Peer Value: Advancing the Commons Collaborative Economy Amsterdam. September 2-3, 2016 Peer Value: Advancing the Commons Collaborative Economy is a conference integrating conversations and plans of action for shaping and connecting the Commons on a global level. Our final program is listed below, please join us in Amsterdam! The conference is organized along three tracks:… Continue reading
Cities have personalities – they’re often described as we would people. They can be dry, manic, laid-back, iconic. Barcelona is what you might call a tonic. Always known as a vivid and creative city, Barcelona is taking the lead as an exemplary change agent on the European stage. Its DIY vigor and urgent form of… Continue reading
What great news – the P2P Foundation has been awarded the 2016 Golden Nica for Digital Communities from Prix Ars Electronica! It’s such a pleasure to share this news with our community – and because “digital community” was the category that we chose for our application, I’d also like to share the video and text… 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 the UK and other countries ravaged by unfettered capitalism, there are many signs of a new kind of resistance. Typically this involves mobilizing all possible sources of counter-power — economic, social, cultural — and different levels of political power, local as well as national and, very occasionally, continental. In particular, these efforts don’t just… Continue reading
* Report: The Tragedy of The PrivaTe. The PoTenTial of The Public. by Hilary Wainwright. Published by Public Services International and the Transnational Institute, 2014 “This booklet is about how public service workers, with their fellow community members, are not only defending public services but also struggling to make them democratic and responsive to people’s… Continue reading
* Report: The Tragedy of The Private. The Potential of the Public. by Hilary Wainwright. Published by Public Services International and the Transnational Institute, 2014
“In an increasingly unequal and unsustainable world, governments must urgently move beyond the restrictive political and economic ideologies of the past and embrace solutions that meet the common needs of people in all countries. This primer outlines the extent of the interconnected global crises we face, and points the way towards an alternative approach to managing… Continue reading
new social forms of ownership are emerging in which public utilities are run by coalitions of workers and service users. Theirs isn’t just a defence of public services but an attempt to democratise them so they are not the top-down bureaucracies of old or simply job-saving strategies (important though these may be). They become what… Continue reading
Valuable and concrete reflections are being published, filling public understanding of the nature and dynamics of the most-recent social and emancipatory uprisings, known also as Global Revolution. The recent articles by Bernardo Gutiérrez and Rodrigo Nunes, both of whom involved in the 15M, Occupy, Gezi, and Brazilian uprisings and systematically put their self-reflections together in a framework of a collaborative action-research network, also… Continue reading
This is from the Final Report on the Economics and the Commons Conference, crafted by David Bollier, and as republished by Mike Linksvayer. We reprint the part on the Knowledge Stream, first the keynote, then the deliberations and finally the conclusions by the streamleader. Excerpts: “Science, and recently, free software, are paradigmatic knowledge commons; copyright… Continue reading
“After 30 years of the right depoliticising the local – of which ‘localism’ is the latest variant – the key issue is to understand and open up political debate and choices about the future of this diffuse and productive creativity. And we must work at a much deeper seam than that of ‘demands on the… Continue reading
Excerpted from a draft of an article by Hilary Wainwright: “Resistance to alienation takes many forms: from the refusal to work, humour, sabotage and conventional trade unionism, to a variety of struggles for and experiments with alternatives in and against state and market. An alternative conception of labour, as part of a wider alternative economics,… Continue reading
Excerpted from Hilary Wainwright: “Something interesting is going on in the city of Stuttgart, one of the regional success stories of the German system of Mitbestimmung, or ‘co-determination’, where workers have a role in the management of companies. The dominant trend in Germany is of co-determination becoming ‘crisis corporatism’, in which the unions concede low… Continue reading
Hilary Wainwright asked me to explain peer production ‘as a challenge to capitalism’ for the July issue of Red Pepper. She then responds the following: “The work of Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation on a peer to peer/commons approach to production is important for several reasons. First, it draws attention to the fact that… Continue reading
A trade unionism that is able to facilitate and express the practical knowledge of its members, as workers and as citizens, is critical to the renewal of public services and for confronting a global politics of austerity. Hilary Wainwright has been at the forefront of such attempts to forge a new public sector unionism for… Continue reading