can you please introduce yourself for our listeners? Yes, I'd be happy to. And thank you so much for having me. Um, so my name is Nicole Wires. I use she and her pronouns and I am calling in today from Lactamesh and Nooksack land in northern Washington state.

Starting point is 01:13:10 And I am the network director for the Nonprofit Democracy Network, which is a community of practice that was incubated by the Sustainable Economies Law Center. And we're a community of practice for organizations that operate as collectively governed, what we call worker self-directed, nonprofits. And most of these organizations are organizations who identify with the solidarity economy or trying to build alternatives to capitalism and very specifically are wanting to structure their organizations in ways that are in alignment with their values for the world. So making the internal look like the external in terms of what they want to produce and create for the

Starting point is 01:13:55 world. So we, a lot of the organizations use collective governance practices, non-hierarchical structures or shared leadership structures, transparency around information and financial information, empowerment of staff at all levels, and strategic decision-making for the organization. Those are some of the practices that are shared. Each organization is unique and looks different, but it's a really beautiful group of folks who are learning

Starting point is 01:14:26 together in public about what it means to build organizations that really reflect our values Excellent. Yes Organizations that reflect our values and having the inside match the outside world that we want to see the post-capitalist world that we're all working Towards I love this and this is the topic of today, the worker self-directed nonprofit. So there are many different elements of capitalism that need to be transformed. And obviously you're zooming in on the governance element of it. So let's start with what are the challenges or problems with how businesses and organizations typically work under capitalism?

Starting point is 01:15:06 Ooh, so many challenges. Where to begin? I think that some of the challenges that we often see in nonprofits, which often get their structures from corporate structures, which are very shaped and designed by capitalism, are sort of a lack of transparency or shared information. So there are certain people who have access to much more information than others.

Starting point is 01:15:30 And without the democratization of information within an organization, only certain people have the resources they need to make decisions. And so you see a lot of circumstances in which someone makes a decision that really has major impacts on other people, or you know other people, maybe an executive director or someone in a leadership suite will make decisions that have to be carried out or implemented by programmatic staff or frontline staff people that are actually doing the work. And there's a disconnect between the experience of the ED and the program staff. And that decision is often not the most liberatory decision.

Starting point is 01:16:08 It's not often not in the best interest of the work itself. It may not be in the best interest of the constituents or the base or the folks that the organization is in solidarity with or working to serve. And so you can see often very patronizing structures or solutions that are out of touch with what is actually needed on the ground by individuals who are benefiting from the work of the organization. So that's one really familiar kind of pattern that gets played out that we see in organizations. I think another one, and this is maybe a little more unique

Starting point is 01:16:44 to the non-profit sector than the corporate sector, is a sense of self-sacrifice or an idea that staff who are working in these organizations, because the work is supposed to be, you know, heart-centered or something that people are very passionate about, it means that staff can contribute to their own exploitation or not be paid a living wage, not receive sufficient benefits, get pushed to the point of burnout in order to try to keep the organization afloat. And that can also recreate some really problematic dynamics. Again, many times that will result in only people who have access to outside wealth or outside class privilege

Starting point is 01:17:34 to be able to work in organizations like this. And we see very often that movement organizations that are trying to diversify or hire more folks from their base, hire people with lived experience, often find that those internal structures aren't going to work for people who have multiple family members that they're trying to support or have debt or are not upper middle class people. And so that's definitely another challenge that we've inherited from capitalist structures that shows up in movement nonprofits and that the work of worker self-direction or empowering staff to have more autonomy over how the work they do is implemented is really trying to address.

Starting point is 01:18:22 Yes, I love what you're pointing out here. So yeah, I think a lot of us can relate to times when a boss, a supervisor has made a decision where the workers are like, what? Where did that come from? Or that doesn't feel in alignment or that's not matching our reality or the reality of the people we're trying to serve.

Starting point is 01:18:40 And then I also hear you on that burnout culture. And I love this reframing of burnout is as worker exploitation and that that can also be like auto exploitation, ways we exploit ourselves, but also can be culture in an organization and it can be structural ways that an organization or structure does not build resilience or resourcefulness. So thanks for pointing those out. And yeah, just to share my own connection to the Worker Self-Directed Nonprofit, I helped co-found the California Donut Economics Coalition, which is all about donut economics. And in creating it, we thought we had to use the Worker Self-Directed Nonprofit because it was the one that aligned

Starting point is 01:19:22 with this post-growth alternatives to capitalism economic structure and we got a lot of inspiration and actually helpful policies research and even procedures from the Sustainable Economies Law Center. So I just want to say some gratitude to Sustainable Economies Law Center which I know what you just described the project that you hold is a part of. So let's dive into the Sustainable Economies Law Center as an example of a worker self-directed nonprofit. So can you share how did CELC or the Sustainable Economies Law Center come to be? What do you all do and why did you all feel that the worker

Starting point is 01:19:59 self-directed nonprofit model was the most aligned to your purpose and vision? Yeah so the Law Center was formed about 15 years ago. Actually, we're celebrating our 15-year anniversary this year, which is very exciting. And at its formation, the founders were very clear that they did not want to be a traditional nonprofit. And part of that just came from individual people

Starting point is 01:20:22 not wanting to be in the role of holding executive leadership and wanting to share that responsibility and privilege. And so the law center was formed from its very inception with the intention to innovate around what other structures are possible within the nonprofit sector that actually reflect our values and as much as it's possible try to dismantle what we call the non-profit industrial complex or the way that non-profits have been co-opted by capitalist structures to actually just recreate capitalism without really effectively trying to transform it. So that was the intention of the Law Center from the very beginning. And essentially the Law Center innovated what is the worker self-directed nonprofit structure that hadn't been a legal structure to our knowledge that others were

Starting point is 01:21:11 using until the law center sort of created it. And a lot of it was experimentation, learning and growing together, trying things out. Of course, there's a very rich history of collaborative governance that comes out of the cooperative sector and a lot can be learned from co-ops and the co-op movement. And of course, many if not most co-ops are for-profit entities. And so they have a different legal structure. They have a different financial bottom line. They're not necessarily driven by the same kind of mission orientation that nonprofits are.

Starting point is 01:21:44 Many are and some can be, but in terms of governance structures, some of that was borrowed from the cooperative sector and a lot of it was just experimented with. And over time as the law center grew from just a few almost exclusively volunteer kind of staff to now a full-time staff of 16 who are all you know paid with benefits there are a lot of changes along the way and all of those changes necessarily required new innovations in our structures. So currently just like paint a little picture of what it feels like in the law center we have kind of a circle structure this is really common in a lot of workers,

Starting point is 01:22:25 self-directed nonprofits with the intention that decisions are made at the lowest circle possible. And circles are often nested. So you might have program level circles for different areas, different programmatic areas, and maybe those programmatic areas that are similar to each other are all part of a larger parent circle.

Starting point is 01:22:46 So we have a labor circle that's like a larger parent circle. And the programs within the labor circle include the worker self-directed nonprofit work. They include the cooperative development work, which is a for-profit form of collective governance. And we always try to make our decisions at the lowest circle level possible. The circles have representatives from the child circles at the parent circles, so that

Starting point is 01:23:11 information is shared and distributed. And then there are certain subset of kind of decisions that impact the organization as a whole that the general circle or everyone on staff gets to participate in making. And the general circle meets once a month, and we review those higher level kind of organizational decisions and processes at the general circle, but really try to empower the smallest circle possible to move forward the work of the organization.

Starting point is 01:23:38 And what that looks like is whoever's personal passions for the work that they wanna do can really come to life, and people can be really independent and self-driven Whoever's personal passions for the work that they want to do can really come to life and People can be really independent and self-driven in their projects and a lot of beautiful work comes out of the structure like that Absolutely, and I love that Yeah the work that you all do is matching your journey of creating these forms and structures that are more equitable and just and I often Turn people towards the Sustainable Economy Law Center for the resources, right?

Starting point is 01:24:07 Either on how to transition to a cooperative, how to start a worker self-directed nonprofit, or any other legal questions regarding the solidarity economy. So yes, thank you and happy anniversary. That's wonderful. And yeah, just to point out, I really heard what you said about how a lot of people

Starting point is 01:24:24 are maybe more familiar with the worker cooperative, right? And there's many worker cooperatives. There's the consumer cooperative, producer cooperatives, multi-stakeholder cooperatives. There's even platform cooperatives. But mostly the difference between a worker cooperative and a worker self-directed nonprofit is that for-profit element. And so as we look towards, again, the things of capitalism that we need to change, the profit motive and mechanism is one of the root causes

Starting point is 01:24:52 of a lot of the pain and the suffering that we're seeing, whether it's corporate consolidation or environmental degradation, the growth imperatives impact on people in the planet. And so bringing this horizontal governance gift and expertise from the worker cooperative movement into nonprofits is such a huge gift to the movement. So thank you for those. And I also do love how a lot of your policies are open source and some of them are quite innovative and fun. So maybe can you share some policies that a worker self-directed nonprofit like CELC has come up with from this more horizontal governance structure? Yeah some that come to mind are some of our benefits in terms of how we relate to each other and to our work and again this is in many

Starting point is 01:25:44 ways this is an attempt to push back against the nonprofit industrial complex and its efforts to exploit our labor. So SELC, we work a 30-hour work week and we consider movement work that may not be a paid project of the organization or directly written into a grant deliverable, but still relevant work to be part of our work. So if we're out doing eviction defense for encampments of unhoused folks in the Bay Area, for example, that can be included during our work time, or showing up for other coalitions or movement organizations, broader movement building, showing up for our Indigenous allies and partners. You know, a lot of our projects are focusing on land rematuration and returning land to tribal nations, and so showing up for spiritual practices or the relational work of being

