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Vishwas Satgar is Professor of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He edits the Democratic Marxism series and is Principal Investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene and a veteran activist. He has worked extensively on post-apartheid cooperative development in township communities and co-founded the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and Climate Justice Charter Movement. He is the author of A Love Letter to the Many – Arguments for Transformative Left Politics in South Africa.

Michelle Williams is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research focuses on democracy, transformative projects, alternative development and women’s participation in political and economic spaces. She is the co-author (with Thomas Isaac) of India, Building Alternatives: the Story of India’s Oldest Worker Cooperative, and the co-editor (with Vishwas Satgar) of Destroying Democracy: Neoliberal Capitalism and the Rise of Authoritarian Politics.

For issue #182 of The Internationalist, editor Cameron Baillie sat down to interview the authors about their most recent book, Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy: Transformative Politics and Planetary Care from Below. In the first half of the interview they spoke about the journey of writing the book, the state, urgency of our planetary polycrisis and the possibility of an alternative to reform and revolution.

To read part 2 of this conversation, click here.

Cameron Baillie (CB – interviewer): The place to start really is a little bit about the journey of creating this book, because it's incredibly well-travelled — both yourselves and the book. It takes you to all these places and these exciting projects, and so I'm curious what that process looked like: how the idea was sparked, and maybe how it changed from start to finish.

Michelle Williams (MW – co-author): The journey started with us wanting to explicitly find hopeful experiments. We had done quite a bit of research on the state of cooperatives, on the state of alternatives, and a lot of it was finding the problems and what was going on. Vish and I decided we actually needed hope — moments of hope. We needed to find where things were going right and who was doing what.

So we decided to look specifically for worker cooperatives around the world, and progressive projects that are actually trying to do production and economic activity differently. We first picked a number of countries, and we wanted to be global north and global south. We wanted regional variation so that we could find how experiments were being differently practised across a range of cultures, places, and economic and political histories.

We just thought we'd find a few projects. What happened was we ended up finding so much more — exciting, deeply thought-out projects with long histories. The details were always different: how they relate to the state, how they relate to local conditions. But what we found is that every project is rooted in its community, and every project has to be deeply, synergistically defined with local conditions.

As we started scratching deeper, we kept finding more and more projects, and many of them were finding solidarities across their isolated situations and creating ways to build alternative economic activity beyond the point of production — the relations beyond their enterprises. The journey was much more inspiring than we originally anticipated.

It was incredibly lucky to travel to all these places, and people were very generous with their time. There is a lot of academic research about a couple of projects here and there, but we decided we really didn't want to do case studies of individual projects. We wanted to find out: is this happening across a wide range of places? It wasn't so much about the particulars of any single enterprise or activity, but rather whether we could find this kind of alternative world-making — even in a very nascent, fledgling form. Are people envisioning and trying to find alternative ways?

The research part was really fun. Then we started writing, and that's much more arduous. We had tons of material — it was quite overwhelming. We were constantly engaging, theorising, and thinking things through. We had three earlier drafts that we completely threw away, except for the empirical material. We entirely rewrote the theoretical framing. This is the third iteration of the theorising, and when we finally arrived at it, we felt: okay, this is actually it, this captures what we were trying to think.

We had the luxury of this being one shared project sustaining us over time, alongside our other academic work. What that meant was we weren't rushed — though by the end, we just needed to get it out. People kept asking when the book was coming, and the projects we'd visited would say, aren't you writing a book about us? But taking the time gave us room to really think through the theoretical framework, and I think that helped us a great deal.

Vishwas Satgar (VS – co-author): One big issue we were grappling with is that there's a 200-year history of modern cooperatives. About one billion people on the planet are members of cooperatives, and there are over 300 million cooperatives globally. It's a crucial structural feature of the global political economy. So we were facing a methodological challenge: where is the alternative world-making happening within cooperatives? Where are people intentional and conscious? Where is there particularism but also universalism, and a genuine attempt to build a new world?

Taking the time and building up a baseline of case studies and insights helped us figure that out. Whether it was rural Venezuela and an amazing movement over 60 years old, the south-western corner of India, Canada with a cooperative movement over 100 years old, or the north of Italy — we gradually realised that what we were really studying was solidarity economy-based systems.

