In this episode of Left Out, we sat down with Kali Akuno — the co-founder and co-directer of Cooperation Jackson. We discuss the emerging network of worker-owned cooperatives and the people behind it building an alternative, solidarity-based economy inside the majority-black and impoverished city of Jackson, Mississippi.

We then diver deeper into the different types of worker-owned cooperatives that makeup Cooperation Jackson; the importance of developing cooperatives with clear political aims; and the need for a nationwide network of cooperatives and solidarity economic institutions as a viable alternative to the exploitative nature of our current economic, social, and environmental relations.

Left Out, a monthly podcast produced by Michael Palmieri, Dante Dallavalle, and Paul Sliker, creates in-depth conversations with the most interesting political thinkers, heterodox economists, and organizers on the Left.

In this episode, we speak with David Harvey about his latest book, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason, as well as what the Left most focus on to effectively organize for a better economy and society.

Inequality in the United States is now so obscene that it’s impossible, even for mainstream economists, to avoid the issue of surplus.

After a decade of crisis and another decade of growth the cooperative sector is finally being given the attention it deserves. But its impact does not reside purely in the numbers that mainstream economic analysis provides.

Charter/Spectrum is already a bloated cable behemoth building toward monopoly. Now it wants to crush the union.

When so-called free marketeers try to defend bosses’ pay, they do the cause of free markets a huge disservice by encouraging people to equate free markets with what is in effect a rigged system whereby bosses enrich themselves with no obvious benefit to the rest of us.

The crazy greed of business enterprises to earn profit has turned the human species from Homo sapiens to the slavery status of Homo employees, whose lives mean nothing more than a bare survival. 

“Time theft” is an ongoing problem of contemporary capitalism, both within the dictatorship of the workplace and in the seeming democracy of our lives outside of work.

Economist David Ruccio responds to Elizabeth Anderson and her recent article for Vox about workplace dictatorship.

The largest study comparing worker cooperatives to normal companies shows that cooperatives are more productive.

This week: Updates on United Airlines' flier abuse, Cuomo's flawed "free college" plan, what to do as self-drive vehicles end millions of jobs, and big investors plan to cash in on Trump infrastructure plans...