In a column on the website of Rick Falkvinge, founder and until January this year head of the Swedish Pirate Party, Zacqary Adam Green takes on the profit motive in a three-part series of articles. He points to damage done in the name of making a profit at any cost, and says that the profit… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2011"
The snowflake model: Marshall Ganz on how technology has changed organizing revolutions
Marshall Ganz is a ‘social movement scholar’ and author of the book, Why David Sometimes Wins.He shares his general thoughts on the use of social media in the Arab spring. This is followed by a testimony of an Egyptian youth activist that gives the lie to the Malcolm Gladwell thesis that social media cannot generate… Continue reading
Together: a union approach to precariat
I want to thank Peter Hall-Jones of the New Unionism Network for sharing this with us. It looks like a pioneering experiment on Social Network Unionism by unions themselves comes from his home land, the New Zealand. These kinds of initiatives are very important, brave and if it wants to turn the tide vital for the union movement to… Continue reading
An ideological history of the urge to own
An excerpt from Chapter 4, “The Trouble with Property”, of Charles Eisenstein’s important new book on Sacred Economics. Charles Eisenstein: “We have lived in an Age of Separation. One by one, our bonds to community, nature, and place have dissolved, marooning us in an alien world. The loss of these bonds is more than a… Continue reading
A tale of vision and leadership
This is an inspiring story of how El Hierro, a small island that is part of the Spanish Canary islands group, gained energy independence and successfully converted much of its agriculture to organic. It is described on the blog of Ellen McArthur at http://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/blog/ellens-blog-a-tale-of-vision-and-leadership The Spanish Island of El Hierro (Canary Islands) is small and… Continue reading
From systems of co-determination to full industrial democracy?
The systems of management+workers co-determination, prevalent in some European countries such as Germany, are no longer functioning to the benefit of the works. Richard Hyman reflects on what’s the next step forward for the labor movement in terms of co-governance? Excerpted from Richard Hyman: “Though formally intact, the machinery of codetermination no longer provides an… Continue reading
Ellen Brown on economic, financial and monetary transformation
Interesting interview with Ellen Brown, author of The Web of Debt, and one of my favourite economic thinkers. This is from a series of interviews conducted by Hazel Henderson on ‘Transforming Finance’; for the ever excellent Ethical Markets TV.
Is the austerity wave related to Peak Oil and a lower return on energy?
The classic and mainstream left position is: the current austerity wave is a direct result of the financial crisis and the need to bailout financial capital, and working people have to pay for this. Steady-state economists have a different explanation: the failure to extract cheap and abundant energy after Peak Oil, is the fundamental cause…. Continue reading
Launch of Anonymous-inspired political groups
After the Pirate Parties, a new brand of ‘p2p’-inspired political movements is emerging around Anonymous, as reported in IT World. Excerpted from John Ribeiro: “Hacker group Anonymous plans to promote an affiliated political party to attract people who share its civil liberties goals, but do not agree with its methods. The move appears similar to… Continue reading
Rethinking corporate structures away from the shareholder paradigm
Patrick Andrews of the open source car project Riversimple explains the innovative ownership and governance structures of the project: “It is time, I believe, to start experimenting with the corporate structure. The joint stock company in its current form dates back to 1856, an era when slavery was still fresh in the memory. We need,… Continue reading
Book of the Week (3): the Situationist tactic of ‘detournement’
Not the destruction of the sign, but rather destruction of the ownership of the sign. * Book: The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. McKenzie Wark. Verso, 2011. A third and last excerpt from Ken Wark’s new book: “For past works to become resources for the present… Continue reading
Open Source Ecology: Towards 50 GVCS Tools by 2013
Here’s an update on the Global Village construction Set posted on Marcin’s blog: This year, especially after my TED talk on the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), we have been expanding rapidly. At this exciting juncture in the evolution of the OSE experiment, I would like to take time to regroup and reorganize. I would like to… Continue reading
The past and future of the democratic archive: from the ancient Greek “Metroon” to Wikileaks
WikiLeaks opens governments. This was the role of the Athenian archive, the Metroon. It should be the role of the contemporary archive; not to serve as a gatekeeper waiting for decades before making the raw materials of history available to us in piecemeal form, but rather as the trusted guardian and provider of timely, useable… Continue reading
Anonymous – Join Us
A well done video, starting with media snippets of past actions, explaining its nonviolent resistance against the capture of our democracies by an organized criminal class, while the last four minutes explain “The Plan”. Watch this video:
Beyond ‘potemkim’ carbon markets, towards true sustainability metrics
Hazel Henderson, the author of the Green Transition Scorecard, describes how, despite the obvious failure of carbon markets, other developments are going into the right direction of a green transition. The original article is much article and has many link. The following excerpt is quite dense, but has many references to concrete projects. Hazel Henderson:… Continue reading
Stop the enclosure of the food and health commons
Food, nutrition and natural remedies are ways to stay in good health and their free availability is, in a way, a commons that needs to be protected. Chemical and pharmaceutical corporations are pushing for laws, apparently to protect pharmaceutical medicine from competition, that are resulting in the gradual elimination of this food and health commons…. Continue reading