Starting point is 01:26:44 in right relationship with our Indigenous partners is also considered part of our work. So we broadly interpret what it trying to identify who are we most accountable to? Do we want to be accountable to our funders or to our movement partners and to the movement more broadly? And if we want to be accountable to the movement, then let's prioritize that by allowing people to spend their work time doing that kind of work. Another one that we're maybe relatively well known for is our paid

Starting point is 01:27:26 parental leave program. So we actually recently went through an organizational process to reassess our parental leave and in the end agreed on a policy of offering 40 weeks of paid parental leave, which is really standard in a lot of social democracies in Europe and almost unheard of standard and a lot of social democracies in Europe and almost unheard of in the United States. And that was certainly a complex process where there were lots of different feelings and concerns and wishes and desires held by many people on staff about this policy and whether or not the organization could sustain it. But fundamentally through a deliberative and democratic process, the organization agreed to pass this policy and to offer this kind of a really robust benefit, recognizing that care work and parenting is also revolutionary work and that we need to sustain and

Starting point is 01:28:17 support our staff as individuals in their lives in order to create work that is truly sustainable in the world as well. So those are some examples that come to mind. Thank you for those. And yeah, for folks listening, just think to where the policies and kind of decisions are typically made in a nonprofit or a business, right? It really usually comes from the top down. And so just imagining this process of parental leave being, let's hear from everyone, let's talk through these, and then let's come through a proposal and see, do we all consent to this? Does this feel good for everyone? So, you know, perhaps it takes a little bit longer, but at the end of it, everyone feels heard, feels supported, and is on board ultimately, because they were a part of this decision process.

Starting point is 01:29:06 And this really speaks to one of the biggest benefits of the Worker Self-Directed Nonprofit, the shift of power. Taking it from this executive director and these board of directors, this very top-down governance structure, to vesting the power instead to those responsible for the day to day and those actually accountable to the communities that are served. So can you just talk a little bit more about like, what does it feel like and look like to draw down this power from an ED and this board of directors to these parent circles and then to these child circles, which are the ones that are really in charge of and getting to decide on the work that they're doing.

Starting point is 01:29:46 Yeah, I think, you know, having had experiences of working in more traditional, myself personally more traditional hierarchical nonprofits and working in worker self-directed workplaces, it's such a notable difference. I mean, I can think of times where the board of an organization I worked for made a decision that reflected a strategic pivot in the organization. A moving away from focusing on one area of work to focusing on a different area of work that was totally out of alignment with what we had been building for many years, all the relationships we had built with people in the community as a community-based organization, and trying to justify that decision when I wasn't part of it at all to my community partners

Starting point is 01:30:30 as the one who was actually in relationship with them was extremely challenging, and it was demotivating for me. I felt disempowered. I didn't want to carry out the board's directive. It felt out of touch and out of alignment and I didn't believe in it and fundamentally, you know, in the end I actually chose to leave the organization rather than stay and fight with a power structure that didn't seem accountable and didn't actually seem connected to what was most needed on the ground. Whereas at the law center or other

Starting point is 01:31:00 places where there's worker self-direction that I've worked at, it's really beautiful to have staff who are closest to the problems be the ones who get to innovate and create the solutions to those problems. And they don't always work, you know, but to have someone come up with, to identify a problem, gather a group of people to help brainstorm solutions, with to identify a problem, gather a group of people to help brainstorm solutions, move forward with a solution, and implement the solution is so much more of an empowering experience for everyone involved. There's a sense of real ownership and stake and desire to contribute and desire to collaborate that I haven't felt in other organizations. And it just feels completely different. And it's, at times it can be time intensive, at times it can be

Starting point is 01:31:48 conflictual or contentious, like not everyone always gets along or has the same ideas. And every time I notice that happening, I just pause to really feel some gratitude for how this is actually some of the revolutionary work that needs to be done, learning how to navigate conflict with each other, learning how to collaborate, learning how to move forward on projects, even if it wasn't my vision, if it's someone else's vision and I might have a different idea,

Starting point is 01:32:15 but supporting other people's leadership, supporting distributed leadership, all of that feels like such important work and it really practicing the way that we wanna be in the world. And so even when it's challenging, there's still something about it that feels really nourishing and meaningful. Yeah, I hear that.

Starting point is 01:32:34 It can be challenging, but then when you think to the alternative of a decision being made for you, like you said, in your old workspace, that sense of powerlessness, feeling unheard, and then ultimately sometimes having to do this work that you don't either feel behind or you feel is actually in misalignment. Let's go into you describe these circles and drawing down the power and the decision-making to those doing the work, but let's go into actually how are the decisions made. How might you introduce sociocracy and also just the field that sociocracy is in? I know it's not the only way but

Starting point is 01:33:09 maybe to someone who's never heard it before. So what is that decision-making structure like and just share a little bit about it? Yeah so CELC, our structure is inspired in in many ways by sociocracy and also by other governance forms like I mentioned, worker cooperatives and holocracy. And sometimes we jokingly refer to our structure as selkocracy. So it's not completely a sociocratic structure, but it draws a lot from sociocracy. And my understanding of sociocracy is that it comes from an attempt to really prioritize decentralizing decision-making and allowing decision-making to move more efficiently, more quickly.

