Jobs, Jive, and Joy

Bernard Marszalek joins us to discuss the history of the Hawthorn Works and his new book: Jobs, Jive, and Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit.

Buy the book from AK Press

Transcript

Josh Davis: So all right, I am here today with Bernard Marszalek. Glad to have you here Bernard. Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your history with worker co-ops?

Bernard Marszalek: That sounds like a good place to start. So I'm originally from Chicago, and my first acquaintance with co-ops were housing co-op. Not that I was a participant but in the 60s there were quite a few in Chicago as in many places. But my first experience at worker co- ops was in a very small print shop friends started. I dropped out of Roosevelt University in the late spring of 68 after an altercation with Staunton Lind who was kicked out of the university. And we demonstrated to keep him in. And of course we were arrested for occupying the school building and charged with felonies and so forth, which were thankfully dropped.

But I dropped out of school and went into my friend's print shop to learn a trade, which historically, as many people know, was very common amongst political people to have a printing background. I mean, we can just mention Proudhon but there are many others who are less well known. So anyway, that was my first acquaintance with printing. I learned the trade there. And of course, this was an exciting time for Chicago in 68. We had the democratic convention. My friend who was twice my size and had a motorcycle helmet and a baseball bat..would go off during the day to Lincoln Park to protect the yippies along with other people. And I was in the print shop during the day. Printing yippie literature and various other..I mean, we did most of the printing for the Democratic Convention opposition.

We had several presses and I was there alone running these presses. And in the evening I would try to go out and see what I could cause in terms of mayhem, but basically that's where I learned my trade. Then I moved to San Francisco in the early 70s, picked up a couple of commercial jobs, which I might expand on later if we talk about ESOPs. And then after about 10 years of working in a couple of commercial print shops, I found myself at Inkworks Press, which was started in 1974 in Berkeley by some Marxists. And it expanded, moved from Oakland to Berkeley. That's when I dropped in by accident, sort of.

I mean, I was on my way. I was living in Berkeley at that time. And I was driving by and saw their shop and knew a little bit about their background, but being something more of an anarchist than a Marxist, I didn't feel too comfortable working there I thought. But it turns out that by chance, my skills in pre-press were exactly what they needed. So I spent almost 18 years there working in a collective print shop, which was..you know, in the co-op, worker co-op community, generally across the country, there aren't that many industrial co-ops or manufacturing co-op, lots of them are retail or service. But in the 70s and early 80s, there was a network of print shops across the country. And there was one in Chicago, New York, Massachusetts, Santa Cruz, and then there were smaller shops. Let me just name the bigger shops..smaller shops. Well in Madison, for example, there was one.

So our print shop was actually in the range of being, in terms of commercial print shops, a medium-sized print shop. At its height, there were up to 25 people working there. Not all of them were members. Some were part-time. Some opted not to become members, but it was a unique situation because it was a worker co-op and also a union-affiliated print shop, so we had the best of both worlds, in my view. We had benefits through the union, and we had the security of a worker co-op enterprise, and the joys of working in a democratic institution.

We're also unusual in the sense that we were placed right in the middle of a very active political scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. So most of our customers were actually nonprofits, some of them well-endowed nonprofits and some marginal. And then of course, there were a lot of political activists. So we had a sliding scale of commercial work, which was typically commercial pay, then sliding scale down for large nonprofits, smaller ones, and basically just gave printing away to people who couldn't afford it. So it was unusual on two senses that we were, first of all, a manufacturing industrial co-op. Had skilled people and therefore had to look for skilled people as members or train them, which we did. And also that we had this political, very political idea behind ourselves in terms of what our function was in the community.

So there was a network of similar semi-large co-ops in the San Francisco area. The Cheese Board, of course, most people know. It was about our size at that time in the late 70s, early 80s. Rainbow Grocery was probably twice the sizes of Inkworks and Cheese Board. But the three of us were major movers in terms of the co-op community, in terms of having longevity. And having the experience of working in a collective situation. So we sort of became a source for peer relationships with smaller co-ops or startups. That evolved into a network, which was..most people now probably know us as the Network of Bay Area Worker Co-ops or NoBAWC. And I think we were the first national network of co-ops, which included at the time probably up to- I'm guessing now, can't recall exactly the first level of membership, but it was at least over a dozen, and it quickly grew to up to 20. Then I think currently, or at least in the near past, because I'm not too certain what the membership is now, we had up to about 30 people from Sonoma County, which is about 30 miles north of us, down to San Jose.

