Blogs

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.

Culture is the primary driving force in human affairs—not ideology, not technology, and not “them.” I, like so many of us, want the world to change in ways that can enable it to work better in support of life, joy, love, and creativity. In spite of this, we have taken ourselves to the darkest edge, doing enormous damage to every form of life across our Earth, including ourselves. In both cases, it’s the work of the cultures we produce. At no point in our history has it been as necessary as now to learn how to use our cultures so that they serve, more and more, the welfare of life, and damage it less and less. I believe this makes understanding how culture works muy importante.

For some time now I have been reading, a page or two at a time, Christopher Alexander's four volume work The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, which is marvelous, idiosyncratic, visionary, and practical, the product of deep collaborative experience and a free mind.

The third and fourth volumes are more focused on architecture, which is Alexander's field. Not being an architect, I discovered that one way to regain my concentration/curiosity when reading his description and analysis of the process followed in contracting and carrying out particular building projects is to imagine that he is describing the process of organizing a cooperative, or some other social movement-building project. I can then see how the deep patterns and principles are relevant to the work.
 

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

Cornel West and Thomas Chatterton Williams discuss art in a polarized world.

In this blog I argue that root democracy, a central notion of the Growing Democracy Project, is the driving force of democratic deliberation: 1) wanting to hear and understand the other, especially when there is a conflict of any kind; and 2) being willing to disclose what is happening for you and what you want, especially in the context of a difficult problem.

Glenn Loury receives some negative feedback on how he "fights" with critical race theory advocates. He then thinks about the feedback on the spot, seeking to find what can be useful.

An exceptional discussion between Cornel West, black socialist, and Glen Loury, black capitalist.

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

Moving out of the grief of toxic masculinity

Collective Action groups, no matter how cooperative, are full of conflict. That's the nature of human life. The keys for working with conflicts are for members to personally pursue 1) wanting to hear and understand the other, and 2) be willing to disclose what is happening for you and what you want, especially when it is challenging to do so. 

The Growing Democracy Project (GDProject) envisions a national transformative civic educational system. Its job would be to develop legions of highly competent democratic practitioners to make democracy the predominant social and political force in our country. 

An interview with Jessica Gordon-Nembhard.

We are living in the unusual, and we don't know what that means. Maybe, all bets are off. Whatever, we will need to rethink a lot.

The New York Times is making a sincere and fairly effective effort to correct its serious missed-recognition of events and people (mostly women and people of color). One example of this is the publication of an Op-Ed piece about Ella Baker, a black woman who played as major a role in the Black Freedom Movement throughout the mid-20^th century, including the Civil Rights Movement, as anyone. Her biographer, Barbara Ransby, beautifully captures the heart, mind, soul, and hands of Baker’s work in 1250 words.

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.

What do Americans call home?

Black Live Matter Activist and Tea Party organizer discuss politics