Ep. 2: Productive Justice with Ed Whitfield
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In this episode, Nikishka and Andrew team up to interview the cooperative economy movement elder Ed Whitfield. Ed sheds lights on the practice of “non-extractive finance” and how it is used to advance “productive justice.”
Highlights:
• Ed defines non-extractive finance and contrasting it with the business-as-usual, highly-extractive form of finance that is commonplace
• A fun deep-dive into Ed’s past that involved in radical protests on his college campus and how this was a continuation of his ancestral legacy
• Charting Ed’s journey from blue collar work to working in the world of cooperative economics and finance
• Ed shares the details of the business model of Seed Commons, a network of loan funds across the U.S.; along with a new local initiative Ed’s launching as a living example of Productive Justice
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Ed Whitfield is originally from Little Rock Arkansas and was a long time anti-war and social justice activist before becoming involved in community development, cooperative development and philanthropy. He now spends most of his time trying to help communities build self-reliant economies to meet their needs and elevate the quality of life. Ed was Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of the Fund for Democratic Communities (F4DC) and continues to serve on the boards of the Seed Commons: A Community Wealth Cooperative and the New Economy Coalition (NEC) Ed spent 9 years as Board Chairman of the Greensboro NC Redevelopment Commission and was the board chair of Greensboro’s Triad Minority Development Corporation before becoming involved with the cooperatives and the world of democratic non-extractive finance. He currently serves as a consultant to community groups on matters of community cooperative economic development and community wealth building, as well as working in the arena of organizational anti-racism, diversity, equity and inclusion improvement. Ed writes, teaches and lectures on these matters of importance while balancing this work with playing blues and eating barbecue.
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RTR Season 1, Episode. 6: Reparative Finance with Kate Poole + Tiffany Brown
RTR Season 1, Episode 2: Ep. 2: Restorative Economics with Nwamaka Agbo
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Ed Whitfield 0:10
Typically people are in relationships where the value of their labor is being extracted and accumulated by someone else. And for this reason, there are folks who think blindly that money makes money, not extracted finances the finance that is intended to enhance communities, help them without extracting wealth out of those communities and accumulating it somewhere else.
RTR Themed Intro 0:33
You ready we get down to business investing in existence, shifting from a system steeped in extraction that steady sapping off peoples and planet to cash in slashing, widening gaps in our access to land wealth, peace, satisfaction. Imagine basing relations on more than transactions. It's time for new pathways, and we need to shape them through our inner landscapes, our relations, our approach our dedication, we're on the road to repair as a commitment to transformation.
Jessica Norwood 1:06
Welcome to the road to repair a podcast exploring our journey out of a business as usual economy to our collective healing and liberation.
Andrew X 1:15
We are your co hosts Andrew X.
Jessica Norwood 1:17
Jessica Norwood.
Nikishka Iyengar 1:18
And I'm Nikishka Iyengar, and we're
Andrew X 1:20
very excited for this conversation. Welcome to today's episode. Today we have with us Ed Whitfield, senior fellow at seed Commons. And Ed is originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, and was a longtime anti war and social justice activist before becoming involved in community development, cooperative development, and also philanthropy. He now spends most of his time trying to help communities build self reliant communities to meet their needs and elevate their quality of life. Ed was co-founder and managing director of Fund for Democratic Communities and continues to serve on the Board of Seed Commons, a community wealth cooperative. Ed spent nine years as board chairman of the Greensboro redevelopment commission, and was Board Chair of Greensboro try it minority Development Corporation before becoming involved with the cooperatives and the world of democratic non extractive finance. He currently serves as a consultant to community groups on matters of community cooperative economic development, and community wealth building, as well as working in the arena of organizational anti racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion improvement. Ed writes, teaches and lectures on these matters of importance while balancing this work with playing blues and eating barbecue as my kind of dude. Welcome, Ed,
Ed Whitfield 2:39
I'm so happy to be here.