Starting point is 01:33:50 So there are some truths and maybe some stereotypes about consensus-based processes that they can be very elaborate, take a long time, move slowly and particularly with larger groups. And I think historically a lot of political projects that had an intention of being shared leadership drew from consensus as a structure and so sociocracy has developed a form of decision-making that they call consent based decision-making which shares some

Starting point is 01:34:20 qualities of consensus but is unique in that it really helps support groups to move through decisions at a quicker pace and hopefully, again, empower decentralized decision-making as much as possible and decision-making at the smallest level in the organization, so kind of at the circle level. And so, sociocracy is a set of, you know, it's a decision-making practice, but it's also an organizational structure, and it's a set of procedures for how to move that decision-making process through that organizational structure in a way to build an organization that is kind of a distributed, shared leadership organization.

Starting point is 01:35:02 And it's being implemented not just in the nonprofit sector. I think there are many for-profit organizations that are also wanting to get access to the benefits of distributing leadership more or distributed autonomous organizations. Many of them draw from sociocracy as a model. Yeah, and maybe walk us through an example of a proposal using sociocracy. How would it work?

Starting point is 01:35:28 Perhaps through the parental leave proposal. So someone says, hey, I have, after all this discussion and research and consideration, I have a proposal I'd like to make. Walk us through how that might happen with sociocracy. Yeah. And I think it's probably done differently in different places, but even not to sort of pass over where you started, where someone does a bunch of research. I think usually the first step is an initial kind of exploratory conversation.

Starting point is 01:35:56 And I think many organizations are finding that to build a really deliberative and democratic space, you want to bring people into that initial brainstorming conversation as soon as possible. You know, coming with a fully developed proposal misses a step, misses an opportunity for people to participate in kind of envisioning what that proposal could even cover or what its benefits could be. So oftentimes for us at the Law Center, we might start with just a discussion. Someone has an idea, they have a vision for something that could be done differently, and they open up a discussion

Starting point is 01:36:30 with no intention of making any decisions, but just hearing feedback. And that discussion might take many weeks or months if it's contentious or if there's lots of ideas, or it might just be one time we have a meeting and we discuss. And then oftentimes a smaller subset of people will take the feedback from that discussion and try to craft some kind of proposal as a draft proposal, and then bring that back

Starting point is 01:36:53 to the group and the group can review it and offer feedback, make adjustments. And soon eventually you get to a proposal that hopefully has already gathered a lot of input from enough people and you can get a sense already that there's enough people on board with this proposal that once you start initiating a decision-making process the proposal will move through that process with relative ease because you've already had in-depth conversations with anyone who may be external to that or you know anyone who may have some concerns or may not be totally on board with

Starting point is 01:37:27 the proposal to begin with. Hopefully you've integrated those concerns, you've adjusted the proposal in order to bring as many folks on board as possible and so once the proposal is ready then you just move through a decision-making process that can look differently in different places. With sociocracy again they use, which is a very particular way of facilitating a decision-making process with particular sort of rules about what dissenting or not agreeing with the proposal might mean. But other organizations might use a voting process

Starting point is 01:37:59 or a gradient voting process or a fist to five is very common structure that organizations sometimes use. So there's lots of different ways to actually make the decision itself. What's fist to five for those who don't know? Yeah. So fist to five is a really useful tool to just sort of get a temperature check about how people are feeling.

Starting point is 01:38:19 Oftentimes, you can just literally display with your hand how you feel about a policy that needs to be that you're voting on, for example. And so a five might be like, I'm enthusiastically in support of this policy. I personally want to help move it forward. I think it's the best thing possible. And a fifth might be, I very strongly disagree with this policy so strongly that if it were to move forward, I would not want to be involved with the organization or with this group. And then of course, it's a gradient in between. And so when you're ready to fistify, you just call for it, see everyone's numbers and get a sense of how are people feeling about this policy.

Starting point is 01:38:57 Yeah. And I can really resonate with this idea of when you make a proposal, it's almost like there's a sense that the fist to five really makes visible or makes clear the sense of whether there is kind of group consensus or cohesion. Sometimes we'll make a proposal in the California Dough and Economics Coalition and it's like seamless, very easy. It's all yeses, it's all consent, It's all great. Other times, much more discussion. We got to slow it way down. We need to add it to next week's agenda. There's a lot more either questions or concerns, and you can sense that too.

