Defragmenting our selves
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…
I’ve written about organisations on this blog, and I’ve written about people, and I’ve written about politics. What I haven’t talked about enough is relationships. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks but was finally prompted to do it today by this story about the role of Blair’s personal leadership…
Curious things keep happening in UK and US politics. The pundits are puzzled: why do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn exist? Why Brexit? A collective madness has settled over the populations of these countries, is the impression you might get from reading seasoned commentators. Ordinary people keep deciding things that make no sense to those who rule…
It appears that many people in the UK, some of them left-inclined, joined a right-driven rush to exit the EU, because they feel abandoned by the institutions that rule us. Leave voters have reacted to this with clear anti-establishment sentiment; it is even visible in claims that we simply need ‘a change’. Voters’ services had…
House prices in London, most people agree, are too high. Orthodoxy on left and right says that this is due either to the free market or constraints on the free market respectively. The two sides propose different solutions. The right demand that planning controls be minimized or simply scrapped, while the left demand that new…
There was much that interested me in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future. The first part of the book constructs a critique of what they call ‘folk politics’. This they define as privileging the local, the small over the large, fetishising horizontalism and direct action, refusing to make demands, and a lack of…
The slogan that has sprung from IMPA, one of the first factories to respond to the Argentinian economic crisis with a worker take-over, is Occupy, Resist, Produce. No part of that is easy. But the rewards are great enough that ailing businesses, usually mismanaged, are still being occupied today. I spoke to a member of…
This is a video of a protest I went to in Buenos Aires, in defense of murgas and street culture. A murga is a carnival performance group, usually attached to a particular barrio, and associated with the poorer end of society. A couple of weeks ago police attacked, allegedly without warning, a murga in a…
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…
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…