FRANSCICO PÉREZ
Why A Solidarity Economy Needs Artists & Artists Need The Solidarity Economy
ISSUE 0: THE PRO-TESTING PRINT
Pérez is the former director of the Center for Popular Economics, a nonprofit collective of political economists whose programs and publications demystify the economy and put useful economic tools in the hands of people fighting for social and economic justice. He is currently an assistant professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a senior economist at the Center for Economic Democracy.
At the beginning of the talk, you mentioned that Fred Ho was your mentor. I found this interesting because Fred, as a composer, and you, as an economist, are examining alternative economic systems from different perspectives. Could you talk about Fred’s mentorship and how their work as a revolutionary saxophonist has influenced your work in the solidarity economy?
Francisco Pérez: Fred Ho was a real inspiration. I've been thinking a lot about him recently because he was, in many ways, my introduction to left political spaces and a lot of debates about strategy and organization and how to change the world. Before that, I, like many folks on the Left, thought of art as trivial. I was working at the Museum for African Art. I was exposed to artwork. But I thought this was a distraction, a hobby or something on the side, not the real work of changing the world. Fred was basically like, you're not going to have a revolution without artists. Period. There's going to have to be a key component of all of this that is led by artists, and that includes a whole new form of art. We are going to have to change people's consciousness, values, and ways of relating to each other and to the world.
Fred emphasized the notion of alienation, which comes out of Marxist philosophy. I do workshops with different groups of people, and I find that artists are attracted to this idea. “Alienation” is a big word that means you're estranged or distanced from yourself. For example, if you grew up going to the supermarket like me, the chicken came in a plastic bag with the guts in a little plastic pouch inside the chicken. But then I would visit my grandmother in the Dominican Republic, and I would see her kill a chicken with her bare hands, chop its neck off, twist it, throw it into a boiling vat of water, pull the feathers out, and cook it for lunch or dinner. I realized I was super alienated from the land.
We're alienated from the work that we do, which is the context that Marx is usually talking about. When solidarity economists talk about this to other people, we don't start with the question, “Do you feel alienated?” We start with, “Have you ever been bored at work?” Or, “Have you ever just wished it was Friday?” Because you don't control your work.
My dad was a baker. He was allowed to . . . even notice my words, “he was allowed to.” He was allowed to bring the pastries he cooked home on our birthdays but on no other day. Even though he's the one who sat there in the summertime in front of a hot oven, baking cookies and cakes and other pastries, those things belong to his boss. They belong to the company. Not to him. He never baked at home because he saw that as something outside himself. Baking is what he did for money. It's not what he did for love or for himself.
So we’re alienated from the land, we’re alienated from our work, and we're alienated from each other. There's a debate now about loneliness versus solitude. Are people just happy being alone? Whichever way you cut it, we are alone, especially in American society. Nati and I are trying to raise kids, and it really does take a village. If you don't have a village, that shit becomes really fucking hard. Ultimately, we’re alienated from ourselves. We have epidemic levels of depression and anxiety. Alienation is very real, thinking of what capitalism does to our spirit. Artists are necessary for doing that healing work and helping to dis-alienate people, to help heal and connect. How do we reconnect people to the land? How do we reconnect people to each other and then to themselves? How can people join our work in organizing for the solidarity economy?
“We’re alienated from the land, we’re alienated from our work, and we're alienated from each other. We have epidemic levels of depression and anxiety. Artists are necessary for doing that healing work and helping to dis-alienate people, to help heal and connect.”
FP: I'm actually not sure if Fred would have been down with solidarity economy. In fact, I'm ninety percent sure he would not have been. There's this big tension on the Left in politics. If you ask people, “What do you think a post-capitalist Utopia looks like?” They'll usually give you some version of a solidarity economy. But then, if you ask them, "How do we get there?" This is where Fred and I would disagree. Fred would say, "You're not going to co-op your way out of this. You're not going to co-op your way to revolution. That shit is a distraction in the moment." It's one of those “Wait 'till after the revolution, brothers" types of things. I wanted to invoke Fred for the revolutionary art, but he would probably not be down with what we're trying to do right now [laughs]. Real talk, he wouldn't have seen it as a viable revolutionary strategy. A lot of people agree with him.
Cierra Peters: I'm curious about where your desire for this work comes from. What was the impetus to become a radical economist?
FP: I grew up working-class, a child of Dominican immigrants in New York City. Life made me a radical socialist. I did the readings later. I love books, but you don't have to read to understand this shit is fucked up. I grew up in a community where I saw a lot of people working very hard and not getting anywhere. They were still poor, still under the threat of eviction, seeing what life looks like at the bottom of American capitalism, which is unstable, insecure, precarious, and often violent. This was also the tail end of the crack epidemic in New York City. I grew up in a context where the margin for error was basically zero.
There's the liberal story of kids who don't have an education and need more resources, but there's no villain. We don't blame anyone. Poverty is just an accident that happens. Then there’s the radical story that we are poor because these other motherfuckers are rich. I'm not buying the liberal story that there's no villain. There's a fucking villain. We know who's doing this stuff and who profits. I was like, well, if not capitalism, then what?
