Defragmenting our selves
Ostrom wrote about the governing of Common Pool Resources, in Governing the Commons. In particular she was writing in opposition to neo-liberal economics which was claiming at the time that private ownership was the only way to solve the mythical ‘Tragedy of the commons’. . Ostrom created a list of common design principles from the experience of…
I don’t usually read books by people like Gar Alperovitz – he had a career as a Legislative Director in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and very much tries to speak a language that professional politicians will understand. I couldn’t give a monkey’s whether those people understand me, since they’ve never shown any…
I haven’t posted much on the history of political organising but recently someone recommended to me the out-of-print book Angry Young Man. This is the autobiography of Leslie Paul, a founder of the Woodcraft Folk who saw at first hand many of the political movements of the early 20th Century. It is well-written and…
Have you ever wondered what happens when a big multinational mining company turns up in your small Colombian town with the intention of building a gold mine? A new report produced by a UK-based campaigning group records the experience of local people in Cajamarca, Tolima, as South African-based gold miner AngloGold Ashanti moved in. The…
This week I interviewed some people from Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), an organisation for people affected by bad mortgages and evictions in Spain. I’ll write it up properly later but a summary of why they seem to be successful: 1. The organisation is a network of local groups made up mostly of…
Last night I was at an event put on by Stir magazine, ‘Old Forms, New Strategies: Trade Unions, Co-operatives and the Commons’, which discussed the historical lack of co-operation between trade unions and the co-operative movement in the UK. The lack of interaction is not an accident. A mixture of ideology and self-interest means that…
This is something of a follow-up to the previous post, as I have just been reading about someone else, James Meade, who proposed a Citizen’s Trust that would hold shares on behalf of the population – a type of property ownership certainly more real than Thatcher’s version in which we all own a lot of…
Rudolf Meidner, one of the architects of the Swedish welfare state – a pretty impressive thing to have on your CV – wanted to go a step further than simply taxing corporations. He proposed that companies issue new shares every year to the value of 20% of their profits. This share levy would be passed…
A few weeks ago I was asked to contribute to Elevate Festival by watching livestreams of debates, joining in on Twitter and otherwise increasing the web presence of the festival. Elevate is discussing a wide range of things I am interested so I was happy to do this, but these days I really like to…
Recently I spoke with the manager of a foodbank in South London. She didn’t offer to go on the record but I afterwards made a few notes on what she was saying: They have recently seen a big increase in people coming to them, many due to delays in benefit, the abolition of crisis loans…