Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It is astonishing that so little of the food debate is enlightened by a proper understanding what the main driver of the food system is: Markets or even more precisely, capitalist markets (today, one can hardly find a market that is not capitalist).
If you know something about Basic Income, you may be aware that one of the first proposals for a Basic Income came from Thomas Paine, hero of the American and French revolutions.
In covid-19, neoliberal capitalism has met a formidable foe. The pandemic has shown just how fragile and dysfunctional the market/state order — as a production apparatus, ideology, and culture — truly is. C
The etymology of “apocalypse” points to an “unveiling”, dropping illusion and finding revelation. As our global production systems and social institutions (eg. healthcare, education) are suddenly overwhelmed, their basic unsuitability is exposed.
It’s much easier to teach students how to shift curves, solve equations, and run regressions, than to carefully observe economic life and think deeply and critically about it. Students also tend to feel comfortable – and even feel powerful – when told “here, we are handing you the exact tools and models you need to use to understand how the economy works.”
We make decisions, not on known outcomes but on imagined projections standing on theories of how things work. These projections have an ethical range called the ‘planning horizon.’ The better we understand the world the broader the reach of our anticipations. Conscience serves to measure how well we encompass social effects.
This manifesto is an intervention by a Europe-wide group of academics – the foundational economy collective – who have for several years in books and articles argued that policy makers need to balance concern with jobs and wages with more attention to essential goods and services like housing, food, utility supply, health, education and care.
April 8 was the launch of the Amsterdam City Doughnut, which takes the global concept of the Doughnut and turns it into a tool for transformative action in the city of Amsterdam.
Right now, while factories have slowed or shut down in China, Europe, the U.S. and other places, would be a perfect time to put a lot of people to work upgrading and improving energy efficiency and pollution control measures, and installing renewable energy options in the furloughed factories around the world.
The problem isn’t humans, it’s the type of fossil-fuel dependent infrastructure that many societies have created. If we could shift that infrastructure, we could have clear skies and clean water more of the time, in more places—without shuttered businesses and schools.
Commoners and allied movements, disillusioned liberals and social democrats, people of goodwill must thwart the many retrograde dangers that threaten to surge forward under the cover of fear. But we must also, simultaneously, demonstrate the feasibility of new forms of commoning, infrastructure, finance, and commons/public partnerships. Rarely have needs and opportunities been so aligned!
The greatest enclosure of the commons is that of the mind: our capacity to imagine better worlds, to be kinder to each other and to the Earth. This will not be an easy or straightforward process. We need to hold each other through the loss and pain. We need to keep finding the others among all of us, until there are no more.