Starting point is 01:39:35 So I really hear you on the variation of this, and also I'm adding this kind of felt sense of whether it feels like a lot of flow and ease and a lot of coherence and alignment or whether there's some roadblocks or some challenges that we have to work through to actually get an agreement about this decision. And related to that, this sense of the undercurrent, or it could be tension or the unspoken, there's this excellent work done by Joe Freeman around the tyranny of structuralistness, which is this kind of critique that in structuralist, leaderless organizations or decision-making structures, there can often still be power, power dynamics, and even leadership, even when it's seen as shared leadership.

Starting point is 01:40:25 And again, I've felt that myself, that there's some people, whether they're maybe a founder or whether they just their personality or their style of communication, there's different levels of, you know, listening and contribution and decision making, even though the intention is to bring everyone along and to have this shared consensus decision-making. And I did get to attend a in-person meeting at the Sustainable Economies Law Center once and sit in on one of your meetings. It was really a beautiful experience. And I remember feeling this a little bit with Janelle Orsi, who is just an amazing leader and such has contributed

Starting point is 01:41:05 so much to this space, this feeling of like a leader amongst leaders in this interesting way. So how does this worker self-directed nonprofit structure, how does it address this or does it does it make it visible? Is there any way to work with this? Is it inevitable? Just what are your thoughts on this idea? Such a great question. And I think you're speaking to actually a couple of different things. One, the tyranny of structuralistness, which is a brilliant article. Folks should read it. Look up Joe Freeman and read the article. It was really in response to movements in the 70s that had tried to move away from hierarchical leadership and didn't actually replace it with any clarity of structure.

Starting point is 01:41:49 I think a worker self-directed nonprofit when designed well is not actually falling into that critique of the tyranny of structuralistness because there is very clear transparent structure. So a well designed worker self-directed nonprofit will have a lot of clarity about how decisions are made, what domains, you know, what circle has domain over what kinds of decisions, what kinds of decisions need to go to the larger circle, you know, what are the responsibilities of the board. So there's a very clearly articulated structure that hopefully people can understand, and it's not a lack of clarity about how decisions are made. They're just made differently than they are in hierarchical structures. And so yeah, worker self-directed are definitely in conversation with that critique

Starting point is 01:42:37 of the tyranny of structurelessness and really wanting to offer alternative structures rather than no structure at all. That being said, I think power is inherent in any kind of structure that we have. And even all of our attempts to democratize power or distribute power or ensure that power is shared equally, there's no guarantee that there won't be forms of power that arise internally. And actually, I would argue that it just, power will always operate within a group of people,

Starting point is 01:43:12 and that power can come in lots of forms. Like you said, I like this concept of rank, which comes out of process-oriented psychology. But the idea of rank is that there are many ways that someone can have rank. It could be because they're a founder of an organization and they've just been around a long time and so they know a lot more about the history of how the organization has operated than other people. It could be because of socialized identities, clearly whiteness and patriarchy confer power on some people over others inherently in the structure and society

Starting point is 01:43:46 that we live in. It could be other forms of rank like just people that are really easy to get along with and everyone likes and so you might defer to them more easily or people that are have a sort of social cachet that gives them some kind of power in a group or a spiritual fortitude, a spiritual grounding that gives them some sort of rank and power in a group. So there are all these ways that power is arising within us and really it's our responsibility if we're making a commitment to democratizing power as much as possible to be aware of those patterns, to name them, and then to

Starting point is 01:44:24 commit as a group to transforming them to the best of our ability. And knowing that that's just sort of a dialectical process, like it's constantly an iterative process, you're never going to get it right. But the way I think you get it wrong is by pretending it doesn't exist or pretending that your structure will somehow eliminate the need to think about how power is operating in the group. Yes. Then this reminds me of one of my favorite tools in an organization and even in meetings

Starting point is 01:44:55 is a space for clearing the air. Just a space to say, is there anyone who needs to voice anything either that they've been impacted by or they're noticing or they even contributed to some potential harm. But just that clearing the air and really being both vulnerable but also direct, honest, open about what they're noticing. So I really hear you on the importance of that. And I think part of what we're doing is we're speaking to the culture shift that workers self-directed nonprofits either necessitate but also foster.

Starting point is 01:45:27 So we've been talking a lot about the forms and the structures that change in a worker self-directed nonprofit, but what are the other culture shifts that develop? And again, these may not be things that we've learned, especially in our previous work experience, as you mentioned, but also in our education system. So sometimes it can actually be a lot of learning of new culture and ways of working with one another. So what are some of those ways that you work with one another that are maybe different

Starting point is 01:46:01 from mainstream nonprofits that really is a different shift in culture. I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is cultivating self-awareness. Being able to navigate shared leadership really requires knowing yourself very well. And I think that includes knowing what kinds of conditions might be really activating for you,

Starting point is 01:46:24 how you show up when you're activated, how to regulate your nervous system or soothe some of that activation when it might be appropriate to say like, I need to take a break from this conversation. I think for many of us, there can be a lot of activation around conversations around money, resources, scarcity, abundance. We've all been conditioned in different ways to relate to those themes.

