Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While billion dollar development companies eat up affordable housing units throughout the Bay Area, dedicated teams of organizers, nonprofit service providers, community development corporations, and others fight a relentless battle along side and on behalf of those at threat of displacement
Let’s begin by asking, is supply and demand truly able to manage the thresholds of resources which an environment can sustain, or to ensure that these resources are allocated sufficiently for the population living in that environment?
Because Positive Money are so selective in both their characterisation of the springs of capitalist accumulation and in their analysis of the impact of economic activity on the ecosystem, they end up proposing a scheme that at best will have little positive impact and could actually make matters worse.
I realized that the commons had great potential as an alternative political vision that is not some unified movement or ideology, like in the past, but something that is locally distributed and grounded in things that people love and want to protect. So, the commons is about sharing those things that belong to all of us that we want to protect in our ability to manage them for our purposes.
Times have been hard of late for us leftists. Despite the fact that a good deal of our tradition’s criticisms of capitalism and modernity have proved accurate, the expected solutions haven’t really come – and when leftist governments have assumed power, they’ve often compounded the problems.
Good Life Permaculture (henceforth referred to as ‘Good Life’) was born in early 2013 after about four years of conception and design by Hannah and Anton. With a ‘good life’ as the mission, the initiative’s vision is to achieve ‘absolute sustainability’…
There are two stories commonly told about robots these days. One is that, in the not-too-distant future, some enormous percentage of jobs currently being done by people will be taken over by computers, and the workers will be left twiddling their thumbs. The other is that, like past periods of technological change, job markets will simply evolve, and new, better things will arise for us to do. The truth is neither – and everything in between.
Jackson Rising is the most important book I have read in a long time. Organizers are going to love it. If you wonder what democracy might look like in our time — here it is.
PIRC, The New Economics Foundation, NEON and the FrameWorks Institute have launched two story strategies that progressives can use to shift thinking on the economy. They’re built on values and metaphors that encourage the hope that change is possible and increase people’s support for progressive policies.
Sacrifice zones – abandoned, economically shattered places – are spreading in historically white rural areas and small towns across the United States. Rural decline fosters regressive authoritarian politics.
My previous post offered a retrospective take on my ‘Peasant’s Republic of Wessex’ post cycle that I completed a while back. I thought I might now turn to another such retrospective, this time on my recently-completed ‘History of the world’ cycle. So I’d like to offer a few thoughts on the way we think about history, with the help of a couple of books from my recent reading.
Like the system of world capitalism it challenges, the dynamic process of constructing alternatives is constantly evolving. Correspondingly, searching for complementarity and synergy among VB, ecosocialism, the commons, degrowth, ecofeminism, and other proposals yields multiple and diverse interactions.
