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From Ventures to Solidarity, Venture for America abruptly closes; ending…

- - - - After the training, VFA announced that it was shutting down. They announced that they wouldn't be able to reimburse travel expenses for travel. “It was an abrupt end for the nonprofit, previously a force in collegiate entrepreneurial circles.”
        
        VFA was meant to bring about a generation of business leaders with a program modeled after teach for america.
        
        Andrew Yang saw entrepreneurship as a catalyst for economic development. He promised 100k jobs created by 2025 to revitalize the economies of up-and-coming cities.
        
        The fellowship would guide fellows through a two-year program. The application was rigorous, with multiple components.
        
        VFA had a disconnect early on between its founding mission and building new startup ecosystems in mid-market cities. Around 40% of fellows were declining to join VFA by 2021. The strategy was “aligned with the strategy of 2010 and not a post-pandemic world.”
        
        Things started to not look too hot with VFA’s finances. They spent 1.25 mn on a film, didn’t get an investment from a NY bank, and lost 1.9 mn in 2022. VFA had a minimum salary of 38k and had jobs listed for 30k and 25k in 2022. All of these things didn’t stop VFA from recruiting for the 2024 class. This class was left behind by VFA, with only 25 jobs listed for 50+ fellows.
        
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- - - - Any conversations around popular power must adopt several premises. (1) Capitalism is a class society, and so class struggle is a core aspect. (2) Mobilization of the exploited classes are essential to expose the contradictions of this class system. (3) social transformations must be based on the leadership of movements rather than vanguards or minority groups.
        
        Politics have to be understood outside of state structures, and expanded to understandings of how power functions. This allows for an understanding of the class struggle, where the exploited classes is in constant conflict with a dominant class, who find allies in the state apparatus.
        
        Even though popular power is a relatively new concept, it can be recognized from analysis of social forces from previous eras. There are various definitions.
        
        For the FAU, popular power should be built within popular movements and catalyzed by the anarchist political organization.
        
        For the MIR, popular power is built through the struggle of exploited classes, independent of the government, for the purpose of overthrowing the state and capital.
        
        Past anarchists were against power, associating it with the state or domination. However, for especifistas, power is linked to the issue of social forces and can be good or bad depending on how it is used. Power circulates through all social relationships.
        
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- - - - Cheap and small-scale production can allow us to build a society outside of the old institutions, leaving them to crumble.
        
        Looking at Physical Production, it can be understood that the material rationale for the wage system and factory system was technological, involving a transition from artisanal production to factory production. This process has reversed with the rise of digitally controlled machine tools that are similar in price (in a relative sense) to the artisan tools of before. Physical production is not what restricts cooperative production anymore.
        
        When looking at Immaterial Production, we can see that the desktop computer is “a machine that meets Marx’s definition of an artisan’s tool: it is an instrument that responds to and extends the productive capacities of the user.” It can make music, do publishing, and make software. These are things that used to require investments of $100,000s. There is a much smaller gap between what can happen at a worksite and what can happen at home than there was 10-15 years ago.
        
        For Distributed Energy Systems, off-grid prices have collapsed and the chances for alternative energy generation are becoming more clear. In recent years, the technology has gotten to the point where it can sustain a “modern” standard of living.
        
        The Implications of this change in the means of production means that the importance of talented employees/workers becomes much more pronounced. This erodes the importance of corporate hierarchies that relied on ownership of machinery. As capital becomes less of a necessary operating system for work, it takes up a more parasitic role on the productivity of workers. “this decline in capital’s organizing role is of great significance. Marx argued that the proletariat was a class in itself because it had been brought together by capital and performed a functional role. But it could only become a class for itself when, having been brought together by capital and begun to function together under the direction of capital, it developed its own consciousness as subject. The growing importance of our self-organization and initiative outside the factory, however, means that the revolutionary subject no longer has to come alive like a golem, from materials brought together by capital.”
        
        Commons based peer production is better than firms and markets because it identifies and assigns human capital to projects more efficiently and it is much more efficient to have large clusters of small groups to produce items. Commons based peer production relies on decentral information gathering and exchange, where individuals self-identify for tasks and perform them.
        
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- - - - The impact of the org was such that in 2020, it was rewarded part of a $500k investment as part of Philly’s Most Diverse Tech Hub initiative. This partnership was renewed in 2022 and 2023.