Economic Democracy and the Billion-Dollar Co-op | P2P Foundation - 0 views
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Candidate Donald Trump made a campaign stop in February 2016 hosted by South Carolina’s Broad River Electric Cooperative.
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By the onset of the Great Depression, few people in the rural United States had electricity at home—about 10 percent. The power companies that had lit up the cities simply didn’t see enough profit in serving far-flung farmers. But gradually some of those farmers started forming electric cooperatives—utility companies owned and governed by their customers—and strung up their own lines.
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We typically think of our democratic institutions as having to do with politicians and governments. But there are democratic businesses, too—not just these electric co-ops, but also hulking credit unions, mutual-insurance companies, and ubiquitous cooperative brands from Land O’Lakes to the Associated Press. Their democracy is fragile. When it’s not exercised or noticed, these creatures act on their own volition.
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Fearless Cities: the new urban movements | Red Pepper - 0 views
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‘Fearless Cities’, a gathering of over 700 people, representing dozens of experiments in taking power at city level, to empower citizens’ movements worldwide. More than a coming together of a series of local experiments, it marked the ‘coming out’ party for a new global social movement.
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A wave of new municipalist movements has been experimenting with how to take – and transform – power in cities large and small.
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it became necessary to change who the movement made demands of.
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New Era Windows Cooperative Forms in Chicago | American Worker Cooperative - 0 views
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"In 2008, the boss decided to close our windows factory on Goose Island and fire everyone. In 2012, we decided to buy the factory for ourselves and fire the boss. We now own the plant together and run it democratically.
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The workers called in help in the form of the United Electrical Workers Union, whom had been with them since the beginning, The Working World, which had worked with dozens of worker controlled factories in Latin America, and the Center for Workplace Democracy, a new organization in Chicago dedicated to supporting worker control.
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It seemed the reason workers were losing their jobs might not be because they weren't doing profitable work.
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Commons-based peer production - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler.[1] It describes a new model of socio-economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization.
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Yochai Benkler contrasts commons-based peer production with firm production (in which tasks are delegated based on a central decision-making process) and market-based production (in which tagging different prices to different tasks serves as an incentive to anyone interested in performing a task).
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The term was first introduced and described in Yochai Benkler's seminal paper "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm".[2] Yochai Benkler's 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks, expands significantly on these ideas.
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Up to half of all food is wasted: agri-industry and supermarkets are culpable... - 0 views
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Between 30% and 50% of all food produced – 1.2-2 billion tonnes/year – is wasted or lost, a report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) says. It argues that the waste is caused mainly by marketing techniques in rich countries, along with poor practice and/or insufficient investment in harvesting, storage and transportation.
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The report, published last week, highlights the vast amounts of farmland, energy, fertilisers and water swallowed up by the production of food that is thrown away or left to rot.
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in poor countries, “wastage tends to occur primarily at the farmer-producer end of the supply chain”. Inefficient farming, and poor transportation and infrastructure mean that food is “frequently handled inappropriately and stored under unsuitable farm site conditions”. Almost all of what reaches households is eaten, though.
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Worker-Owned Cooperatives: Direct Democracy in Action - 3 views
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Flashpoints—those unexpected events that movements gather around, when everything is accelerated, exciting, and energizing—fizzle.
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The cooperative movement is experiencing a string of these moments now, and is burgeoning with renewed activity. I see this firsthand as a co-owner of the Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), a worker-owned cooperative
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It’s our philosophy that cooperatives enable direct democracy and local control over the economy. As participants in the coop movement, we help to turn flashpoints into lasting social change.
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Strengthen the Commons - Now! - Democracy - Heinrich Böll Foundation - 0 views
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By Yochai Benkler “Commons are institutional spaces in which we are free.” Yochai Benkler
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How the crisis reveals the fabric of our Commons
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Over the last two hundred years, the explosion of knowledge, technology, and productivity has enabled an unprecedented increase of private wealth. This has improved our quality of life in numerous ways. At the same time, however, we have permitted the depletion of resources and the dwindling of societal wealth. This is brought to our attention by current, interrelated crises in finance, the economy, nutrition, energy, and in the fundamental ecological systems of life.
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Public Services & Democracy | Unleashing the creativity of labour - 1 views
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Something interesting is going on in the city of Stuttgart, one of the regional success stories of the German system of Mitbestimmung, or ‘co-determination’, where workers have a role in the management of companies. The dominant trend in Germany is of co‐determination becoming ‘crisis corporatism’, in which the unions concede low wages and increases in hours, ostensibly to save jobs. But in Germany’s southern manufacturing centre, in contrast, trade unionists are holding out for workers having real control over the conditions and hours of work – and over the purpose of their labour too.
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In Stuttgart’s public services, the union Verdi has combined a strong fight over wages and conditions with an effective and popular campaign to improve and defend public services. In response, the city government – a coalition of the SPD, Green, Die Linke and local party Stuttgart Ökologisch Sozial – is re‐municipalising several services that the previous CDU city government sold off.
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Meanwhile, among the 20,000 workers at the Daimler Mercedes factories, a radical grouping in the IG Metall union is also looking beyond bargaining over the price of labour, instead holding out for shorter working hours and an alternative view of the future of the car industry. ‘We have a huge amount of intelligence in this factory,’ says works council member Tom Adler, also an active member of Stuttgart Ökologisch Sozial. ‘It’s not beyond the capacity of our designers and engineers to think beyond the motor car.’
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Transnational Republics of Commoning | David Bollier - 0 views
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The nation-state as now constituted, in its close alliance with capital and markets, is largely incapable of transcending its core commitments to economic growth, consumerism, and the rights of capital and corporations -- arguably the core structural drivers of climate change.
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Because the piece -- "Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing Governance Through Emergent Networking" -- is nearly 14,000 words long, I am separating it into three parts. You can download the full essay as a pdf file here.
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In moments of crisis, when the structures of conventional governance are suddenly exposed as weak or ineffectual, it is clear that there is no substitute for ordinary people acting together.
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The Revolution will (not) be decentralised: Blockchains - Commons TransitionCommons Tra... - 0 views
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Decentralised topologies and non-discriminatory protocols have been all but replaced by a recentralisation of infrastructure, as powerful corporations now gatekeep our networks. Everything might be accessible, but this access is mediated by a centralised entity. Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure.
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These centralising tendencies have also reared their head in cryptocurrencies.
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powerful mining pools now control much of the infrastructure and rent-seeking individuals control a lion’s share of Bitcoin’s value.
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