So like many great ideas, this started as a joke.
If we want to make wide-scale change from below in a way that centers and encourages direct participation from people with demographics that aren’t just white vanguardistas de siempre, we need something that is small, local, but replicable and works in a coordinated network. This is coming from a platform cooperative perspective yeah?
Well the problems are always that the people starting these types of organisations and projects have no money to invest in their project, usually start in a moment of crisis that makes it difficult to plan appropriately and think long term, lack of education and experience in the thing they are doing and no larger network available to offer that knowledge, and the usual problem of having something that because its economic and political, both looses money and pisses off about a third of the original participants due to political infighting.
So that´s a whole political diatribe for another day and like…a longer post.
Small businesses in immigrant communities have very similar issues to platform cooperatives, like freakily so. Often started in times of crisis (immigration is a crisis, ask any one of them ever. Actually its a double crisis because you’re likely running from one crisis and now the local government is creating a new crisis made up of paperwork and catch22-like buerocratic nightmares), lack of financing, a strange mix of economic, social and political goals due to being part of a community in the way most businesses don’t think of themselves, and very often a business that the individual did not get an education for (sorry that all your highly valued degrees don’t mean shit here, enjoy slow cooking dead animals!)
And yet, kebab shops have proliferated across the European landscape with an ease and breadth that is frankly astonishing if you compare it to what the left considers to be its wildest successes. Occupied factories make up how much of the labor force? Compare that to how many people are employed at kebabs. Slow Food managed to make more eco food popular? Kebabs changed the entire landscape of the European drunken late night culinary scene. I bet kebabs have more people involved than Mondragón and the french CGT combined. Obviously this is a huge oversimplification but its still big.
They have been successful enough to attract a large number of people to start these businesses, but not so successful as to get franchised. Its some perfect sweet spot we have never been able to replicate in the social and solidarity economy.
So, how did this happen? There has to be some type of structure that helps break a path through European racism and capitalism. My best guess at the moment is that the people who sell the kebab its product are vaguely the platform that provides some informal education, provides the product, maybe has some access to start up money, maybe uses family networks to build out everything in a formal/informal, economic/social, business/large-scale-family type way.
Sorry this is a bit rushed, but this is probably what i need tumblr for. A place to free flow brainstorm with myself about ideas most people only want to hear about once they are past the “is this really stupid or really interesting” phase. So I’m going to go talk to some kebabers, ill be back later with delicious sandwiches and more political ramblings.
