Josh Davis's blog

What is the meaning of meaning, and how can we fill our lives with it once we've figured out what it is?

Why we are still on Twitter (and other corporate-owned social media platforms).

The Argentine government has recently suspended 11,000 worker co-ops on flimsy reasoning. Argentine worker cooperators call for a reversal of that policy and solidarity from the international community.

DAO tooling is a poor fit for co-ops (and everyone else too).

DAOs have a fundamental flaw that make them inappropriate for cooperatives: they are written in code.

There are a lot of misconceptions in the US about the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. A conversation happened online recently that highlighted some of those.

Thinking as a movement requires public conversations about where we do and do not agree with one another.

A bill in California would create a very strange kind of worker co-op federation.

Why the metaphor of a cooperative ecosystem should be changed to a metaphor of a cooperative organism.

It is important that non-profit cooperative developers democratize their own work places.

We need to think about how we approach and use leftist lingo in the cooperative movement.

There are times and places where alleviating some suffering for the short term is valuable and desirable, but there are plenty of others where easing pain in the short-term is actually harmful.  Pain, after all, isn't just some negative sensation — it's a signal that we're being damaged in some way and need to do something to stop that damage from occuring.

A story about how cooperation used to work.

In a "letter from Mondragon", recently published by on the Cincinnati Union Co-op Initiative (CUCI) website, Armin Isasti, makes some incisive and thought-provoking observations that I think we in the worker co-op movement would do well to consider.  Below are some quotes from his letter along with my thoughts and comments.

Imagining a multi-generational ecovillage.

Something came up at the Worker Cooperative National Conference in Austin that created a lot of mixed feelings in me.  At the USFWC member meeting one of the topics for discussion was setting up a joint 401(k) plan for member co-ops.  While it's great to see the staff at USFWC helping worker co-ops harness the power of cooperation in their benefits packages, there are a number of aspects of the 401(k) model of retirement saving that I think should be cause for concern among cooperators.

In editing an article recently, that touched on the design of the US monetary system,  I was forcefully reminded of 1) how complex (some would say purposefully so) our monetary system is, and 2) how rarely anyone tries to talk about it in an easily digestable way.  There was a time in this country's history when knowledge of the fundamentals of the monetary system was wide spread among the common citizens, not just Wall Street financiers and academic economists.  Nowadays, however, even a lot of financiers and economists fail to understand either the design or the problems of our money system.