What if the options to our best challenges had been already throughout us? This concept comes from a easy but radical perception that the knowledge to rework our world already exists in our communities. It’s within the mutual support networks offering care the place governments fail, in cooperatives fostering financial democracy, and in actions reclaiming land, tradition, and sovereignty.
Amid ecological collapse, rising authoritarianism, genocide, and widening inequality, the pressing want for these tales and instruments is evident. The challenges we face typically really feel overwhelming, however we’re not ranging from scratch. Throughout historical past and geography, individuals have responded to injustice and hardship with ingenuity, laying the groundwork for solidarity economies and imagining new methods that may work for all of us.
The tales that comply with illustrate how community-driven approaches can problem entrenched establishments, foster collective well-being, and create tangible options to urgent world challenges. Battle Kitchen served the delicacies and tradition of countries in battle with the US, sparking significant dialogue throughout political and geographic divides. The Carolina Textile District reworked its cooperative community throughout COVID-19 to provide important medical provides, proving that mutual support and collective possession can outpace conventional enterprise fashions. In the meantime, the push for publicly owned pharmaceutical methods demonstrates how prioritizing well being over revenue can decrease prices, scale back shortages, and guarantee equitable entry to life-saving medicines.
These tales are half of a bigger assortment we name Stunning Options: A Toolbox for Liberation (OR Books, 2024), a rallying cry for these prepared to withstand repression, reimagine thriving in our present circumstances, and maintain constructing a greater world. The long run we deserve isn’t a distant dream; it’s within the seeds already being sown in our communities. This assortment evokes us to nurture that future, collectively. Written collaboratively by greater than 70 contributors, and born from the lived experiences of grassroots organizers, solidarity financial system practitioners, and communities on the entrance strains of local weather and financial disaster, Stunning Options demonstrates {that a} extra simply and democratic world just isn’t solely doable—it’s actively underneath building.
Battle Kitchen
Written by Sydney Arndt
Believing that the quickest strategy to an individual’s coronary heart is thru their abdomen, Battle Kitchen sought to advertise peace and construct cross-cultural understanding by introducing individuals to the meals and tradition of locations with which their authorities is in battle. Primarily based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the brainchild of artist-activists Jon Rubin and Daybreak Weleski, Battle Kitchen used a easy takeout window framed by a colourful facade to serve up the delicacies, and have fun the tradition of a succession of nations, together with Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Palestine, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
The takeout window functioned as a platform for public dialogue, and the meals line turned an area for hungry Pittsburghers to interact with individuals and locations the media constantly distorts and misrepresents. The takeout counter was staffed by cooks and public artists skilled to facilitate conversations in regards to the featured nation. Every meals wrapper was printed with private profiles of people that stay within the nation being celebrated, in addition to articles on the nation’s meals, artwork, faith, tradition, and authorities.
To increase the expertise past the takeout line and additional encourage cross-cultural dialogue, Battle Kitchen additionally organized public occasions that centered round meals. Pittsburgh locals and Iranians in Tehran shared a meal through webcam in a digital, city-to-city banquet. Each teams made the identical Persian recipes, then sat all the way down to eat collectively. Different occasions have included casual lunch-hour discussions on meals and politics, dinners with invited audio system, and stay cooking classes via Skype.
In November 2014, a sequence of demise threats pressured Battle Kitchen to shut down for practically per week. In response to the threats and allegations of being anti-Israel, the administrators of Battle Kitchen emphasised that their objective is to carry a loudspeaker to the voices and historic experiences of individuals from the world over—Palestinians and Palestinian People included. The backlash they obtained is proof that the sort of work is critical.
Battle Kitchen supplied the general public many factors of entry, from the style of a brand new dish, to interactions with staff or fellow prospects, to the interviews printed on the meals wrappers, and the intimate meals with individuals distant. Cultural change was central to the venture; the organizers prioritized facilitating an area for locals and folks abroad to precise their respective factors of view.
The webcam meals between Pittsburgh and overseas offered a short lived glimpse of what it could imply to share cultures, politics, and, after all, meals. By making a zone of open dialogue and cross-cultural understanding for no less than one meal, Battle Kitchen made a world the place we pay attention to one another and draw our personal conclusions appear doable. It used meals as a automobile for cross-cultural understanding—and in addition offered scrumptious takeout.
