With the building of these networks of social economy and solidarity, people are rethinking their ideas of how society could be more equitable.
Stacco Troncoso at P2P Foundation. Greece: Alternative Economies & Community Currencies Pt. 3 – FairCoop
Half of CO2 emissions between 1751–2010 were produced after 1986 in an exponential growth spiral that saw post-2000 emissions triple those from the 1990s; this took place, furthermore, in an era of hyper-mobile capital far beyond the scope of anything nineteenth-century British capitalists might have dreamed.
Miranda Trimmer in The New Inquiry. Coal Comfort
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power in the British Cotton Industry, c. 1825-1848, and the Roots of Global Warming (Amazon)
This is not a debate about changing the world without taking power or by taking power, this is a debate about constructing new power, a new civil society, a new (ethical) market, and a new form of (partner) state; and on the basis of this power, to institute a new mode of production and society.
Michel Bauwens at P2P Foundation. The European left in shock after the defeat of Greece
Bauwens post is in re a forty minute episode of TalkReal, TalkReal in Athens: Democracy Rising - Syriza and Europe, with Costas Douzinas, Margarita Tsomou, Srecko Horvat, Jerome Roos, and host Lorenzo Marsili.
Jerome Roos is the founder and editor of Roar Magazine, an online journal of the radical imagination founded in 2010. I have just discovered Roar Magazine within the past year, and think it very good. Of the panelists Roos was most explicit about making power within the commons frame.
Capitalism has emerged in a world in which air and water, as elements of life, were free, but information the ultimate value. It has spurred technological innovation to a point where information is abundant and its marginal cost drops to zero; from a systemic perspective, the “solution” is to put a price tag onto the only thing more fundamental than information: water, air, land. In other words: to feed the insatiable mill stones of the market with life itself.
Kamiel Choi at Meandering home. Some notes on Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism In reply to a noteworthy article in the Guardian about the book “Postcapitalism” that is published on July 30.
The end of capitalism has begun
In The Guardian last week the headline: The end of capitalism has begun took me by surprise. It's not the headline per se that's surprising, but that such a headline would be in a mainstream paper like The Guardian.
I have some links that seem relavant to the article to put together in one place.
The Guardian article was about Paul Mason's book, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future.
Two left critiques are worth notice:
LBO News from Doug Henwood. Workers: no longer needed? So-Called “Post-Capitalism” is Just Another Crappy Capitalist Snowjob
Capitalism has three major characteristics: private property, capital accumulation, and wage labor. Henwood and Stephanie McMillan are concerned primarily with wage labor. Immanuel Wallerstein sees a breakdown of capital accumulation. Mason address all three characteristics of capitalism in his argument for the end of capitalism.
Jonathan Derbyshire's interview with Mason in The Prospect provides more.
I'm a fan of Henwood's Left Business Observer, but I think dismissive attitudes towards Paul Mason's arguments miss their importance. It seems to me that when capitalists are talking seriously of postcapitalism it's important to hear the arguments and to see where they lead.
Not a critique of Mason's book, but relevant from a broadly pro-capitalist perspective is: Hernando DeSoto: The Poor Against Piketty
Also not a critique of Mason's book, but relevant from a Marxist perspective is Slavoj Zizek: The Ideology of the Empire and its Traps