Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.
In order to build a progressive international political economy that produces material dignity and freedom for all the world’s people, we need to engage three distinct yet interrelated projects.
Like the original New Deal, the GND is trying to do something that has never been done before; we will have to learn from experience and experiment and correct the mistakes we will inevitably make along the way. But with these strategies we can make a start in the right direction.
Conventional economics describes acts of human kindness in entirely pejorative terms. They are variously classed as unproductive labour or labour that is resistant to productivity gains. The criticism runs across the whole gamut of personal, educational and creative services.
This is the first road to solidarity economy, traveled by many who set out from the reality of poverty and experiences of popular economy. As these initiatives encounter others arising from other realities, with different motivations, the idea of a solidarity economy sector acquires greater visibility.
Many of the exploding number of local projects are actually not local, but transnational in nature: as Enzio Manzini called them, they are “Small, Local, Open, Connected.”
This is one of the signal lessons of the inspiring work of Tosepan: that a culture of solidarity — fortified by cooperative(s) providing for material and cultural needs — deepens democracy, and that this in turn makes it very hard for predatory capital to enter.
The West Philly Tool Library was founded in 2007 to help make home repairs and maintenance more accessible and affordable for local residents. The library offers more than 4,000 tools to its more than 2,600 members, who pay for membership on a sliding scale.
Capitalism is not just a system, it is a system of social relations and socio-metabolic processes, and we have to change many of those relations and processes radically from within and very quickly in order to deal with the current ecological emergency.
CECOP-CICOPA Europe has decided to give a voice directly to young people and those working with them. Here is the result! Three videos illustrating employment and entrepreneurial opportunities that cooperatives in industry and services provide to young people across EU.
Ecosocialism aspires to be egalitarian and ecologically sustainable. But nothing is said in this essay about proper limits to the range of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth.
One of the worst effects of capitalist realism is the endless bad-mouthing of alternatives to its toxicity. With this in mind, I’d like to share with you some extraordinary examples of imaginative prototyping exercises towards commons-oriented futures — presented by the very people who will bring them about in the face of darker possibilities.
