By Adoración Guamán, Transnational Institute
The future is uncertain. Attempts to impose Lex Mercatoria will continue but there will also be social victories along the way, along with the increasingly widespread conviction that we are facing a profound and epoch-making alternative: ‘democracy or markets’.
By George Monbiot, Brendan Montague, Open Democracy
Monbiot argues that capitalism now is neoliberal capitalism. And, unusually, that capitalism and consumerism are ideologies as much as neoliberalism is. “Part of the insidious power of these ideologies is that they are the water in which we swim - the plastic soup in which we swim. They are everywhere.
By Marc Hudson, Mark H. Burton, Climate Emergency Manchester
For us, it is good to know what we are against, but if we are to fight for something better, then we really need an alternative vision. Our idea is to work with those that come on that. What comes out of it will depend on the level of interest, enthusiasm, creativity and commitment to do further work.
By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
We should use the new story, and the proposals this narrative vehicle carries, to build mass resistance movements, taking inspiration from – and building on – highly effective mobilisations such as the youth climate strikes. We will draw strength from the movements in other nations, and support them in turn.
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
When I step from the timeless present to time again, the horror would overwhelm me, but for the utopian light, the other side of darkness. Utopia is not fanciful. Our lives are that. It is imaginative and true. Utopia is possible. It is our weakness which makes it apparently impossible.
By Joe Liesman, Resilience.org
The conversation you hear about the environment on CNN is not the conversation taking place in college dorms or outdoors clubs or in community centers or on farms or in the heads of those who hope and fight and when they sleep they dream of mountain air and when they close their eyes at work for just a moment are no further removed from the ocean than the fish who swim in it. And they are getting louder.
By Ronald Purser, Open Democracy
When we recognize that disaffection, anxiety and stress are not just our own fault but are connected to structural causes, mindfulness becomes fuel for igniting resistance.
By Ashish Kothari, Pallav Das, Empowering Nonviolence
We’re committed and excited about our attempts at cooperation between academics, movement activists, creative thinkers, and practitioners of alternatives to challenge the ever-tightening grip of corporate fundamentalism on the economy and the environment.
By Laurie Macfarlane, openDemocracy
'New Thinking for the British Economy' – a new eBook published today by openDemocracy – brings together leading thinkers to outline the broad pillars of a new post-neoliberal agenda, and the type of policies that are needed to get us there.
By Oliver Sylvester-Bradley, Open Coop
An ontology is basically a set of principles or assumption about how the world works; about the fundamental ‘nature of reality’.
By Mathew Lawrence, Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Red Pepper
It seems that the short lived cycles of electoral politics means that politicians chase short-term goals, rather than tackling problems such as climate change which require long-term, global thinking. The test of a capable politician in 2018 is whether they take a stand against cavalier resource extraction.
By Kate Raworth, Resilience.org
Whether you consider yourself an economic veteran or novice, now is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or, better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times.