Carolina Textile District and COVID-19
Guided by Marciela Lopez
Written by the Industrial Commons Group
Western North Carolina has lengthy been a middle for manufacturing, particularly of textiles and furnishings. Regardless of free-trade agreements, which stripped jobs from communities on each side of the U.S.–Mexico border, one in 4 individuals in North Carolina’s Western Piedmont area nonetheless work in manufacturing. Many Guatemalan Mayan immigrants have settled within the space to work in textiles and furnishings manufacturing. Over time, they’ve formed the area by campaigning for dignified workplaces. Organizer Molly Hemstreet witnessed their wrestle to unionize a manufacturing facility in Morganton, North Carolina, and started to marvel: May staff personal and function their very own firms?
In 2008, Hemstreet and leaders from the Mayan group co-founded a stitching cooperative, Alternative Threads. They drew on inspiration from Frank Adams, an early architect of the Highlander Folks College (now the Highlander Analysis and Training Middle). Alternative Threads has grow to be one of many largest immigrant-led stitching co-ops in the US, with greater than 50 staff as of 2020.
Aiming to increase cooperativism throughout the textile trade and strengthen native provide chains, Hemstreet collaborated with the realm’s financial growth affiliation and a textile analysis and growth middle to determine the Carolina Textile District (CTD). Fueled by its mantra, “Be large by being small collectively,” CTD is a community that brings collectively over 30 small producers, together with Alternative Threads, and is led by 9 companions, representing 1,500 staff in whole. Members cooperatively govern, practice new staff, share contracts and contacts, develop sturdy moral requirements for the trade, and share their struggles and joys.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the US in early 2020, CTD was well-positioned to provide private protecting tools and fabric face masks. Pivoting its textile and furnishings member-companies to fabricate medical provides was a problem with many shifting components. It required consulting with medical doctors and public-health professionals, navigating ever-changing federal tips, prototyping masks and robes, sourcing medical-grade supplies, organizing the cohorts of producers, connecting with markets and sponsors, creating a cohesive warehousing and distribution middle, upscaling manufacturing, and overseeing high quality management. As factories in Western North Carolina had been shuttering, CTD was not solely safely maintaining open their vegetation, however hiring as nicely. The pandemic underscored the necessity for CTD and accelerated the community’s progress.
Alternative Threads was the hub for CTD’s sewn items throughout the pandemic. Employee-owners responded shortly, placing their technical abilities to make use of in creating market-ready items. Different CTD members got here on board to assist. Since CTD members had a number of years of “coopetition” underneath their belts, the community quickly developed new merchandise and elevated manufacturing. At one level, they had been producing 50,000 models per week, which saved greater than 60 mills buzzing. “We’ve achieved so many issues that we most likely wouldn’t have been in a position to accomplish in an organization owned by one individual,” says Maricela Lopez, a worker-owner at Alternative Threads.
By this venture, CTD equipped 190,000 sanitary robes to North Carolina’s Division of Well being and Human Providers and greater than 500,000 face masks and different private protecting tools to frontline staff. Moreover, it generated $2 million in income for its textile and furnishings producers. In keeping with Sara Chester, CTD co-founder and Industrial Commons co-executive director, “When weekly masks manufacturing hit 40,000 models, [we] realized one thing super was being achieved.”
As a substitute of communities having to attend for firms to return in and to unravel financial, well being, and social issues, cooperative trade networks can resolve crucial issues shortly and creatively. This mannequin is one replicable instance of how rural communities can actively construct an trade ecosystem the place staff personal a safe provide chain, collaborate in mutually useful methods, and resolve their communities’ most urgent issues.
Public Prescription drugs
Written by Dana Brown
The worldwide medicines market is dominated by massive personal drug firms chargeable for a decline in significant innovation in addition to skyrocketing costs, recurring shortages, troubling issues of safety, and corruption within the establishments which are supposed to manage them. These tendencies are dangerous to our well being, economies, and democracies—and they’re inevitable outcomes of an trade pushed by revenue maximization.
So-called “Massive Pharma” firms spend lower than one-fifth of their income on analysis and growth, however half of their income on advertising and marketing. Many additionally repeatedly distribute greater than one hundred pc of earnings to shareholders by promoting off belongings, taking up extra debt, and downsizing manufacturing—inefficient and extractive practices in an trade we rely on for our well being and well-being.