Nikishka Iyengar 2:40
We are so honored to have you today. Okay, so I heard in your bio, democratic non extractive finance. Now I know what that means, but maybe some of our listeners need a little bit of a primer on what that stands for,
Ed Whitfield 2:53
I guess the formulation may be relatively new, but the concept is just so very different from the way people are used to living their lives and interacting with finance, which typically is highly extractive and has little utility, for the purposes of actually helping communities. The purpose of finance is to enhance and expand finance. And so people with a whole lot of money, try to make a whole lot of money into a whole lot more money pretending as though it is money making money, when we know that it's some people somewhere in the world who are being exploited, whose money cranks it's going back to the banks. So this whole notion of I'm gonna make my money work for me, the United State money knew how to work, it doesn't work knows how to work with people. But typically people are in relationships where the value of their labor is being extracted and accumulated by someone else. And for this reason, there are folks who think blindly that money makes money, not extracted finances, the finance that is intended to enhance communities, help them without extracting wealth out of those communities and accumulating it somewhere else. It grew out of some work that happened in Latin America with the recovered factory movement, when in Argentina, the economy was so dysfunctional, one time that they went through six governments and seven days, and suddenly, it was just really well, but during that time, a lot of workers had been locked out of factories, which might otherwise be functional, except the capitalists who own those factories weren't making enough money for it. So there was some people went down and started helping them with the small things that they needed to do to reopen their factories, worker owned cooperatives, so there's not extractive finance was a way of looking at the cattle and anything that was being done to those groups and decide that this lending should help you be productive should help you make more money than you can make without it. And it's only on the basis of the extra money that you made. Did you pay it back not on the basis of any collateral anything you already owned or anything so I had not extracted finances finance has different kinds of collateral requirements. So if you already have a truck and you want to buy another truck to expand your business, and we financed the other truck we paid for the other truck why you using You pay us back, if you change your mind, or for whatever other reasons don't make payment on the truck, we can take that truck as collateral and try to recover some portion of what was borrowed. If you're not going to keep it, we're not gonna bother the truck you already had or your office furniture or your house. And so you got to understand that that's just very different from the way lending is typically around the United States, where they want a claim on all previously existing business assets as the collateral for a loan, that is probably a relatively small part of the total business assets, but they want the total because they want to make sure that their money is is out of it, not extracted. Finance wants to make sure that the community benefits, we say, rather than maximizing profit, we want to maximize community benefits. We do this by lending under the condition that if the money was lending doesn't help you make more money, you don't have to pay it back. So we're not looking at a lot of collateral, we're not looking at a lot of personal credit scores. We're more interested in the idea that there are some productive activities getting ready to take place is your sincere and honestly going to engage in it and that if it's successful, you will be able to pay it back. It is not successful, we all made a mistake. And there certainly are times when that is possible. And it happened that you're not going to have to pay this back. And we're not going to take a bunch of stuff from so that's not extracted, finance,
Andrew X 6:19
thank you for giving that background context, you're sharing what not extracted finance is. And just to emphasize again, they're pretty radical nature of what you're doing relative to what is common. We're diving right in here, which is great. I'm loving it. And would also love to hear just a little bit about your journey from being a young activist organizer to nowadays and for the past several decades becoming a radical economist in your work in non extractive finance. Now we have a little bit of a clearer understanding of what that is.
Ed Whitfield 6:48
Well, you know, if I was to give you all the details, it would take a long time to tell you that.
Nikishka Iyengar 6:53
I want to know the details because I saw this picture on Facebook the other day, and when I think you posted a picture of you at a demonstration when you were in college, maybe do you know what I'm talking about?
Ed Whitfield 7:07
Demonstrations when I was in college, yeah, some of the ones photograph and one of the photographs won the Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism in 1970 by a guy named Steve Starr, and it kept me from getting elected to the county commission in Greensboro, North Carolina. Wow. Because it gives us an A mudslinging campaign. This guy circulated that picture and all of the white precincts in the district, not all of the black priests, all of the white precincts he was smart. With a note on his like, do you really know who it would feel is and I saw it last, I mean, but it was okay, I had but I scared the devil out of him
Andrew X 7:44
and slowing you down. That's when you know you're on the right path.
Ed Whitfield 7:47
Me and some students 1969 and occupation that was once described as having ended the era of the good Negro and always thought that was cool. ended an era this was a very turbulent time in 1968. In February 68 students was shot and killed on the campus of South Carolina State in Orangeburg, South Carolina trying to integrate a bowling alley. And then in May of 1970 students shot and killed Kent State's campus and Jackson states campuses around protests and demonstration there was in opposition to the Vietnam War. And I think the one at Jackson State was around the Vietnam War as well as escalation in turbulent times. So I was at Cornell and a student leader there, and we had kind of decided that, you know, people safety was most important. And these were unarmed students in these places getting shot. So we figured that wasn't the fundamental safety factor, and lots of different people could hurt you, and they should remember that you live. So anyway, we had an occupation of building it was connected with some campuses. But while we were in the building, some students tried to break in and throw us out and they were thrown back out the window. And there were a lot of rumors later that day that some students will come over to kick us out. And so we are my selves and self defense thing about the turbulent times we we unfortunately, the president of the college was a Quaker pacifist and refuse to allow the intimidating forces of the state. They wanted to run rampage over us. He refused to let him do it. They had taken a boathouse in downtown Ithaca, New York and strung it with razor wire all around the edges to look like some, you know, concentration camp site to be able to lock us all up at one time. They were getting ready, but the President didn't allow it. So he got fired later Bevan University. Interesting times. What is even weirder than that, to me now is that two years before that I was in the White House eating dinner with the president united states and meeting and greeting Thurgood Marshall on the day he was appointed to the Supreme Court.