Starting point is 01:46:51 And in worker self-direction, often you're setting a budget collectively, you're doing fundraising collectively. There's a lot of interaction with that kind of point of tangency with capitalism where ideally we wouldn't have to deal with these kinds of questions or think about them, but we're not free from capitalism yet. And so we do have to navigate some challenging conversations around budget, how we pay ourselves,

Starting point is 01:47:16 where our money's coming from, what compromises we will or won't make in order to fund our work. And those can be really activating for people. And so I think, again, that self-awareness of like, where does my family conditioning, where does my cultural conditioning show up and how I'm feeling motivated in this conversation to advocate for one thing or another? And can I take responsibility to the best of my ability for my own conditioning and

Starting point is 01:47:43 take care of myself in the group so that I can show up as sort of my most grounded highest self to contribute to the collective process. So that feels like a really important kind of cultural shift that is often not expected in a lot of workplace organizations and some people feel understandably a little bit of tension around the expectation to have to bring that kind of self-awareness into the workplace. So that even recognizing that and the tension that might arise there about do we have to bring our full emotional selves or the full depth of our experience into our workplace? Or can we have boundaries around what we reveal and what we share with our colleagues and what

Starting point is 01:48:30 becomes part of work and what's not? Yeah, self-awareness. And you also mentioned self-responsibility. And it reminds me, I had a good friend who tried to start a landscaping permaculture cooperative. And everyone that she asked if they wanted to be a worker member who was already working for her as say contract employees were like, oh, that sounds like a lot of responsibility. I actually like to just clock in, clock out, and even have someone who kind of guides me in what I'm doing that day, this kind of idea of a boss, right? And I thought that was so interesting because it is true that one, we can maybe say, if I'm allowed to say this, one benefit under capitalism is the kind of

Starting point is 01:49:12 decision making is so clear and the accountability is so clear. You have a boss or a supervisor and they tell you what to do. When you become your own boss, right, or you all are the bosses, there is more personal responsibility and accountability as well. You have to develop skills of self accountability and also peer accountability, which can be very difficult. And one thing I love about the circles model within worker self-directed nonprofits is there might be a circle where somebody else is the coordinator and even facilitator of that circle. And then in another circle, you're the coordinator or the facilitator and they're

Starting point is 01:49:50 a member of your circle. So it really flips this kind of accountability and coordination facilitation element. So can you talk a little bit more about accountability and even responsibility and how that's different from a mainstream nonprofit to a worker self-directed one. Yes definitely that is one of the very unique aspects I think of worker self-direction and we call what you just described a hierarchy of roles but not of people. So it's not that Nicole is always in a hierarchical power over position to Della, but that in one circumstance that might be the case and in another circumstance that might be reversed.

Starting point is 01:50:30 And so we are always practicing both leadership and accountability kind of simultaneously depending on the roles that we're having, that we hold in different circles. I think one, and again, this is another kind of cultural shift, but shifting the frame when we think about accountability away from holding other people or making sure other people are accountable to what they said they would do to holding ourselves accountable to what we said

Starting point is 01:51:00 we would do as our primary kind of source of motivation. So that accountability stops feeling like a policing of other people's behavior or a checking in or a verifying and rather a self reflective process of these are the commitments I made. Am I following through on my commitments? If not, what's holding me back? What support do I need to ask for? What commitments are out of reach for me at this time? through on my commitments, if not what's holding me back, what support do I need to ask for, what commitments are out of reach for me at this time and I might need to transition or delegate or ask for someone else to pick up.

Starting point is 01:51:32 And then from that place of self accountability, learning how to accurately self assess and then invite feedback from others and learning the skills of being able to give and receive feedback about how each of us is doing in relationship to our own commitments. And that feels like a really big shift from often hierarchical organizations where there's a boss or a supervisor who sets a set of standards or expectations and then tells you whether or not you're meeting them through maybe an annual review process or something. So you're not really getting very much feedback at all for most of the year.

Starting point is 01:52:09 And then all of a sudden, once a year, there's this very high stress moment in which a bunch of feedback is delivered. And I think culturally in work or self-directed organizations, there's an effort to make that feedback process just a very normalized, very common, very regular part of everyday work. And so no one feels confused about whether or not they're meeting the expectations that they hold for themselves or that the group holds for them. And if things are

Starting point is 01:52:39 not feeling like they're working well, that's addressed early with, you know, open-mindedness and creativity about what might need to shift in order to help feel a stronger alignment or a better sense of connection and working together. And it's never really a surprise. It should never really be a surprise to someone if there are concerns about whether or not tasks are being completed in, you know, in a way that meets the standards of the group, because that's something that you're just actively talking about on a regular basis. Yeah. And I'm also really hearing trust and the importance of thresholds. So thresholds,

