Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the interests of both local and global sustainability, we need to redesign the economy by recognising two separate spheres of exchange, representing two different kinds of values.
For those of us seeking post-capitalist futures: rather than burning ourselves out Doing — the energy of the capitalist system we are trying to topple — why not try Being, the energy of degrowth?
It’s not rare for people to be left behind by profit-driven corporations, or even overlooked by underfunded and understaffed government agencies. In that case, we must learn to turn to each other. And in preparation for such times, we must bolster community resilience through initiatives like community gardens, tool libraries, and the like.
Perhaps the main problem for capitalism and the problem with capitalism is that it is dependent on the same free “services” from nature and humans as it destroys?
Purchasing others’ time, whether by the hour, the day, or the week, can be an important tactic for extracting wealth – especially when asserting control over that time allows for speed-ups in the production of exchange value. But Alyssa Battistoni emphasizes that much wealth depends on natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to speed up. In many such cases capitalism forgoes direct control of labour and finds other ways to extract value.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores the relationship between technology and wealth when viewed through a global biophysical lens.
We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Moving forward effectively requires clarity about the limits of conventional finance – and the creation of new finance vehicles that honor the deep complexities of commoning and ecosystems at bioregional scales.
In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions (i.e., regions defined by characteristics of the natural environment rather than human-imposed borders). For readers receptive to those arguments, the fundamental follow-up question is, “How?”
SMPLE-KOIN will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity.
We must move from a finance that demands private benefits at scale, as purely transactional and extractive, to finance systems grounded in particular places and cooperative relationships, all closely aligned with living systems.
The bounty brought by rainfall, fertile soil, and biodiversity cannot truly be expressed through quantitative proxies, prices, algorithms, or markets because this “wealth” doesn’t exist in static, objectified forms or essentialist identities
