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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 #183 of The Internationalist, editor Cameron Baillie continues his interview with the authors about their most recent book, Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy: Transformative Politics and Planetary Care from Below. In the second half of the interview, they spoke about feminist threads across the world and darker, reactionary alternatives.

To read part 1 of this conversation, click here.

Cameron Baillie (CB – interviewer): You mentioned the reactionary neo-fascist tendency to meet the current moment, and I'll come back to that. But the next thing I wanted to ask about was the element of social reproduction, which recurs throughout the book. I was quite curious about what threads of feminist practice you observed that were replicable between locations. How was gendered social reproduction brought meaningfully and centrally into social, ecological, and economic relations in a way that you describe as impossible within capitalist societies? And how did that vary from space to space — what worked, and what do you think is replicable across geographies?

Michelle Williams (MW – co-author): That's a great question, and I'm glad you're asking it. What we found across cases — the nuances and details may vary, but there was a consistent sensibility within socio-ecological reproduction — was the centrality of ethics and human care. Caring and human solidarity, but also beyond humans, also in relation to nature. That was central in pretty much every project we looked at, whether overtly or more subtly.

Chilavert in Argentina, for instance — it was overt. Their wage structure is dependent on social need: if you are a single person, your wage is one thing; if you are a single parent, your wage is another. They integrated care into the wage structure. And they had transformed their work relations: before the workers took over, if someone on the production line had a problem, it would stop production and that person had to solve it alone. Now, if one person had a problem — a machine broke, or whatever — they would all come together and help. There was a social relation of support and care. They also brought play into their work.

They had this iconic struggle to take over their factory, which they depended on the community to help sustain for a full year — I won't go into all the detail, but what came out of it was quite extraordinary. They saw themselves as deeply embedded in the community, and so they made the factory a place for community need as well. During the day it was a printing press factory; in the evenings it became a night school. They also linked up with the university and housed archives and documentation of working-class history in the community. They allowed artists to display their work. Weekends, the space was available for the local youth to hold social events, to have a space to gather, to party, play, or do whatever they wanted.

For us, that was social reproduction: being central in the lifeblood of a community, and bringing social needs and human well-being into relations of production. We saw that in many places. In a psychosocial sense too — everything they did was about both individual and collective well-being. Sometimes it was very structural, about wages or the types of leave people received. Other times it was very much about the ways they related to each other and to nature.

In Trentino, and in a cooperative in Brazil, it was trying to ensure the enterprise was not a menace to the neighbourhood — because it's a large steel forge, one of the dirtiest industries in the world, and they immediately took a number of steps to mitigate their impact on the local environment. Again, that's bringing human and social needs to the centre of the production process.

Vishwas Satgar (VS – co-author): There are numerous empirical references here. When we visited worker cooperatives in the US and interviewed several women worker-owners, they described the labour process very differently from a capitalist enterprise. At the Berkeley Cheese Board Cooperative, for instance, the woman we interviewed said: I have a family, I have children, and I'm able to plan my work time and my care time because there's so much flexibility inside the cooperative. Those needs are taken into account.

In Argentina, when developing wage structures, they were thinking about: do you have a family, how many children do you support? These became conversations in the actual material allocation of surplus.

At Mondragon, when we went to the supermarket cooperative, one of the women worker-owners we interviewed was remarkable in talking about how she had been building her capacity to speak several languages — including Mandarin — so she could play a bigger role in their trading practices. There was space in the cooperative to find a pathway to build your skills. You didn't have to be stuck like a cog in a machine. That was fascinating in terms of how, in a worker-owned cooperative, production and social reproduction are not separate. They are integrated and embedded.

That's what we try to bring out in this book. Capitalism and capitalist enterprises — and social reproduction theory, through Nancy Fraser and many others, makes this point — maintain an institutional divide. In the cases we looked at, this divide is not there, because these enterprises are practising care labour for their worker-owners but also for society. We wrote this book from a decolonial Marxist eco-feminist perspective precisely to make this point: that there is a consistency of care labour throughout all of this.

MW: It really is the creativity. In the rooibos tea cooperative we visited, the way they integrated care was this: membership of the co-op is not per farm family, but per individual — and they did this specifically so that women would be paid directly. A farm family might contribute a certain amount, but the payment would be divided among the individual men and women, meaning women would have their own money. We found so much creativity in the ways this happened.

In Kerala, they fed people — breakfast and lunch — for 2,000 members a day, and the chefs and cooks were all part of the cooperative as well. They integrated social needs in various creative ways that we could never have anticipated in advance.

CB: I could see a lot of those threads. It sounds like — even though the particularities vary and there's an incredible amount people could draw inspiration from — the fundamentals of an ethos of solidarity and care generally gave rise to these kinds of practices, even if the individual forms differed somewhat. Fantastic.

I hope you'll be happy for me to poke this idea a little — coming from a quite different place of non-care. I sent you an example, and I don't know if you had a chance to look at the video I hyperlinked, but it was one phrase from the book that made me wonder: could this be taken in a direction we wouldn't be familiar with?

