Agrarian reform, agro-ecology, and integration were the topics discussed between the MST and the vice president-elect of Colombia.
The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) was one of the organizations that met with the Vice President-elect of Colombia, Francia Márquez, during her visit to Brazil on July 26. The meeting at the Perseu Abramo Foundation, in São Paulo, was a “dialogue among family,” said MST leader Messilene Gorete, adding, “it served to introduce ourselves and to put ourselves at the disposal of the people’s government of Colombia.”
The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement is present in 24 Brazilian states, with around 450,000 families who have acquired land through collective and organized peasant struggle. Created in 1984, the Movement’s principal demand is the right to the social purpose of the land: land for those who live and produce on it, with respect for the environment and a guarantee of food sovereignty and a call for structural changes in the country.
Today, one of the main issues is Popular Agrarian Reform, guaranteeing land tenure and use for Indigenous, riverine, and quilombolas communities, and organizing national agricultural production with the goal of delivering healthy food, free of pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), to the population. This year alone, the MST carried out around 60 actions, including 28 occupations of areas considered unproductive.
With support from MST members, Comuna El Maizal produces native corn seeds for national distribution. Photo: Comuna El Maizal
Like Brazil, Colombia has one of the highest land ownership inequalities in the region. Independent surveys indicate that 5% of the Colombian population owns 87% of the land.
Data from the last National Agricultural Census in Colombia indicates that of the 113 million hectares of arable land in the country, about 75% of the productive units have less than 5 hectares and represent 2.1% of the area covered by the census. Properties larger than 500 hectares represent 0.4% of the units and account for 41.1% of the territory.
The dispute over territory is what gave rise to the armed conflict that has lasted 58 years. To defend the land on which they lived and made a living, Colombian small farmers began to organize themselves into peasant leagues, which gave rise to the two largest guerrillas in the country: Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) and the National Liberation Army (ELN).
One of the main proposals of the new government is to carry out comprehensive agrarian reform, as provided for in the Peace Accords, signed in 2016 between then-President Juan Manuel Santos and the defunct FARC-EP guerrillas. It was agreed that seven million hectares were to be granted to the former Colombian guerrillas, which has not happened.
The proposal of the Historic Pact, the group under which Gustavo Petro was elected, is to move forward with agreements made to the former FARC-EP and to advance in land concessions and the demarcation of Indigenous and quilombola lands. “If they manage to carry out agrarian reform in this context, it will be a great model for us to carry out agrarian reform in Brazil,” argues Messilene Gorete.
In the conversation with the MST, Francia Márquez showed interest in learning about the local experience in order to bring examples to Colombia, and reiterated that agrarian reform is a priority for her government.
“To hear this from a vice president, knowing what it means for Colombia and for us, a movement that fights for agrarian reform as its central goal, inspires us to put pressure on the Brazilian government to consider this agenda as a priority, because it is a great need. There will only be justice and equality in Brazil if there is true agrarian reform,” says Messilene Gorete.
Food distribution in Pernambuco by MST. During the pandemic, the MST donated more than 6,000 tons of food produced in the settlements. Photo: Ana Olívia Godoy/MST-PE.
Through cooperativism and projects based on the solidarity economy, the MST has become the largest producer of agro-ecologically grown rice in Latin America, with an annual production of more than 3,000 hectares and 15,000 tons of rice. Nationwide, the MST has created 160 cooperatives, 120 agro-industries and 1,900 associations.
For this reason, one of the points agreed upon with the Colombian Vice President was training on agro-ecological production within political and technical education. This will occur within the scope of the boosting of rice production, based on the experience of the MST. “From the Florestan Fernandes School we want to help them build agroecology schools in Colombia,” said Messilene.
For the former coordinator of the Internationalist Brigade Apolônio de Carvalho, the inauguration of a leftist government in Colombia and the possibility of Lula da Silva’s victory in Brazil marks a new moment for Latin America.
“We can think of a new cycle of progressive governments that bet on Latin American integration, based on joint work mechanisms such as UNASUR, MERCOSUR and ALBA. It will certainly be a new chapter in the history of Latin America and a chapter in favor of the people,” concludes the MST leader.