Andrew X 9:46
I was a Good Negro once and that stopped.
Andrew X 9:50
Well, you're reminding me of my in depth interview with Clark Arrington and I'm just like, oh my god, I have to sit down with Edie and do a deep dive because I know there's so much rich stories, so maybe we can explore that maybe. Okay, okay, I can appreciate that it could also be a one on one, I just want this pearl selfishly. And we'd love to learn more about you. So take us a little bit from those days as a young activist and how that kind of flowed into your current Dharma, right livelihood journey in radical economics, non extractive finance.
Ed Whitfield 10:31
If you don't mind, let me go back an extra 100 years,
Andrew X 10:35
let's do it.
Ed Whitfield 10:40
In 1849 on a small plantation somewhere north of Alabama. I think it was in Tennessee, while he would feel that great grandfather was born as a slave and the illegitimate child man named John would feel anyhow, while he was kind of raised in the house jam seem to, you know, been partial to it a little bit, John, somebody I would describe as a horse, the just in shorthand, and somebody said, we've already come a horsey. I said, well, because he was a murderer, a hypocrite liar, and a rapist. And I think it's men who do all that was still a horse. And I just kind of added that anybody in a heartbeat. That was the white man with the plantation on it. But I add to that, but he wasn't all bad. Because at the end of the Civil War, he took his 16 year old son over to Arkansas with him, and helped teach him about the timber business and stuff. And while he was able to come back to Scottsboro and set up a sawmill, Construction Company, rental company, I think he was also a stonemason. He's written about in the Scottsboro Boys history, and when he died in 1931, at age of 80. By 82, he was written up as the wealthiest, most prominent Negro, in Scottsboro, when he was there and owned a sawmill at one point, it was something called Goose Pond, Cumberland Presbyterian Church there, and he supplied all the lumber for them to rebuild after the Civil War. So in 1883, they were getting ready to reopen after they rebuild their church. This is a white congregation in in Scottsboro, they will get ready to reopen he, he stood on the steps of a church and told them that they could not set foot into that building, until they paid him in full for wood that he had supplied for them to build. Whereupon they looked at this black man who's an ex slave standing, blocking their way into the church, and it turned around and went, so somebody didn't get the money, and they brought him his money back and patient and go, Okay, you know, it's like, Oh, 1883, I'm glad it ended that way. Because there's other ways that story could have ended. But that was the life he lived. That's who he was, it was my ancestor. So I'm thinking, Oh, my goodness, I'm just shattered turn to my roots. My radical roots come immediately after the Civil War. But I wanted to go back to that, and the fact that my father was also a jack of all trades. So when I grew up, I thought all men knew how to fix cars, wire houses, do planning, put on roofs, building, that my dad didn't know how to do it. I thought everybody knew how to do it, and I was broke. So I was supposed to learn how to do it. So I kind of did, and found out later, there's like, oh, that's open, and all of a sudden, necessarily to be a man didn't know. So when I was in college, I left Cornell University and went to teach in place to a Malcolm X liberation University. It was the kind of epitome of black studies because it was what happened when some black students from Duke University, were going to try to set up a Black Studies Department at Duke. And they were thwarted in their efforts. And they said they would build their own school, their own university. And this was at university, a mathematical preparation University. And while many of them went back to Duke, and didn't go back to Cornell, I went and I joined Malcolm X's operation University to teach them and my teaching brought with me the life that I had been brought up by my dad, who was the grandson of this incredible builder, developer in Alabama. And I think about people being able to do things that we have a need to provide for ourselves. I even have gotten in trouble with a lot of activists for saying that I'm way less concerned about rights than I am about power and responsibility. Because we have the power, we have the capacity, we do have a responsibility to take care of ourselves. So if you're out in the forest, and he's getting cold, you can say you know, housing is a human right, and you can scream that to the trees, and they're not gonna respond, but you would need to do is take X amount of trees and build some shelter. So you don't freeze Devo, the word as opposed to timeout right? So what's the difference? Well, we are in the forest, you haven't given away your rights to do for yourself to some other larger entity for which you then demand that they respect your right to be taken care of. I like to think of communities as kind of entire holes that more have the responsibility to do for themselves to meet their needs and elevate the quality of life and community. And that this is possible because of the productivity of human labor that in the final analysis the producer values human labor isn't know how valuable something is in any abstract sense, because if that were the case, then the most expensive thing would be air, which we can only pull it out for a few minutes without bag, then water, we can only go without a few days without day, very much of the air and water in the world, not all of the water anymore, but very much of the air and what is in the commons, it still exists as a common resource for everyone to use. So then have a high price, even those utility is great. There are other things that do have high prices and trade for a lot of money, diamonds, gold, precious metals is having the other some of them are useful to us, some of them only their principal value is and the fact that people trust them and trading back and forth between one another. These financial instruments are at some level, an abstraction from the fact that people have needs and those needs need