Marx and Sartre go shopping for a car
Why is it so difficult to find a job or to buy products that align with our values? Why is it difficult to even know whether our personal choices might have effects in the right direction?
Economy featured
Our broken and brutal economy
The frustration is reaching critical mass, and it will drive change. The question is what type, and direction, of change?
Rethinking Supply Chains
Working at smaller scales means that the benefits of additional crop rotations, processing mills and artisan-micro-maker labs could be spread throughout the country, bringing greater resilience and livelihoods to rural areas. Energy demands would be lower and distributed as processing would be localised and require limited transport.
Pluralistic: The enshittification of labor
How would a job guarantee disenshittify the labor market? The job guarantee means a “permanent, publicly provided employment opportunity to anyone ready and willing to work, it establishes an effective floor for the entire labor market.”
Labour, capital, and the ‘free gifts of nature’
Political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century employed a curious phrase to denote the source of wealth at the base of the economy: the “free gifts of nature.” Alyssa Battistoni, a political science professor at Barnard College, believes that careful attention to the meanings of this phrase illuminates many aspects of the world we inhabit today.
A response to Daniel Susskind: Degrowth – a reckoning
Given the gravity of the present situation, we should be very careful about what we think we know about growth. if I’m wrong about degrowth, then you can kick-start the economy back again to continue growing business-as-usual. If Daniel Susskind is wrong, on the other hand, it will cost us the biosphere.
What Is the Commons—And Why Does It Matter Today?
Once we recognise the principles of commoning, we start to see them everywhere: neighbours sharing childcare or tending a community garden. Local repair cafés and tool libraries. Digital communities building and maintaining open-source projects on the Internet.
Beyond AI Futurism: A Socio-Ecological Vision for AI
We must engage in a deliberate act of political imagination: to recognise that AI’s path is not predetermined by Big Tech, but is contested terrain – a technology that can either concentrate power or strengthen democracy, accelerate ecological collapse or support sustainability.
Regenerative Economics: Excerpt
It is our task, now, to bring our economic system into alignment with the regenerative process. When we do, like turning a canoe downstream after a long struggle against the current, our journey will be lightened, our destination assured.
U.S.-China trade dispute resolution leaves China with huge leverage over global electronics industry
Even with the seeming resolution of the China-US trade war, China is still capable of denying key resources to the world’s electronics manufacturers at any time.
Kreisler: Community-Driven Catalysts for Degrowth
By embedding degrowth principles in local, everyday practice, Kreisler associations offer a vision for urban provisioning beyond extraction and individualism and toward a communal, crisis-resilient future.
We’re Surrounded by Crises. What’s Stopping Us from Acting?
Where markets “commodify” and states “collectify”, Commons initiatives “commonify”: rooted in a culture of collaboration around the needs of a community, they mutualise the benefits that arise from collectively created wealth—through systems owned, governed, and maintained by the community itself.