Let’s Talk About Failure

As those who follow us on social media or receive our newsletter already know, the MARSH Grocery and Diner have now closed. Complicated emotions (aren’t they always?) make an “accurate” debrief difficult, but it does seem important for patrons, supporters, community members, and observers to receive at least a summary of the thinking around this decision.

MARSH was formed as a life-art laboratory, based on the assumption that any project might be an “experiment” and not designed to last forever, and that any action we take is a kind of performance of the world as we might imagine it to be. The foundational argument goes something like this: a capitalist economy has resulted in a conflation of money and power whereby human labor and natural resources are seen as fuel for a self-actualizing machine that works for the betterment of only a select few members of society. Change can emerge from interrogating the features of the machine that prevent the well-being of the majority of actors, and from working together to build alternatives. The specific features we resolved to consider were exploitation of the labor force, extraction from and pollution of the environment, top-down decision-making, market economics (e.g. systems of profit), inequality of access to resources, and white supremacy/patriarchy. Not ambitious at all, right?

Without going into a lot of detail about how the performance of this project was designed and significantly undermined from the start (flooding, COVID, etc.), we WERE able to attract the necessary funding to use a food-system model to explore the issues articulated above. We formed a cooperative (under the umbrella of a not-for-profit), hired mostly women, non-binary, and BIPOC worker-managers to grow food in neighborhood gardens and operate a sliding scale natural foods grocery store, and eventually opened a diner focused on accessible quality food and mitigating waste. So, what happened?

Well, capitalism happened. 

• Grant funding dried up, presumably due to a number of known and unknown factors (extremely high competition for limited funds? The subversive, transparently anti-capitalist nature of our project?) 
• Patronage never achieved a sustainable level (again, for reasons we will never fully know but likely related to capitalist demands on precarious time; emphasis on eating out, ordering in, anything but cooking at home, and the weird cost-assessment calculations that make bad food seem cheaper; higher-than-comfortable prices due to the specialty nature of the products even with rock-bottom mark-ups and a sliding scale; inflation due to profit greed; the impossibility of a small store having everything all the time, and probably lots of other things we haven’t thought of or couldn’t address). 
• Payroll costs increased. What seemed like a fair salary when we started, $18 per hour, is  no longer a liveable wage, coupled with the notoriously small margins for both grocery and restaurant enterprises. Plus, our model was dependent on the huge labor demands of both growing and preparing the food that patrons were most interested in.
• Always being short-staffed with more to do than we could ever achieve and not enough money to do it and less of a response to our efforts than we had hoped led to burnout.
• We wanted to focus on mutual benefit instead of profit.
• The every-day demands of running the enterprises (garden, kitchen, grocery) prevented us from having enough time to build the community in other ways through events, programming, etc.

Could we or should we have done something differently? Maybe. But it might be constructive to reformulate the question. How, in fact, do we measure success (or failure) in the first place? Can a project end and still be instructive, even transformational? While recognizing that endings also mean losses (jobs, incomes, resources, forms of community), might we also imagine what might have been lost if we DIDN’T fail (if we raised prices, or provided less healthy or sustainable products, or lowered salaries, or measured ourselves by our profits, or relocated to a wealthier neighborhood, or focused promotion on sales instead of values . . . ) 

We know from post-structural theory – and from daily life! – that systems have to keep reproducing their own structures in order to function. These structures in capitalism are, of course, exploitation of labor, inequitable access to resources, top-down power dynamics, ecological extraction and destruction, and on and on. While the structures may have defeated us this time, possibly we can see them just a tiny bit more clearly now, will recognize the specific nature of the threat better next time, and will have gained some knowledge about how to create more effective alternatives. What we didn’t do is dilute our principles and may have, as Judith Halberstam describes it in The Queer Art of Failure, attempted a triumphant mode of “unbeing and unbecoming” that proposes, in its own small way,  a new perspective on being in but not of the world.