Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a recently published article in Nature Climate Change, Jeroen van den Bergh argues that neither degrowth nor green-growth strategies might lead to sufficient climate action and hence makes the case for a third option which he calls “agrowth”.
In 2013, three young people opened the doors of their Valparaíso, Chile home to their entire community. It started as a coworking experience, but ended up being a great deal more: a self-sustaining space based on generous cross-collaboration.
With a broader understanding of the solidarity economy in Brazil in mind, testimonials from participating entrepreneurs themselves show the real advantages of this kind of work, from circumventing market exclusion to creating new kinds of spaces where women are reimagining the divide between domestic and productive spheres.
In a year chock full of surprises, contradictions, warning signs, and increasingly vocal calls for systemic change, it is easy to overlook the many ways that new economic paradigms and practices are cropping up in everyday awareness as an essential vector of the immense transitions underway.
Since the left cannot necessarily advance its larger agenda of social justice, fairness and human rights through the state – subservient as it is to neoliberal circuits of global power – it should entertain how the commons might open up some new solution-sets.
As technology develops, fears increase. Who will we work for in the future? Will AI and robots just expel us from the market? Will they pay for our health system or keep the retirement bucket up and running?
That NEIC was able to finance property cooperatively reflects Minnesota’s deeply cooperative root system, which reaches back more than 100 years to producer-owned cooperatives that invested together in grain elevators, then used those connections to form vast sellers’ cooperatives like Land O’ Lakes.
The ‘sharing economy’ concept first appeared around 2010, launched on a sea of optimism about technology’s ability to transform the world for the better.
‘Journey to Earthland’ is a recently released book by the Great Transition Initiative (GTI), a worldwide network of activist scholars with a unique purpose—to advance “a vision and praxis for global transformation”.
Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life.
Last Thursday Mark Zuckerberg published a long piece called ‘Building a Global Community’. In it he explained that his company could help ‘develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.’ The effect was unnerving.
With Donald Trump’s election and the rising perils of war, climate upheaval, accelerating inequality, and civil unrest, some of the richest people in the United States are making escape plans.
