Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For me personally this is a great opportunity to create the space for people to come, discuss and really face the climate change issue, and bring in the facts and the data and the possibility of what we can do together to find solutions. Yet my personal experience is that I question the grand scale of COP23. I question even the economy behind it and if this money could be used to actually implement the solutions that are needed.
In Curing Affluenza Australian economist, Richard Denniss puts forward proposals to tackle “that strange desire we feel to spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know”. This disease of ‘affluenza,’ he argues, “is economically inefficient… the root cause of environmental destruction and… global inequality”…But in my view his diagnosis, as well as the proposed remedies, are far too mild to adequately deal with our societal ills.
Big changes are underway in Gdansk, Poland today. Since July 2016, some of the city’s most vexing problems have been dealt with calmly – even enjoyably — by a changing, randomly-selected “citizens assembly” made up of approximately 60 ordinary city dwellers, who are brought together and given the authority to take action.
So what might the commons actually achieve for you if you live in a city? How might you experience the joys of commoning? Check out Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, a fantastic new book that describes more than 100 case studies and model policies for urban commoning. Researched and published by Shareable, the book is an impressive survey of citizen-led innovations now underway in more than 80 cities in 35 countries.
An Alien’s Quest is by far the most cerebral and metaphysical of all of Cary Neeper’s Archives of Varok novels. That isn’t to say that the others have shied away from deep subject matter; they haven’t. It’s just that this one takes the level of philosophical engagement to new heights in its tale of a young woman who leaves her home planet to find the answers to the cosmos.
Instead, we’re going to continue to do more of what we’ve been doing. And it’s going to fail. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But eventually the whole big pile of overly leveraged 12,000 mile supply chain debt-soaked tech extravaganza is going to break down and crash of its own dead weight. When we finally get back up and dust ourselves off, we’ll have no choice but to reinvent things.
The difficulty, I think, is that the conditions in which it’s feasible to build plausible ‘bottom-up’ anarchist-communist societies are unusual, and their chances of longevity are slight – either because they’re annihilated by the stronger forces of the centralised state (as happened with the Paris Commune), or because they succumb to the internal contradictions of their own somewhat hidden power dynamics. Still, Ross’s analysis raises a lot of interesting questions concerning the course that a free, egalitarian peasant society of the future might take.
When I talk to my elderly neighbours, or read interviews with people from earlier eras, one of the things that most comes through about their childhoods, and seems dramatically different than the way children are raised today, is how far and freely they roamed. Unlike most modern children, they did not spend most of their time indoors watching television or playing video games, or following one adult-led activity after another.
Though human rights are not unproblematic, examining basic income through the lens of human rights moves us into discussions about the type of society and economy we want to have, instead of hiding these real questions behind broad economic approaches and traditional cultural values.
Despite my various friendly critiques here, it goes without saying that Naomi Klein is one of the most important figures on the radical left today. There are few other activists who are able to make radical arguments that are read by so many and taken seriously in the mainstream.
Almost every global city has a similar dynamic – a battle between the finance capital that seeks to make money from the city and the needs of the residents who seek to make the city their home. Rarely do we see residents successfully push back against the power of finance capital. But for those wanting to know how this can be done, look to Barcelona.
My daughter, being sixteen, just got her driver’s license. I asked her a question a few days ago: ” If you had to choose one and give up the other, which would you choose: a personal vehicle or the internet (including social media, wifi, smart phones, etc.)?” She thought for a bit and said: “It’s a hard question but I would choose the internet. Nobody actually likes driving, it’s just something we have to do, but I really like having access to movies at home and all that other stuff.” She is just one young person, but the choice and the distinction that she made surprised me.
