Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The platform co-op movement is only two years old. Slowly but surely the movement has grown and it is now looking into ways to get organized. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider did a tremendous job inventorying existing coops and advocating their actions throughout the world. They are connecting people with one another in an effort to ease knowledge exchange.
Now, in addition to the products that magically appear on Western store shelves absolutely shorn of history and provenance, much of the hitherto distant pollution emitted in their production has also arrived. It has come home to roost. Globalization’s blowback.
It’s time to take control of our lives. Now is the time. We are building a socioeconomic system by the people and for the people, totally decentralized, open, cooperative and managed horizontally by all of its participants and taking all the decisions in assembly form. Meet and participate.
The US economy’s deep systemic inequalities of income, wealth, power, and opportunity are part of global inequality trends, but US-style capitalism and public policy make inequalities more acute. Their observable and felt harm to our civic and economic life is corroborated by research from many disciplines. Yet, by the same token, moving toward a more egalitarian society would realign most aspects of economic and social life for the better. So how can we bring these changes about?
Environmentalists are hypocrites, right? They condemn all sorts of behaviours like driving cars or taking plane flights in which they themselves indulge, and they want to deny poor people the right to the same luxuries by saying that the economic growth which promises to widen access to such luxuries is unsustainable.
Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.” Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities…
In the 1970s and 80s, a series of economic policies began to take hold all over the world. These policies, and the philosophies behind them, have come to be known as neoliberalism, and they have proven to be incredibly harmful to society as a whole. During this period, factories closed, industries disappeared, jobs became scarce, and the foundation of many communities were ripped out from under their feet.
The ability to cooperate brought us to where we are today, and it’s what will help us change the world. Without cooperation, the Circular Economy will not be possible. So how will this work, practically? And what are the key principles of cooperation that we can start applying everywhere we go?
One argument of those who defend growth is that growth is the natural and inevitable course of the economy. Liberated from governmental or other restrictions, and left to their own powers, entrepreneurs will make an economy grow, as they are endlessly inventive in growing their own incomes.
In a world that is falling apart (no further elaboration needed), how shall we understand the dynamics of survival and collaboration? How does life persist and flourish in a world that is hellbent on commodifying and privatizing every aspect of human relations and the natural world? For anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, the answer is to study the strange life of the humble matsutake mushroom…
Key to the conceptual confidence trick are assumptions about what people in general are like. It is all based on an implicit modelling of human beings. Certain types of behaviour (the type that allows economists to model people and markets) are called “rational”.
Greenbelt is not the only city where these ideas are taking off, but its “new” economy is unique in one way: It’s in fact quite old, going back 80 years. During the Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set up three “Greenbelt Towns”: Greenhills, Ohio; Greendale, Wis.; and Greenbelt, Md., a tree-lined city 13 miles northeast of Washington, D.C.
