Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tami Simon hosts the popular Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge, which has been downloaded more than 20 million times. With its guiding principle “to disseminate spiritual wisdom”, Sounds True has grown into a multimedia publisher that has produced over 6,000 titles. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
If you follow those steps, find a group of people, start dreaming together, start educating yourselves, start listening and identifying gaps in the community and assets in the community, then I think you’re at that point where you can actually start thinking seriously about, “Okay, which of these Community Economic Development toolkit strategies do we want to take on first?”
‘Made in Italy’ labels are coveted by shoppers internationally – Italy is, after all, a famous creator of fashion and food. Could ‘Made in Carcere’ go global too?
Community Economic Development seeks to build long-term capacity in a community for equitable economic activity. Those are all key. There’s capacity, it’s long term and it’s equitable.
To face the complexities of the 21st century, we must be open to discussing how core elements of modern capitalism were founded upon and created to uphold white Western economic privilege, and still do.
While capitalism has taught us to identify the first with money-making and the second with life-making – a necessary but nevertheless subordinated, dependent and qualitatively inferior activity – climate justice movements are claiming the progressive, i.e. egalitarian, emancipatory, and wealth-producing agency of reproductive forces.
The desire that Túmin be used to help build a social fabric that favours barter and interest-free loans, especially in the face of the growth of electronic banking that came with the pandemic, is central to its creators.
Deep, systemic, positive change arises when we collectively dream and enact a different form of society altogether — one focused on free and flourishing lives for all.
It’s not just about «seizing the means of production», we also need to co-produce alternative cosmovisions that liberate us from capitalist common sense and normalise horizontal relations based on mutual aid, cooperation and solidarity.
Through the organization Fashion Act Now, a growing band of dissident fashionistas want to make the clothing industry more ecologically responsible, relocalized, and culturally in sync with this moment in history, especially with respect to climate change, economic justice, and decolonialization.
The fundamental defining principle of a capitalist economy is that what happens is determined by what will maximise the profits, income and wealth of the few who own most of the capital, by competing in the market place.
Employing the economics of sharing more widely would be a good way to show that “ethical economics” is not necessarily an oxymoron. It might even allow people of different political perspectives to find common ground for solving real environmental and economic problems while reducing tax burdens as well.