to be met largely that people engaging their own labor of nature and producing the things that they need for themselves and to enhance the quality of life. And people say well, what do you have these rights come from these human rights? Yeah, like what God gave us these human rights? Okay, well, is indoor toilets, a human rights? You know, a lot of people at this point in time in in the United States, it was, you know, be a human rights violation, NASA might access indoor toilets in the United States right now. But that is that it is a community standard. It is a highly held community standard. I found it a very desirable community standard, I like it, but it is indeed a community standard and some other parts of the world and no toilets are not community standards, we may argue that they should become so at some point, and perhaps they will, in fact, almost certainly the will. But in the meantime and not. And so, you know, what are the human rights in one place is not a human right, somewhere else, they all humans. So now these there, there are rights, their needs, their responsibilities, and their, what I was talking about community standards that people express and hold on to and try to generally elevate those standards even. So that's what we're actually doing. And I try to be often very literal about that. And think about it in some level of detail. That's, you know, who I was, when I came out of school was teaching amounts of exploration University, we always talked about the things that people needed to try to build and do for themselves. We were very much in the self reliance. I even went and looked at a project in West Africa, where we're thinking about taking over some land there. But that never came to fruition. The school closed down for lack of money and all kinds of other internal problems that plague people doing things. So I went and started working as a machinist, and later went into the tobacco industry. So I could be in a union as plant they had, like 2000 union as members and the South were people out the right to work laws and this and that prevented you from actually building Union. This was had like 99%, union membership largely rooted a lot of black folks who were working there, it was a highly integrated workplace. It may have been close to 5050. Yeah, that would be so I worked there. I worked there for 30 years. I started there as a machinist, I took a test to become a machinist there. And then after a couple of years as machines, they had a job opening for an Electronics Technician. It was a test, I could take a selected test. So I took the test and I pass it. So it told me I had the highest score anyone ever may not if I did it, so I got to be an Electronics Technician. Then I shifted and came electronics specialist was advising the technician. But I was there for 30 years.
Before my 30 years was up, my dear friend, Marnie Thompson came to me and said, Hey, my dad has been accumulating money all his life. He's getting sick, he's about to die. He wants to leave me a lot of money. He knows that I get a lot of money out of it. Please give it away. He said he lived away anyway. And I won't have to pay death taxes on it. So once you set up a foundation, so she said, Well, you helped me do that. I've got I mean, those were, I've told her since then. And she thought it was not true that I reluctantly agreed. Because I took a pay cut. Every time I was in an industry that was doing really well. It was an industry that was almost a meritocracy at the time, you know, I got the job. Basically, I took a test or something as opposed to who they like Sonia and I was getting paid the money. But she figured that nonprofit salaries had no reason to be as high as the salaries in the tobacco industry where I made poison. Okay, whatever, cigarettes, okay, that's why I say I made was delivered in April. So I worked there for 30 years, she wanted to form a foundation, I agreed to help her, I became co Managing Director, she and I were together the CO managing directors of the foundation. Our big work was to build community democracy. You know, our concern was how do you make communities more democratic spaces and an authentic way? We didn't just mean voting. In fact, often voting didn't have very much to do with democracy at all. And democracy is more about how people engage with and think together than it is the specific mechanisms of how that thinking together is used. Because the idea is to think together of what should we do as a whole? What should we do as a group that advances you know, most of our interests? So that's, to me is the essence of democracy. But we wanted to build democracy, and it was actually during the financial week. I'm in crisis where a lot of people were so heavily interested in economics that we would think, Oh, what does economic democracy look like? And we were quickly attracted to, you know, the development building of cooperatives as one of the forms of economic democracy takes even within, you know, severely capitalist sick economies. So I did some study, I did a field trip, I drove across the south, we had already decided to focus on work in the south a little bit to take the bill of southern cooperative movement. I went to Spain and studied cooperatives at Mondriaan, came back worked with the Federation of southern cooperatives and how to research and education institute and some others to build an organization called the southern grassroots economies project. And one part of the work of the seven grassroots economists project was what we call the money project, which was around helping to secure financing from our discussion with the Federation of southern cooperatives, we learned that there were three things in development work that we might do together. One was sharing learnings. And we did that by putting on a conference called coop con. And the other was advocacy work. That's largely the work that the Federation's have incorporated a lot of going back to Washington trying to impress them, and like doing anything, and the last was finance, trying to figure out some ways to collectively gathered pool of financing to be utilized. So that was a collective training, collective finance, collective advocacy were the three things we settled on