Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As the government faces widespread criticism for failing to act to help us keep our homes warm more affordably – and at less cost to the climate – a feeling of powerlessness is palpable for many. The idea that fuel poverty is just another thing more of us will have to “learn to live with” is devastating.
Capitalism has various growth imperatives that are inconsistent with environmental limits. That is, capitalism must grow for stability but cannot grow limitlessly on a finite planet. It follows that the future will be post-capitalist – by design or disaster.
Returning to the Great Resignation mentioned at the opening of this piece, it is clear that deep discontent with work, production and our relationship to our own finite time have never been more relevant.
Imagine how much more capital can be directed into radical Black-led worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, and other solidarity economy organizations if this work is sustained and continuously invested in over the years.
At this point in history, war is inevitable as long as nations are determined to grow their economies. Economic growth starts at the trophic base; that is, with agricultural surplus. In other words, a bigger economy requires more lebensraum.
The Radical Open Access Collective is one of the key forces trying to show how commoning in scientific and scholarly publishing can actually work.
“If we’re fortunate,” Crary dares to hope, “a short-lived digital age will have been overtaken by a hybrid material culture based on both old and new ways of living and subsisting cooperatively.”
Protesting textile workers of 1800s Paris share ideological threads with garment industry strikers from India to Lesotho today. Like them, in the face of injustice, we should recognise the value of crafting resistance and sewing dissent.
“When we talk about urban mining, we’re talking about mining what we have already made and brought into an urban context.”
The neoliberal ideology of unrestrained markets has led to a global crisis. Humanity now faces an existential threat as the result of global dominance by corporations, whose ultimate goal is at odds with human flourishing.
What would daily life would be like in a ‘degrowth’ economy? That is, in an economy seeking planned contraction of energy and resource demands in order to achieve sustainability, equity, and social wellbeing.
Thus I think it’s worth suggesting that there’s room for a rebirth of imagination in contemporary industrial societies—and one of the themes that it might focus on first and foremost is the sphere of political economy.
