Kategorie: English

The text »Peer-commonist produced livelihoods« is now available in Korean language (PDF)!

Dr. Jang, Hun-Gyo, from the Research Center on the Commons and Sustainable Society of the National Jeju University in South Korea, has carefully translated the text into Korean. That’s really great, thank you very much!

The text is a chapter of the following book: Ruivenkamp, G. & A. Hilton (2017). Perspectives on Commoning. Autonomist Principles and Practices, London: Bloomsbury Publishers (former Zed Books), p. 417-461. License: CC BY-NC 4.0

On February, 18th/19th, 2021, the project „Society after Money“ is holding a workshop online: „Envisioning Post-Capitalist Societies via Simulation – Critique, Utopias and Agent Based Modelling“ (PDF-Flyer).

How might a post-capitalist society look like? How can we conceive modes of production and coordination that no longer rely on money, markets and the state? Is this possible on a large-scale, not only as small community projects, but society-wide?

The interdisciplinary research group „Society after Money“ (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation), whose goal is to build an Agent Based Model of a post-capitalist economy that can serve as a laboratory to foster thinking about a society after money via experimentation, has invited scholars from respective fields to debate the nexus of critique, utopia and simulation.

Find more informations on the project’s website.

Originally published on Fightback.org.nz, a trans-Tasman socialist media project operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia.

Over the last couple of years, we have seen leftist activists throwing themselves into electoral movements – Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and more recently the movement for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and for Bernie Sanders in the US¹. To some extent, enthusiasm about these popular campaigns is certainly understandable after decades of only defensive or unsuccessful left wing struggles which were not able to achieve structural change. However, there is also a lot of confusion about what to actually expect from an electoral strategy, since these movements often talk the language of radical change (e.g. Sander’s “political revolution”) and socialism, but in fact only have a social democratic program for regulating capitalism. I would argue that for radical leftists, it makes sense to figure out where we actually want to get – let’s call it communism – in order to figure out how to get there and what our practice should look like. (Spoiler alert: electoralism is not such a practice.)

A sentiment that is shared by many within the growing climate movement is that there is a connection between the capitalist mode of production and the climate crisis. In this piece, I will analyse this connection and explore what that means for transformational strategies towards eco-communism as well as immediate demands for fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

NOW RELEASED!

Project Society After Money is an interdisciplinary project between commons theory, evolutionary political economy, media studies and sociology, that enter into a dialogue with one another in order to look at their specific theories and criticisms of money. Conceived as the beginning of a necessary interdisciplinary dialogue, the possibilities of post-monetary forms of organization and production are taken into account and examined. On one hand there is a lot of talk about ‚digital revolution‘, ‚mediatized society‘, ’networks‘, ‚Industry 4.0‘. On the other hand the present is described in terms of crisis: ‚financial crisis‘, ‚economic crisis‘, ‚planetary boundaries‘. At once there is the description of a media-technological change along with massive social and ecological disruptions.

[This text has been translated into Korean]

[Chapter in: Ruivenkamp, G. & A. Hilton (2017). Perspectives on Commoning. Autonomist Principles and Practices, London: Bloomsbury Publishers (former Zed Books), p. 417-461. License: CC BY-NC 4.0]

By Stefan Meretz

Introduction

The class struggle fails because it only addresses the question of how wealth is distributed and fundamentally fails to consider how it is produced. Essentially, production is treated as neutral, and commodities are more or less understood as objects, material or immaterial, that circulate through an economy; capitalism thus becomes an external system of power vis-à-vis the individual, visited only for the sale of our labour power or to buy commodities for our reproduction. Crucially, according to this rendition of socioeconomic and thus political meta-structure, we – the masses, the multitude – and capital – the hegemonic, power – are ontologically distinguished, quite separate entities. This basic analysis and the consequent call to solidarity demands a radical review.

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Between 15 – 17 November, 2016, The European Commons Assembly gathered in Brussels a group of commoners coming from different parts of Europe who claimed for a pan-European movement for the commons. This video shows a summary of the energizing kick-off event — followed by some more vids below.

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On 22 September this blog has turned ten years old [DE] — and it’s still going strong! In order to celebrate this event we have asked various companions of keimform.de to share their memories and thoughts on our blog. The responses that we have received we’ll publish here in loose order.

The emerging social movements of the commons are very diverse, which is good, but also very fragmented, which may not be a good thing. So we need media that can report on this bio-diversity and point to underlying common threads. There are still preciously few online media outlets that do this. One consisting voice in the German-language world, with regular English reporting as well, has been Keimform, which acts as a necessary bridge between the German-speaking world and those who only know the lingua franca of our times.

Congratulations on a full decade of sharing and reporting!! Bravo to the team of editors who has been providing this unpaid service so consistently!

— Michel Bauwens, P2P theorist and activist, director and founder of the P2P Foundation

David Bollier was invited to talk about the Commons in the TV show „Conversations with Great Minds“. Watch the great introduction to the Commons in two parts:

(mehr …)

On 22 September this blog has turned ten years old [DE] — and it’s still going strong! In order to celebrate this event we have asked various companions of keimform.de to share their memories and thoughts on our blog. The responses that we have received we’ll publish here in loose order.

Congratulations to Keimform for a decade of exploring the challenges of commoning, the promise of free software, the structural deficiencies of capitalism, and the fate of the human condition! I have frequently been introduced to sharp new perspectives by the contributors to Keimform. May this rare voice of deep, committed inquiry continue to flourish and expand!

— David Bollier, commons activist and blogger