July 2019 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Fw: Fw: Info
by Natalie Golovin 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

Mark: You and your compatriots on P2P view the world from revisionism. Go ahead and keep looking through your microscope-provided by your "teachers." Or take the time and read some very old documented evidence available at a library near you= but you may need to stay there awhile on microfiche. -----Original Message----- From: Mark Janssen Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2011 4:39 PM To: P2P Foundation mailing list Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fw: Info On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 10:32 AM, Natalie Golovin <10natalie(a)cox.net> wrote: > The European Tribes treated the Natives no worse than they treated each > other. Whoa. You should really stop talking. You have NO idea what you're talking about. How about forced acculturation, not allowing them to speak their own language (which hold the record of their own history), confined them under threat of violent force into reservations, among other things. But, really, that's probably not even the worst of it -- the worst of it is that for reasons they couldn't ever understand is why you were doing all of these cruel things when they were willing to share it it all with you. Why, when they handed out their hand to be friends, you chopped it off. Remember, they're the ones who gave us Thanksgiving which is still "celebrated" in this nation today. Read the reports made of making first contact with the Native peoples here. You really should read up before propagating the attitudes of conquest. Sorry.... marcos _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation

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Fwd: Making the Universe Great Again
by Michel Bauwens 24 Jul '19

24 Jul '19

contrarian review of the avengers ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Tikkun & the Network of Spiritual Progressives <miriam(a)tikkun.org> Date: Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 3:07 AM Subject: Making the Universe Great Again To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> *Independent progressive media such as ours relies on independent donations such as yours. **Click here <https://default.salsalabs.org/T097d240b-d322-4ab6-9132-bc6ee61b719d/c02a818…> to make a tax-deductible contribution to *Tikkun. Making the Universe Great Again <https://default.salsalabs.org/Teaf92077-9c2c-43a3-8916-fdbcbe8a7c50/c02a818…> Thoughts on <https://default.salsalabs.org/T2440dc96-dac6-44f1-8808-0cef1f7a6200/c02a818…>*Avengers: Endgame <https://default.salsalabs.org/Te24bc847-1e07-475b-934d-dcb58073181e/c02a818…>* by Charles Eisenstein *Image courtesy of Pixabay.* Two-thirds of the way through the interminable *Avengers: Endgame*, I leaned over to Stella and whispered, “They say a shared ordeal makes a marriage stronger.” Gaping plot holes, characters that were more like self-caricatures, scenes that seemed as if they were grafted in from another movie, and concatenations of vapid one-liners that served as dialog made the film nearly unwatchable. Unwatchable to me, anyway. When I offered my complaints to my teenage son, he gave me quite a passionate schooling. My incomprehension of the movie was due largely to my having somehow missed most of the other 22 films in the *Avengers* franchise. No matter. Philip is right that it is unfair to pick on *Avengers*. Most of what I am about to say applies to countless other Hollywood action movies of recent years. At this point it is customary to issue a spoiler alert. I am going to reveal pretty much the entire plot. That won’t matter though, because if you have followed the series you have already seen this film. If you haven’t, you will find the plot so contrived and the characters so flimsy that you won’t care what happens. Walking out of the theater, I felt something else besides the smug glee of ridicule and the annoyance of three hours squandered. I felt alarm, even dread. Aesthetics are inseparable from other dimensions of human creation and human relating. They are political, they are economic, they are ecological. That such a film even exists, especially with large budget and resounding commercial success, is diagnostic of a severely diseased civilization. The aesthetic shortcomings of *Avengers: Endgame* reflect disturbing trends in politics and society. Worse, the film is a propaganda and indoctrination vehicle for those trends. I’ll explore three of them here: the shattering of causal connections and holistic understanding; escapism into delusions of restoring a heroic past; and the descent into a virtual reality of image that seems to excuse us from the laws of material reality. All of these have profound political implications. *Restoring the Past* *Avengers: Endgame* is the sequel to *Avengers: Infinity War*, in