And so Inkworks, Cheese Board, and Rainbow were the initiators and sort of the basis for NoBAWC. And it was an interesting development because there were no nonprofits organizing co-ops or doing any kind of co-op development except the small one on the peninsula that was -through the Catholic agencies - doing housework. But very small, just starting, getting off the ground.

So we had a relationship with smaller co-ops in the sense of being peer instructors and communicators of attitudes towards development of the co-op, how things work, finances and so forth. This was really a great time to see the development of what I'll get into later, what I want to talk about which is a co-op culture. A culture of people who are not only in their own co-ops experiencing a new culture amongst themselves. I mean, when people get into a coop coming from usual top-down boss relationships, they have to relearn how to communicate with people as peers, how to communication their intentions, how to listen to people.

That really takes some time to develop. Sometimes, some people just can't take it and just leave. But the good side of it is bringing in people, especially at Inkworks, we had to bring in people who had some experience but maybe not the level that we needed. I mean, we had half a million dollar presses that we had to operate. People had to have years of experience to do that. But they could be trained if they were in a situation where, like a child learning something, if they're happy and pleasurable doing it, they learn quicker. I mean, it's a no-brainer, really.

But so we train people, but in the training was also not only a skill but also the development of how to work in a peer relationship, how to to work with others. And so people would come in and be sort of hesitant to say anything or do anything and be somewhat nervous. We always bonded with a new person. So a new person coming in would have a mentor. And that person would sort of guide them through the operation of the collective, encourage them to speak out when they had something to say.

And over a period of six months during the trial period, a probationary period, they would begin to actually adopt the culture that we were trying to cultivate. It was a marvelous thing to see. And I think, you know, this is common to all co-ops, even very small ones. They have to develop a different kind of relationship than they've had in previous jobs. And it takes a bit of learning. So that's some of my background.

Josh Davis: The point about culture, the co-op culture and just being..taking some time to sink in for people and learning all those skills is one that comes up a lot with people with..you know, experienced worker owners, it's always a big one to focus on. And it's important, I think, to say over and over again because a lot of people, when they get excited about worker co-ops, initially if they haven't had much co-op experience, don't necessarily credit that fact that that's going to take..those skills are going to take time to develop. So, I probably should have started by mentioning you have a new book out, correct? Is it ready for purchase yet?

Bernard Marszalek: I'm not much of a commercial, but it's called "Jobs, Jive, and Joy." It's an argument for the utopian spirit. And it's published by my press, Zatangi Press, which is kind of a cloud endeavor. It has really little concrete reality, to be frank. And C.H. Kerr, Kerr Company, of course, has a long history of publishing political documents of one sort or another. In fact, Charles H. Kerrr, the founder of the company, was the translator of Marx's "Capital" at the turn of the century. And I believe the warehouse in Chicago still has copy of the original, some of the the original bound volumes. I shouldn't say that for sure because I'm not that certain, but I know when I left in the 70s the warehouse still had some of the earliest bound literature, small books of..pocket-sized books but hard bound. For example, like Paul Lafargue's Right to Be Lazy, which I published the essays of Lafargue about 10 years, 11 years ago. So I have that printing background and also the publishing background with Kerr. So Kerr distributes to AK Press so people can find my book at AK Press. Maybe if I can pull away for a second, I'll grab a copy.

Josh Davis: Oh, I can edit in the cover next to you while you're talking about it, if you'd like. If you want to grab the book, you can but-

Bernard Marszalek: Oh, OK. Thanks Josh.

Josh Davis: It's the magic of editing. We can make that happen. So yeah, tell us a little bit more about the book, "Jobs, Jive, and Joy."

Bernard Marszalek: Yeah, the reason I brought up the culture of worker co-ops is because before the pandemic..is how I started to find my life these days..and the fall of 2019, I began reading about my mother's workplace, which in Chicago was the Hawthorne Works. That was part of the Bell System. I'll take a second or two to explain this because it's..people, you know..this is like historic note that many people will have some appreciation of with maybe their grandparents and old telephones, but certainly not anything current that makes sense.

