1) The Small-Mart Revolution, How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition, by Michael H Shuman
Via Dave Pollard’s exceptional blog:
“Michael Shuman, one of the co-founders of BALLE, has written an excellent book diagnosing the reasons entrepreneurial businesses face an uneven playing field and an unfair competitive disadvantage versus the multinational corporatist oligopolies (MCOs). This book, The Small-Mart Revolution, also prescribes 95 ways we can help rectify this damaging distortion of the ‘market’ economy — as customers, investors, public policy-setters, community members, citizens, and entrepreneurs ourselves.
Shuman introduces a useful acronym to differentiate the types of entrepreneurial business we need to encourage and support: LOIS (local ownership & import substitution). Only when owners live and work in the communities they operate in do they really care about the people and environment in those communities, he argues. And only by replacing shoddy products and services transported half way around the globe (at enormous social and environmental cost) with goods and services produced right in the community can we hope to build strong, healthy and resilient local economies where people can both live and make a reasonable living.”…

2) Endgame, Vol 1: The Problem of Civilization; Vol 2: Resistance, by Derrick Jensen
From the Endgame website:
“Hailed as the philosopher poet of the ecological movement, best-selling author Derrick Jensen returns with a passionate forecast of how industrial civilization, and the persistent and widespread violence it requires, is unsustainable. Jensen’s intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy’s Black Ship to Hell.”
See also Dave Pollard’s review.

3) Pulse, The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things, by Robert Frenay
The author writes:
“We’ve gotten our planet into quite a predicament. Pulse is about the ideas from nature that will let us prosper, and the people who are making it happen. This is a networked book. We’re releasing the full text of Pulse to the public via RSS, email, and on this blog. You can even get a from-the-beginning feed if you come late. In a first, the text is fully linked and tagged.
PULSE is a book of ideas, a philosophy disguised as pop science. While it offers gee-whiz stories about cutting-edge technology, these stories are also meant as parables. Like Aesop’s fables, they aim to illustrate something more—in this case the core dynamics of how living systems work.”

4) The LETSaholic Twist: Everything you always wanted to know about LETS… but didn’t know who to ask, by James Taris Â
The author writes on his website:
“My name is James Taris, and I’m a LETSaholic. That is, I can’t get enough of LETS.
For those of you who do not know what LETS is, LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading System. It is a group of people from a small community who all agree to exchange goods and services with each other without the need for cash.
And once you have grasped the LETS philosophy, then trading in LETS points becomes an enjoyable and rewarding experience.
My LETS philosophy is, “Don’t think of LETS points like dollars. Think of them as favours. LETS Favours!”

Michel Bauwens writes: “How are the Local Exchange Trading Systems, through which people can trade services and hours of labour, related to peer to peer. Peer production is essentially non-reciprocal: anyone contributes voluntarily and use is open to all. This works fine in spheres of abundance. LETS scheme belong to the gift economy and are a form of exchange. But unlike the market, labour hours are considered equal, and thus the exchange is based on the idea of partnership and sharing. Such peer-informed forms of exchange are ideal for services and probably also for the surviving non-capitalist traditional economies. They will not replace the market however, in the sense that equal labour does not take into account the amount of investment needed to achieve some types of particular labour. Such pricing can take place in a market only.”

5) Cultural Software, A Theory of Ideology, by J.M. Balkin
From CulturalSoftware.com:Â Â Cultural Software offers a new theory about how ideologies and beliefs grow, spread, and develop– a theory of cultural evolution, which explains both shared understandings and disagreement and diversity within cultures.
Cultural Software draws upon many different areas of study, including anthropology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology and law. The book’s explanation of how shared understandings arise, how cultures grow and spread, and how people of different cultures can understand and critique each other’s views should be relevant to work in many different areas of the human sciences.

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