To listen to Wall Street tell the story, Twitter is an abject failure. The stock is down more than 50 percent since co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as CEO last year. User growth and revenue prospects have stagnated, and investors see little chance of a major turnaround. Yet only in the twisted logic of the… Continue reading
Thomas Greco to conduct a course on innovative exchange, finance, and economics this summer in Greece. Full title: “Exchange and Finance for the New Economy: Principles and Practice” “In the face of the ongoing global economic and financial crisis and increasing centralization of power, it is becoming ever more urgent that communities take the initiative… Continue reading
A conference report by Birgit Daiber: “The Transform! European Left Foundation organised on March 11 and 12, 2016 a debate on “production and commons” in Rome. In his introduction to the workshop Roberto Morea said Commons could become a method/to create an alternative model to confront capitalism. Dario Azzellini presented a new view on self-managed… Continue reading
So rather than asking “What happened to Occupy?” or “What happened to 15-M?” as though they were discrete entities with a beginning and an end, it makes more sense to think of the whole trajectory of movements including the Arab Spring, M15 and Syntagma, Madison, Occupy, Quebec, the N14 General Strike, and so on, as one loose global… Continue reading
“the process of turning unsustainable, resource-intensive lawns and otherwise underutilized green spaces into small food production sites” Excerpted from Emily Helminen and Erik Assadourian: “Industrial agriculture concentrates social power and exacerbates problems of food insecurity and poverty, whereas small-scale organic farming on an individual or community level can significantly distribute social power across communities all… Continue reading
Some time ago Arthur Chu said on Twitter — entirely correctly — that “capitalism” didn’t make the iPhone, or anything else. Labor is what has produced things under every ism in history. The isms just determine who gets paid. On Facebook, Doug Henwood — author of Wall Street and editor of the Left Business Observer… Continue reading
The real crisis is not the influx of refugees to Europe per se but a toxic combination of destabilising foreign policy agendas, economic austerity and the rise of right-wing nationalism, which is likely to push the world further into social and political chaos in the months ahead. Razor-wire fences, detention centres, xenophobic rhetoric and political… Continue reading
Design & The City is an innovative conference, held from April 19 until 22 in Amsterdam. As part of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam) during the Dutch EU chairmanship, Design & The City challenges the international community to shape the city of the future, by participating in Lab of Labs, workshops… Continue reading
C4SS Senior Fellow Kevin Carson’s book The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks, a project of five years work, is now in print. It’s also available online here. Here’s a description C4SS Senior Fellow Gary Chartier — who’s also responsible for the beautiful interior and cover design — wrote for the… Continue reading
With the alpha version of “Sharings,” we’re laying the foundation to turn GNU social into the distributed standard of the Sharing Economy. Collaborative consumption allows everything from car-sharing to go to work to exchanging hours of language practice, from offering babysitting services to offering hospitality to people who speak other languages or are part of… Continue reading
In this second part of an article by Fran Quigley, we excerpt the recent history of that enclosure and why the patent system doesn’t work for medicines. “The origins of modern intellectual property law can be traced back to the occasional awards of exclusive rights to artists in ancient Persia and Greece. “Letters patent,” meaning… Continue reading
Only the ethic and practice of sharing can provide the necessary values-based policy framework for planetary rehabilitation – one that compels us to think in global terms, prioritise the needs of the poorest, and recognise that we only have one planet’s worth of resources that must be fairly shared by all people. An edited version… Continue reading
“Momentum needs to reach beyond the familiar campaign politics of the Left — not abandoning the conventional modes entirely but combining them with economic initiatives and self-organization endeavors that can develop the capacities and create the resources through which to build power to transform society (as well as win electoral office to manage the state).”… Continue reading
In this first part of an article by Fran Quigley, we excerpt the history of medicines as a public good: “Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the rich and the powerful fenced off commonly held land and transformed it into private property. Land switched from a source of subsistence to a source of profit, and… Continue reading
If we want to improve ourselves and improve the world, consumption isn’t what empowers us. Only the conquest of work can do it. Let’s start with a fact: consumption is an individual activity, something that we generally do alone. So, thinking about society in terms of consumption leads us to think that the only way… Continue reading
As healthcare insurance in the US has skyrocketed, despite passage of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, many Americans are turning to a new/old solution: mutualized self-help. As reported in the New York Times, many Christian groups in the US are forming their own unregulated insurance pools to pay the medical bills of their… Continue reading