Strong-arm tactic by parent firm Unilever aims to appease Tel Aviv.
Since 2020, Cooperation Tulsa has been planting seeds of radical democracy in Oklahoma based on Indigenous values and social ecology. Aside from running a community center and gardening projects, they helped start the Symbiosis federation of horizontally-structured organizations aiming to “confront the present system while creating the future that will replace it.”
A Conversation with Mike Strode of the Kola Nut Collaborative and Open Collective Josh Davis June 20, 2022, 4:31 pm
Mike Strode, a program officer with the Open Collective, is a writer, cyclist, IT consultant, facilitator, and solidarity economy organizer residing in southeast Chicago whose community engagement work has included ride leadership with the Chicago chapter of Red, Bike & Green; editorial and archival oversight for Fultonia; and co-facilitation of Cooperation for Liberation Study & Working Group. He is founding coordinator of the Kola Nut Collaborative, a time-based service and skills trading platform which promotes timebanking throughout Chicago. He also serves as a current board member for Dill Pickle Food Co-op.
EC :
Great to have you here, Mike. You have a long list of organizations you’ve worked with or founded. How about we start with your founding of the Kola Nut Collaborative in Chicago?
MS :
Sure. I was trying to figure out what were the possibilities for timebanking in Chicago. I was coming off of the heels of my work with the Healthy Food Hub in the food justice and food sovereignty space. The Kola Nut Collaborative was a discovery point, along with the 2018 Cooperative Economy Summit in Chicago and the discovery of the solidarity economy.
I came to realize it’s hard to tell the story of what timebanking can be outside of a larger shift in thinking about economic ecosystems. That’s when the Kola Nut Collaborative began its initial partnerships, trying to figure out if we can seed timebanking into cooperatives.
It turned out to be very difficult work to sell that message — until the world turned, right? Until the pandemic shift, where suddenly everybody was pod mapping, everybody was timebanking, everybody was engaging in mutual aid.
Elizabeth Woodruff drained her retirement account and took on three jobs after she and her husband were sued for nearly $10,000 by the New York hospital where his infected leg was amputated.
Ariane Buck, a young father in Arizona who sells health insurance, couldn’t make an appointment with his doctor for a dangerous intestinal infection because the office said he had outstanding bills.
Allyson Ward and her husband loaded up credit cards, borrowed from relatives, and delayed repaying student loans after the premature birth of their twins left them with $80,000 in debt. Ward, a nurse practitioner, took on extra nursing shifts, working days and nights.
“I wanted to be a mom,” she said. “But we had to have the money.”
The three are among more than 100 million people in America ― including 41% of adults ― beset by a health care system that is systematically pushing patients into debt on a mass scale, an investigation by KHN and NPR shows.
The investigation reveals a problem that, despite new attention from the White House and Congress, is far more pervasive than previously reported. That is because much of the debt that patients accrue is hidden as credit card balances, loans from family, or payment plans to hospitals and other medical providers.
To calculate the true extent and burden of this debt, the KHN-NPR investigation draws on a nationwide poll conducted by KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) for this project. The poll was designed to capture not just bills patients couldn’t afford, but other borrowing used to pay for health care as well. New analyses of credit bureau, hospital billing, and credit card data by the Urban Institute and other research partners also inform the project. And KHN and NPR reporters conducted hundreds of interviews with patients, physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, and researchers.
The picture is bleak.
In the past five years, more than half of U.S. adults report they’ve gone into debt because of medical or dental bills, the KFF poll found.
A quarter of adults with health care debt owe more than $5,000. And about 1 in 5 with any amount of debt said they don’t expect to ever pay it off.
“Debt is no longer just a bug in our system. It is one of the main products,” said Dr. Rishi Manchanda, who has worked with low-income patients in California for more than a decade and served on the board of the nonprofit RIP Medical Debt. “We have a health care system almost perfectly designed to create debt.”
The burden is forcing families to cut spending on food and other essentials. Millions are being driven from their homes or into bankruptcy, the poll found.