Starting point is 01:53:18 what I mean by that is, again, what does the group, whether it's the parent circle, the sub circle, or the organization as a whole, what can they make decisions on autonomously? What do they need kind of approval by their parent circle? And then what do they need approval by maybe the whole organization or even the board of directors? And getting really clear on that is useful so that you know we can make decisions around our own work at this level, and then for other circles or other roles to trust that circle and that work. I'm really hearing that. And one thing I'm thinking about is that I had the great fortune of being able to develop

Starting point is 01:53:55 a worker self-directed nonprofit with others at the beginning, right? We created it as we became a 501c3. What about those who are in an organization right now and they're like, wow, I'm really feeling the strain of the culture of burnout and exploitation or the top down lack of transparency and top down decision making. How might someone transition their nonprofit or a nonprofit? What should they think about? What are maybe their questions, maybe the barriers or even the benefits? And also what size is appropriate to this? Can anyone do it? So tell us a little bit about the transition process.

Starting point is 01:54:31 Yes, such a great question. And of course, you know, each organization looks unique in their transition process. So there's not one individual roadmap that will take an organization through the process. But I think that it's not uncommon that these transitions happen because executive leadership is ready for the transition to happen. I think in places where program level staff or the least empowered staff are really wanting to make a transition, but the executive leadership or the board is not yet on board, that's a different project. To me, that's an organizing

Starting point is 01:55:11 project. And oftentimes that organizing project is effective and through discussions, exposure to new ideas, eventually you can bring more staff on board to the potential and possibility of this new structure. And sometimes that organizing project is not effective. And occasionally we see in organizations like that, and certainly more and more these days, that organizations are turning to unionization as an alternative pathway toward building worker power in organizations.

Starting point is 01:55:42 And we're seeing more and more nonprofits starting to unionize. Particularly, I think that happens more often when executive leadership is not on board with the idea of distributing or sharing power. But so I think one of the conditions that feels necessary for a generative transition is having the support of the existing

Starting point is 01:56:04 executive leadership and the board. And if that condition isn't met, then there are pathway, the project begins by figuring out how to get that condition met by organizing staff and leadership into an understanding of really how powerful this model can be. And then from there, it really, a lot of it depends on And then from there, it really, a lot of it depends on the organization's financial position and financial strength. I think that I've seen organizations who have very minimal general operations funding, and a lot of their funding is very deliverable, specific, grant-based, you know, if it's funding from the state especially, where they just have very tight deliverables and a lot to deliver and that can also be a challenging condition for this transition to happen because many

Starting point is 01:56:54 organizations do find that through the transition process creating the space to slow down some and to be in generative conversation a fair amount is really supportive to a successful transition and if there's no way to either slow down on some of the existing programming or bring in more capacity by hiring a new staff person or hiring a consultant to support with the transition you're trying to do the whole transition all by yourself while also trying to do all the other work that you've committed to doing That can be a really challenging setup. So having the financial abundance whether through general operating Funds or funds that are specifically for supporting this kind of transition

Starting point is 01:57:37 Which organizations more and more are getting access to without that kind of financial stability It can be very hard to execute the transition. And then oftentimes, you know, it starts once there's executive leadership on board and there's some financial stability, then there can be kind of like a internal auditing process of how decisions are currently made. A lot of times, interestingly, that information is not super clear or transparent.

Starting point is 01:58:05 So it starts by just identifying, how are we currently making decisions? And what kinds of decisions could we democratize? And what are low-hanging fruit? Maybe we feel confident and ready to democratize programming decisions, but the financial decisions, we don't yet feel ready as an organization to have everyone involved in.

Starting point is 01:58:23 And so we're gonna really look at the kinds of decisions that are being made, how they're being made and where they're being made and which ones that we can vest in the collective. How can we distribute some of that power to the collective? And then over time, what the collective is holding may expand. The kinds of decisions the collective is holding may expand. The responsibility the collective takes on may expand. I think it's really, can be really useful for organizations to relate to this transition as an experiment. Let's try this for this set amount of time.

Starting point is 01:58:55 Let's assess how it's working for us. Let's learn from it. Let's feel flexible and willing to try something different if this isn't working exactly how we wanted. And really just like in the law center's history of how we were created through a lot of experimentation, expect that there's going to be experimentation and figuring out what works for you as you go. And I think maybe just the last thing I'll say in reference to the story you shared about

Starting point is 01:59:21 the Permaculture Landscaping Cooperative is that shared leadership isn't actually for everyone. And there are some staff, some individuals who are clear, like, I don't want to take on that responsibility. And there are ways that organizations can hold that and like invite some people into the leadership structures, but not require everyone to be in the leadership structure. But depending on the structure you have, a transition may mean that some people choose to move on to a different place that's a better fit for them and you bring new people in. So it could result in some shift in personnel and who's involved in the organization as well because not everyone wants to have the responsibility of stewarding an organization beyond the responsibilities that they may hold in their day-to-day operational

Starting point is 02:00:09 work for the organization. Yeah, and one way that we work with that is in each circle, whether it's the parent circle or the child circle, we do elections regularly. And the elections include who's going to be the next coordinator, the facilitator, the secretary, as well as the delegate to the parent circle.

