Part One: The Alter-Globalization Movement: From the Zapatistas to the Battle of Seattle
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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that whenever there are bad things happening, there are also cool people trying to stop those bad things, or morally complicated people trying to stop those bad things, or people I hate trying to stop those bad things. There's always people trying to stop the bad things. I am your host, Margaret Killjoy, and for this series I'm doing right now, it's just me and you. You in this context is the microphone, but you're also the listener. Isn't that weird?

I'm alone in a closet that's been sound treated, and yet you're here with me. It's so strange. I have been enjoying experimenting with these sort of scripted episodes as a way to break up the format. And I've like kind of had this idea of doing a particular series. And this is that series. It's the series that I wanted to do with no guest. Of course, we still have producers like our producer Sophie Lichterman and our audio engineer Eva. Hi, Eva.

And everyone who's listening has to say hi to Eva. You're not off the hook just because there's no guests saying it to. Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. Our topic these coming weeks is neoliberalism and the worldwide movement that worked successfully to stem its spread. It's a bit strange to think about nowadays because a core component of neoliberalism was a series of free trade agreements that broke down trade barriers between countries.

Our problem right now, as I record this, is essentially the opposite. The Trump administration has embraced trade war as a core policy. Tariffs are one of their primary weapons that they are using to make the rich richer. But you can also use free trade agreements to make the rich richer. It's really just about how you want to do it. They have so many options about screwing us all over.

Neoliberalism seems well and truly dead, or at least taken a real long nap. You can go up and poke it with a stick and be like, oh, it's totally just napping. And what was born from its corpse, or, you know, sleeping body, we swear, it'll wake up, don't worry. Don't worry, liberals, it'll come back. What was born from neoliberalism's corpse seems even worse now.

Because it's fascism. Spoiler alert, that's what grew out of its corpse. It is easy then to look back and assume all those free trade agreements were good things because the fascists want to get rid of them. They were not good things. They did not help the poor of the developing nations or the developed nations.

This series of episodes is going to take us on a winding course through history that explains the horizontal shape of the global left during the turn of the millennium. And along the way, we're going to talk mostly about the Zapatistas, the indigenous bottom-up leftists in Chiapas, Mexico, who have carved out an impressive amount of autonomy from the state, as well as the alter-globalization movement that brought together a global movement of farmers and punks and a thousand other types of people besides.

and ended through creative, mostly nonviolent direct action, the spread of the neoliberal world order. These are some of the most successful movements in history and some of the most successful experiments with direct democracy in history at scale. But since none of them seize state power, their accomplishments are often overlooked. It was the alter globalization movement that swept me up into politics a couple decades ago. And we'll see how much I do or don't weave my own story into these episodes.

This whole series is a bit ambitious, so I'm going to have to start with maybe even more than my usual fair share of content. We're going to start by talking about neoliberalism. What the fuck is neoliberalism? It's a word that gets tossed around a lot, which a lot of people assume they know what it means, but many of the people who assume that they know what it means are wrong and are using it wrong.

First and foremost, just think to yourself, neoliberalism has more or less nothing to do with being a liberal. They both come from the same root economic and political concepts, but they're really just different. It's a Venn diagram and not a circle. And they're not just different because one is neo, because one's the new of it. It is important to understand that political terminology is and has always been a mess.

If you call yourself a Republican, for example, what you actually believe as a Republican depends on where and when you're living. If you're a Republican in Ireland, you might be a militant socialist. If you're a Republican in 1930s Spain, you might be one of the most diehard anti-fascists to ever live. If you're a Republican in the U.S., well...

In the 19th century, you were vaguely progressive. During most of the 20th century, you were a conservative. And in the present era, you're something closer to a fascist than you are to a traditional conservative. You simply cannot look at a political group and judge them based on the labels they use, or you'll wind up with nonsense like the people who believe the National Socialist Party was leftist. Part of the problem is that world politics don't actually map well to a simple left-right dichotomy.

Anarchists and Stalinists are both leftists, but believe in fundamentally opposing things. The nationalist right and the pro-globalization right are fundamentally different things, as we're seeing now that the nationalist right is ascendant over the neoliberal right. Classical liberalism, which is sort of the origin of the word liberalism,

It's an old-timey belief structure that basically says we should be free from government interference in most things, including our business dealings. And I'm not trying to downplay it. It is the belief structure that brings us capitalism. But when people talk about being a liberal in the U.S. these days, they usually mean it in contrast to conservative. Or if you're far enough left, they mean it in contrast to, you know, progressive or leftist or radical.