This is very important: the historical left critique of cooperatives is that, firstly, they self-exploit, and secondly, they are prone to degeneration — that they take on the logics of capitalism. But what we found with systems was that they actually had immense potential for transformation and even the capacity to go beyond capitalism. They had a transformative power that enabled them to be with and against capitalism, which is really powerful. That's what we ultimately try to foreground in this book.

The second imperative on our journey was learning the lessons of failure from 20th-century state-centric socialism. We had three big projects, which we discuss in the book: Soviet socialism, social democracy, and revolutionary nationalism. All three, in different ways, foregrounded the state. You had top-down rationalities prevailing over societies — everything began and ended with the state, and if the state failed, those societies failed. We've seen that: social democracy gets subsumed by neoliberalism and is now in crisis; the Soviet Union collapses under its own contradictions and loses the impulse from below; revolutionary nationalism gets corrupted and criminalised.

So we were trying to figure out: what is this impulse for world-making from below, and how far can it go? The cases we foreground in terms of systems have outlasted Soviet socialism, social democracy, and revolutionary nationalism. Clearly there is something powerful about this impulse for transformation from below.

The last point I'll make is that there have been three cycles of resistance to neoliberalism, and we've seen the emergence of a new global left and new imaginaries. These cycles of resistance have also coincided with what we call the fourth great crisis of capitalism — a crisis that is very historically specific in its dynamics, with climate being one very specific dimension.

If you look back at the left tradition of politics, we have an inheritance of strategic thought, but 1917 cannot be the point of reference for the world we are in today. The type of crisis we're living is very different from 1917, and very different from the 1970s. So we were trying to theorise from the prefigurative to the macro and the planetary: what is the strategic politics of our time? How can we theorise this with a new strategic vocabulary that can help us speak to this fourth great crisis, this planetary polycrisis of capitalism?

What kind of politics is needed? We get into it in the book, and we can talk more about it. In our case, leaving behind the binary of reform versus revolution — which is so stale on the left — and using these case studies and powerful systemic examples to show that a new kind of politics of world-making is necessary and possible now. That journey helped clarify a lot of that, and even challenged our own conceptions of politics and life.

CB: I was quite interested in this fracturing of the binary between reform and revolution, which I'm sure every leftist has oscillated between. My first question is about the urgency of action in the planetary polycrisis and transformation as the alternative. I wanted to challenge that third way from a friendly and optimistic position, but also with full consciousness of the urgency of the crisis — the threats that are mounting, the impacts taking hold across the world with drought, extreme weather, forest fires, and so on.

There's a quote that really stuck with me from that section of the book: that the “Earth is not a static wallpaper in the background of capitalist civilisation, but an active force that has the power to destroy conditions of liveability” and that “capitalist civilisation will not prevail over the Earth. The great harms this is bringing through climate shocks, while tragic, will also unhinge imperial control, ruin class power structures, and create space for new transformative forces of socio-ecological reproduction to sustain, reproduce, and enjoy life.” And shortly after that, you have this idea that “ecocidal capitalism” needs to be urgently met “before it ends life.”

What worries me is that the first passage reads as optimistic — with time, space will be created for these projects. But there's also this lingering fear that time is the one thing we don't have. I suppose I wanted to ask: what gives you the hope or confidence in these transformative politics, these grassroots solidarity economies? Do you believe they are truly urgent enough to meet the moment we're in?

VS: If you look at Argentina, there was that collapse in 2001. The response of forces of socio-ecological reproduction — working classes in what had been a major industrial economy in Latin America — was to take over the factories. That intrigued us a lot, and we went to Argentina about three times to figure out what was going on.

It was interesting: the workers resolved that if wage-earning is lost, if my job is lost, I don't have a life. So they chose to take over their factories — sin patrón, no boss. That was very powerful, to the point where there are now over 350 worker-run factories in Argentina. We don't hear about this in the mainstream media, and they're not perfect, but they inaugurated a different political economy. They turned the crisis against capitalism.

There are still major class and popular struggles underway in Argentina today, as we know with Milei and so on. But there is something out of view whenever we look at Argentina — there is an alternative at the base of that society, and it's fighting.

