Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Salvage capitalism, ecological assemblages, and precarity… These are a few concepts that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing fleshes out in The Mushroom At the End of the World, a genre bending book that tracks the global economy by way of the Matsutake mushroom.
Quebec’s social economy (also translated as “solidarity economy”) extends far beyond the province’s two major cities, and includes manufacturing, agricultural cooperatives, daycare centers, homecare services, affordable housing, social service initiatives, food co-ops, ecotourism, arts programs, public markets, media, and funeral homes.
The Toronto Tool Library in Ontario, Canada, is a model tool lending program. With four locations and a variety of workshops and community events, it is a pioneer of the lending and sharing movement.
So, we also need to reverse the parasitic, rentier effects of enclosure and marry basic income to her true partner – land value tax. Land tax combined with a citizen’s dividend provides the simplest, most elegant regenerative tool for social justice.
Brancaglione proposes a very anarchist-sounding agenda of federated local communities bypassing the state to create a counter-economy and appropriate illegitimately enclosed resources to fund a basic income.
At the Mutual Aid Network, we have developed a new type of networked cooperative — one that, among other things, lets people find talented collaborators for personal, neighborhood-wide, or even city-wide projects.
Abundance is a new economic frame in which scarcity cannot be preserved. It’s funny to speak in these terms about scarcity, but it is appropriate. Economics used to be about managing scarce resources, but scarcity has turned out to be not a condition to overcome, but the Holy Grail to access monetary wealth for some.
The challenge now is to create local to global economies that ensure that no one falls short on life’s essentials – from food and housing to healthcare and political voice – while safeguarding Earth’s life-giving systems, from a stable climate and fertile soils to healthy oceans and a protective ozone layer.
Economics should recognize that unpaid care work—e.g., caring for children, for elders, for the infirm—provides economically valuable services that contribute both to living standards and to the Gross Domestic Product.
…we must accelerate construction of the prefigurative commons economy, with its respect for the sharing of knowledge (free movements), just distribution of the social surplus (solidarity economy), and ecologically viable production for human need (political ecology).
What is the personal experience of living in a community that wants to change the basic tenets of economic system and work organization? Certainly, each community is different and the individuals living there determine the atmosphere, so my description cannot serve as a base for generalization.
The concept of open cooperativism has been conceived as an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons-based peer production. Pat Conaty and David Bollier have called for “a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement…and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements