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.Daniel Wood / NPR and Noam N. Levey / KHN
Medical debt is piling additional hardships on people with cancer and other chronic illnesses. Debt levels in U.S. counties with the highest rates of disease can be three or four times what they are in the healthiest counties, according to an Urban Institute analysis.
The debt is also deepening racial disparities.
And it is preventing Americans from saving for retirement, investing in their children’s educations, or laying the traditional building blocks for a secure future, such as borrowing for college or buying a home. Debt from health care is nearly twice as common for adults under 30 as for those 65 and older, the KFF poll found.
Perhaps most perversely, medical debt is blocking patients from care.
About 1 in 7 people with debt said they’ve been denied access to a hospital, doctor, or other provider because of unpaid bills, according to the poll. An even greater share ― about two-thirds ― have put off care they or a family member need because of cost.
“It’s barbaric,” said Dr. Miriam Atkins, a Georgia oncologist who, like many physicians, said she’s had patients give up treatment for fear of debt.
Patient debt is piling up despite the landmark 2010 Affordable Care Act.
The law expanded insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans. Yet it also ushered in years of robust profits for the medical industry, which has steadily raised prices over the past decade.
Hospitals recorded their most profitable year on record in 2019, notching an aggregate profit margin of 7.6%, according to the federal Medicare Payment Advisory Committee. Many hospitals thrived even through the pandemic.
But for many Americans, the law failed to live up to its promise of more affordable care. Instead, they’ve faced thousands of dollars in bills as health insurers shifted costs onto patients through higher deductibles.
Now, a highly lucrative industry is capitalizing on patients’ inability to pay. Hospitals and other medical providers are pushing millions into credit cards and other loans. These stick patients with high interest rates while generating profits for the lenders that top 29%, according to research firm IBISWorld.
Patient debt is also sustaining a shadowy collections business fed by hospitals ― including public university systems and nonprofits granted tax breaks to serve their communities ― that sell debt in private deals to collections companies that, in turn, pursue patients.
“People are getting harassed at all hours of the day. Many come to us with no idea where the debt came from,” said Eric Zell, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society of Cleveland. “It seems to be an epidemic.”
In Debt to Hospitals, Credit Cards, and Relatives
America’s debt crisis is driven by a simple reality: Half of U.S. adults don’t have the cash to cover an unexpected $500 health care bill, according to the KFF poll.
As a result, many simply don’t pay. The flood of unpaid bills has made medical debt the most common form of debt on consumer credit records.
As of last year, 58% of debts recorded in collections were for a medical bill, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That’s nearly four times as many debts attributable to telecom bills, the next most common form of debt on credit records.
But the medical debt on credit reports represents only a fraction of the money that Americans owe for health care, the KHN-NPR investigation shows.
About 50 million adults ― roughly 1 in 5 ― are paying off bills for their own care or a family member’s through an installment plan with a hospital or other provider, the KFF poll found. Such debt arrangements don’t appear on credit reports unless a patient stops paying.
One in 10 owe money to a friend or family member who covered their medical or dental bills, another form of borrowing not customarily measured.
Still more debt ends up on credit cards, as patients charge their bills and run up balances, piling high interest rates on top of what they owe for care. About 1 in 6 adults are paying off a medical or dental bill they put on a card.
How much medical debt Americans have in total is hard to know because so much isn’t recorded. But an earlier KFF analysis of federal data estimated that collective medical debt totaled at least $195 billion in 2019, larger than the economy of Greece.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.Juweek Adolphe for KHN and Alyson Hurt / NPR
The credit card balances, which also aren’t recorded as medical debt, can be substantial, according to an analysis of credit card records by the JPMorgan Chase Institute. The financial research group found that the typical cardholder’s monthly balance jumped 34% after a major medical expense.
Monthly balances then declined as people paid down their bills. But for a year, they remained about 10% above where they had been before the medical expense. Balances for a comparable group of cardholders without a major medical expense stayed relatively flat.