But in general, it's liberal versus conservative. And so a liberal will tend towards believing in social liberty, the freedom to have or not have a religion, for example, and is less specifically concerned about the economic stuff in capitalism, though most liberals have been generally supportive of capitalism. But that's starting to change as, well, the Cold War has been gone long enough that people are starting to actually have breathing room to critique capitalism more.

which is very nice. Neoliberal, in contrast to being a liberal, it's the capitalism side of liberalism without any real thought given one way or another to the personal side of it. Neoliberalism would ostensibly be like, sure, you can be gay or not believe in God or believe in God or whatever, I guess. But that's not what neoliberalism is about at all. It is about capitalism.

neoliberalism is an ideology built around the spread of free market capitalism and how that needs to spread around the world. And not just in like a nice way, like, hey, I have some beans. Would you like to buy them? We should set it up so that you can buy the beans. You know, it's not a like Timu utopia. Maybe it is, but Timu is probably actually a dystopian. Instead, neoliberalism is around

using aggressive programs to gut the social services of various countries, and specifically force places to privatize everything. Many, many cultures around the world have ancient histories of keeping many things in public ownership. We've talked about this a lot on the show. It's almost like you find a place and you will find that the traditional structure for people to work the land or whatever is essentially communal. And

neoliberalism is like, nope, none of that. Everything's a business now. And look, I know it's a little early for an ad break, but how can I not use that as a transition to an ad break? Because one of the things that's a business is this very podcast. And we are in the business of selling advertisers the time on our show. And here is that happening. Everyone feels great. Everyone's having a good time.

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And we're back.

Neoliberalism is absolutely not the only version of capitalism. It presents itself as the only version of capitalism. And I'm not even trying to defend old-timey capitalism. But neoliberalism is like, this is what capitalism is. And it's just not. It's only in the past 50 years or so that neoliberalism has gained much traction at all. Around the end of World War II...

As the world really decided to get settled into a nice, long, cozy, cold war with proxy wars that are not cold, the dominant strain of capitalist politics was Keynesian politics. Keynesian politics comes from a 1936 book written by this British guy, John Maynard Keynes. The book is called The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. And I will be honest with you, I am not an economist.

I spent way too long this week trying to, and even sometimes succeeding, at learning the difference between mercantile capitalism versus classical economics versus Keynesian understandings versus neoclassical versus neoliberal. And I still could not tell you everything about the difference between classical and Keynesian understandings of like long run aggregate supply or whatever the fuck.

I can tell you that Keynesian economics, the economics that was dominant during the World War II and afterwards for several decades, is pretty into government intervention in the markets. It's pretty much like, well, we want markets and we want capitalism, but we want them to do what we want to do. We want the government to be in charge of capitalism. And so it would have more of an attempt to, you know, fight unemployment and things like that.

Neoliberalism was the underdog ideology back then. For decades. It took a really long time for it to gain popularity. They present this as this, like, natural evolution where people just figured out it's better. But they did not luck their way onto the world stage. Instead, they spent all kinds of money. I read the transcript of a speech from someone pointing out that they spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing think tanks and institutions and foundations and shit to present...

the idea of neoliberalism as like the natural world order. They claim that unfettered capitalism is the natural way for humans to interact and that indeed the only moral way for people to act is in fierce competition with each other. This has been a key component of neoliberalism since probably the start.

Not just the competition thing, but that this is the natural thing. It's like honestly kind of religious. And it's really easy to point to an ideology you don't like and be like, it's basically religion. And I do it every now and then. But that's because people structure their ideologies in similar ways as religion. And the two things are not as distinct as atheistic ideological adherence of the right or the left wants you to believe.

Neoliberalism says that the market is the ultimate decider of, well, everything. This is part of why it's so at odds with any kind of nationalism. It basically hates the concept of government outside of desiring for there to be systems that can use violence to defend the private property of the wealthy. Like, in an ideal neoliberal situation...