So the Bell system was the huge monopoly that controlled the entire telephone system in the country. It was divided up into three parts. It was a research section, which still exists, the Bell Labs. It had the phone system, which was all the operators who made the connections between individual phones and the phone you were trying to reach, which had to be done manually by operators. Maybe some people have seen pictures of switchboards from years ago. Well, there were 100,000 operators doing that across the country. It's a huge workforce. And then the manufacturing section of the Bell system was Western Electric and was based mainly in Chicago and some in New York. But the section in Chicago was divided up into numerous small workplaces near the Loop or downtown section of Chicago.

Around the turn of the century, they realized that this was nuts. They needed to expand into one large place and consolidated these small work places. It'd make no sense to do this today. It made no sense back then either. But since they were a monopoly and they had tons of money, they bought 300 acres just outside the city limits. That's important because they didn't want to be part of city constrictions in terms of employment or in manufacturing and so forth. So they're out in the farmland just west of the city's limits in a town called Hawthorne. Hawthorne didn't exist very long. It became Cicero, Illinois. And people may know Cicero as the home of Al Capone. Of course, he was living there because he also wanted to live outside the Chicago limits for reasons that are obvious.

So Hawthorne Works developed as a huge institution. I think the only equivalent today would be Google because it was 300 acres, huge number of buildings, some of the largest factory buildings ever built with sprinkler systems in it. First time that ever happened. Huge windows for daylight to bring in as much natural light as possible. But also they had what was important, and what I picked up from my mother, was that they had huge fields. They had three baseball fields, tennis courts. They built a huge gym for the workers. The whole enterprise was, in fact, a way in which they would provide after work time leisure for the workers there.

Why did they do that? The reason was, of course, the only workers at the Hawthorne Works, they were in unions, were the skilled workers that were transferred from those small factories in Chicago out to the Hawthorne Work's new plant. But they didn't want the women who were the majority of the workers in the factory doing what today would be considered the minutiae work of putting an iPhone together. They were doing that in terms of wrapping coils, copper coils for the innards of phones. The electronic equipment for the switchboard and so forth. It was drudgery work and would be rife for union organizing if the company didn't in fact offer a lot of allegiance to their employees in terms of several levels of allegiance.

One was that they were doing necessary work. They were actually putting together a communication system across the entire country, which, like Google would be, you know, be a..how can I say..a motive to actually bond with the company. You were doing useful work. You were are doing something that was a benefit to many people. So that was one element of the capture of the employees.

The other was - since they held this land - after work activities. Sports became, of course, the first thing that fell into place. And I should say that lots of company towns at that time, like Hershey, Pennsylvania, for example, had land to provide baseball fields, maybe football or something. That kind of stuff was pretty common. It wasn't unusual.

Josh Davis: Yeah, in Butte the “Copper Kings” had Columbia Gardens, this nice place to go to enjoy with your family on your Sunday off.

Bernard Marszalek: Right, right, this is pretty common because, well, leisure wasn't commercialized. There was no leisure except what people could put together themselves. Well, the Hawthorne Works went one step further than all that because of their monopoly position and the wealth that they had. They not only had the fields, they built an enormous gym. I think several of them. So people could play tennis inside when it was cold and miserable outside.

But even beyond that, they set up a library. They set up a clinic. They did all this work to actually create a whole life experience for the workers there. And this was significant because for the women that worked there, many of them teenagers, there was no other social life but the social life that was provided by the company. My mother still had friends after she quit and was raised a family who were friends from that period of time that she worked at the Hawthorne Works. She worked there for over 13 years. I heard about this through her in brief, but I never really talked to her much about the details because her main connection with the after work like activity was in one adjunct to the library and the workshops and the classes they had, which was called the Hello Charlie Club.

The Hello Charlie club was really a kind of a- I don't know what to call it. It's almost like a sorority of sorts, in the sense that it was basically just for women. And it's renowned was to have activities that would cultivate a certain feminine activity. There were, for example, at the time, yearly Hello Charlie contests where the woman who won the Hello Charlie contest was for a year the advertising spokesperson for the Bell system. I mean, this is sort of ridiculous today and was obviously a - what can I call it - disgusting development.

But on the other hand, in the classes they had and the workshops and so forth, there was a women's gun club. So here we had rifle training at the Hawthorne works for women. I mean, if I tell people that, they just don't believe me. They just think this is nuts. But they had literary clubs.

