Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life.
Last Thursday Mark Zuckerberg published a long piece called ‘Building a Global Community’. In it he explained that his company could help ‘develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.’ The effect was unnerving.
With Donald Trump’s election and the rising perils of war, climate upheaval, accelerating inequality, and civil unrest, some of the richest people in the United States are making escape plans.
Co-operatives have been described as freshwater fish in a saltwater environment. In the 1930s, the co-operative sector in many countries was very powerful but it was destroyed by fascist and communist regimes. What was it that the authoritarians found so threatening in co-operation?
This is where buy local is different from Buy America. Buying locally-produced products that are sold in locally-owned stores is a key strategy for building local wealth. Every dollar spent locally is a dollar of wealth retained in the community. The alternative is for that wealth to leak into other communities while making the local community poorer. This is the community expression of the saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
In the religion of economics, the entrepreneur is a hero engaged in a narrative of destructive creation. Entrepreneurs are tragically noble figures on a treadmill of competition – but who is really making the sacrifices?
As a developed set of social practices, techniques and ethical norms, permaculture has a lot to say to the world of the commons. This is immediately clear from reading the twelve design principles of permaculture that David Holmgren enumerated in his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Practices Beyond Sustainability.
As Christian Arnsperger suggests, to retrieve the idea of circularity requires a second concept, that of sufficiency, of “enough”. Without that, it is at best a way of postponing the inevitable crash, and at worst a way of giving false credibility to the growthist delusion. So the idea of resource cycling loops needs combining with the radical reduction of consumption, long product durability, re-use and repair.
In this episode of Next Economy Now, Erin Axelrod, a Partner at LIFT Economy, interviews Janelle Orsi, founder of The Sustainable Economies Law Center.
The universal basic income has become a subject of increasing fascination across the entire ideological spectrum in recent years. Capable of much more than just a simple “employment fix”, basic income could help to create no less than a shared political vision for a future society.
Why are so many young people – even those with the “best” educations – almost completely ignorant about a huge ongoing threat to human rights, democracy and the climate? Well, I guess it’s not surprising.
Of all the problems facing parents, making sure our children have access to the highest quality childcare is one of the biggest. As studio members at Near Now…we have been working with #RadicalChildcare founder Amy Martin to research and prototype possible alternatives to current childcare provision.
