Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Eticom is a member of mésOpcions, an “intercooperation” project that bundles together the goods and services offered by a number of cooperatives – in addition to Eticom, including Som Energia and Fiare – and which, according to its coordinator, Jordi Rojas, “seeks to provide access to social market services. For just six euros a year, you can access the services of all the projects without having to become a member of each one of them.”
As a result of my participation in an organizational context whose mandate is the promotion of worker cooperatives, I have realized the great unease of some worker-cooperators with the notion of entrepreneurship. This reaction is shortsighted and represents a failure to be fully cognizant of the business environment in which worker cooperatives must operate.
The drive toward a basic income isn’t new. It’s a 100-year-old movement that has gotten stronger each time inequality has returned to the public discussion. Support for unconditional basic income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that some might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, activists have been floating the plan – and other forms of a basic income guarantee (BIG) – for over a century.
The next economy will have to balance the needs of Earth’s expanding population with the shrinking level of resources which are available to everyone. This dynamic equilibrium is called carrying capacity.
We are currently facing the most severe migration crisis in history. But this is only one dimension of a broader civilizational crisis. Thus, anti-racist movements should not focus solely on issues of human mobility rights, but also build new paths of solidarity with societies in the geopolitical Global South.
In this moment of massive wealth inequality, we urgently need to develop a new model for society to deliver both social and economic equity. The answer may be in the concept of Universal Basic Assets (UBA), which in my definition is a core, basic set of resources that every person is entitled to, from housing and healthcare to education and financial security.
Below, I argue that the commons paradigm offers a refreshing and practical lens for re-imagining politics, governance and law. The commons, briefly put, is about self-organized social systems for managing shared wealth. Far from a “tragedy,” the commons as a system for mutualizing responsibilities and benefits is highly generative.
The stage is now set for the next scene in our whistle-stop tour – the emergence of capitalism. But first a quick aside. Enmeshed in a contemporary global capitalist economy as we are, it’s easy to read it back into history as some kind of inevitable culmination of past processes. But there’s no reason to think that our present was foreordained.
In a stagnant economy, a UBI can create the demand needed to clear the shelves of unsold products and drive new productivity. Robots do not buy food, clothing, or electronic gadgets. Demand must come from consumers, and for that they need money to spend.
The MP Sergi Saladié (a university professor when not in parliament) presented an “interpelation1” on degrowth to the vice-president and minister for the economy in Catalonia, Sr. Oriol Junqueras, currently president of The Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC: Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya). It is the first time that a motion of this type has been discussed in a national parliament in Spain, and this makes it an event of great importance.
We live in turbulent times: many certainties are disappearing and changes are difficult to understand. Can transition management help us to explain where the world is heading? Derk Loorbach, director of the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, talks about the mechanisms, risks, and trends necessitated by transitioning towards a more sustainable world. “If you want to change the system, you should eventually be willing to become the system,” he says.
The savings groups they nurture are encouraged to federate, enabling them to have more influence over city and national governments in ways that are grounded in real experience. Members survey, map and profile their neighbourhoods, turning invisible challenges into concrete evidence and locally-proposed solutions.