Literally, the government exists just to make sure that capitalism stays in charge. And that's the only thing it does. To quote the activist and author, the one whose transcript I was talking about earlier, Susan George, neoliberalism says that, quote, the economy should dictate its rules to society, not the other way around. Neoliberalism really got its start in England when returning villain of the pod, Margaret Thatcher, aka the only bad Margaret,

There's probably other bad Margaret's too, but you know, she's the worst of them. I actually feel pretty confident about that because she's kind of one of the worst people who's ever lived in terms of just sheer destruction of environment, traditional ways of living, worker protection, people's lives. Bad Margaret, just a real bad one. In contrast to the best Margaret,

Margaret Thatcher stepped onto the world stage in 1971 when she became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. If you want to hear more about how she gutted the working class of England, smashed unions, started bullshit wars, and accidentally engendered a pretty sick punk scene, listen to our episodes about the band Crass. And there's actually, in those episodes, some origin to what's going to become Crass.

the ultra-globalization movement that it's probably a thread we won't trace as much again during this time. So it's probably worth going and listening to. Whether or not you like the band Crass, because that's the fun thing about history stuff, is that it's not me just listening to the band Crass. It's talking about all of the things that happened during that time and place. That is pretty fundamental, because this is where neoliberalism got its start. Anyway, Margaret Thatcher, her slogan was TINA, T-I-N-A.

There is no alternative. Because yeah, neoliberals are not convinced that their way is the right way. They're convinced it's literally the only way. Before she took power, 10% of people in Britain lived below the poverty line. By 1996, it was one in four. And one in three children. It's gotten a little better in the 35 years since she left office. It is one in five now. So, you know...

Bully to that. I don't know what bully to that means. I'm trying to speak in British slang, but all I know is cheerio. I don't know anything British. Never mind. But don't worry, we don't have to stay in the UK. America got its own neoliberal very shortly thereafter in Ronald Reagan. And I probably know 80s America slang better.

Rad. I don't know. Under neoliberalism, money fled the public sector and poured into the coffers of the wealthy by design. Public services were gutted and privatized. Unions were attacked on every front and in many cases destroyed. The first time I spent any time in West Virginia, I spent a lot of time talking to union coal miners who had fought during the death of the coal mining unions in the 80s.

And just like them describing how this culture that they had built up, you know, for generations that, you know, coal mining is not the best thing that's ever happened for anyone involved. But at least they had built these incredible unions after an incredible amount of conflict. And they were just destroyed in the 80s. And it's so funny to me because then conservatives come in and are like, well, we care about the coal miners. The liberals are trying to get rid of it. And you're like, motherfucker, all those coal miners used to be all...

liberal as hell, like progressive as hell. It was one of the most heavily unionized industries until you all destroyed it. Anyway, I'm not bitter. I am bitter. Unions were attacked on every front and in many cases destroyed. The strong welfare state that saw the West through the Cold War was beginning to disappear. So in an odd way, it was the working classes of the US and the UK that were the first to suffer under neoliberalism.

at least as I've been able to track down. But don't worry, soon it'll be destroying the entire world. But first, all of history needs to come to an end, at least if you ask the capitalists. The other thing the capitalists will say if you ask them is that you should buy the stuff that advertises on this show.

Although, I talk all this shit, but sometimes we get advertisements for, like, genuinely good things, like, get your flu shot, or go outside, or don't talk to cops. So, I don't know. What if you had to use your own judgment instead of listening to what I said and decided how you felt about these things? Wouldn't that be wild? And we're back. I promised you the end of history. See, the Cold War eventually ended famously.

It came to an end when the Western liberal democracies won in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, or maybe in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. And that, according to a popular idea at the time, was the end of history. There was this author and political scientist, an American named Francis Fukuyama, who wrote an essay in 1989 called The End of History? The End of History?

in an international relationships journal put out by a think tank. The journal is called The National Interest. Later, Fukuyama developed these ideas into a book, The End of History and the Last Man. And basically in this work, he argues that, well, there's a one-sentence quote by him that sums it up well. Quote, What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of history,

but the end of history as such. That is, the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. You will not be surprised to know that Fukuyama was a Reagan advisor. And for a while, he was one of the principal theorists of neoconservativism. What's neoconservativism, you might ask? Surely, that would be the opposite of neoliberalism, right?

It is not. To be honest, the easiest way to understand neoconservativism is that it's sort of the militant wing of neoliberalism or its militant cousin. This isn't quite true. And the two do have some differences. And there's people who would identify with one and not the other.

Neoconservativism is the idea that we should use military force to spread Western capitalist democracy. I actually think that it maybe started just as like we should spread Western capitalist democracy and the military force thing just sort of was a very logical extension of that. But neoliberalism is more concerned about spreading capitalism but is more excited about free trade agreements than bombing places into accepting democracy.

And neoconservatives are a bit more into strong government, specifically a strong defense sector. Big government, guns, and nothing else. All taxes go towards guns, but not fun ones for you and your friends. Does that sound familiar? It's because we live in a world that was created by neoconservativism and neoliberalism.

