A New Notion: Two Works by C. L. R. James: "Every Cook Can Govern" and "The Invading Socialist Society"

Part of the newly reorganized Red Emma's is a new meeting system; because we now have weekly meeting at the department level (i.e. the food workgroup, or the books workgroup), rather than with the collective as a whole, we need to carve out time for the necessary work of democratically managing the overall business.  Our plan is to have quarterly financial and budgeting meetings, in which we decide which departments can spend what money, what our hourly pay is, and how many hours are allocated to each part of the overall project.  We're also hoping to integrate reporting on key ecological and ethical metrics as we move forward with this process—we think so-called "triple bottom line" accounting is definitely a baseline for making sure that financial considerations are balanced against other imperatives.

The upshot of all of this is that we need a Sunday afternoon every few months where the whole collective can meet for a long meeting with many, many charts.  (It's hard to have workplace democracy if someone has to be making sandwiches and slinging coffee while everyone else is in the back room making decisions!)  So we'll be closing early (at 2PM) on Sunday, January 12th.

A selection of titles related to the Marxian tradition