which the arch-villain, Thanos, succeeds in his evil plan to collect all six infinity stones and kill half of all living beings in the universe. (Along with them, he kills half of the superhero Avengers, including Spiderman.) His rationale is, amusingly, humanitarian and ecological: to alleviate the suffering caused by overpopulation. Refreshingly, the villain wins complete victory in that film, which ends with Thanos retiring to a remote planet, enjoying the sunset as he rests after a job well done. A few minutes into the new film, a squad of the remaining Avengers find him on his remote planet. He is occupied in his garden, and has destroyed the infinity stones so that no one will ever be tempted again by their power. Unmoved by Thanos’s transformation into an organic gardener and unswayed by what appears to be his stirrings of regret or at least doubt, they chop off his head and return home, avenged. The rest of the movie is occupied with their use of time travel technology to go back in time, collect the infinity stones from the past, and use them to undo Thanos’s handiwork. What the stones can do, they can undo. It is not only the stones that they bring back from the past though, it is also Thanos himself, and along with him the familiar dramatic engine of heroes versus arch-villain. Moreover, the Thanos they bring back is not the nuanced, evolving Thanos in his garden, but an old, unregenerate version, purely malevolent and unproblematically worth killing. Neither the filmmakers nor the superheroes knew what to do without him. Their identity cannot stand without an evil to define them as good, as heroes. Without Thanos, Thor becomes a drunken oaf, Ironman becomes a suburban dad, Hawkeye becomes a vigilante assassin, and Hulk becomes a giant green scientist. Their superpowers are as superfluous as the MX missile became with the demise of the USSR. In the milieu of geopolitics, the last truly credible good-versus-evil story died with the Soviet Union, a signal event that inaugurated the slow dissolution of the good-versus-evil storyline altogether. Despite various attempts to resuscitate its corpse, the succession of candidates for the New Evil – Colombian drug cartels, radical Islam, the ‘axis of evil,” and so forth – inspires little dread. These puny opponents are inadequate to incite war fever or justify the continuation of the military-industrial complex. Imagine an *Avengers* sequel with a smaller, weaker Thanos. Failing to find a new foe as mighty and diabolical as the old Soviet Thanos, we try to bring it back from the past in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But this is not the movies. No amount of narrative management, psyops, or political prestidigitation can inflate today’s Russia into anything as scary as the Soviet Union, with its ideology of global communist revolution, its totalitarian police state, its Gulag Archipelago, and its Iron Curtain. Before the Avengers (and the filmmakers) brought back Thanos, evil had essentially retired. The Avengers and their powers were, like the military hardware in the American arsenal, obsolete. It is still obsolete; unable to win a decisive victory over puny opponents like Afghanistan or Iraq, the United States military succeeds only in sowing chaos wherever it strikes. It is as if the Avengers themselves have become the new evil. To Make America Great Again requires some kind of reference point. Great in respect to what? What exactly is it about the past that Trump and other national chauvinists around the world seek to restore? While Trump might harbor erratic non-interventionist tendencies, these necessarily collide with the ugly truth of “greatness” in an imperial system, where great equals dominant. Supremicism requires someone to vanquish and subjugate. Here is a plot summary of the *Avengers* series to date. A bad guy appears, the fate of the world or galaxy is at stake, and the hero(es) destroy him. Then another bad guy appears, the fate of the world is at stake again, and the heroes destroy him. Then another, and another.... What is the reason they keep appearing? There isn’t one, except that they are bad. Maintaining a livable world, then, requires an endless series of fights. Does that remind you at all of American foreign policy? Establishing evil as elemental, the cause of our troubles, the *Avengers* series elevates a simplified Hero archetype, promotes a puerile conception of greatness, and writes a prescription for endless war. The *Avengers* plotline expresses and, I fear, validates a political nostalgia, suggesting to the public that greatness might be resurrected, and that the hero-state is still a viable national identity. Like most action movies, it harks as well to another kind of nostalgia: for the days when problems could be solved by force. Wanting to become again “the greatest” – Trump’s version of the neocons’ “full spectrum dominance” – makes