degrowth is a call for a radical break from traditional growth-based models of society, no matter if these models are “left” or “right”, to invent new ways of living together in a true democracy, respectful of the values of equality and freedom, based on sharing and cooperation, and with sufficiently moderate consumption so as to… Continue reading
Jem Bendell on the Money Myth
Great, easy to understand, presentation on the crisis in the monetary system, and what we can do about it, and what is done about it!
Book of the Day: The New Global Revolutions
* Book: Paul Mason. Why it’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. Verso, 2012 “Paul Mason’s remarkable and highly readable book does a great job of putting the uprisings of 2011 in a longer-term historical context, as well as helping to emphasize that they are far from over.” Chris Carlsson has an interesting double… Continue reading
Marco Berlinguer on the problems of information capitalism
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
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