Starting point is 02:00:27 And just as you're saying, there may be times in one's role, maybe times of the year or just times in one's role, where being a delegate to the parent circle and then possibly even having a leadership role in that parent circle may be too much at that moment. And they really want to focus on whether it's fundraising or presentations or communication. So I think that that election process can be supportive of that. And like you said,

Starting point is 02:00:50 just communicating with each other that like sharing how you're doing, checking in with how you're doing and what your needs are and articulating them and then knowing to the cycle will shift. That's also a useful thing, knowing that a new election will come. So it will be revisited. So I just wanted to add that. As you're sharing about the experimentation that you did, I just feel that it's important to say that the good news is Sustainable Economies Law Center did this experimentation and really, I want to say pioneered, but of course that's colonialist language, but really created this structure that's inspiring and also very well documented. So folks can draw from those resources as well as the resources of

Starting point is 02:01:32 the network that you facilitate. And also that I think we're seeing a real wave of interest in this. And I think it's partially because people are becoming more and more aware of capitalism being unsustainable and harmful to people on the planet, right? And wanting a new system, a next system, a revolution, a transition. So there's that. And then doing that work of the prefigured of politics that, as you said, making our ways of living and working with one another match the economic system that we want. And so I think there's such interest right now. I mean, personally, I've already as a consultant helped one organization

Starting point is 02:02:10 transition from a mainstream nonprofit to a worker self-directed nonprofit. Now this other one, and I know you know of so many, and then as well as cooperatives. And so just to share the good news that this really is a wave. And so if folks are thinking of transitioning the organization or starting one, you are not alone. You're part of a large movement. So maybe anything where you'd share about what you're noticing by way of numbers, by way of what's happening and interest and just how that's all going. Yeah. I mean, I think you said it very well. There's a lot of growing interest. The heartbeat of where I work is really in the social justice movement left. So most of the organizations

Starting point is 02:02:49 that I'm connected to are solidarity economy organizations that are already sort of have some kind of revolutionary politic in some form in which they recognize the harms of capitalism and a desire to transform them. And there is definitely a really exciting growing interest in these kinds of ways of governance. And I find it very inspiring and very encouraging. And also I think it's important for us as a movement sector to keep our eyes on the fundamental prize, which is not just being

Starting point is 02:03:25 able to build these prefigurative alternative institutions, but actually to win governing power at material scales and to take back power from our fundamentally non-democratic structures, and to be able to have more autonomy and control over how we make decisions at a much larger scale. And I think that to me, it feels like the movement is currently testing a hypothesis, which is a really interesting one about if we learn how to make decisions differently and govern differently within our movement organizations that will make us more effective, make us able to accomplish our missions in more impactful ways that will be more liberatory and joyful for us in the process. And I think a question that's still sort of unanswered

Starting point is 02:04:16 is does that build our capacity to govern at larger scales? And if not, we need to reconcile with that. And we need to check in with ourselves as a movement and make sure that we haven't over prioritized our small scale, alternative kind of prefigurative institutions and lost sight of what we need for to truly transform major power structures in this society. So I think it's a really exciting time to get connected to these kinds of governance structures and to learn new ways of being internally and in relationship to each other.

Starting point is 02:04:53 And always, you know, with the hope of using that to continue to build ever greater power as the solidarity economy or as a movement, you know, to transform capitalism on a larger scale. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Nicole Wires and Syo Graydon. Syo Graydon teaches politics at King's College London and is a community organizer and educator who has spent 20 years running workshops, campaigns, and organizations for global justice. They are the author of the book Pre-Figurative Politics, Building Tomorrow Today, published by Polity Books. Nicole Wires is an

Starting point is 02:05:39 organizer and the network director for the Nonprofit Democracy Network and a worker member of the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Bobby Frith for the intermission music and to Carolyn Rader for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by me, Ravi. This episode was produced in collaboration with EcoGather, a collapse-responsive co-learning network that hosts free, online, weekly eco-gatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world.

Starting point is 02:06:25 comics, collective action, and belonging in an enlivened world. In this collaboration, EcoGather will be hosting gatherings to bring some Upstream episodes to life. This is one of those episodes. Find out more, including the date and time for this EcoGathering, in the show notes, or by going to www.eco-gather.ing. Upstream is almost entirely listener funded. We could not keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways in which you can support us financially.

Starting point is 02:06:57 You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring donation or a one-time donation on our website at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through your support, you'll be helping us to keep Upstream sustainable and helping to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance

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Upstream - Prefigurative Politics and Workplace Democracy w/ Saio Gradin and Nicole Wires

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