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’….
Renting a home in London can be a living nightmare. Renters feel little control over their own homes, are forbidden to hang pictures on a wall, or take up state support in hard times. Their happiness and mental health is held hostage to the whims of landlords who refuse to do essential repairs or enter…
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…
The reader’s attitude to this book is likely to depend on what they think of the subtitle. Do you want an alternative to capitalism, and do you think co-ops can offer it? People Over Capital is a book of essays on co-operatives put together in 2012 and published by New Internationalist. What makes it interesting…
I feel hugely underqualified to review this economics classic, not just because I’m not an economist (ignorance seems to be regarded as a qualification among many of them) but because the book takes in a vast sweep of British/European history. I have doubts about some of the historical narratives he constructs but I’m not well-enough…
This blog post is not a defence of the Labour Party. Months of spinelessness prior to the elections have been followed by weeks of unprincipled positioning by new leaders after it. I see nothing to defend. But it has to be said that their main problem – that they have no economic plan – is…
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….
Last week I found myself, for the sake of a trip out of Mexico City, at some pre-Colombian pyramids. They were big. They were pointy. They dominated the surrounding landscape. Much exploitation must have been necessary to build them. A group of people who considered themselves more important than the others presumably got those others…
This is the lid of a toilet on a Virgin train. The same message was also being played in audio in the toilet cubicle. When I came across it yesterday I was trying to work out exactly what creeped me out about Corporate Cute. There’s a lot of it around now. The first example of…