It’s unclear how much of the higher balances ended up as debt, as the institute’s data doesn’t distinguish between cardholders who pay off their balance every month from those who don’t. But about half of cardholders nationwide carry a balance on their cards, which usually adds interest and fees.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.Juweek Adolphe / Alyson Hurt for KHN and NPR
Debts Large and Small
For many Americans, debt from medical or dental care may be relatively low. About a third owe less than $1,000, the KFF poll found.
Even small debts can take a toll.
Edy Adams, a 31-year-old medical student in Texas, was pursued by debt collectors for years for a medical exam she received after she was sexually assaulted.
Adams had recently graduated from college and was living in Chicago.
Police never found the perpetrator. But two years after the attack, Adams started getting calls from collectors saying she owed $130.68.
Illinois law prohibits billing victims for such tests. But no matter how many times Adams explained the error, the calls kept coming, each forcing her, she said, to relive the worst day of her life.
Sometimes when the collectors called, Adams would break down in tears on the phone. “I was frantic,” she recalled. “I was being haunted by this zombie bill. I couldn’t make it stop.”
Health care debt can also be catastrophic.
Sherrie Foy, 63, and her husband, Michael, saw their carefully planned retirement upended when Foy’s colon had to be removed.
After Michael retired from Consolidated Edison in New York, the couple moved to rural southwestern Virginia. Sherrie had the space to care for rescued horses.
The couple had diligently saved. And they had retiree health insurance through Con Edison. But Sherrie’s surgery led to numerous complications, months in the hospital, and medical bills that passed the $1 million cap on the couple’s health plan.
When Foy couldn’t pay more than $775,000 she owed the University of Virginia Health System, the medical center sued, a once common practice that the university said it has reined in. The couple declared bankruptcy.
The Foys cashed in a life insurance policy to pay a bankruptcy lawyer and liquidated savings accounts the couple had set up for their grandchildren.
“They took everything we had,” Foy said. “Now we have nothing.”
About 1 in 8 medically indebted Americans owe $10,000 or more, according to the KFF poll.
Although most expect to repay their debt, 23% said it will take at least three years; 18% said they don’t expect to ever pay it off.
Medical Debt’s Wide Reach
Debt has long lurked in the shadows of American health care.
In the 19th century, male patients at New York’s Bellevue Hospital had to ferry passengers on the East River and new mothers had to scrub floors to pay their debts, according to a history of American hospitals by Charles Rosenberg.
The arrangements were mostly informal, however. More often, physicians simply wrote off bills patients couldn’t afford, historian Jonathan Engel said. “There was no notion of being in medical arrears.”
Today, debt from medical and dental bills touches nearly every corner of American society, burdening even those with insurance coverage through work or government programs such as Medicare.
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.Daniel Wood / NPR and Noam N. Levey / KHN
Nearly half of Americans in households making more than $90,000 a year have incurred health care debt in the past five years, the KFF poll found.
Women are more likely than men to be in debt. And parents more commonly have health care debt than people without children.
But the crisis has landed hardest on the poorest and uninsured.
Debt is most widespread in the South, an analysis of credit records by the Urban Institute shows. Insurance protections there are weaker, many of the states haven’t expanded Medicaid, and chronic illness is more widespread.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.Juweek Adolphe / Alyson Hurt for KHN and NPR
Nationwide, according to the poll, Black adults are 50% more likely and Hispanic adults 35% more likely than whites to owe money for care. (Hispanics can be of any race or combination of races.)
In some places, such as the nation’s capital, disparities are even larger, Urban Institute data shows: Medical debt in Washington, D.C.’s predominantly minority neighborhoods is nearly four times as common as in white neighborhoods.
In minority communities already struggling with fewer educational and economic opportunities, the debt can be crippling, said Joseph Leitmann-Santa Cruz, chief executive of Capital Area Asset Builders, a nonprofit that provides financial counseling to low-income Washington residents. “It’s like having another arm tied behind their backs,” he said.
Medical debt can also keep young people from building savings, finishing their education, or getting a job. One analysis of credit data found that debt from health care peaks for typical Americans in their late 20s and early 30s, then declines as they get older.
Cheyenne Dantona’s medical debt derailed her career before it began.