is the work of seven grassroots candidates budget. Well, the finance part ended up developing relationships with people across the country, including the people at what was then the working world, the working world as business now as see Commons. And so the financial history of the working world is what we started with at sea cameras, as we go into and do the fundraising. Let's see, tambours is explicitly a network of loan firms across the country. I think at this point, we'd like 31, loan funds, at various levels of development. Some of them are very active, making loans into millions of dollars, some of the beginning and working on trying to get their first 40 or $50,000 loan out for some local business. But all of us together doing this man extracted finance, but I was in my role and been for democratic communities and villains have been grassroots economists project. That's what I came across Brandon Martin and his work at the working world we have described and we developed very close working relationship so that the formation of sea Commons itself as a network, I was actually around and very much a part of deeply grew out of thinking and work that Brendan had been doing before, I was also able to get tenant language to some pieces of our work that help people understand that. I just told you everything.
Nikishka Iyengar 22:33
That’s so rich. And like, I mean, you're clearly you know, an elder in this space. And it's just an honor to learn from you.
In terms of the the language piece that you just touched on, right, and I heard you go into this a little bit when you were sharing about your journey, and I've heard you frame issues of economic justice previously along the lines of, you know, productive justice versus distributive justice. And I think that that framing is so spot on. And I would love if you could, you know, break that down a little bit. And then also kind of share what have been some of the challenges that you've encountered in building productive justice and non extractive finance models while still operating within this like dominant system of capitalism? Two part question,
Ed Whitfield 23:20
so much of the dialogue. I'm used to hearing from civil rights organization, a lot of stuff just like I was railing a minute ago about people talking about rights, when really we should talk about what a human needs and what responsibilities in particular, because that helps guide me toward the thing of how can we provide these things for ourselves rather than having to be demanded of others. So to me distributive justice is around demanding the redistribution of money. So the people who have more conviction people who have less have enough and distributed and can go and do things they wouldn't miss. This is something about where did the money comes from? And how legitimate is the kind of existing ownership structures the mentally how legitimate is it? How do we help people produce more, so I'll go buy the 1860 fabricate, I get a little tangled selfie store meeting in Savannah, Georgia with some black ministers 2020 negro ministers that leaves the meeting, often described at the end of civil war, William Tecumseh, Sherman and Stanton was Secretary wars. They had just marched cannabis to the sea in Savannah with better coasts. They wanted to know from these prominent negros, like, what do you people want? Seriously, that was funny to me, but that was one of the early kind of times they say what do people want because proud of them when they had as a slave, they didn't even ask but at this point, we're gonna be slaves and I'm sure they thought was gonna be a social problem. They asking people what did you understand to be the nature of slavery? And what do you understand the the nature of the Emancipation that was declared by the Emancipation Proclamation, and we asked him out. And so the answer this one guy from North Carolina was a spokesperson of a group and he said, by slavery we understand to be when one person takes by force, the value of the labor produced by another man. And I understand that freedom is when we will be in a position to produce and do for ourselves, you have access to some land that we can tell and toilet work and from that feed ourselves in our communities. And so NASA has to help in the war effort. So this whole idea that slavery was when one person takes the value of the labor of another person produces it, it struck me as such a clean and precise way of describing it was the slavery experience a bit, it says, such wet contrast this idea about they brought us over here to they hate us. It's like you think people left Spain and England got the rickety boats and went around an ocean, you know, risking their lives and kitchen scurvy and all that? Because they didn't like you? They they went that far. They could have just left you a lot of state and have a safe right now. No, they went over there. And obviously, they didn't like you, because they heard that you could make a bunch of money off a whole bunch of money. And this was about greed, Matt, exactly by hatred. That's the roots of this system, because it makes no sense to take some angle airpark and it heats up. Anyhow, this idea of productive justice is have given us opportunities to do for ourselves. And everything James Brown said, I don't want nobody to give me nothing, just Oh, love the dog, get it myself. I opened the keynote speech at the new academy coalition. I plan that so let's say you go have a joke from Jane, I say it's not it's not a joke. That's a profound philosophical statement and a critique of the welfare state as a critic of the welfare state and the social movements. I don't want nobody give me method, open up the door. Get it myself. So the whole idea like how do we open these doors. So we had seen cameras do it in finance, we do it in finance and technical assistance. We work in communities where people have never thought about doing something like this together. But we know people who've been predicted they do so they produce in vain, even when they work for other people, and many of them are still working for themselves and producing value that way. So you still have small entrepreneurs who produce with the small producers, barbershops, beauty shops, nail salons, funeral