Defragmenting our selves
Owning the Earth is an account of Western land ownership from the medieval period, through colonisation to the present, though it does not, alas, always recognise how geographically restricted it is. While I enjoyed the book’s account of private property in the Anglo-sphere I’d have to disagree with reviews that refer to it as ‘comprehensive’….
Imagine you have sacrificed hundreds of hours of your volunteering time to a non-profit organisation doing good work. After years of effort, often exhaustion, you discover that the directors don’t care that much about whether you succeeded in helping those people you intended to help. They care mostly about how much time they can spend…
In my recent review of People Over Capital, I commented that many co-operatives have been set up by radically-minded co-operators, but that they often fail to remain politically radical, or fail to pass their radical thinking onto others. I am interested particularly in trying to develop, over the long term, an interplay between co-ops and…
When I’ve talked about what a co-operative economy might look like I’ve had it said to me a few times that Yugoslavia, back when it was Yugoslavia, had an economy made up of co-operatives and that this experiment didn’t go very well. It turned out this wasn’t really true, but I discovered it can be…
I recently decided to look into how established housing co-ops with resources and access to better interest rates might help create new housing co-ops. Originally I imagined a kind of hire-purchase agreement between the new co-op and mother co-op, in which the mother co-op would buy the building, then lease it to the new co-op….