Similarly, if we come to other aspects of the fourth great crisis: capitalism has had four great crises — the late 19th century, the interwar years, the 1970s, and the current one from roughly the mid-2000s onwards. This particular crisis is impacting systems in a very profound way. Capitalism has globalised the worst of American capitalism over the past four decades. It is deeply entangled with the planetary in very serious ways. The rupture around the climate system brings the Earth front and centre. The Earth is responding — it is an agential force, whether capitalism or us like it or not.

It is reacting to the harms done, and that agential factor is something we really have to grapple with. As we discuss in the book, it is going to unhinge power structures more and more. If we have droughts, and on top of that heatwaves, and then food systems collapse, that creates very serious challenges for ruling classes. We're already beginning to see that. And I think that creates, objectively, a very important condition for pushing back against these structures. That's why, for us, climate justice is not just a critique — not just a set of ethical concerns. It's actually a political project, and a political project that has to be about changing everything.

That's where transformative politics becomes absolutely essential. Not just marching in the streets and doing symbolic things, but articulating and building the capacity for that next society. When we step forward and say we want socially and community-owned renewable energy systems, and we are building them in community X, and we are building the next food system through food sovereignty pathways in this region — there's potential in this fourth great crisis to turn the contradictions of the system against the system, and to argue for systemic alternatives and to build them.

That's what we are arguing for, as the basis of a grounded, concrete hope. And linked to that, the solidarity economy-based systems we feature in this book — we are dealing with a 200- to 300-year climate crisis problem. We need to be engaged in a praxis that can build those life-sustaining systems to endure for two or three hundred years. If on the left we start engaging in transformative practice and building that next world, as systems collapse around us and as capitalist states reach their limits — because they're not thinking complexity, they're not thinking the depth of this crisis — these transformative systems and logics could supersede, work around, work against, and work beyond those limits.

This is where the notion of democratic systemic reforms is very, very important. It connects the prefigurative to the larger macro-scale transformations. It's not waiting to seize power through the revolutionary mould, but at the same time, it's not tinkering with low-hanging fruit. It's going to the depth of the crisis and articulating and building the systems we need. That's the kind of hope we see in all of this.

MW: I'll just amplify that point. With the breakdown of capitalist hegemony, we've also been seeing more and more people open to and wanting an alternative. So there is actually more space for alternative world-making in practice right now.

What we've seen is the power of learning from existing projects. For instance, one cooperative in South Africa — when they formed in 2001, the whole thing that inspired them to form as a cooperative and start practising solidarity was actually a visit to another cooperative. Learning from other examples was incredibly powerful. Building capacity for the next world is central.

What we see is that we've all lost our social capacity. People don't even understand the commons, and that's been part of human history for so long. Today it seems completely out of the spectrum of possibility. What we're doing at our university is: we have food gardens, and we're trying to reintroduce the idea of de-commodified food systems and commons. We're saying we should have food grown everywhere — nobody should be hungry, no one on our campus should be hungry, and no one in general. These examples are actually showing people and inspiring alternative ways of thinking.

Because if we just destroy the system and don't have practice-centred alternatives already in their fledgling, prefigurative forms, where are we going to find those ways? That's the importance of this building work — taming, building, exiting: multiple ways of challenging the system simultaneously. For me, the experiments and hope come from existing practice, not from destruction. And we even hear that from a lot of people: destroying only takes you so far. Building — on an experiential, personal, existential level — is much more affirmative than just trying to tear down.

CB: Switching from revolutionary and putting my more reformist hat on: to what extent do you think those kinds of projects — which I absolutely agree are urgently needed and very welcome, and which can inspire so many other projects with that outward spiral of inspiration and action — how well do you think they can meet the moment, without working through state structures?

For me, even just in the last five years, the major steps China has made in reforestation and in building an entire electric industrial market seem to me one of the most credible responses so far from any major global actor. I know the consumption habits and the dependency on coal are still not ideal, but it's rapidly made leaps and bounds in just five to ten years. If the option is between that and the kind of imperialist petrodollar model, it's not even a real question to ask.

Not only in terms of renewable energy production, but also in terms of resisting imperialist hegemony — which I'm glad to see you touch on throughout the book. Where do you see the state factoring into the transformative project, not for destroying it, but rather for capturing it?

MW: I think we should not see it as either China or capitalist hegemony — we have to find alternatives that can actually bring us to a different kind of future. And the role of the state, I think, is crucial. We ask that question throughout the book, because often these experiments were initiated precisely due to state failure. These places were feeling that they weren't part of a state project, or that they could never rely on the state to deliver.

