A conversation between Nika Dubrovsky and Oisin O’Reilly
ON SOVIET COLLECTIVITY
So — cooperatives. What’s your relationship to the idea?
NIKA
I’ll be honest. I grew up in the Soviet Union, where collectivity was forced on everyone. It was organized top-down — labor unions, kolkhozes, all the formal collective structures. They functioned, technically. But the way they functioned was radically different from what cooperation actually means.
Collectivization was essentially a second civil war. They took people’s property and called it freedom. Peasants in kolkhozes didn’t even have internal passports until Khrushchev — legally, they were serfs. I didn’t grow up in a village, I don’t have direct kolkhoz experience, but this logic ran through the entire social fabric. The whole tissue of Soviet life was arranged to prevent natural cooperation and enforce collectivization from above.
That does something specific to language. The word “cooperative” meant “kolkhoz” — which meant basically nothing good. So when I left, I spent years avoiding anything that officially resembled collective organization.
Though my early life in squats was a kind of cooperation — people collectively occupying someone else’s property, organizing life together. No police to resolve your problems. You navigate everything yourself.
OISIN
Did that change how you thought about it?
NIKA
Eventually. The other thing that shifted it was meeting friends from former Yugoslavia. They described their relationship to production as genuinely different — workers actually running factories collaboratively, and it was efficient, it was sufficient. And it’s interesting: Germany was the first country to recognize Croatia, and many people think that contributed to Yugoslavia’s collapse. Economic competition between production models was part of what brought the country to war.
But what I can speak to more directly is life after collapse. I was young when I left for the West, my friends too. We had this internal understanding of what our parents lived through — and we thought about it constantly, because the collapse affected us directly. We became migrants. We lost a lot.
OISIN
You wrote about this with David — the art world piece?
NIKA
Yes, it’s in e-flux, you can find it online. We were writing about how the contemporary art world resembles the late Soviet Union — intensely competitive, atomized. To survive, you fight other artists. It’s directly connected to financial capitalism; that’s the territory where it thrives.
The cooperatives I’ve encountered — ZAD in France, for example — I observed from the outside, I wasn’t part of them. Nonetheless, I could introduce you to other people who might share their immediate experiences.
But across the world, I’ve seen different arrangements for how people do things together. And that’s probably the most important work right now. In the 20th century, we successfully democratized consumption — people have access to vastly more goods than 200 years ago. But we did not democratize production. Production remains staggeringly hierarchical. That’s the key problem.
And it looks like the world is slowly moving in a better direction — partly through catastrophe. Wars over oil are making oil too dangerous. People are turning to solar, to local production. With energy, everything else starts becoming more local too.
I don’t want to promote any formal cooperative structure. But cooperation is something we have to figure out how to achieve. Otherwise we’re going to die.
ON ASSEMBLIES
NIKA
Yesterday I gave a talk, and I want to share a few points from it. I started with why assembly matters — because assembly isn’t a tool, it’s the game itself. Only when people try to reach a decision together does society actually come into being. And above all, nothing is set in stone, any decision can be altered. That’s why organizing assemblies, in as many forms as possible, is so important.
Then I told a personal story. David and I lived in London, we were connected to the Extinction Rebellion collective — many of those people later helped set up the Graeber Institute. One of XR’s three demands was a Citizens’ Assembly. Citizens’ Assembly is a more formalized version: you have experts, you vote, it’s a very Western model of decision-making. But it works.
I know that in a very conservative region of Ireland people who were strongly opposed to same-sex marriage took part in a citizens’ assembly. It was a week-long process: conversations with experts, with different communities. By the end, even people who had said there was absolutely no chance they’d support it, eventually voted yes. That story stayed with me.
But I kept thinking about people like me. I’m not a native English speaker, not an academic. In that kind of assembly, I couldn’t hold a room the way David could in Zuccotti Park. What about people like me? Or kids? Migrants? Non-academics? Shy people? People who think in pictures rather than arguments?
The more people have access to decision-making, the safer the society. From that, everything else follows — production, cooperation. Everyone needs access.
That’s how we arrived at the Visual Assembly project. It’s an addition to existing forms of assembly, not a replacement. In traditional cultures, people collaborate in many ways — singing, making things together, doing craft. Visual Assembly is one such way: collective brainstorming, mapping a specific social space. Could be a hospital, a playground, a whole city.
That’s what I’m working on now — developing the playground idea in Nairobi with Alistair Parvin, who runs the WikiHouse project in the UK. They’ve helped build over 30,000 houses, but not with their own hands: they gave people the knowledge and the tools to make their own homes. Part of it is the community coming together. There’s a very cheap pre-designed structure: over one intense weekend, a family can get a house.