And the thing about the club - it was called the club - this leisure time activity, was that it was managed by the management there, the people running it were actually part of management, that was their job, is to maintain the club. But the workers themselves would bring propositions for, or suggestions for, activities. And I don't know of any that were really- I mean, there must've been some that were decided that was just off the range of activities that would be possible. I mean maybe there was a woman's gun club, but maybe there wasn't a target practicing gun for men. I don' know. Maybe, you know, pistols weren't allowed but rifles were. I have no idea. But from my research, I couldn't find anything that was out of the scope.

So obviously there were classes, workshops, and job training, and that sort of stuff. But there were book clubs, there were music clubs. In fact, I think- this is hard to believe, but you have to understand that at the height of the Hawthorne works, there were 40,000 people working there. That's a whole major city working in one location. So with all that workforce, it's not beyond reason to imagine that they had three marching bands. Three marching bands. They had people who were either trained to be musicians or had some musical background before they began working there and developed it further. It is pretty incredible when you think about how this functioned.

My point was that when I began getting into it more deeply, I realized that what was developing here was a nascent worker culture. It was organized by the workers but managed by, of course, the company and financed by the company. But it was really a way in which the workers could develop their aspects of their lives free from the commercialization that preceded this development in the late 30s with movies, for example..dance hall setting..being set up. I mean, you know, all this stuff could be handled through people you knew at work and who you worked with daily.

And so anyway, I realized that these two cultures have some relationship to the larger issue I've seen in the last, well, over 30 years of my life from the first beginnings of Earth Day, and so forth. I mean, living out here in California where we are susceptible to earthquakes, to fires, to tsunamis, to tremendous rainstorms. I mean you name it, we're on the edge here of catastrophe every day. I don't know how people today recognize climate change, for example, because it's now affecting the whole country in very serious ways, but 30 years ago, in California, it was a very real situation with forest fires and earthquakes. I mean, the earthquake we had - it was 25, 30 years ago now - brought down one of our bridges. The East Bay Bridge was destroyed. People had to take ferries to get into San Francisco. So this was all very real for us.

Unfortunately California, especially Southern California, is an oil field and I remember as a child visiting California with my parents, visiting a friend of my father's outside Los Angeles, I looked out their kitchen window and there was a pump, not two blocks away from the window I was looking out, pumping oil. I had no idea what this was. I asked my father, he said, "Oh, they're pumping oil." They're pumping oil? I mean, I thought this was something that happened either in foreign countries or maybe in Texas, but not where people live.

Anyway, so my interest, my fear of climate change was coupled with what I next recognized was resource depletion, and now what is called the polycrisis. And I don't see how we're going to survive without developing a new culture. And I think that culture that has been developed amongst the worker co-ops and what I saw developing amongst the leisure time activities in Chicago are glimpses of what a new culture could look like. And that's why I'm interested in how the worker co-ops can actually have a great influence in terms of where we go in developing that culture and what's necessary because it's not gonna happen from the top down. Forget that.

I mean, you know, there was a great deal- I mean lots of young people these days are pushing for a youth conservation corps; something like the old CCC, the New Deal. Well, that was up and going and Biden set up the money for it and everything and now it's been scuttled. So, you know, so much for spending years and years and time and energy trying to get the federal government to do something. I mean, it might work, but you're taking your chances and what you're missing by developing all your time and energy towards doing that kind of activity in terms of influencing a top-down solution. It misses the element of local control that could be developed.

There's tons of money available, not just through the federal government, but through local agencies, foundations, churches. There's all sorts of money available locally that people could draw upon, not to create nonprofits that simply push some minor effort to green our roofs, and so forth. That's necessary but more major stuff in terms of actually setting up real self-reliance in terms of, for example, networking small farms - the networking of the food industry. And co-ops, I think, can play a big role in getting that off the ground.

And some places, I thinks it's happening. But we need to develop that further. And I think GEO, for example, has been doing a great job. And promoting that sort of view of how the co-ops can actually play a big role in developing resistance to climate change and to resource depletion and, in fact, a whole new way of life that we're gonna have to live. One that's not based on sacrifice but based on something that's enjoyable because we're going to have to enjoy our lives, not have to sacrifice them. If we're going to ask people to sacrifice to create a livable world, it's not gonna work. You have to develop some way in which people see some benefit in a change, and that benefit is going to have to be something that satisfies something that has been denied to people, which is control over their lives and some sense of being responsible for developing a future. It's not going to happen by asking some nonprofit to provide electric stoves or E-scooters, as we see here in Berkeley which are just devastating pedestrian sidewalks. This is not a solution. So that's- well I'm ranting here sort of now.

