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Michel Bauwens (Madison, Wisconsin), June 12, 2016: Part One – Analyzing the global situation One of the best books I have read in the last ten years is undoubtedly, The Structure of World History, by Kojin Karatini.
2 diagrams that map the big picture of the emerging post-capitalist paradigm, underpinned by peer-to-peer and collaborative dimensions.
So, how to be an anti-capitalist in the 21st century? You should give up the fantasy of smashing capitalism to start constructing an emancipatory future.
Carlos Delclós "Hope is a Promise" is an excellent and succinct overview of the rise of Podemos and its complex relationship to the 15-M movement.
2 diagrams that map the big picture of the emerging post-capitalist paradigm, underpinned by peer-to-peer and collaborative dimensions.
2 diagrams that map the big picture of the emerging post-capitalist paradigm, underpinned by peer-to-peer and collaborative dimensions.
The #JezWeCan social media campaign has been, by a long stretch, the biggest single campaign for an individual politician this country has ever seen. … It’s about the democratic possibilities which are opened up by this new medium and this extensive reach. It gives us leverage where previously there was very little – and it …
* M.A. Thesis: The Transformative Effects of Crisis: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the New Economic Cultures in Spain and Greece. Janosch Sbeih. Schumacher College, 2014 Here is a summary from the abstract, followed by two excerpts: “By adopting an action research methodology, I inquire into how far the responses of citizens to the global economic …
Six months after promising the end of austerity, the Syriza leadership had to sign an agreement which not just imposes an extreme neoliberal impoverishment of its people, but actually suspends democracy, since the agreement explicitely states that no laws can be voted without agreement of the European institutions. The radicality of this defeat is not …
The debates in Italy (with the history of the referendum on water as common good) are the most advanced reflecting the content and strategic options. A interesting input gave Ernest Urtasun from the Catalonian left-green party – referring to a more general approach for a Fundamental Charter on Common Goods. Republished from Elisabetta Cangelosi, and …
What the new commons coalition has on its plate, excerpted from Ashifa Kassam: “Colau’s main challenge will come from inheriting a city at a crossroads. “The Barcelona model is in decline,” said journalist Marta Monedero, referring to the ideas that guided the city’s growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s and helped put Barcelona …
“In the aftermath of the global economic crisis, and the worst recession for over seventy years, Britain has witnessed one of the most turbulent eras in politics since the Second World War. The dominant political and capitalistic system has come under close scrutiny; and the 2008 financial crash and urban riots of 2011 have cast serious doubt on the economic and social liberalism of both Thatcherism and Blairism.
We are all hackers now, apparently—or are trying to be. Guilty as charged. I am writing these words, as I write most things, not with a pen and paper, or a commercial word processor, but on Emacs, a command-line text editor first developed in the 1970s for that early generation of free-software hackers. I had to hack it, so to speak, with a few crude lines of scripting code in order that it would properly serve my purposes as a writer. And it does so extremely well, with only simple text files, an integrated interpreter for the Markdown markup language, and as many split screens as I want. I get to feel clever and devious every time I sit down to use it.
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Marshall Ganz is a ‘social movement scholar’ and author of the book, Why David Sometimes Wins.He shares his general thoughts on the use of social media in the Arab spring.
A scholarly paper titled "Commons Movements & 'Progressive' Governments as Dual Power: The Potential for Social Transformation in Europe" by A. Broumas.
When I think about the politics of powerlessness, it feels clear as day to me that the source of all of it is fear. Fear of leaders, of the enemy, of the possibility of having to govern, of the stakes of winning and losing, of each other, of ourselves. Excerpted from Yotam Marom: (we will …
“”What an amazing day on Sunday at Mindful Uprising: a pop-up People’s Summit in Melbourne. Thanks Michel Bauwens for presenting your inspirational vision for a p2p commons-based society; Richard and Laurent from Centre for the Future for co-sponsoring and hosting the event with Melbourne Polytechnic; Daryl for bringing the Summit into being; Jose for co-facilitating the Open Space session with me & our Connectors Michelle, Julian, Aidan & Mike. At the end of the day we were proud to announce the formation of the Commons Transition Coalition and now invite our friends in Adelaide (Sharon), Sydney (Declan), Brisbane (Michelle), Canberra (David), NZ (Sam) and others to work with us to develop a charter and plan for 2016.”
Rise of the Commons: Fundamentals of P2P Economies: a summary of Michel Bauwens' recent New Zealand workshop.
“Open Labour means three things then: first, to be sure, a much more open Labour party, with a culture and democratic ways of doing things that really is fraternal not sectarian or administrative. Second, a party and movement much more open to ideas from within and without, especially over how the economy and the constitution works in in a European context, in addition to social policy where Labour is on more familiar ground. Third, respecting and working openly with others wherever possible, especially other parties, for example on defending our liberties: seeing alliances as a positive rather than a last resort, most obviously by embracing a fairer voting system. In other words not collaborating instrumentally but being open to being improved externally as well as internally by partnerships, and ending the ghastly, reactionary, Westminster politics of ‘winner takes all’.”
is it possible that Klein’s analysis is right on the politics and the solutions, but incomplete in terms of an overarching strategy for how to get there?
Tufekci: Autocratic regimes don’t stay in power for decades by governing randomly; rather, they do so by following a tried-and-tested playbook of strategic censorship, isolation and repression of dissent. And control over information flows and the public sphere is a key element of this model of autocratic regime. Regimes in the Middle East actively sought to prevent and control the spread of information because they understood that keeping sparks of dissent from lighting prairie fires of uprisings was crucial. Dissidents were punished disproportionately – long prison sentence for the smallest offenses, torture — not just because the security forces happened to be composed of sadists, but because of the same problem: to prevent cascades of dissent from taking off. The Internet has opened up the public sphere; it has allowed citizens to express their views and coordinate with each other. Does that always lead to revolution? No, you need the dissent to be there on the ground. But it does mean that such that regimes cannot continue to govern as before. They are forced to play a new game.
By focusing on hierarchy instead of class, Bookchin became the first Leftist thinker to offer a coherent, meaningful framework for the liberation struggles in the Middle East. His narrative implies that a revolutionary movement in Kurdistan is a struggle at the material origin of institutional hierarchy itself. Although such a localized struggle cannot automatically release hierarchy’s tight grip over rest of the world, it does powerfully illustrate the full scope of the revolutionary task at hand. In this way, the Kurdish freedom movement is not only influenced by social ecology, it also enriches that perspective and articulates it further. The human beings who live at the material origins of institutional hierarchy, and who have maintained organic ways of life there for millennia, are now answering the call to establish the positive conditions of a free society.
“This is where dissensus and the deliberate encouragement of the eccentric, the improbable and the rejected come into their own. We are far past the point at which an organized, society-wide program to deal with the crisis of industrial civilization is possible – as the Hirsch report pointed out five years ago, that had to start twenty years before the peak of petroleum production, which puts that hope a good quarter century into the realm of might-have-beens – and even if the option still existed, the political will to make it happen simply isn’t there. That means that aiming for flexible ad hoc responses cobbled together out of whatever resources come to hand is probably the best option we’ve got. Focusing on those possibilities that can be done on a shoestring, and maximizing the total number of these that get tested in the immediate future, is therefore a crucially important strategy right now. Even if most of those efforts fail, this approach will likely yield the largest number of useful options to mitigate the crisis in the short run and manage some degree of recovery later on.
X-net's Simona Levi corrects some popular misconceptions resulting from international press coverage on the role of Podemos.
Why Greek debt cancellation is a legal necessity and why this would not be anything new.
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Scoop.it!