sense only in a world where dominating the Other brought benefit to the self, a world where progress meant more effective ways of killing, conquering, and controlling, where the next antibiotic, the next weedkiller, the next weapon would bring happily-ever-after victory. It is a nostalgia for a time when our arsenals were actually useful for something, when humanity could escape ecology, and when unfettered capitalism brought prosperity for all. It is doubtful whether such a time ever existed (in any case, nostalgia usually recalls an imagined past), but at least the illusion seemed true at the time. Judging by the success of *Avengers*, part of us holds to that story still. *Making Nonsense of the World* The reader might attribute my dislike for this movie to my over-intellectual resistance to a bit of mindless summer fun. If so, my highbrow disdain was shared by an eight-year-old boy and his sister who, along with their bewildered mother, were the only other occupants of the theater. Meandering around the aisles and paying only sporadic attention to the movie (which, admittedly, is just as watchable in random ten-second chunks as in its entirety), they brought to mind a similarly jaded and inattentive American public. Take a few days’ or weeks’ break from watching the news, and you may discover upon your return that current events make no less sense in sporadic bursts than they do in one continual stream. The media makes little attempt to connect events to each other or to larger historical and economic processes, offering the thinnest of plotlines, or none at all, for the seemingly senseless barrage of shootings, wars, scandals, coups, election results, and so on. In the film as well as the news media, it is not as if events are wholly unexplained; it is that the explanations cannot bear scrutiny. Juvenile metanarratives, simplistic motives, and ad hoc explanations pass without question. As with *Avengers*, if you have immersed yourself in the stories and become attached to the fictional world of the mainstream news narrative, what is senseless to the newcomer makes sense. Only by pulling back is the nonsense manifest. The problem with *Avengers* is not that it conflicts with reality – it is, after all, fantasy – it is that its internal reality seems so contrived. Why are Pim Particles necessary for time travel? How does Thanos transport an entire army though time using a one-person supply of them? Why, despite its high technology, does that army rely on hand-to-hand combat? Why, if the whole universe is involved, are nearly all the superheroes from one tiny planet, Earth? The viewer automatically lets such questions slide, accepting the inconsistencies and ad hoc explanations because he knows it is necessary for the plot to proceed. This goes beyond a willing suspension of disbelief; it is a willing suspension of rational thought. Any explanation is good enough as long as the narrative requires it. Outside the theater, what thoughts daren’t we think? What questions and inconsistencies do we let slide, so that the show might go on? Above I referred to gaping plot holes, and while there are a few, what disturbs me more aesthetically and politically are the unbelievable patches used to hold the fabric of the plot together. The contrived explanations of how and why in *Avengers: Endgame* eerily parallel the way the news media present current events to the public. Some rationale is needed for why multiple trips to the past are impossible, so the Pim Particles, in limited supply, are called in. Some rationale is necessary for bombing Syria, so poison gas attacks are called in. In the movie, the flimsiest pretext – or sometimes none at all – is sufficient to motivate a character’s action. The viewer endures a cacophony of loosely connected events. Usually I could fill in the gaps with a stretch of imagination; other times my imagination snapped in disbelief. To perform these imaginatory calisthenics requires a certain degree of buy-in to the drama, a willingness to suspend disbelief, give the narrator the benefit of the doubt, and fill in the gaps. This film was practice in accepting absurd premises to collude with the storytellers in upholding a narrative. The story of the world that established power offers us, in both its liberal and conservative variants, is not much more coherent than *Avengers: Endgame*. In the real world, so attached is the public to a political mythology that preserves its national and cultural identity, that it ignores gaping plot holes and logical incoherencies. Venezuela’s economic crisis can be blamed on “economic mismanagement” even after years of crushing sanctions. Pariah states like Iran and Cuba can be excoriated for their human rights violations even as allies like Saudi Arabia and Guatemala commit worse ones. Neoliberal austerity is prescribed for financial crises caused, self-evidently, by past austerity