Anyway, our guy Fukuyama, who declared the end of history, was a theorist of neoconservativism. But he actually balked once the second Bush started the Iraq war because he realized that neoconservativism just led to unrestrained militarism. I think he was kind of a true believer, or is, I think he's alive, you know, in like Western democracy rather than specifically like military supremacy.

By 2008, he endorsed Obama and believes in a strong welfare state as part of a liberal democracy. So he's actually not a neolib either. But this idea, the end of history, is more important to my story than its author's own political arc. History was over. After the end of the Cold War, there was just this thing in the air that, that's it, we're done. Nothing new is going to happen politically. And for a few years, that felt almost true.

The war was over and capitalism reigned over the field of the glorious dead soldiers of the Cold War. But it's worth understanding that by and large, except in the last decade or so of the war, the sort of liberal democracy, the capitalist democracy that won the Cold War, was actually a bit economically progressive. It certainly emphasized a strong welfare state.

One could even say, and it has been said by I believe multiple people in my long source list, that it was the welfare state that defeated the USSR. In a welfare state, anyone who can do so is self-sufficient under capitalism. Anyone who fails at that is kept from falling to rock bottom by a strong social safety net. While some people in the West did complain here and there about welfare being like halfway to socialism,

The welfare state basically provided an essential pressure release valve that kept actual socialism, which involves workers owning the means of production, from taking hold among the disenfranchised of society. With actual socialism an ideological threat, like during the Cold War, the welfare state did well as an alternative.

You also have the social democracies, like those in Northern Europe, which combined a strong welfare state with moderate attempts at actual public ownership of services. But after the Cold War, the welfare state and social democracy started to fall out of favor. Because, well, to borrow from the capitalist view of things, when capitalism itself had the ideological monopoly, with no competition it had no incentive to care for its customer, citizen.

When the Soviet states fell, capitalism in its rawest and most corrupt form fled in to fill the vacuum. This is actually pretty specific evidence of how this was not a democratic process because that's not what people wanted in the former Soviet states. One of my favorite authors and one of my favorite people to quote on this show is the anthropologist David Graeber.

His Ethnography of the Alter Globalization Movement, Direct Action and Ethnography, is one of my main sources for these episodes. And in that book, he wrote, quote, With Stalinism dead, most Marxists expected to see a renaissance of more humane forms of Marxism. Social Democrats believed that they had finally won the argument with the revolutionary left and expected to shepherd the former subjects of the Soviet bloc into their fold.

So the end of the Cold War wasn't the beginning of peace and prosperity, but the beginning of capitalism developing into an even more evil beast.

The end of history had been announced. Liberal democracy is the final form of human organization. All that was left was to mop up the pieces on the board and to do the work of spreading capitalism and one specific understanding of democracy all over the globe. Of course, if you grew up entrenched in the winning side of the Cold War, you grew up being told that democracy and capitalism are synonyms, but nothing could be further from the truth.

If you want to listen to me talk about one of the many, many other origins of democracy, including influencing our legal structures today, listen to my recent episode with Kat Abugazala talking about the origins of English common law and the pre-Roman indigenous traditions of the Britonic-speaking Celts. So that doesn't mean that the USSR was a bastion of freedom or anything either. Just that more than one thing can be bad at once. So neoliberalism is all the rage among people who are rich and want to get richer now.

The version of capitalism the neoliberals wanted to push all over the world is something called the Washington Consensus. Much like how our end-of-history guy wound up distancing himself from the neoconservative movement that he helped build, the Washington Consensus guy, John Williamson, wound up pretty sad about how directly his ideas were tied to neoliberalism and economic imperialism and walked back a bunch of his own points in retrospect in a very defensive and kind of amusing way.

Basically, he put together a list of 10 points to say this is what Washington, D.C. economists largely think is the plan for all countries, i.e., it's the Washington Consensus. And it's a list of things like privatize everything and remove economic regulation and poor countries have to tighten their belts and be more fiscally responsible and property rights must be enforced.

The organizations most heavily involved in spreading neoliberalism are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which both started back in the 1940s. They both exist to try and keep international trade flowing and both ostensibly work to help their member nations become more economically productive and wealthier. And the difference between them is...

annoying. I'll just say that. I have read many articles about the difference between them, and they work hand in hand is honestly the easiest way to think about it. To skip ahead a little, I was a teenager living near DC during some of the protests against the World Bank and the IMF in the year 2000. And I had no idea what any of that shit was. I remember I was on the metro in DC where I'd been off to a youth pride day.