Dantona, 31, was diagnosed with blood cancer while in college. The cancer went into remission, but when Dantona changed health plans, she was hit with thousands of dollars of medical bills because one of her primary providers was out of network.
She enrolled in a medical credit card, only to get stuck paying even more in interest. Other bills went to collections, dragging down her credit score. Dantona still dreams of working with injured and orphaned wild animals, but she’s been forced to move back in with her mother outside Minneapolis.
“She’s been trapped,” said Dantona’s sister, Desiree. “Her life is on pause.”
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.Daniel Wood / NPR and Noam N. Levey / KHN
Barriers to Care
Desiree Dantona said the debt has also made her sister hesitant to seek care to ensure her cancer remains in remission.
Medical providers say this is one of the most pernicious effects of America’s debt crisis, keeping the sick away from care and piling toxic stress on patients when they are most vulnerable.
The financial strain can slow patients’ recovery and even increase their chances of death, cancer researchers have found.
Yet the link between sickness and debt is a defining feature of American health care, according to the Urban Institute, which analyzed credit records and other demographic data on poverty, race, and health status.
U.S. counties with the highest share of residents with multiple chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease, also tend to have the most medical debt. That makes illness a stronger predictor of medical debt than either poverty or insurance.
In the 100 U.S. counties with the highest levels of chronic disease, nearly a quarter of adults have medical debt on their credit records, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 in the healthiest counties.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data and the 2018 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.Juweek Adolphe / Alyson Hurt for KHN and NPR
The problem is so pervasive that even many physicians and business leaders concede debt has become a black mark on American health care.
“There is no reason in this country that people should have medical debt that destroys them,” said George Halvorson, former chief executive of Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest integrated medical system and health plan. KP has a relatively generous financial assistance policy but does sometimes sue patients. (The health system is not affiliated with KHN.)
Halvorson cited the growth of high-deductible health insurance as a key driver of the debt crisis. “People are getting bankrupted when they get care,” he said, “even if they have insurance.”
Washington’s Role
The Affordable Care Act bolstered financial protections for millions of Americans, not only increasing health coverage but also setting insurance standards that were supposed to limit how much patients must pay out of their own pockets.
By some measures, the law worked, research shows. In California, there was an 11% decline in the monthly use of payday loans after the state expanded coverage through the law.
But the law’s caps on out-of-pocket costs have proven too high for most Americans. Federal regulations allow out-of-pocket maximums on individual plans up to $8,700.
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.Daniel Wood / NPR and Noam N. Levey / KHN
Additionally, the law did not stop the growth of high-deductible plans, which have become standard over the past decade. That has forced many Americans to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets before their coverage kicks in.
Last year the average annual deductible for a single worker with job-based coverage topped $1,400, almost four times what it was in 2006, according to an annual employer survey by KFF. Family deductibles can top $10,000.
While health plans are requiring patients to pay more, hospitals, drugmakers, and other medical providers are raising prices.
From 2012 to 2016, prices for medical care surged 16%, almost four times the rate of overall inflation, a report by the nonprofit Health Care Cost Institute found.
For many Americans, the combination of high prices and high out-of-pocket costs almost inevitably means debt. The KFF poll found that 6 in 10 working-age adults with coverage have gone into debt getting care in the past five years, a rate only slightly lower than the uninsured.
Even Medicare coverage can leave patients on the hook for thousands of dollars in charges for drugs and treatment, studies show.
About a third of seniors have owed money for care, the poll found. And 37% of these said they or someone in their household have been forced to cut spending on food, clothing, or other essentials because of what they owe; 12% said they’ve taken on extra work.
The widespread burden of medical debt has sparked new interest from elected officials, regulators, and industry leaders.
In March, following warnings from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the major credit reporting companies said they would remove medical debts under $500 and those that had been repaid from consumer credit reports.
In April, the Biden administration announced a new CFPB crackdown on debt collectors and an initiative by the Department of Health and Human Services to gather more information on how hospitals provide financial aid.
The actions were applauded by patient advocates. However, the changes likely won’t address the root causes of this national crisis.