homes, these small producers, you still have people working in ways you can we work with other folks, you still have people who are involved in the transfer economy where they get a check. You know, the bottom line is we get a check. But we also need people operating the subsistence economy where they produce into themselves, not necessarily a small commodity production, nobody can produce for themselves. And so the worker coops, rebuilding our form of this productive justice, where we're trying to enhance people's ability to do for themselves and community, rather than again, demanding their rights and the redistribution of wealth. Others create it as a recognition that people are capable of creating, producing work themselves, when given the proper tools to do so that the society itself has over time there was social production, it has accumulated a bunch of wealth that needs to be made available to the succeeding generations as a new commons, a commons that includes not only a healthy Earth, but that includes the accumulated value produced, again by billions of people over millennia, that accumulated wealth is around here is piled up in Wall Street in Beijing and London, you know, where people are trying to figure out how to invest it, the way to invest and put it back into communities in such a way to enhance people's capacity to be creative and productive for themselves. And if given that opportunity, then you have to worry about high taxation so they can spend your money. You know, you do not know how to work and make some
Andrew X 28:33
just to kind of highlight the overarching thread here of productive justice. I've heard you talk about kind of the connection to reparations previously, thinking about just that self determination piece, like the theme of our show, The Road to repair. It's like what we're needing in terms of repair is productive assets.
Ed Whitfield 28:51
Yeah, I want to touch on that. And I wanted to kind of bring us to today and some work I'm working on here, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, that's how they incomplete is entirely possible that it goes wrong, because I could get hit again by a car. I got hit back on. So walking across the street here by the store. But right now we billing a thing. clarito plays with a lot of blues, tourism, and people come through here from around the world. I was listening to some guy from Spain, and another guy from Belgium, were sitting in a small bar with me last night, you know, so these blues tourists come through here. That's one of the main kind of economic generators in this area is blues tourism. So the tourist experience produces some jobs with a lot of jobs in the service industry waiting tables, you know, making beds and the bed and breakfast, cleaning up stuff, maybe some other kinds of things and food service, food service waiting tables. There handful of people who are blues musicians, some of them will certainly do better the blues tourists event than just playing. It's very small town. One of the things I'm working on though, is designing and building musical instruments to sell to the tourists. So when you come here, you don't only have an immediate experience To listen to the music, enjoying the hospitality and all that, because you can also go home and take something that's made in Clarksdale. And so because it's made in Clarksdale, this is something that the Chinese, Japanese, they can't compete with it. So they don't make guitars. They can make way cheaper guitars. So I'm not going to try to be cheap. So they will win if it would turn out to be cheap. They won't win if it's made in Clarksdale, because I'm making them in Clarksdale. And then, so I want to build a worker cooperatives around building marketing, branding, the whole works of this idea of a made in Clarksdale brand to enhance people's tourist experience, and we're gonna sell it to the tourism boards, we're gonna sell it to everybody, but we're mainly gonna be selling products that we build ourselves. So one of the things my daughter suggested was you need to make some logos and things and Henson embroidery. So I'm buying a 12 needle embroidery machine that cost $2,000. But the company let league buy at 0% down and 0% interest over six years, which means this machine will easily pay for itself without any money. I'm gonna honest, is that how people live? I didn't understand that you could get a machine for nothing that was a productive it is like Do you realize it, everybody knew that? Did anybody have to name open border machines that live in the front room, and the world would be flooded with embroidered hats said make America better. So building this business vertical integration, we're going to have a base salary of 50. Now for people who participate in it when you sweep the floor or is that websites that matter for 12 to 18 hours and profit share profit sharing will be determined by the percentage of the total labor you did. So you can just look at your percentage of total payroll. And as your percentage of profit to be shared, there will be a lot of profit to be shared, because we talked about selling really expensive items to people who have a lot of money and are not under the pressure of wanting to Batchi because one of the things gonna have some local artists do is play an instrument that I build, I say I right now, because I haven't trained I'm going to be training other people how to make stuff. And there'll be involved in designing things from the beginning. But we all share the profit equally. That's the cool part about this, but I'm gonna have local artists play them in a concert. And then at the end of the concert option, the off the instrument the date, which removes from the question like Will this instrument play with a professional musician? Yes, some guy who uses love, you just watch it for two hours playing that instrument. And now you'll actually have who knows if BB King been willing to sell you, Lucille what it would be worth now. So just think about that we did another session that you could take back home with you, along with a framed photograph of the artists and signature, we're gonna do all of that. So a lot of this is about marketing some data, some tourists with a lot of money. And so