Dear Charu,

I hope you had a lovely (albeit short) winter break and are off to a good start with the winter quarter. I am grateful to have participated in your postcapitalist politics class as an introduction to my grad school career. I really miss being in conversation with you and the scholars you invited into our classroom.

So, Scott and I implemented our proposal for a community dialogue around solidarity economies and alternatives to capitalism today, Sunday afternoon. We largely consider it a success! There were around 15 attendees, some of whom we knew from community and many new faces. It was difficult to anticipate the makeup and mood of the gathering, as it was open to the public. We started with introductions, then launched into mini-lectures on J.K. Gibson-Graham’s work, invited representatives from Resource Generation and Social Justice Fund to talk about their programs, broke out into 3 smaller discussion groups, and reported back on group sharings.

In terms of affect, it was a tremendous amount of work pulling this event together. After the quarter ended, Scott was largely unresponsive to collaborating on the event details, which included securing a date, a space, and instructing our partner organizations on how to shape their presentations. I think this was due to the stress of a new quarter, and the fact that the actual doing of our proposal was outside the realm of grades. As I am learning about collaboration in the MACS core class this quarter, this collaboration has proved to be frustrating during this implementation stage.

I also held a lot of stress and anxiety around nailing down all the details, making sure the event was as accessible as possible, and being on the defensive about possible criticism. It also scared me that people in attendance might disagree with JKGG’s framework of openness and even demand answers to the large problems posed by capitalism in our lives.

The event went very, very well! After about 30 minutes of presentations and lectures, we broke out into smaller groups, which I considered to be the “meat” of the dialogue. The whole point of getting together was to have people talk to each other, be vulnerable, and share ideas on how we are already resisting capitalism in our everyday lives.

During that 30 minutes, the 3 groups engaged in hearty conversation, and were still at it when we directed them back to the large group report back. I was surprised that people were open to talking to strangers about these issues, and in my group, folks came up with a host of non capitalist ways of being: potlucks, German communes, book lending, emotional labor in the household, care between friends. My group came up on their own with the idea that instead of a large-scale revolution, we are enacting the revolution every day within ourselves, that mass change is a long-intern incremental process, and that completely writing off political leaders and movements for being imperfect is itself a capitalocentric way of thinking. Folks also discussed the idea of “unproductive care and labor,” pointing to a way of sharing that exists outside of the capitalist values.

At the end, many folks came up and thanked us for hosting, and expressed interest in continuing this conversation, and coming together to read critical texts and engage with other intellectual ideas. The organizers at Resource Generation and SJF thanked us for being invited to present, and expressed that even though they were not explicitly post-capitalist and did not espouse a political ideology with their participants, that this conversation gave them a new way to think about and explore their work. I really loved that this created openings for their organizing and show them other facets of their commitment.

It was pleasure to host this event and we got so much positive feedback that I (Frances) will be continuing this vein of community discussion/salons with a reading group that more broadly rethinks social justice and the culture surrounding it.

Thanks Charu!