I thought I was straight and I was just a good ally. I spent most of my time organizing LGBT stuff. What a surprise.

Anyway, I took the Metro into D.C. to go to Youth Pride Day, and it was the same day as A16, the April 16th protests in D.C. against all this shit, all the neoliberal world order. And the train car was full of alter-globalization protesters. And there was this woman dressed up like a fairy, and she comes over and is like, hey, are you kids going to the protest against the IMF? And I was like, no. Well, what's that? And at least as I remember it, what she said was,

They loan money to developing nations, but it's bad. And I remember, I was like 16, I remember just thinking like, man, fuck off, lady. Like, that's not a, like, I was not convinced by this argument. Two years later, I would get arrested at a protest in D.C. against the IMF and the World Bank.

I think how we talk about these things matters. Because you can tell a version of the IMF and the World Bank, and you still can, they're still around, you can go to their websites and read their history like I did while researching this episode, and they're just like, oh, we're like saviors of the poor, basically the world exists because of us. But that's not true, right? And so I don't want to just tell you the IMF loans money to developing nations and it's bad, though in all fairness to the ferry on the metro...

It is factually correct. They do loan money to developing nations, and it is bad. The IMF loans money to developing nations the same way the mafia loans you money to start a business. Except, actually, the mafia is probably a lot nicer because I think as long as you pay on time, it probably works out all right. Obviously, I've seen a lot of movies where it doesn't work out all right, but, you know...

Loans from the IMF actually look an awful lot more like every bit of folklore you've ever read about making a deal with a literal devil at a crossroads somewhere. In order to pay back these loans...

countries are forced to restructure themselves into being more economically productive. But not productive for themselves, but for the purpose of paying back these predatory loans. It's more like, oh, you want to pay me back? You're going to have to work. How many hours a day? Well, how many you got? And social services, environmental protections, and labor rights, all gone. Austerity measures for everyone.

These were called structural adjustment programs. So they didn't even have to elect neoliberals with these new democracies that they're blowing people up into having, right? They literally can force...

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

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

Well, the rest of the world has a really big stick, and so austerity for everyone. This is comparable to the system that has left Haiti one of the poorest countries on earth. After the Haitian Revolution threw out the slavers and broke the country off from France, listen to our episodes about that, the Western powers imposed so much interest-bearing debt onto the place that its wealth has poured out of the country ever since. You basically always have to remember that when communities or nations are poor, they

It is not because they don't produce wealth, but because that wealth is extracted. It is for this reason that neoliberalism is seen as a fundamentally colonial enterprise. A neocolonialism, if you will. In poor communities here in the States, you can physically see the institutions that extract value from them. Like take a chain store. If you go and spend your money at McDonald's or whatever...

whatever community you're in, that money now leaves that community unless the people at the very top also live in that community. Because like, yeah, it makes jobs, but literally it wouldn't be worth it for the chain store if people working those jobs didn't produce more value than you give them, right? This is the sort of basis of, well, Marx's understanding to the world, but also just like the way that the modern capitalist system works is that like,

If you make $2 worth of stuff an hour, the boss can give you a dollar and you go home with a dollar and the boss goes home with a dollar. And so the boss gets a dollar or the owner really is a better way to think of this than the boss. You know, and then if you have 10 employees, the boss is now making $10 and et cetera. Right. And so chain stores extract wealth no matter how many jobs they put into an area. They extract wealth from an area. Yeah.

You can also see other institutions that extract value from poor neighborhoods, like ones that keep people trapped in a cycle of debt, like payday loan sharks and the cash bail system of the prison industrial complex. And when you've stripped away a region's social safety net, and I could be talking about a country or I could be talking about an impoverished neighborhood in America, people become desperate. And that's where soft power comes in.

The USAID, which is, because it's in the news a lot, I now know it's called USAID. I would have called it USAID because it looks like USAID and it's aid. But anyway, whatever. The USAID that is currently being stripped away was a big part of this soft power, as were a ton of other non-governmental organizations or NGOs. Within the states, you could talk about nonprofits doing the same thing in poor neighborhoods. Not all NGOs and nonprofits participate in soft power, but plenty do. Because

When you remove a country's ability to be economically productive internally and force them to provide you with things instead, you can show up and be their savior and make them reliant on you simply by keeping them from starving to death. Whereas...

