Sharryn Kasmir: Mondragón coops and the anthropological imagination

In 2013, Fagor Electrodomésticos, the home appliance division of the world-renowned Mondragón cooperative group, declared bankruptcy. The announcement disheartened coop advocates who consider Mondragón the most successful worker-owned enterprise in the world.
Continue reading

Manissa Maharawal: Shut it down: Notes on the #blacklivesmatter protests – Part 2

Part 2. Breaking windows and broken windows policing:

“Do we have the same level of outrage when a young black person gets killed as we do when a window gets broken? And if not, then why is that?”

—Alicia Garza, co-founder of #blacklivesmatter

Trader Joe’s
In Berkeley, California, on a warm night in mid-December 2014, I stood in stalled traffic and watched as protestors smashed the windows of the Trader Joe’s grocery store on University Avenue—part of the ongoing protests in the aftermath of the NYPD’s murder of Eric Garner and the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Continue reading