Josh Davis: What you're talking about, I think, is what Jessica Gordon-Nemhard, one of our members - and well known co-op author in the US here - she likes to refer to as the cooperative commonwealth as kind of our goal. And just, for the sake of the topical nature of it, some of us - myself included - have been for a long time warning about getting too involved with, especially the federal government, but just kind of governmental agencies in general. And for a couple of reasons - one because budgets can go away very quickly when you have a change of who's in power, what party's in power and that can be a thing. And as we're seeing in Argentina now - and we could have it here in the US as well - when you connect your co-op movement - whatever you're doing, your project, your thing - to a particular political party, you put a target on your back for the other political party, right?

And, of course, the politicians who are on quote-unquote your side cannot necessarily be trusted to back anybody up, to be there when you need them. So it feels like a dangerous game to play. And I understand why people want to try to have effects on the people who have the controls of the levers of power in our society. But I think you are very correct. And that's what we want. We need local control, local power, local funding. And even within our co-op movement, we've been very supportive of regional co-op federations and municipal co-op federations like NoBAWC. That's really where a lot of the good stuff happens.

Bernard Marszalek: I'm very happy to see developments like- I think the Cincinnati group, for example, is allied with local unions, and that makes for certain solidity and a way of leveraging power. So I'm not opposed to people finding those connections, it's just how much you devote your time and energy towards it. And how much, in fact, foundations and grantees play a role in steering people in that direction. And you don't..so for example, you know, my..okay, I'll go off into another rant here.

I believe that co-ops have - and you can see this with Inkworks, for example and other co-ops, it's very obvious - there's the pragmatic side of the co-op and then there's the visionary side of co-op. And they're both there. But if you emphasize simply the pragmatic side and lose sight of the visionary project, you lose sight of what is actually motivating lots of people to be attracted to what you're doing. I mean, we lack vision in this society. You know, why is Bernie, for example, pulling out thousands of people to an event today? It's not simply because he's fighting Musk or Trump, which are a losing battle anyway. You can't fight these personalities, you have to fight the system. He's doing that but also he's providing something of a vision. I mean, it might be not one that I particularly care for. I don't think we can go back to the New Deal at FDR, for example. So talking about a New Green Deal didn't ever rub me the right way. But there's aspects of what co-ops have done in the past that preceded the New Deal and flowed afterward.

I bring those up in my book. The one that preceded the New Deal was the unemployed consuls that existed in this country during the Depression. The one in California that I highlight that was based in San Francisco, but also in Los Angeles, was a total self-help organization. They organized trucks to bring farm produce into the cities to feed people. They went out to farms to help farm them, help to raise the crops and then to harvest the crops, help people rebuild their houses or build new housing - not new housing but refurbished housing for people who needed housing. They did all sorts of stuff before the New Deal came along.

In fact, there was even a socialist campaign in California based on these unemployed consuls. And then coming after, the New Deal and the Conservation Corps, which did an enormous amount of work in forest preservation and so forth, as everyone knows..I mean, all across the country you can see evidence of the New Deal's conservation work today. But coming after that, in the 70s, were the Hoedads, starting up in Oregon first, and then going throughout the Western states.

Josh Davis: I live right next to an old Hoedad by the way, I’ve got a Hoedad as a neighbor.

Bernard Marszalek: Right, yeah. So that's a history that's to some extent available on the internet. I mean, that's where I found tons of information about the Hoedads. And it's still, yes, as you said, there's still some old timers around who can talk about it. But the Hoedads were a perfect sort of situation that we need today. These people were contracted with the federal government to reforest the depleted forests. And I think at the height there were 300 Hoedad members and 13 different organizations all run as worker co-ops. So they didn't call themselves, I don't think they called themselves worker co-ops. They were simply co-ops at that point. But it was an amazing situation that developed for, I think, more than 15 years.

I think they got to the point where they were in every Western state and doing more than just forest restoration. The Hoedad name comes from the tool that they used, which was kind of a pick on one side and a hoe or a blade on the other. So they would break the earth, and then with the hoe, the blade, dig a hole large enough for planting a small tree, a sapling. But they did other sorts of restoration work too. So this was, to me, this is an example of what we could be doing today.

