Could this be the herald of another political economy based on abundance, not scarcity and greed? We can help nature to restore itself, cut down emissions, our consumption of mass manufactured and designed-to-break-down crap. We can radically curtail speculative ventures and fictitious commodities.
"I want everyone to have access to as much nutritious food as they need to thrive, and I want local residents to control how that food is produced and distributed," she says in an email to the Journal. "I want housing to be guaranteed for all and for residents to be empowered to make decisions about the things that affect their lives. It's way past time for regular people to be empowered to create the world they want to inhabit, and my involvement with Cooperation Humboldt allows me to help build that reality in the place I've lived for the past 40 years."
Cultural hybridity is increasingly a feature of social change communities around the world, as best practices from cooperatives, social justice movements, environmental coalitions, and startup ecosystems become shared and reassembled in new contexts. The Workers Lab, for example, in Oakland, California, is working on getting traditional entrepreneurs to bring in social justice concerns to their startups. And digital platforms are beginning to see what they can learn from the ownership structures of cooperatives.
In 2009, a group of 16 Italian workers in Padova in Italy saw their lives turn from bad to worse. A 30 year old foundry business they worked for had been in economic trouble for years, and had been bought by a businessman from Egypt, in the aftermath of the financial crisis. He was not good at his job, and had failed to pay the workers for 5 months before filing for bankruptcy. With the support of trade unions and cooperative organisations, the workers chose to restart the activities, but as a worker cooperative.
As it turns out, it only took a few weeks to expose the vulnerability and deep-seated fragility of our economic and political systems. One of the areas in which we are least prepared for the many complex challenges surrounding us is in our relationship to food. The UK, for instance, imports almost half the food it consumes, and the home-grown stuff is for the most part reliant on migrant workers from eastern Europe. If labour shortages were already a source of anxiety before coronavirus, the prospect that we might run out of food is now very real indeed.
The coronavirus pandemic has once again exposed the cruelty of landlords and the private rented system. Research has shown that 12% of tenants have had to choose between food and bills or paying the rent during this crisis.
Friday, May 8, 2020
10-11:00 a.m. Mountain TimeIn the new world made by the coronavirus, there has been a lot of discussion recently about online collaboration and work. But what about governance? If we are to have community-owned platforms, we’ll have to skill up in platform-based community governance. In this webinar, we are joined by two people who have been doing just that—in contexts ranging from crisis relief to running a national government.
Speakers
Once a week for the past six weeks, I have purchased a $35 box with veggies and fruits from Feed Sonoma, which has been growing like crazy during the pandemic.
There are two significant opportunities that are possible in this time when most people have developed a sense that the old normal is not about to return, and we need to be willing to make major changes to how our society and economy work. The first opportunity is to ask ourselves what kinds of organizational structures would respond better to meeting human need and enhance our ability to engage people to build a better more caring society. If we reflect on the lessons above, what type of organization would be most appropriate and likely to perform better? The
Can May Day 2020 be the beginning of a new labor movement? A labor movement not divided by credentialism, artificial class divisions* and other systemic systems designed to divide us? I hope so. I think that this is a generational moment. We have a pandemic that cares little for people’s identity and we have had to rediscover the concept of mutual aid and support to manage through it. Perhaps we can keep this energy moving, growing, and creating a new world.
Let’s make this May Day the beginning of a new world.