maybe an instrument that I would otherwise sell them for $1,500, they will be willing to buy at an auction after having seen it being played for $3,000. In which case, we then divide the excess open above the $1,500 with the artist who played it, which means that he's completely incentivized to play his butt off to get a big check. So this is a way to help artists have another revenue stream help people in the community has some jobs. There's a young man, he used to walk by my house after the sweeps up and I let him do that several times ask anyone you want a job. So I mean, and so now he works with me very regularly. I'm helping him learn how to read write and do numbers because the public schools have failed and they've given up on some people, I told him, the school may have given up on you, but I'm not gonna that's okay. And he expressed interest, he likes to learn, he wanted to learn this is great. It's gonna make an incredible amount out of this business. Even early on, he will kind of keep things right and keep me from tripping and falling in the shop and investment. So that's what I'm working on now, as a means of kind of being concrete about it is a cooperative. I'm having a meeting with some people later tonight about it, some people who just want jobs, and they will have no reason to believe or understand what I'm talking about. But I'm going to tell them anyway, because it's important to hear more than once they'll see it when they get that first profit share and distribution. Several people told me, it just worked ever to fit this, they had this little word,
Nikishka Iyengar 33:59
right. This is like beyond just livable wage jobs. This is about taking surplus value, because otherwise profit surplus value is typically just extracted into the hands of capitalists, right? Yeah.
Ed Whitfield 34:10
So by just for having this brilliant idea that I had about how to do this marketing, Maven parser, somebody could make a lot of money off of that, if that's what he wanted to do, because he could have people to it if he knows how to do things I'm talking about. I really do want to create some community. Well, you know, I'll take my cut of it just because that's how we're doing it. And to be fair to everyone, could it be really something epic has to be usable?
Nikishka Iyengar 34:32
Absolutely. And let me ask you this. And because this work you're doing is so valuable. You're building alternative models to the status quo, right? You're building cooperatives, you're building these non extractive funds. Andrew and I are in this work and doing it it's not easy, because you're still grappling with the constraints of capitalism. So you just said maybe there's there's a level of political education that you're doing through this work, right. Not everybody is interested in these models, or maybe because they don't know enough about it. to political education is something that's necessary. But what are some of the challenges that you're you're grappling with in the, in the last decade, a couple of decades, three decades of doing this work of building alternative models, that you think the field needs to work on a little bit better
Ed Whitfield 35:16
sounding things, working with people, the most challenging thing is to build a core of people who are capable of engaging in the thinking together that is needed to build democracy, if you can do that, and everything else is well, within reach, we can find people say machines for no money. And I tell people that regularly, like the challenges is getting people together, there's a certain level of integrity, I think that's required to in the long term, draw people together and keep them if it's, you know, the non predatory kind of way. And so, you know, I try to build that level of integrity and rapport with the people I work with, and get them to leave it because we're actually doing it, I don't want to be somebody who talks about something. And then you asked me two years down the line where that when you know, this happened, and that happened, and you know, excuses. So I'd rather do it first didn't tell you about it, I've kind of fired up a log of this, this idea, now, it's gonna happen, I've got to get team working on it, the team is growing and bringing in additional people gave me a bunch of equipment just told me he took his granddaughter about this, and she was excited about it. So we're gonna have a lot of folks, hopefully, a reasonable amount of people at the meeting. And I say that a lot of people because it's worth to talk to folks, and you know, class size does matter. And so if it's more than a certain number of people, I wouldn't be able to answer all their questions well, below that, below that number, I can do it. So I'm looking forward to working with people, this is the hard part, working with people is always the challenging part. If you have a good project and fast money, there are people who have money. And then people who have real social concerns, who often advise the people who do have money, sacrificed some money for somebody, I can't necessarily find people in this community who want to be part of a cooperative, because they've never heard what it is. So I had to do a lot of teaching work to help people know what it is. And in the meantime, I have to help people actually have a job. So you do some work for me to get to effigy alpha right now. So we'll have the payroll system setup harder making people believe you it has to be believable, and to have some integrity and to do what you say and to build what you say, and to talk about your mistakes. Talk about the things you tried to do that didn't work there people who ought to be just telling folks long list and say that didn't work. And instead of bragging about it as though it did work, and it would be much better for them to explain all the things that didn't work, all the things that prevented them from being able to do whatever they thought they would be able to do. Because someone to learn something from that, to think you're learning something by following their model is probably a terrible idea. You'll do better to understand the things that they did. And to know that you have to try to find a way to do them in a better way. So that's the work I'm working on.
