Not since Marx identified Manchester’s manufacturing plants as blueprints for the new capitalist society have our political economy’s fundamentals faced a more profound transformation. As structural crises beset capitalism, a new mode of production is emerging: commons-based peer production. This piece by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis was originally published on The Next System.org. Download… Continue reading
How we can wrestle back our apps from the tech giants and end surveillance capitalism. Peter Harris: 2018 was the year where the twisted intersection of apps, data exploitation, privacy and corporate tech giants went mainstream. While the issues had been brewing for a while — such as the revelation of addiction design in most apps, the… Continue reading
“Spotlight Interviews with Co-operators” is a series of interviews with co-operators from around the world with whom ILO officials have crossed paths during the course of their work on cooperatives and the wider social and solidarity economy (SSE). On this occasion, ILO interviewed Mr Siôn Whellens, a member of Calverts, the London branding, design and… Continue reading
Part of the appeal in being a worker on new gig-economy platforms like Uber or Taskrabbit is the apparent autonomy, the feeling of not having a boss. Sure, an app on your phone is your new boss, and through it a large, transnational corporation whose investors want nothing more than to automate you away, but… Continue reading
The local activities of the P2P Lab in the context of the Distributed Design Market Platform Creative Europe project (Year 2) have come to an end. On Sunday 9th of June, four selected makers presented their agricultural solutions at Tzoumakers, our rural makerspace in Kalentzi (Ioannina, Greece). The workshop has enabled participants to explore a… Continue reading
John Gieryn: What if the purpose of companies was “to create benefit for the world and try to make it a better place”? Or if they had “employee happiness” as a key performance indicator? While it may seem far-fetched at first, we at Loomio have the privilege of serving one such company that is leading… Continue reading
Sol Trumbo Vila: With the results still playing out, the survival of parties like Barcelona en Comú will depend on their ability to bring together the ‘three souls’ of the movement. As the European Elections unfolded last week, many activists and progressive forces around the world paid particular attention to the municipal elections taking place… Continue reading
Note: the updated submission deadline is June 20, 2019. Venue: Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal Date: 6 – 8th November 2019 Organiser: Centre for International Studies (CEI-IUL) The second international conference “Social Solidarity Economy and the Commons” will be a meeting point for researchers, activists, public officials and social entrepreneurs involved in social… Continue reading
Katarzyna Gajewska: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Egalitarian communes create an alternative to capitalist individualist lifestyle and values. The add communal organization of life and sharing living space to the self-managed enterprises that they operate to generate income. Living in such setting means agreeing to be challenged and confronted… Continue reading
This month’s guest is Nathalia Scherer of DAOstack who asks How Can We Self-Organize at Scale? Can we create big, ambitious projects without corporations, governments, and bosses? Nathalia Scherer wants to try. Her organization, DAOstack, is using Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to make tools for self-organizing. Last year DAOstack raised $30 million in a 60-second token… Continue reading