“The No. 1 reason, and the No. 2, 3, and 4 reasons, that people go into medical debt is they don’t have the money,” said Alan Cohen, a co-founder of insurer Centivo who has worked in health benefits for more than 30 years. “It’s not complicated.”
Buck, the father in Arizona who was denied care, has seen this firsthand while selling Medicare plans to seniors. “I’ve had old people crying on the phone with me,” he said. “It’s horrifying.”
Now 30, Buck faces his own struggles. He recovered from the intestinal infection, but after being forced to go to a hospital emergency room, he was hit with thousands of dollars in medical bills.
More piled on when Buck’s wife landed in an emergency room for ovarian cysts.
Today the Bucks, who have three children, estimate they owe more than $50,000, including medical bills they put on credit cards that they can’t pay off.
“We’ve all had to cut back on everything,” Buck said. The kids wear hand-me-downs. They scrimp on school supplies and rely on family for Christmas gifts. A dinner out for chili is an extravagance.
“It pains me when my kids ask to go somewhere, and I can’t,” Buck said. “I feel as if I’ve failed as a parent.”
The couple is preparing to file for bankruptcy.
About This Project
“Diagnosis: Debt” is a reporting partnership between KHN and NPR exploring the scale, impact, and causes of medical debt in America.
The series draws on the “KFF Health Care Debt Survey,” a poll designed and analyzed by public opinion researchers at KFF in collaboration with KHN journalists and editors. The survey was conducted Feb. 25 through March 20, 2022, online and via telephone, in English and Spanish, among a nationally representative sample of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,292 adults with current health care debt and 382 adults who had health care debt in the past five years. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points for the full sample and 3 percentage points for those with current debt. For results based on subgroups, the margin of sampling error may be higher.
Additional research was conducted by the Urban Institute, which analyzed credit bureau and other demographic data on poverty, race, and health status to explore where medical debt is concentrated in the U.S. and what factors are associated with high debt levels.
The JPMorgan Chase Institute analyzed records from a sampling of Chase credit card holders to look at how customers’ balances may be affected by major medical expenses.
Reporters from KHN and NPR also conducted hundreds of interviews with patients across the country; spoke with physicians, health industry leaders, consumer advocates, debt lawyers, and researchers; and reviewed scores of studies and surveys about medical debt.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
Tackling inflation requires reining in private markets—and embracing economic democracy.
Building Worker Co-op Infrastructure: What Knowledge Does the Field Need? Josh Davis June 10, 2022, 4:10 pm
As Courtney Berner of the Center for Cooperatives wrote in NPQ earlier this year, between 2016 and 2019, 47 percent of new co-ops formed in the US were worker co-ops. If one considers a longer period stretching from 2011 to 2019, nearly one in three newly formed co-ops in which the ownership type is known (253 of 771) were worker co-ops, an extraordinary development given that historically fewer than one in 100 co-ops nationally have been worker owned. And while the current decade is still young, the pace of worker co-op development—especially in BIPOC communities—has only accelerated.
The need for educational infrastructure to support this growth is evident. Indeed, a half-dozen years ago, Melissa Hoover, Executive Director of DAWI, and Hilary Abell—co-founder of Project Equity, an employee ownership technical assistance nonprofit—identified education as a key element of what they labelled a cooperative growth ecosystem.
Course instructors include Vincent Green, who became a worker-owner in November 2020, when the nonprofit-owned Baltimore-based social enterprise ice cream business where he worked, Taharka Brothers, converted into a worker co-op. He is now one of five worker-owners of that business.
As we continue to watch federal and state governments fail us on issue after issue — from climate change to voting rights to even the most basic of human rights, such as the right to an abortion — a growing movement of change-makers are beginning to look closer to home for ways to exercise political agency and to reshape their world.
This movement has been referred to as the “municipalist moment,” one which puts the city at the heart of the revolutionary struggle. Broadly speaking, municipalism is a bottom-up political system that puts power in the hands of the people working from blocks to neighborhoods to the city. At its heart is the desire to transform society into one that reflects the values of solidarity, democracy, equity, sustainability and pluralism.