I mean, why can't a church group, for example, get together and develop a similar sort of situation, even starting small and doing it just in the summer when the kids are home from college and stuff. I mean this would be an example that could be transferred and replicated across the country. I mean, we don't have a lot of time to fight this. I mean, it's going to get worse. It's not going to get better with climate change and resources depleting and the polycrisis as they call it now because we have several issues that we have to deal with. But we can start small, we can start locally.

And, you know, I bring these issues up to discuss what could happen if people had the vision, and that's why I think the vision is so necessary in developing more co-ops. I really bridle under this term, worker-owned co-op. I mean, there's ownership, of course, in a sense, but you can think of co-ops as a commons, and a commons is not owned by anybody. A commons is cultivated or used, if it's a forest, for example, to gather wood by whoever is available nearby, and [whomever] participants agree can be a commoner. It's an arrangement that works on the basis of a membership, not a basis of ownership. I don't buy a portion of the commons. I'm granted a portion of the commons by people who are commoners already. So it makes sense to think of co-ops as a commons, and if it's a commons, then the ownership part of it is there for sure, in a sense, but not in the basic legal sense of owning your job. I mean, you don't sell your job to somebody else. You don't have the role of an owner in a relationship like, for example, a condo even.

You don't have ownership of the job in the sense of being able to sell it or being able to transfer it to somebody else. You have ownership of a right to vote. That's it. You have ownership of a vote. And that vote is ownership only as long as you are agreeable to the membership. If, for example, you start slacking off and not doing your job or having some kind of mental breakdown, I mean, you'll be helped to try to get back in line. But if it doesn't work out or if for some reason you decide that you can't stand the personality and you can't agree to work with that person, then you're gone. I mean, you can't be tolerated in a situation where you're disrupting an entire group. And you know, I've seen that happen. I mean it's not a pleasant situation but it does- it's necessary to keep the group focused.

So for me it's what the United Kingdom did, Great Britain did, when they talked about co-ops in the 60s and 70s, they talked about common ownership. Which makes more sense, in the sense that it's a common endeavor that we're involved in and our ownership is a group ownership. It's not an individual ownership. So that makes more sense to me and I just prefer saying, you know, worker-run co-op. What's wrong with worker-run co-op? I mean, it's the control that we have on the job that's important here. It's not what we own; it's our control.

So, you know, especially with retail co-ops, they're usually pretty small. I mean, a large coffee shop, for example, may have 12 people in it, but that's probably the limit for all sorts of reasons. But at that level, everyone can be in a membership meeting. It's not like you have 250 people or whatever the current number is at Rainbow, where they have to break down each department into like a small co-op. So the produce people have their own network and their own agreed way of working together. The cheese people do their own cheese thing. And then those various different departments come together for group meetings. And there are all group, all member meetings too, but basically the place is run in a balkanized way. You know, people are divided up into certain sections which is what you want.

And that's how the culture works too, because if it's 250 people working anonymously as one big group and then there's a hierarchy of managers for that- I mean, that just sort of breaks down the whole idea of what the culture is about, how much control you actually have. So that's a smart way of developing, and that's to me the whole crux of what the visionary element is. That's why I talk about the utopian spirit because I think it's too easy today to just fall into nihilism and the dystopia. It's almost, it's self-defeating in many ways. It's what the system wants, you know, just give up.

Just, you know, let's..the latest thing here is shipping routes in the Arctic North. Great, so now we're gonna be able to ship our crap from one place to another quickly and avoid going through the Middle East and the troubles that, the so-called troubles that are happening there. I mean, give me a break. You know, we should be working on preserving the Arctic, not celebrating its destruction by sending ships through it so that we can get our junk from one place to another. This is so screwy, you know? I mean we live in a bizarre culture, we live at a time that makes no sense at all to me.

Josh Davis: Yeah, I think for me, it's important for people like us and our movement to keep that utopian spirit and the cooperative spirit alive and going, even when things look dark. Because when things do collapse - which I think inevitably our economic system is unsustainable and things that cannot go on forever will stop eventually – and we're already seeing breakdowns with all of the fires in L.A., and the hurricanes in North Carolina and what not. But there's this kind of silver lining to the disasters, which is it often brings out more of the cooperative, solidaristic spirit in people. And we have a great example of this recently.