The project — Return to the Land — is outside and against mainstream capitalist society in the sense that it's an LLC and a shareholding enterprise. At the same time, it's prefigurative and communalist, albeit white nationalist: ultra-conservative, reactionary. And yet it could, on the surface, be described as an emancipatory, utopian, transformative, and prefigurative practice — a worker cooperative and solidarity economy-based cooperative system. While it's obviously not our vision of utopia, I'd be really curious how you would respond to or analyse this anti-progressive model. And perhaps: how could the initiatives you spotlight throughout the book act as a counterbalance — offering people an alternative not based on racism and exclusion, but on inter-community solidarity and mutual cooperation?

MW: We read that. It's very much a possibility in this dystopian moment — which is all the more reason to have the utopian, progressive versions of our examples be more important than ever. We haven't heard of that particular US case, but there's a similar case in South Africa: Orania. Orania was started in the 1990s by diehard apartheid reactionaries who didn't want the new South Africa. It sounds very similar to this Return to the Land model, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a connection.

We actually visited Orania a couple of years ago to look at what was going on. The original group never really got very big, and most Afrikaners in South Africa disavow it — it represents everything they don't want. But there's been recent growth, and I think this is probably similar to what's happening in the US. This new generation is essentially a lost generation: they don't feel like they've been part of the post-apartheid nation-building project, they feel excluded from the system as economic and political subjects. So they're not the same kind of people who started Orania in the 1990s, who were really diehard racists. These ones are just trying to find a way to feel like they belong.

What's interesting is that they have a co-op bank, renewable energy, and a requirement that everyone works within Orania — no external labour. To be there, you have to speak Afrikaans, be Christian, and believe in their shared history — which are all proxies for race. Effectively, you have to be a white Afrikaner.

But I think these exclusionary projects can exist, especially as long as capitalism is excluding people and making them feel lost. People will gravitate to places where they feel they belong. Our projects, by contrast, are fundamentally inclusive. They're the opposite in many ways. They're not exclusionary. They're always based on inclusive sensibilities, politics, and imagined communities. It's not about belonging because of particular ascriptive identities, but because you adhere to the principles of the project. That's a very different thing.

I don't think the existence of these exclusionary versions is what determines outcomes. Rather, it's the conditions under which we're living today — people feeling left out — that will generate these kinds of projects, whether progressive or reactionary. I think how people can find their place is what determines which direction they go.

VS: To complement what Michelle says: the way we even conceive of solidarity economy-based systems, there's particularity to it, but there's also universality. The values that get institutionalised in these systems — solidarity, care, cooperation — are completely antithetical to racist exclusion. That is very, very important for us. We're not about advancing alternatives that discriminate or reproduce racist exclusionary logics. We have to be very clear where we stand in terms of this kind of alternative.

In addition, I think we have to understand that there's a kind of libertarian anti-statism in the US context — a variant of Americanised anarchism that can marry with racist exclusionary politics. There's more particularity there that we need to understand and contextualise, as Michelle was referencing with the South African example.

The cases we bring to the fore — solidarity economy systems — none of them are simply defined against the state. There's nuance there. They need to work with, against, and beyond the state. They're driven by an impulse from below, and they want to build community and ensure socio-ecological reproduction. But it doesn't just stop with insiders. All the cases show that they are impacting more broadly in society — they want to transmit this beyond themselves wherever they can. If they can work with the state to achieve it, they will. They've done this in Trentino, in Mondragon, in Kerala, in Venezuela, in Argentina. Where they need to fight the state, they'll do that too. Their values take them in the direction of societal transformation.

Particularly when they're building systems, they understand that the scale at which they are working has the potential to impact more broadly. From the interviews we did, we learned that they believe this is even the future for their society — they are providing an example for their society. It's really about genuine solidarity. If these systems have their way, they will impact all scalar levels and push for solidarity societies. That's the bigger utopian horizon here — solidarity societies — and that is completely contrary to these kinds of right-wing exclusionary projects.

CB: Just to be clear — there was no implication on my part that any of the projects you spotlight have this kind of tendency. I just wanted to use it as a provocation.

MW: It's a great question, and it's one we have to grab. That's exactly why we went to Orania — people were saying, they're doing this stuff too, they want renewable energy. We ended up going because one of our students was general secretary of a trade union called Solidarity, and one faction there has a link to Orania. He could get us access, and he took us. It was quite an engagement — we met every institution, every layer of leadership. And there are serious debates happening internally, around self-reliance and autonomy. It is anti-state, in that case, but notably not anti-other-communities, which is interesting.

It's something we have to grapple with. But I think the idea of exclusionary politics is trying to protect a little enclosed project, whereas the inclusive vision of solidarity is expansive. It's not about drawing boundaries around others. Our projects are about an expansionary vision of what it is to be human. I think that's a crucial difference in how these projects envision themselves.

VS: That's why we theorise transformative politics as encompassing solidarity economy-based cooperative systems on a spectrum of bottom-up practices — whether it's forests, fishing communities, participatory budgeting, and so on. There's a spectrum of transformative practices that can connect different scalar levels.

This book doesn't argue that one utopian experiment in one corner of society is the answer. The potential with these systems is that you can aggregate with other bottom-up logics and transform society. It's about politics that is transformative of everything. Socio-ecological reproduction of life — of everything — can happen through this kind of transformative politics.

