By John Perkins: “What can I do to fix a broken global economy?” It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot these past few months as I’ve crisscrossed the US speaking at TED venues, music concerts, the World Affairs Council, bookstores, on radio and TV shows, and at a variety of other forums. During this… Continue reading
This post by Olga Alexeeva was originally published on politicalcritique.org. Future architecture should look for ways of living (al)together, as all power structures and capitalist formations push us more and more away from each other. Merve Bedir talks with Future Architecture about her work, including the project Bostan: A Garden for All which she presented… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Platform.coop Amidst misogyny, racism & political hostility, networks of economic alternatives in 2017. Happy new year! Last week, we kicked around ideas for concrete projects that the Platform Cooperativism Consortium should realize this coming year. In the second part of this article, we’ll devote ourselves to just that: pragmatic objectives for the next… Continue reading
This is our edit of Stacco Troncoso’s keynote presentation at the Prix Ars Festival, held in Linz, Austria. The P2P Foundation was awarded the Golden Nica 2016 for Digital Communities, which we dedicated to our lost friend, Jean Lievens. In his presentation, Stacco defines P2P, the Commons, and how they interrelate, while distinguishing generative, commons-based Peer… Continue reading
By Zelealem Tefera Ashenafi: Ethiopia is home to one of the oldest, most effective conservation management systems in sub-Saharan Africa, the Menz-Guassa Community Conservation Area, an 11,100-hectare region that is home to a rich endowment of grasslands, plants and rare animals such as the Ethiopian wolf, gelada and Abyssinian hare. The history of the indigenous land… Continue reading
Why do some community spaces thrive while others struggle or fail? A lot of it comes down to how people are welcomed. Last April, I joined a group of activists and academics in Madrid, Spain, to build software that helps communities self-organize. This group was part of the P2Pvalue project, a three-year research initiative that… Continue reading
The P2P Foundation is serializing video highlights from last year’s Platform Cooperativism conference. Click here to see all conference videos. Camille Kerr, ICA Group — Platform cooperativism has the potential to completely transform the caregiving industry – including childcare and homecare – into dignified jobs where people make a livable wage and have control over… Continue reading
The following text has been sourced from the press release for Guy Standing’s latest book The Corruption of Capitalism Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay: Mark Twain wrote of the late nineteenth Century as a Gilded Age in America, in which vast inequality and insecurity were masked by a veneer of wealth concentrated… Continue reading
This text was published in Open Democracy —— A statement made before the Catalan Parliamentary Committee for the Study of Anti-Corruption Measures and for Democratic Regeneration. Without claiming to represent anyone but myself, I wish to focus my statement on what, under the present circumstances, I represent here today, namely civil society, as a member… Continue reading
In a discussion on the perma-circularity blog of Christian Arnsperger, the French biophysical engineer and economist Francois Grosse strongly argues that degrowth is the wrong path: “Nobody has the slightest hint as to how to render viable a world economy that would be structurally de-growing while ensuring social balance, individual and collective satisfaction, and peace… Continue reading
The ocean never reaches the shore. There is no simple arrival here; that’s an inadequate portrayal of what is happening. Instead, the ocean enacts the shore. It happens the other way around too – in one single move. The shore performs the ocean. By acting as cleaning agent, the shore characterizes the ocean; and by… Continue reading
How can a universal basic minimum income be made compatible with socialist principles and avoid inadvertently furthering a neoliberal agenda? Ursula Huws continues the conversation on Universal Basic Income in this article, originally published on Open Democracy’s New Economics section: More than one in five UK workers, over seven million people, are now in precarious… Continue reading
Access to affordable smartphones has disrupted the extractive regimes of multinationals and oligarchies in many nations. Connected to the world and to each other, ordinary people can create their own production and exchange systems. But technology can intimidate people who are unaccustomed to it; especially when they grow up without access. Digital justice aims to… Continue reading
Intro by Michel Bauwens: The following contribution is from Christian Felber, who has co-founded and co-organized the successful Economy for the Common Good network that is mostly active in Austria and German-language countries. This approach broadens the accounting and accountability of enterprises away from its sole reliance on financial achievements, and towards taking to account… Continue reading
I have come to realize that language is an indispensable portal into the deeper mysteries of the commons. The words we use – to name aspects of nature, to evoke feelings associated with each other and shared wealth, to express ourselves in sly, subtle or playful ways – our words themselves are bridges to the… Continue reading
My wife is a Mennonite. This is an actual ethnicity, not simply a religious sect. Mennonites are pacifists. As the story goes, Europe was not into pacifism during its war with the Ottoman Empire. Nor did Germany and Switzerland want Mennonites advocating pacifism to other citizens. The Mennonites became refugees. In Russia, Catherine the Great… Continue reading