To get totally different outcomes, we’d like a special design. Democratic, public possession of pharmaceutical establishments at scale would take away the revenue motive and assist reclaim medication for the frequent good. Public possession of prescription drugs can exist at all or any factors within the provide chain, from analysis for brand spanking new medicines to manufacturing and distribution providers. Since they aren’t beholden to shareholders and have some insulation from market pressures, they will concentrate on targets apart from maximizing earnings—like contributions to public well being, scientific development, and native economies.
From Massachusetts to the U.Okay., Thailand, India, and past, there are various current examples of states turning to public possession of pharmaceutical firms in efforts to fight excessive costs, medication shortages, and political interference by multinational companies.
Since 1960, Cuba’s whole pharmaceutical sector has been public. It produces each low-cost generic medicine and first-in-class discoveries, whereas offering 1000’s of fine jobs and academic alternatives within the nationwide financial system. Identified principally for its improvements—just like the world’s first lung most cancers and meningitis B vaccines—the trade additionally manufactures many of the home provide of medication and shares its expertise with quite a few low- and middle-income nations, lessening these nations’ reliance on Massive Pharma to satisfy well being care wants.
When correctly resourced, Public Pharma can decrease drug costs, scale back inefficiencies, and guarantee broad, equitable entry to new medicine. Public management of producing, wholesale distribution, or retail pharmacies can function the premise for large-scale investments in public well being, creating academic alternatives and first rate jobs and rising resilience in provide chains. South Korea, for example, helps small and medium pharmaceutical firms with publicly owned manufacturing amenities, which generate native jobs and buying energy that broadly profit the financial system.
Public Pharma may also guarantee that medicines most important to public well being are prioritized for growth. State-owned pharmaceutical firms in each Cuba and Brazil function with specific mandates to develop medicines ignored by the market, like these for uncared for tropical ailments, whereas Massive Pharma firms prioritize medicines that generate essentially the most revenue—typically copies of current merchandise.
Public Pharma can contribute to the creation of a biomedical commons wherein life-saving applied sciences, and the data wanted to provide and enhance upon them, are handled as collective assets for all of humanity. Massive-scale public possession and management of the advantages of pharmaceutical innovation, for example, might assist facilitate packages wherein the wealth created by the trade might prioritize serving traditionally marginalized communities, quite than perpetuating neglect within the title of enterprise imperatives. Public Pharma is a crucial software for reorienting the aim of well being care from earnings to human wants.
Profitable examples from world wide can inform the design and growth of a sturdy Public Pharma sector for any nation. Sweden’s state-owned Apotek Produktion & Laboratorier AB has discovered a distinct segment in specialty pharmaceutical manufacturing, promoting merchandise to dozens of nations, and directing any earnings it earns to its solely shareholder: the Swedish state. China’s and India’s state-owned drug firms have lengthy produced a good portion of the world’s provide of energetic pharmaceutical substances. Brazil’s state-owned labs produce greater than 100 important medicines that enable its nationwide well being service to supply free and reduced-price medicines to low-income sufferers.
Around the globe—even in the US—public-sector labs had been traditionally chargeable for the event of most vaccines. Insulin as a remedy for diabetes was developed in a public lab in Canada and the following sale of the rights to provide insulin to personal United States producers stays a robust cautionary story in regards to the hurt that may occur when privatizing public items. Regardless of being a century-old drug, insulin costs within the U.S. have skyrocketed lately because the three firms that management nearly your complete insulin market make small tweaks on their merchandise as a way to take out new patents and frequently elevate costs. This pattern has produced a uniquely American epidemic of cost-related deaths due to individuals rationing insulin.
Due to the U.S.’s outsized position in world commerce talks and the utter dominance of its Massive Pharma companies within the world medicines market, creating a public pharmaceutical trade within the U.S. particularly can be decisive in world efforts to roll again Massive Pharma monopolies and reclaim medication as a public good. It could scale back regulatory seize and shrink company lobbying, opening up political area for a lot broader enter into the priorities and outputs of this crucial trade. With democratic, public-sector establishments innovating and producing medicines at scale, Massive Pharma’s pursuits would not dominate, and public establishments would have incentives to cooperate as an alternative of competing in occasions of public well being crises.