ON VALUE SYSTEMS
NIKA
When we talk about success, we’re talking about a value system. And right now all our value systems are imposed from the outside. The bank tells us how much money we have. The university tells us what degree we’ve got. The government tells us what passport and permissions we hold. That’s got to change. The only way to change it is to create different tools.
And then maybe we’ll live like they used to in medieval Europe — working a few weeks or months a year, and spending the rest of the time happily engaged in carnivals.
ON FINANCIAL CAPITALISM
OISIN
Why do you think this is so resisted?
NIKA
Because if people start organizing themselves in grassroots production and decision-making, they threaten existing power. It’s obvious. That’s why Occupy was so effective — it spread so quickly. And also why everyone who organized locally in New York faced punishment from the government one way or another. A bunch of people staying together in a public space, sharing food, giving public lectures. How can you be against that?
ON CARE WORK AND BULLSHIT JOBS
NIKA
COVID made something visible that David had been trying to name for years. Governments started using the terms “essential labor” and “non-essential labor.” And it turned out that “non-essential” was the management class — lawyers, accountants, the people not really in the system. The cleaners, the nurses, the delivery workers — they were essential.
David talked about the revolt of the caring class. The distinction now isn’t workers versus capitalists — it’s people doing actual work versus people doing what he called bullshit jobs. In the book, he doesn’t blame the managers. He says those people are themselves suffering from doing useless work. It’s not that someone evil designed the system this way. It’s a bug. We just don’t know how to get out of it.
What’s needed is a mechanism for people who actually do the work to come together and discuss how to do that work — not have the management class assign them structures that are usually just stupid. That’s not what our existing institutions provide. In fact, they actively work to destroy this collectivity.
There’s also the car story — a group of friends who bought a car together, and it broke their friendship. Because the car is a piece of property outside their group, and they had to navigate all the external infrastructure: who pays insurance, who pays for parking. The cooperative arrangement collapsed against external property structures.
I’m also interested in cybernetic network project, that was done by Allende. 50 years ago in order to give workers democratic control over the national economy. Looks like we now have the technology to use not only for surveillance and killing, but for distributed decision-making, horizontal connection, including everyone’s voice. Everyone whose wellbeing actually matters.
And there’s no single recipe. Whether you dance collectively or run a factory, you’ll have different models of collaboration. That’s not a problem — it’s the point.
ON EDUCATION
OISIN
What does this mean for education?
NIKA
There’s a movement called Free and Democratic Schools. Their principle: every child has the right to decide when, how, and with whom they study. Bureaucracy in education can be useful — repetition, structure, spreadsheets — but only when people use it voluntarily, not because it’s imposed. The whole apparatus of achievement and restraint should be eliminated.
Summerhill in the UK is one example. They’ve existed for about a hundred years, since the early 20th century. Kids decide whether to attend classes. It’s a private school, very established.
Actually, history runs in cycles. In the early 20th century, there were experimental schools all over — the Soviet Union, Germany, the UK, the US. Then they collapsed. In the 60s, another wave: new schools, big movements, liberal arts universities like Bard College. Now we’re at the end of that cycle. Total bureaucratization, privatization, atomization of students. Nothing progressive left in the current educational system. But the tide seems to be turning again.
At the David Graeber Institute, we’re trying to build a university. I need to give people access to David’s archive — but I can’t manage it alone, and I don’t want to hand it to a big university where it’ll just become another bureaucratic system. We’re creating our own structure. We already run regular public lectures. Now we’re trying to add an educational model to that.
We have an upcoming lecture with an Argentine historian of science about the history of bureaucracy as an archive. Archives and libraries can be deeply colonial — in the 1500s, kings and queens never went to their colonies in person, but through rules and regulations they governed vast populations and territories. The archive can function as a form of control. But of course there’s also the Borges model — the open library, the open archive. The question is how.
ON THE IDEAL COOPERATIVE
NIKA
My ideal cooperative isn’t a factory or a formal organization. It’s a network.
I’m working now on this playground project — the idea is to create a toolkit, very cheap, small enough to send by mail. Inside is a map of a playground — not a real playground, more like a place for a community to come together. People in different countries, when I run workshops, come up with similar ideas: a nursery garden, a market square, inviting artists to do sound installations. And these playgrounds could form a federation, connected to each other.
I’ve been doing this kind of thing my whole life. Open-source spirulina — same logic: you give someone the knowledge and the initial culture, ideally they give it to a neighbor, and it spreads as a network.
Growing up in the Soviet Union, practically every third apartment had kombucha brewing at home. People gave a piece to a neighbor when theirs died. The very day perestroika was announced, when Coca-Cola and Pepsi finally arrived — everyone threw out their kombucha. Overnight. Nobody had it anymore.
Now it’s coming back.
That’s the work: educational work, creating conditions where people can produce and share together, and let the network spread itself. It’s the only way we might actually survive.