The care labour at the heart of these practices means that they're also trying to think differently about basic natural relations. Capitalism is about endless accumulation and devouring everything through commodification, including the natural world. Whereas in these examples of commoning, there's a deeper awareness of limits — of the fact that you cannot have this kind of extractivism, this kind of destruction. It's mediated by a deeper understanding of the world we are in, our dependencies, and how to navigate this web of life.

Some of these eco-fascist examples end up in an exclusionary place — defending a nature they want for themselves. Whereas in the examples we studied, it's about the planetary, about a universal condition. They know that whatever they are doing in their local systems has planetary implications. That's another aspect of what takes these examples beyond exclusionary politics.

CB: I think that's a great counterbalance to the grim example I offered. I was going to ask about what these movements have offered each other beyond learning, but I think you've spoken to that. I agree it comes from a fundamentally different place — exclusion and micro-protectionism come first, then the question of how to build follows. Whereas in the examples you're speaking about, it's completely the opposite.

I wanted to ask if there's anything in particular you'd like to spotlight that we haven't touched on. I'm conscious that our whole discussion has been guided by my questions, and I wanted to give you the open option if there's anything else you'd like to raise.

MW: One thing I could raise is about the particularities of the different projects and the big things that come out of them. I would say something that might not be explicit in the book is that these projects aren't perfect. They're all struggling. They're all trying to make the next world. When we asked the Mondragon folks about the criticism — that they're still working within capitalism, that they've made compromises — their response was: yeah, we know we're doing the best we can, but if you create a different market for us, we'll be there. We also have to be generous in appreciating that we all have a role to play in creating the next world market and the next world we're trying to build. And it does mean creating new markets — everyone has a role to play in that.

I also think that we are all, to some extent, overwhelmed by where the world is today — the threat of AI, the climate crisis, global conflagrations, nuclear war. These are things by which I think many of us are virtually paralysed and genuinely scared. All of these projects, and the people in them, are living in that same world. They're trying to create a different world in this horrible context, trying to build alternative markets based on different values. That's something really worth highlighting: it's easy to criticise things for not being perfect. But what we need to do is amplify the attempts to build alternatives. Through all of us amplifying this, we can probably find different ways of creating the world.

VS: Neo-fascism doesn't have answers. Building walls and militarising the contradictions of capitalism is a dead end — it will come back to bite them. Climate shocks are registering inside the United States, and the costs are going up. Trump's walls are not going to keep the climate crisis outside the United States. It's madness.

Amplifying what Michelle said: the articulation of these alternatives, making them more visible, learning from them, and attempting world-making from below — this is the frontier for praxis now. This moment has arrived where the left must be able to demonstrate that it stands for something different, and show it concretely. We may not have countries we can point to, but we can point to particular examples on the ground of alternative world-making, to these amazing systems that have outlasted the 20th-century left project. I think that's important.

The other thing is the state. I edit the Democratic Marxism series, and the current volume I'm working on is titled Transforming the Polycrisis State: Complexity, Disaster and Just Transitions. It grows out of the book Michelle and I worked on, and it's trying to think more deeply about the state — because the state has been hollowed out by neoliberalisation, weakened, remade. The state right now is not able to rise to this moment of systemic crises and complexities. And that's where the next conversation really begins.

CB: What project(s) are you working on next?

VS: I edit a Democratic Marxism series and the current volume is titled ‘Transforming the Polycrisis State: Complexity, Disaster and Just Transitions.’ I think it grows out of this book that Michelle and I worked on. It’s trying to think more deeply about the state, because the state has been hollowed out by neoliberalisation, it’s been weakened, remade, etc. And right now the state is not able to rise to this moment of systemic crises, the complexities, and so on. It’s not thinking in these terms. 

There’s some amazing chapters in this volume, including impacts in Mozambique and using that as an entry point to rethink the state. Also, Kerala’s Covid-19 pandemic response, which was way better than the neo-fascist Modi regime, right? They pushed mortality rates in a positive direction; thinking about disaster-risk systems that can be people led; thinking about climate-emergency social contracts where you mobilise all of society; and so on. We need a politics that can ensure that the state is democratised, repositioned, and able to play the kind of role that creates space for these alternatives to emerge. It’s got to be part of this logic of eroding, taming and exiting capitalism. The forces of social-ecological reproduction have got to subsume, to steer the state. 

MW: …I’m the delinquent contributor. My chapter’s overdue! I’m also working on some green transition alternatives that are trying to do commoning at the community level.

CB: Any book recommendations for readers?

MW: We’re both reading Black Wave [by Kim Ghattas, 2020] which is a history of the Middle East and it’s mind-blowing. It’s such a good book.

VS: Goliath’s Curse [by Luke Kemp, 2025] is interesting and is very relevant to our conversation about the state. He takes a long view of history and state-making.

CB: Where can readers pick up your book?

MW: African and South African readers can get a copy on the Wits University Press. We always do that to make sure students can get a hold of an affordable copy. 

VS: Pluto Press is the best place to watch for a copy elsewhere.

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