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Institutionalizing the Commons: An Italian Primer

"This chapter is devoted to what I believe is a rather interesting and unique experiment in transforming indignation into new institutions of the commons. Perhaps this praxis “Italian style” could become an example for a global strategy."

 

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Resilience Under Violence: The Highlander Center

A suspicious fire destroyed one of the main buildings of the Highlander Center in late March, an almost century-old civil rights school in Tennessee that once housed the likes of Rosa Parks and Dr. King. What has happened since our last discussion with the newest co-directors of the school and what do we need to know about the white power symbol that was found spray painted on the premises?

The Co-op With Forty Years of Making Loans to Co-ops

At Shared Capital Cooperative, a Twin Cities-based loan fund, Executive Director Christina Jennings rattles off what the fund has in its pipeline. About a dozen loans were recently approved, she says, another 16-18 in the final application phases, and another 25-30 leads that are in active pre-application conversations with her team.

May 14, 2019

Solidarity Economy Roads

Having previously identified the participation of workers in decision-making as the key to the emergence of solidarity in labor and the recuperation of work’s “rich meaning and content,” Razeto deepens and expands his analysis of participation and self-management. A “bottom-up” analysis of management, power, and authority – understood as a gift the subordinated make to those in power – enables a powerful critique of centralization, bureaucracy, delegation, and co-optation.

Worker-Owned Cooperatives Can Succeed

The CEO of a nonprofit expressed how conflicted she was about being a white woman running a business with mostly Latina/o workers. Her conflict was rooted in a sense of social justice that was pulling her in two directions. On the one hand, she had been told all her life that, as a woman, she is less valuable than men. So being a female CEO is, in itself, a kind of achievement. On the other hand, she recognized that she is a white woman who’s essentially the boss of a bunch of Latina/o workers who she doesn’t pay that much. She hoped to find a way to address this issue.

Tucson’s 'cohousing' neighborhoods

Imagine living in a community where everyone knows your name, remembers your birthday and offers to make you dinner on a regular basis.

Three Tucson communities have embraced such a lifestyle, called “cohousing,” which is a growing housing trend nationwide.

Dubbed “intentional, collaborative neighborhoods that combine extensive common facilities with private homes,” cohousing appears to be the antithesis of today’s computer-connected world.

How to Seize the Means

In May of 2011, the seventy workers of Vio.Me stopped getting paid. Like many Greek capitalists, the long-absentee owner of this industrial chemical manufacturer faced financial ruin, and would soon file for bankruptcy. As such, the plant was abandoned. There would be no more jobs there, and the machines would soon be taken out and sold. For the people working in this plant, this was an especially frightening prospect.

How Namasté Solar Became a Worker Co-op

When Boulder-based solar energy company Namasté Solar first went looking for capital to expand in 2004, it could have gone through the hassle of securing a bank loan or put together a dog-and-pony show to attract outside investors. But the company decided it wanted to partner with the people who knew the business better than anyone: its own staff.