Arts & Cultural Creation

Ever dreamed about starting your own business with like-minded creators? A worker cooperative is a business that is owned and controlled by its workers. It is an underused model in the cultural industry that channels the creative power and freedom of the workers to build a world grounded in solidarity. Join us in this discussion on how Creative Workers Cooperatives function and how you can make one too! 

find a (relatively) short poem to share and bring it to our May 4^th virtual Solidarity Economy Poetry Slam!

Mirlo (“black bird” in Spanish) starts from a simple proposal: the music industry does not work for artists or listeners, and it needs a radical reimagining. Two years in, Mirlo hosts a small but growing community of artists, listeners, organizers, and coders who are trying exactly that: taking lessons from mutual aid and militant political organizing and applying them to a platform built cooperatively.

The music industry doesn’t have to be exploitative. What if artists owned the platforms we depend on? What if musicians shared resources, power, and profits—together?

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.

What if the way we support artists is broken, but the answers have been with us all along? Today on Next Economy Now, we’re joined by Ethiopian-American vocalist, composer, and cultural activist Meklit Hadero to explore how migration shapes music, why the traditional music industry is collapsing, and how collective economic models could be the key to artists' survival. 

Chris interviews worker-owners from Wholehearted Bookkeeping Co-op, Sunset Scholars, and Breadfruit Cooperative.

Turning football into a common, managed directly by the players and the fans, is a feasible possibility and has already been attempted.

Can creativity flourish and remain within the control of commoners? Or will businesses inevitably capture creativity and convert it into private property to make money?

A Venezuelan cooperative network that recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” tells its story.