On May Day, residents of the Los Angeles area are taking to the streets to begin a two-year project aimed at taking back their city. Anchored by Los Angeles for All, a network of self-organized social movements, the intention of this place-based project is to craft a municipalist platform that reflects the needs of the residents instead of corporations, opens up space for direct democratic reforms, and puts power back in the hands of the people.
Based in the El Sereno neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles, Yvonne Yen Liu is the coordinator of the Los Angeles for All and the Municipalism Learning Series project, as well as the research director of the Solidarity Research Center, a worker self-directed nonprofit that advances solidarity economies. In this interview, Liu discusses what municipalism entails, the importance of intersectionality in democratizing movements and how others can get involved.
Robert Raymond: I want to start with some basic table-setting. The term “municipalism” conjures a few different images in my mind, but I’m wondering if you could start by just unpacking the term. What is municipalism?
Yvonne Yen Liu: At the heart of it, municipalism is about democratizing the local economy and the state — there are three characteristics to it. First, it’s directly democratic, meaning that people are participating in an authentic way, not just electing a representative to make decisions on their behalf. Second, it’s feminist. It’s important to value the labor that is done in terms of caring labor, in terms of housework, in terms of caregiving — whether that’s for children or for elders. But that’s an important piece to consider and also an important group of people to value in terms of participation in politics. And then the third, [municipalism is] anti-capitalist. We’re not trying to control our economy in order to continue the status quo of the economy.
Capitalism is neither natural nor necessary. And I don’t think it needs to be the order of things. Municipalism is about creating different types of social relationships. That could take the form of a solidarity economy, which is an economy based on principles of cooperation, mutuality and inclusion. Or it could be based on a different form of economic organization where workers aren’t exploited for their labor but instead, own the means of production, as Marx famously wrote over 200 years ago. So we could have worker-owned cooperatives, for example, or worker councils, instead.
I love that. And I think that all of those three different points that you mentioned — direct democracy, feminist and anti-capitalist — they intersect in so many ways. Worker cooperatives, for example, are an example of direct democracy, but within the economic realm, right? So it’s also capitalist. And then one could argue that as workers have control over their own livelihoods and the decisions made in their workplaces, a lot of issues could be brought up that are overlooked. For example, how we dealt — or didn’t deal — with issues of care work during the pandemic. Broadly speaking, those issues are feminist issues that typically go unheard or unaddressed in traditional firms.
The intention of this place-based project is to craft a municipalist platform that reflects the needs of the residents instead of corporations, opens up space for direct democratic reforms, and puts power back in the hands of the people.
Absolutely. I think all of this is intersectional. I would say that the general ethic is to make decisions that impact our lives on a daily basis and to make those openly — not just transparently, because what good is transparency when we can see how decisions are being made but we’re still not participating in them? But instead making them actually participatory so that we’re involved and engaged in the decision-making.
Los Angeles for All is a project with an expiration date — we will expire in 2024. We have a hypothesis that Los Angeles is ripe for a municipalist platform, and so we’re giving ourselves two years to test this hypothesis. Depending on the results, we will recalibrate our assumptions and make decisions about our next steps.
Our hypothesis is that social conditions are such that the City of Los Angeles is ripe for a municipalist movement. We studied the example of Barcelona and saw that they had a confluence of different social movement forces at around 2015. They had their version of the Occupy movement — the Indignados movement. They also had the anti-eviction movement that was created in the aftermath of the Great Recession. All of those different groups came together and created a platform for the people to take their city back from neoliberalism, from capitalists, from privatization — for the people, not the banks.
We think that it’s the same time here in Los Angeles. LA has a rich history, but also a contemporary scene of different types of social movements working in different sectors — but we’re not necessarily connected together. And so we intend to network the different self-organized social movements that exist in our ridiculously ginormous megalopolis. And then starting from the neighborhood level — a smaller, more manageable unit of geography — we intend to do popular assemblies so that folks can talk about what is it that they want to see in our city, what it is that they need in their lives.
One of the assumptions in our hypothesis is the 3.5 percent rule: Based on research that was done by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, they found that you only need three and a half percent of a population to move into structural change. So, we’re using that calculation to say that in a city of almost 4 million people, that’s about 400 people that we need to activate in each neighborhood — or about 150,000 people.
