Via: “Marco Berlinguer from the Transform! network maps here some potential points of rupture in our current form of capitalism. Excerpted from his article over at openDemocracy.” Marco Berlinguer: “Let’s put it simply. We are still living in a capitalist society; and in the last twenty years, one major change has been the qualitatively new… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2013"
Strategizing the commons (4): The fallacy of the Subject
* Article: Massimo de Angelis, Crises, Movements and Commons. Borderlands e-journal, VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2, 2012. Massimo de Angelis has written an interesting essay on how to correlate the growth and re-emergence of the commons, with the rythms of the rise and fall of social and political movements, with a view on the transformation of… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Occupy Money
* Book: Occupy Money. Creating an Economy where Everybody Wins. by Margrit Kennedy. New Society, 2012. Here’s is a summary: (and please watch Jem Bendell’s presenation on the same topic below!) “As a medium of exchange, money is one of the most ingenious inventions of mankind, as it facilitates the trade of goods and services… Continue reading
Private Property vs. Tribal Commons amongst the (U.S.) Native Americans
David Bollier reports on a controversy launched in Forbes blaming the poverty of Northern American Native Americans to their communal property. Here we feature the responses against the call for more privatized property: “Thank God for the interactive Internet, because the commenters on Koppisch’s article had a field day tearing apart his ahistorical, ideologically driven… Continue reading
A Perezian Framework for the P2P Techno-Economic Paradigm
Our Greek p2p friend, and political economy researcher, Vasilis Kostakis, has published a new essay placing P2P in the context of the evolution of long-term econmic waves (cfr. Kondratieff and Carlota Perez). * Paper: At the Turning Point of the Current Techno-Economic Paradigm: Commons-Based Peer Production, Desktop Manufacturing and the Role of Civil Society in… Continue reading
Revolution is not an Event but a Process
Via: “Author and Occupy activist Yotam Marom tackles in his article the age-old question of reformism versus revolution. The article was originally published in the book We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation (2012). Here’s an excerpt discussing the nature of revolutions.” Yotam Marom: “In school, history is taught around dates… Continue reading
Interview with Jean-Luc Mélenchon
Michel Bauwens: In our Al Jazeera editorial, we called for a ‘grand alliance of the commons’, a new broad alliance between the Pirate Parties, as expressions of digital cultural forces, the Greens, as the natural defenders of the ecological and natural commons but also with the newly re-emerging ‘transformative’ left. While there is no hope,… Continue reading
Democracy Now on Aaron Swartz
Worth watching to remember Aaron’s engagement for our rights. It has a moving tribute by Lawrence Lessig and excerpts from Aaron’s own speeches.
Strategizing the commons (3): The fallacy of the Model
* Article: Massimo de Angelis, Crises, Movements and Commons. Borderlands e-journal, VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2, 2012. Massimo de Angelis has written an interesting essay on how to correlate the growth and re-emergence of the commons, with the rythms of the rise and fall of social and political movements, with a view on the transformation of… Continue reading
Tom Atlee on the Sortition-Based Democracy of Ancient Athens
* Article: Ancient Athens didn’t have politicians. Is there a lesson for us? By Tom Atlee. Tom Atlee writes: “Few people realize that in ancient Athens – the original democracy from which modern democracies supposedly grew – no one was elected to be a representative. There were no public offices elected by the people. They… Continue reading
Cloud Computing as Enclosure
Republished from David Bollier: “As more and more computing moves off our PCs and into “the Cloud,” Internet users are gaining access to a wealth of new software-based services that can exploit vast computing capacity and memory storage. That’s wonderful. But what about our freedom to create and share things as we wish, free from… Continue reading
Aaron Swartz’s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Written by Aaron Swartz, July 2008, Eremo, Italy “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read… Continue reading
A Proposed Strategy to Break the Dominance of Walled Gardens (and in Favor of the Free Network Services)
Republished from Michal Wozniak: “For some time now I have been pondering the best way to break people free from walled-gardens (like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc). For all those services there are viable, free-as-in-freedom alternatives (Diaspora/Friendica, StatusNet, and many more). All those proprietary services are being heavily criticised (among others, for privacy violations, tricking or… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Corporation 2020
* Book: Pavan Sukhdev. Corporation 2020. Hazel Henderson reviews this important book about corporate reform: “Corporation 2020 is a global, systemic and future-oriented review of the past of “Corporation 1920”, how it has morphed into the global corporation of today and where it can evolve into a powerful agent for shaping the global transition to… Continue reading
Aaron Swartz on the Parpolity System
One of the most compelling visions for rebooting democracy adopts this system of abstraction for politics. Parpolity, developed by the political scientist Stephen Shalom, would build a legislature out of a hierarchical series of nested councils. Agreeing with Madison, he says each council should be small enough that everyone can engage in face-to-face discussion but… Continue reading
Occupy Has Generated a Multitude of Activist Networks
The next big idea might very well not be called “Occupy”, which may be a good thing — but the chances are high that, even so, it will be the result of networks that were forged during the Occupy movement. Excerpted from an interview of Nathan Schneider, conducted by Joel Dietz: ‘What did Occupy Wall… Continue reading