A couple of our members were talking to people at Firestone Books, which is an anarchist worker co-op bookstore in Asheville. And after their big floods, that bookstore became the community hub for organizing and distributing. And while this didn't make it into the article, one of our members who was talking to the people there said, yeah, they said their neighbors were kind of conservative leaning, pretty skeptical, would never come in an anarchist bookshop but once the disaster happened, all of a sudden everybody's friends now and you know, and they came over and they're like, oh, okay, no, you guys are cool. And you're doing good stuff. And so it was like, already being there and having that culture ready to go I guess for other people to like be able to adopt, you know, it having at least some of us who have that kind of the idea down. And then when the disaster hits, can actually be, I mean, I don't want to say beneficial but drive a lot more people over to our side. I think it's where people naturally end up anyway.

Bernard Marszalek: You have to have the opportunity to do that. I mean, mutual aid bring people together spontaneously because they see a need and that can develop into a ongoing organization or least ongoing connections with people. But we can't wait for that to happen. We have to be prepared for it. So, we can't wait for a disaster and hope that people come together. I mean this happened in Los Angeles in the fire. I mean, there were a couple of food dispensing places that became the networks for neighbors to just gravitate towards developing a mutual aid on a larger scale. I mean, huge trucks were being..delivering food because there were a number of people who had the money to support delivery of huge 18-wheelers pulling up to this small food distribution place with the crates of food. But that..we can't wait for that. We have to have, we have to be prepared for it. That's what I..that's my point here.

Josh Davis: Oh, yeah- no. I guess that's also my point. It's the being prepared for it because the disasters are going to just keep coming. But I wanted to give you a chance-you mentioned earlier that you wanted to say something about co-ops and ESOPs. And I just wanted to give you chance before we wrap up here to get off your mind, off your chest, whatever you have on it about co-ops and ESOPs.

Bernard Marszalek: My ESOP rap, yes. Okay, I worked at a small commercial print shop. Well, it's not small - I think there were 12 of us working there in Palo Alto. And there were four owners of the shop. It wasn't an ESOP, there were just four individual owners of this shop. And they were thinking of retiring and how they would transfer the ownership - not the land because they recognized the land was very valuable. This is the late ‘70s, early ‘80s in Silicon Valley. And the print shop was actually thriving because it was printing for these new Silicon Valley companies. And I decided along with three other people there who were about the same age - at least 20 years younger than the owners - to think about forming a similar sort of buyout of the four owners.

And so I investigated this local- Oakland had, I think it still exists, a Democratic ESOP organization. By Democratic ESOP, they meant that they were setting up an ESOP where everyone in the company had a vested interest in the ESOP. It wasn't simply a matter of buying in piece by piece over a period of time or whatever.

ESOPs are, in case people don't know - I'm not gonna go into it in detail - but basically they're a situation where the outside party organizes and runs the financial aspects of the ESOP so that it benefits the current owners as they slowly divest themselves of the ownership of the company to the workers that were there. But it's basically one step removed from direct control of the workplace by the workers. The ESOP aspect of it controls, as the people who control the finances control where the shop is going. So decisions made have to pass through this board of financial overseers.

In a small ESOP, that can actually sort of be bypassed in a way. And that's what the group in Oakland was promoting, was smaller ESOPs. To join an ESOP - first of all it's almost impossible for a small enterprise to do this because it would take the salary of one of the participants to keep the ESOP going yearly, and that's a stretch for a small five, six, seven person group.

So anyway, the thing with the ESOP didn't work out because we were too small, four of us could not support an ESOP. So it didn't workout. Meantime, I just quit and moved on to another shop closer to my home. And it was there in Berkeley I found Inkworks. But when I was visiting other shops- well, let me skip that.

When at Inkworks, we bought most of our ink from a small ESOP, that is, I think it was maybe seven, eight people working there, maybe a few more people worked part-time, but they mixed their inks and stuff. We bought their ink mostly, and they were an ESOP. And the salesperson who came over regularly, of course, to sell us the ink and keep in touch with us would marvel over how similar our co-op was to their ESOP because all of the members of the ESOP there would have, I think there were not weekly, maybe bimonthly meetings or there were regular scheduled meetings of all the members there who decided on how things would function.

Now those democratic ESOPs are a tiny, tiny portion of what the ESOPs are about. Most of the ESOPS that really control the whole operation are much larger because that's the way. You know, you may have 300 people, it's very difficult for a co-op to even begin to organize something like that. It takes the building of co-op culture to actually get to the point where something like could happen. Though it does. I mean, Rainbow is almost over 200 people and the group in New York, the home health care group, is over a thousand. I mean, it can happen. And there are other industrial co-ops, the people in Madison. Doing laser work, or I forgot exactly what they're doing, but it's an industrial co-op. They could organize another industrial coop like them and give advice, but it's not the easiest thing to do.

The easiest thing is to build smaller co-ops, and they're necessary, so let's build them. Like you said, the bookshop in Asheville was a case in point of where a small co-op can actually have a magnificent [effect]. But ESOPs began calling themselves employer ownership, and that's very, that's misleading. I mean, it's ownership in the most removed sort of way. But when the co-op movement began to develop with some grant money and foundation funding, the notion of co-ops as worker-owned co-ops developed. So they took the ESOP employee-ownership thing and changed it to worker-ownership. And that was because they thought that would develop a more easily understood relationship between people and their job.

That might work, and I can see that that might be necessary, but what's happened is that that's taken the entire scope of how co-ops are discussed today; and the visionary aspect, as I mentioned, it gets lost. I mean, maybe at best it gets picked up in conversations once the group is forming, and so forth, but I don't see evidence of that happening really. And I think it may develop in Cincinnati, or in Buffalo, or now in Dayton, which sort of spun off from Cincinnati, I understand. Chicago, maybe it's places where people who are developing issues around land and developing land ownership, like a land trust situation, that might be a way of discussing the visionary element because once you have something concrete like land, you have to figure out how you're going to use it. You have to think long term. Thinking long term is visionary thinking.

So, you know, I'm hopeful that some of this will work. My book was an attempt at giving some evidence of how that's worked in the past, how it can work, and giving some inkling of what utopian thinking has been in the past, even the most fantastic utopian thinking of Fourier. Fourier was a French utopianist who many people today laugh at as promoting a vision of oceans full of lemonade, which of course was a total joke. I mean, this was, you know, just was a spoof on the whole idea of creating a pleasant future.

Utopias were more than a way of imagining a utopia as a heaven on earth. They were also a way of envisioning a vision of how people could live together differently. And Fourier had an enormous sensibility about how people would work together. His passions were really a psychology of how people could make work pleasurable. So there's aspects of all this.

And let me just wind up here by mentioning one other thing that I think is unknown mainly in the co-op movement. There were 3 million cooperators in Poland during the interwar period. They had a whole society of co-op retails, industries, farms. The whole system was set up as a way of avoiding the marketplace, avoiding the capitalist structure. And this was very conscious on their part. There were 3 million people doing this. It existed to some extent, even after the war, with co-ops still being run during the communist period. But some of the Solidarność period, when the workers struck at the Gdańsk shipyard in 81, was a development of that history. Their grandparents and parents of the people who were working in the shipyards knew about those co-ops. They had that sense of working together in something as an enterprise, beyond just simply the market and beyond the communist party.

So I wanted to bring that up, because too often Mondragon is considered the heaven on earth for co-ops. And I think there are some very major pluses with Mondragon, and especially the way people working there see themselves more as peers in their everyday lives, like in the town. But we have to think also of places that were actually even grander than Mondragon. Even if they didn't last, but they did last for over 10 years in Poland.

Josh Davis: Yeah, and another one of those places is in Venezuela, the CECOSESOLA cooperative group that has been so impressive to me reading about that, and reading the accounts from the people involved with that. And talk about a very different culture, when you can have membership meetings with 200 people, and no agenda, and yet you make a decision and things get done, and it sounds it sounds completely impossible to us. And they're very clear about that that's what they're doing. It's not just about a different ownership structure: it's creating new ways to be together, to live together.

Bernard Marszalek: If people want to read more about this, they should read about the Spanish Civil War, and thousands of people organized their defense. So it's, as you said, when crises happen people's better nature comes in. And the point is, as we said, you know, we can't wait for the crisis. We're in the middle of it right now. We have to respond in ways that make sense, and I think co-ops are that mini-utopia that we have in our presence and need to support. And I'm doing my part to try to make that more possible for people, and discount the dystopias that seem prevalent, and think about what's possible and what people are actually doing today to make a better life for everyone. And what you're doing in terms of what you are promoting. So kudos to you.

Josh Davis: Thanks, Bernard. And thanks for taking the time to talk to us. The book is Jobs, Jive, and Joy available from AK Press. Link will be in the description.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.