Actual economic justice is about reversing the flows of economic extraction. And if you want to see a really sweet example that I've actually never done episodes about directly here in the United States, I want to push people towards... It's technically a nonprofit, I believe. I want to push people to look towards something called seed commons, which I think we talked about. Actually, we did talk about this a bit in the Argentinian worker cooperative episode earlier.

Basically, a lot of what I understand about reversing economic extraction comes from some of the thinkers who work at this organization called Seed Commons that helps build worker cooperatives in all kinds of places and does so specifically to say like our communities, you know, it's largely run by people of color. Our communities create wealth and then that wealth is extracted from us. But by creating worker cooperatives,

We not only build workplace democracy, but we also keep money and what we produce within our own neighborhoods. And we enrich that and we stop economic extraction. And it's not even about like isolation either. It's just literally about not getting ripped off. And so, yeah, you should go watch their videos and learn more about them. Anyway, this economic extractive process, the idea that like

oh, well, sure, you could produce wealth for yourself, but instead you have to produce wealth for us, is exactly what genocided the Irish in the 19th century in the so-called potato famine. There was no potato famine. I mean, yes, there was a potato blight that happened, right? I actually managed to recreate the potato famine. That sounds really bad. At my own house last year, because I grew a lot of potatoes and they all got the potato blight that I think my friend was explaining is the actual potato blight of what destroyed everything, like these

All my potatoes came out bad with like bugs in them and stuff. My sweet potatoes came out okay. Because actually the thing that solves this is growing a diversity of crops. And the Irish were quite capable of growing non-potato food. But the English were forcing them to export that stuff because it was a colony. And the soft power that England sent in return was like nearly inedible corn and shit like that. And Ireland still doesn't have the same population it did before this genocide happened.

So I don't like the system of economic extraction very much. You might have figured that out by now. So history has ended and neoliberalism is sweeping the globe and country after country is watching its public sector privatized and its labor rights demolished and its natural resources extracted and shipped off to the global north. But people didn't like that.

And some of those people, well, they'd been fighting regular colonialism for about 500 years. So they knew a thing or two about fighting this neocolonialism too. And they lived in Chiapas, Mexico. And they are going to rip open a wound in neoliberalism for everyone to see and for everyone to pour through. And they're called the Zapatistas. And we'll start talking about them later.

On Wednesday! That's my cliffhanger. Thanks for listening to the Whoops All Context episode. But don't worry, it's not a Whoops All Context series. It's just a Whoops All Context episode. And I don't know if I have any plugs. I'm going to just plug Sea Commons again. I'm going to plug worker cooperatives. Like...

People, when they think of cooperatives, they're like, oh, you know, they often think of customer cooperatives, right? Like when you go to a grocery store and it costs too much money, which actually doesn't even need to be the way that that kind of cooperative works either. We did a whole series of those with food historian Ren Arai talking about the history of food cooperatives. But

Fire your boss. Or if you're the boss, sell your business to your employees and become one equal with them. Worker cooperatives are, they even are fairly competitive economically, but that's like kind of less the important thing. We get told every day of our life that we're supposedly, you know, in the liberal world order, we're in charge of ourselves, but we're not because we go to work and democracy stops

at the door to your office and you have a boss and you have an obligation to produce more value for your boss than they give you back. You are personally economically extracted from and that sucks. And one of the ways to stop that is by building worker cooperatives and building, it is a fantastic way to build worker power. Unions are great, but I'm far more interested in

creating our own things. So that's my pitch for worker cooperatives. Oh, I could turn that into a pitch for my own worker cooperative. I am part of an anarchist publishing cooperative called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And we put out a bunch of stuff, books and zines. We mail out a zine every single month to our Patreon backers at $10 or more a month. And it could be all kinds of things. The most recent one that I got in the mail from us, I'm not in charge of this part, is called...

I don't know. It's about how to throw DIY parties and shows and stuff. But we also do like fiction and we do poetry and we do all kinds of how-tos and fun things. And we have a bunch of different podcasts. We have one that I am a co-host of called Live Like the World is Dying about individual and community preparedness. We have one called The Spectacle, which is for people who love movies and hate cops. And we have one called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, which is actually the monthly zine read to you by a voice actor and then an interview with the person who creates it.

And so you can check out all that stuff. Almost everything we do is available for free as well. Our books we make available digitally as cheap as we can. We have some audio books and including some of my own books. Strangers in Tango Wilderness. That's my plug. A worker cooperative.

And see you Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.