Nikishka Iyengar 37:47
That's exactly it. I mean, at the guild, we say two things. One, this work of building cooperatives. We're not just entrepreneurs on worker owners, we're organizers. And I think the people aspect that you touch on, it's like you can't not do the work of organizing. You can't skip that part. And then think about mistakes. Like I think, yeah, sharing transplant. I think a lot of times it's a vulnerable thing in general, but it's vulnerable when you've got so much working against you in terms of the dominant system that you have this desire to like, there's a perfectionism that creeps in and you want to only share your wins. Because if you share your losses, then maybe a funder will be like, Oh, well, we're not gonna invest in that anymore. You know, and I think there's a level of fear around that. But to your point, the field only gets better when we're sharing transparently what would didn't work? Out? It's been an honor to share space with you, Andrew, I don't know if you have any closing thoughts or and if you have any closing thoughts, but I'm just really excited to have you on the podcast and see where our relationship with the guild and see comments goes to.
Ed Whitfield 38:49
We're really looking forward to continue to conversations about that relationship. We at sea cameras are very impressed with the guild, I guess you know that we're looking for additional peers and we're looking forward to work together with you. I'm looking forward to some of these other things and trying to develop new models of how to do this possibly, if we can get this actually working. It's kind of serendipity Creative Arts cooperative, beautiful. I was working by chance and a small music store, again, new tour of what it means to keep the store open. And these two young ladies walked in and they turned out they saw these instruments that I had made. And we started talking about that I said I wanted to build something that can make these and so people so one young lady sent me jewelry, and I said well, I do too and I you know had just bought $2,000 worth of scrap copper, I could make it into over $20,000 worth of jewelry for people making twisted wires. So we got interested and they say, you know, we just came in here by chance and we had no idea that we were going to pass medic was talking about he said we've been doing I'd say yeah, that's it serendipity. And they go well, we're not sure I said let's look it up and read the definition of serendipity, this chance of that happened and turned out very, very well and use that as a Yeah, that's a sad. Yeah, that's my group that so we decided to meet the serendipity Creative Arts cooperative.
Nikishka Iyengar 40:10
That's beautiful. Oh my gosh, yes, you have to let us know when when your products are available and we will do will be one of your first customers hopefully. Thank you, ad. So appreciate you so much. I've enjoyed it. Andrew, any closing thoughts?
Andrew X 40:26
I just really would love to get to know you more and learn. I just feel like you have such rich wisdom and perspective to share that both affirming and probably like you said, like, maybe there's mistakes along the way and or successes and so just selfishly personally. That's what's happening for me, but I feel deeply honored. Baba Edward fields have you on the road to repair podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
Ed Whitfield 40:53
Thank you all for having me.
Jessica Norwood 40:57
Thank you for joining us on the road to repair. Our greatest hope is that this show will have a transformative impact for those of you tuning in the road to repair podcast is produced by Andrew X. Kiska ion guard and Jessica Norwood with amazing post production support for frequency media music for the show was produced by Andrew X. in close collaboration with artists and sound designer Zachary Seth Greer and the luscious vocals and original poetics of Nyima Penniman, shout out to SOPA hood. For all the amazing artwork, you can check out more of their great work on our website, you can find the links at the road to repair.com We always love the social media shout outs and you can help this message ripple out to those who might really benefit from it by rating this show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts. And if you feel so called you can make a donation to support the show at WWW dot roto repair.com Thanks again for tuning in and stay tuned for our next episode.
RTR Themed Outro 42:06
We stand with the land. We are far more than a commodity we join with the water bodies are not property. We're reclaiming our shared sovereignty and shaping an economy based on reciprocity, cooperative, accountable ground and justice and ecology. The Empire is toppling who want to be about this prophecy. We've been summoned to the summit trust we here for something what is now possible, who are we becoming?
Nikishka Iyengar 42:37
The road to repair is sponsored by the guild and runway. The Guild develops community owned models of land housing in real estate as a means to build power and self determination in black and other communities of color. Runway envisions a world where black entrepreneurs thrive in a reimagined economy rooted in equity and justice.