And you’re planning the launch of this municipalist project on May Day?
Yeah, we’re going to have a social gathering at a community center here in Los Angeles on May Day. And we’re also going to watch the Municipalism Learning Series opening panel together. And then subsequently, we’re hoping to map out those social movements in Los Angeles for the rest of the year. We’re going to be doing that using relational organizing. It’s a little bit like the six degrees to Kevin Bacon thing. I mean, we all have relationships with folks, so I think if we start from who we know and extend outwards, I believe we can actually cover a good chunk of the different parts of our city.
We’re planning to use relational organizing so that folks are thinking about who their networks are and how those networks overlap with other networks. And then we’re launching our neighborhood assemblies starting next year and we’re hoping to go through a process where the neighborhood assemblies formulate their version of their policy needs and demands, and then that gets elevated to a higher geographic level. And finally, we’ll have a platform that represents the needs of the entire city.
And to broaden out, I’m wondering if you have any connections to other cities? I’m thinking about the idea of confederated cities — what social theorist, political philosopher and anarchist Murray Bookchin wrote about, and what’s being embodied by the Cooperation Cities movement, organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Cooperation Richmond. Are you thinking bigger than Los Angeles?
Municipalism is about creating different types of social relationships. That could take the form of a solidarity economy.
We also have gatherings in Humboldt County, California, and also a watch party in New York City. We do think that this is the municipal moment and I think that there’s a lot of folks that are interested in doing this connecting work of what Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson calls “liberated zones,” of different places that have a measure of local democracy in place at the state level and also in the economy.
Confederating municipalities is a way to achieve scale. We can do deep local work in our place, but the way that we can reach larger numbers of people is if we connect with other places that are doing similar experiments. This is also part of why we are doing this learning series. It’s a desire to connect with other places that are doing similar types of municipalist projects, be they people’s platforms, popular assemblies or other associated decision making.
We’re going to actually feature different cases every quarter. So our second panel after our May Day panel is going to be on the 11th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street on September 17, and it’s going to look at municipalist platforms in Barcelona, Bologna and also Zagreb. And subsequently, we’ll have other panels on Indigenous municipalism, the relationship of organized labor with municipalism, “just transition,” etc. It’s our way of learning from other folks, other municipalities, and it’s just been an incredible opportunity to do some of that networking of the nodes.
So, yeah, for so many reasons, so many people who for many years have been doing national level or international level work that hasn’t really been tied to geographic place — I think there’s a real interest in that now. Maybe it’s a reflection of how we’ve had to stay in place during the pandemic, potentially. But people are really rooting into place and situating their projects in a specific place, which I think is really exciting. And I think municipalism speaks to impulse really well at this moment.
For folks who want to get involved or maybe start something in their own city, do you have any words of advice or ways they can plug into the municipalist moment?
Great question! I’d recommend joining the Municipalism Learning Series. Reach out and connect with us. We’re trying to create a peer space, we’re calling it the Resist and Build school (inspired by my mentor Emily Kawano, the cofounder of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network, who says that we need to do both: Resist the dominant system while building alternatives, where folks at varying levels can learn from each other. It’s still in the works, and the idea is that folks should have a place-based project, to democratize their local economy and state. Our hope for this school is that it’s a “learn and action” community of practice for municipalism.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
From the forests of the Congo, to the salt flats of Chile, to the hills of central Idaho — the struggle for control of the minerals of the future heats up By Sean Case The mainstream US press does a …
With support from MST members, Comuna El Maizal produces native corn seeds for national distribution. Photo: Comuna El Maizal 
Food distribution in Pernambuco by MST. During the pandemic, the MST donated more than 6,000 tons of food produced in the settlements. Photo: Ana Olívia Godoy/MST-PE. 
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data.
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
Tabulations of the August 2021 Urban Institute credit bureau data and the 2018 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.
KFF Health Care Debt Survey of 2,375 U.S. adults, including 1,674 with current or past debt from medical or dental bills, conducted Feb. 25 through March 20. The margin of sampling error for the overall sample is 3 percentage points.