But what we found really interesting were the places that had healthy, synergistic relations with the state — like Mondragon in the Basque Country, Trentino in northern Italy, and Kerala. In those places, movements had enough structural, associational power to push and shape the state in directions that were in their interest.

In the Basque Country, for instance, they call it the social economy — the principles are closer to what we'd call a solidarity economy. They were able to push the state so that ethics and social need became central, not just finance, GDP, and markets. As a consequence, the Basque Country — with Mondragon at its centre pushing these ethics — has some of the lowest inequality in Europe and scores highest on the democracy index in Spain.

The same with Trentino: it goes from being the poorest region of Italy to being the wealthiest, with cooperatives central to that and pushing the state to deliver to the people. And Kerala is interesting because the Communist Party is not always in power — in fact, it's only now serving its second consecutive term — and so it's constantly having to remake its relationship to the base. That's key for Kerala. Unlike West Bengal, where it had dominance for 30 years and then was completely annihilated, Kerala has strong movements that emerge from below and can put pressure on the state.

In many ways, in those places you can actually take projects further because of the state. I would agree the state is crucial, but we have to find the places where movements can actually shape and influence it, and where states are open to that — because too often you have top-down state domination, with the state simply telling projects what they should do.

VS: To complement what Michelle says, and to go a little further into Kerala: what's interesting about the history of transformation there is that it has evolved as a state-civil society partnership. It's very dynamic, contentious, messy — but that's what drives it. Hence they talk about the Kerala model, which Amartya Sen and others have examined.

From below, they've been able to demonstrate that the state working with society can reclaim healthcare back into the public sector. They've achieved that — they've eclipsed private healthcare in Kerala. They've eradicated poverty. But it comes down to the synergistic relationship: the state doesn't prevail over society, it doesn't assume it knows best. It remains open to dialogue and listening.

The Brazilian example is also very interesting in terms of this synergistic relationship between the state and forces of socio-ecological reproduction. In the first Lula administration in the 2000s, the solidarity economy was a very powerful current — to the point where movements were able to secure a Secretariat for Solidarity Economy within the Brazilian state. We interviewed Paul Singer, who was the Secretary for Solidarity Economy. They were mapping this alternative economy, alternative ways of provisioning, and trying to institutionalise solidarity economy forums at different levels of government, giving space to movements to drive and build this work.

The debates we encountered in Brazil were about legislation to secure structural space for the solidarity economy — that was very fascinating to encounter in terms of where the impulse from below meets the state and is willing to take it in a democratising direction.

My second point is that the crisis we are in is eroding capitalism. The more capitalism fails — and the more its ruling classes fail to listen to science — it unleashes systemic crises that eat the system up. It is self-eroding, and that dynamic is also creating conditions to rupture with neoliberalism. The right is rupturing towards neo-fascism. On the left, there are conditions here to start aggressively taming capitalism.

Let me give an example: overfishing through industrial trawlers. A case can be made to ban industrial fishing now. That's taming capitalism. We can increasingly redirect pension funds towards accelerating renewable energy — the case can be made, given the situation in the Middle East and high oil and petrol prices. We can start redirecting finance capital. Democratic publics want solutions out of the cost of living crisis. And with the kind of systemic transformations we study in this book, you can also lay the conditions to go beyond capitalism. The state can play a part alongside these forces.

My last point on China: on the left, we have to think more critically about it. Yes, coming out of the 2000s crisis, China mastered manufacturing, and it has also mastered renewable energy, EVs, batteries, and solar power. But China also played a very important role in rolling back the working class on a planetary scale. The rise of China fed into the neoliberalisation of the world through a cheap labour model, and that put the global working class on a back foot. We cannot ignore that.

The other point about China is that it's very neo-mercantilist. Even the way it's positioning renewables — it's not as though it's saying, we have to tackle the climate crisis. It's all about the imperatives of its export-led model and competitive advantage in technology. If it can penetrate European or African markets with its technology and export emphasis, it will. So it's not some benign force here.

I really think we have to think very carefully about that. We shouldn't supplant a dying US hegemon with another hegemon in our imaginary. We need to keep front and centre this idea of world-making from below — people-to-people solidarities — and that's where the real breakthroughs are going to come, in my view.

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