Growing up in the Caribbean community, people talked a lot about Cuba. I went for the first time in 2007, right after college. It made me want to cry in both good and bad ways. Around that time, my friend Aaron Tanaka handed me a book called Parecon by Michael Albert, which described a democratically planned economy. So, not capitalism, not markets, not Marx's 'anarchy of production,’ but democratic. So basically, Cuba, but if the people voted on the plan. Things have changed a lot, especially since I first went in 2007. The economy is less planned than it used to be. At the time, the elite of the party-state decided what to produce, so you were going to get trucks and guns, which they justifiably needed to defend their revolution. But if you ask most Cubans, they probably would have been like, we want paint for our houses, or new construction so I don't have to live with my ex or my mom or grandmother for the rest of my life. Something that was actually responsive to people's desires.
I have these debates with friends of mine who are very skeptical. As this movement grows, there's always a right-wing criticism that this shit is just unrealistic. They argue that humans are selfish and greedy and will never like to help one another out or care for each other, and blah, blah, blah. But there’s a left-wing criticism that if you have co-ops and land trusts in a capitalist society, they're just going to get swallowed up by capitalism, or they're going to exploit themselves in order to compete in capitalist markets so that they become virtually indistinguishable from a typical capitalist business. We've seen a lot of these big co-ops like REI. Or they're just going to disappear; you'll have your own little worker-owned coffee shop, and then it will close in three or four years.
I get that this is a serious challenge. My take is that you can't wait until after the revolution. You have to start practicing this stuff now. You can't just microwave a co-op sector and the land trust sector after some mythical moment of revolutionary victory. You have to have some sense of how that shit works, even given all the contradictions and issues you're having now, because otherwise, you're going to end up in a similar situation where you don't have a worked-out alternative top-down solution where you're like, we're just going to impose this. You couldn't even try to impose co-ops. We can't impose co-ops. That shit’s not going to work.
Later on, I went to Venezuela in 2011. It was really fascinating to see an actual revolutionary situation where that shit was unfolding. It wasn't in the past. It wasn't in the future. It was the present. They were trying to build some elements of a democratic or planned economy. It's one thing to study and be like, these are the issues we can anticipate based on theory and history. It's another thing to be like, this is what people are trying to work with right now, in real, concrete terms at this factory, in this town, at that assembly. It just made it much more real. My journey took me from the hoods of New York to fancy schools in Boston to Cuba and Venezuela, and then later to West Africa. I'm just trying to piece it all together and make the case that we should be flexing these democratic muscles.
FP: I really appreciate the question. First, because I came from a working-class background. I don't want to learn all this stuff, go to college, get a PhD, and then have these conversations with the five other PhDs who write about West Africa, too. The whole point is to share this knowledge with other people, which means you have to “make it plain.” What does this mean for regular people? What does this mean for people's day-to-day lives? If you can't explain to someone why it's important, then it isn't important. If you can't explain this to your family, neighbors, or community, then why are you doing it?
Secondly, the reason I appreciate studying history and anthropology is that both give you a sense of human possibility. Anthropology looks at different cultures, and history looks at cultures in the past. What you realize is that human beings are strange and have come up with a lot of different ways of relating to each other. All kinds of ways of being. And one of the difficult things is that people tend to naturalize what they have now. They think what we have now is all there ever has been or all there ever will be. Pick up any history book, even a conservative one. You'll see that that shit is not true.
Part of what we try to do in some of these workshops—my favorite one is “Flavors of Socialism”—is to show there are other ways of doing this. To me, the biggest challenge talking to the working class is not convincing them that shit is fucked up. They already know that. When I talk to my middle-class students, I'll get pushback with them being like, "Capitalism is freedom. Capitalism has created all this wealth." Obviously, working-class people are not monolithic, but in working-class audiences, you get a lot less of that. Instead, you get a lot of, "Yeah, I know this is fucked up, but it's never going to change."
That's why I latch on to the artists who are the consciousness shifters. I can tell you, "Look, there are different ways of being; let's talk about the different ways; let's come up with a fun, interactive way to learn about different ways of being." What I cannot do, or at least haven't figured out yet how to do, is be like, "And we can make a change here." Because that's something to do with the spirit, people's collective psyche. I don't know how you move things on that level, which is why I've enjoyed working with artists and want to keep doing it. Maybe they can't do it either. But if anyone can, it would be this group of people who have the ability to operate at that wavelength. Writing journal articles is not going to do it. Academia is not going to do it. I'm not even sure if popular education can do that. That is either an artistic thing or, to open up a can of worms, a religious thing. You have to talk about moving people's spirits.
“My take is that you can't wait until after the revolution. You have to start practicing this stuff now[,] even given all the contradictions and issues you're having, because otherwise, you're going to end up in a similar situation where you don't have a worked-out alternative.”
FP: My academic work is lone wolf work. I chose academia because I didn't want to be part of a team, and I also resent the fact that it encourages this individualism. Because of that, all the work I do outside the classroom is always done with a collaborator. I don't do anything by myself, and I wouldn't even try to. I wouldn't even pretend to. It wouldn't be possible. It wouldn't be fun. It wouldn't be effective. With my work with artists, I usually collaborate with Nati, and we also collaborate with artist collectives. If anything, I learned from those experiences that we should have collaborated even more.
I'm a big sports fan, so I'm like, this is all a team effort. I'm either the point guard or the power forward. You play your role on the team. It's my job to set screens and rebound, and then somebody else is going to shoot. It's more about finding out where you fit in. Each of you brings something, but together, you all bring something else that none of you individually could deliver.