policies. The political class complains loudly of Russian interference in elections, while the United States has egregiously interfered in elections for the last seventy years, and mounted coups and invasions when the interference doesn’t work. And the very same politicians and journalists who used obviously fraudulent claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for war now offer equally flimsy claims about Assad’s poison gas attacks and Iranian plots to attack US forces and Russia’s plans to disable the US power grid, claims which reverberate through the mainstream media as if the Iraqi WMD fiasco and all the other frauds had never happened. Conditioned by films like *Avengers*, the public accepts without much question thin and incoherent plotlines like the Mad Dictator, America the Exceptional Nation, and the Bloodthirsty Other. Political leaders can ply their base with infantile stories demonizing the other side, as if the other side comprised comic book characters with debased, cartoonish emotions and motivations. I am afraid that it is not only the xenophobic, bigoted sectors of the political right that deploy this tactic. Limited to the vocabulary of fighting, campaigns, and struggles, activists and dissidents on the Left often mirror the system they hope to change. Disagreeing on the identity of the bad guy, they agree on the fundamental good-versus-evil paradigm. Evil takes the form of “corporate greed,” “white supremacy,” and so on, embodied in caricatures of real human beings like the “racist cop,” the “entitled frat boy,” or the demented “climate denier.” Here are the people to hate! My point here is not to argue that racism or misogyny are just so much storytelling. It is to warn of the trap of a simple but false narrative that locates blame for these evils on Evil, that reduces human beings to cartoons, and offers false solutions (defeat the bad guy) accordingly. The Avengers films are, of course, live-action renditions of what was originally a comic book; it is to be expected that the emotions, relationships, and psychology of the characters remain cartoonish. That reviewers saw fit to describe the film’s trite emotionality with words like “pathos,” “somber,” “intimate,” and “devastating” bespeaks either very low expectations, or, worse, a coarsening of emotional perception. Instead of bringing comic book characters to life, it was as if the screenwriters were flattening the characters into cartoons. (Again, it is unfair to pick on *Avengers* – nearly all action movies do the same.) This conditions the public to accept the dehumanized versions of world actors that are necessary to maintain dominant political narratives. Thus stupefied, the public passively acquiesces to the cartoon version of world affairs presented for its consumption, content never to search for a more coherent story that would account for the choices and conditions of real, full human beings, embedded in complex historical, social, and economic conditions. So used are we to senselessness, that we (the collective public) seldom pause to say, “Wait, that doesn’t make sense. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Who stands to gain here? How are these decisions made? Where is this information coming from? What assumptions are taken for granted?” Blithe acceptance of superficial narratives forestalls deeper investigation into causes. For example, blaming terrorism on diabolical fanatics who “hate our freedoms” or on the vague shibboleth of “radical Islam” bypasses any discussion of decades of neoliberal extraction, covert support for dictators, subversion of democracy, and military violence, all of which create conditions for desperation and hate. Even that list is dangerously reductive, simplifying a long, complicated history to four bullet points, but it is a start. One cannot really blame the public for their ready acceptance of the spurious, contrived narratives of politics and entertainment. It is hard to engage in critical thinking when we are barraged by one luridly urgent crisis after another. In both film and reality, the hyperbolic shrillness of the action distracts us from the incoherency of the plot. There is no time to think – the crisis is now! It is urgent! Time is running out! It’s a matter of life and death! Failure in this moment brings dire consequences! In such circumstances, normal rules of civil order do not apply. We must allow those with power to use that power to intervene, urgently, and do whatever it takes to save the day. It is not that urgent crises are illusory. Right now, there are people on the verge of starvation, execution, expulsion, torture, dispossession of land, unjust detention, ebola, death squads, floods, fires, etc. who will suffer or perish without quick intervention. But these events are like the pinnacles of a vast, structured iceberg. Looking only above the surface, they look random, disconnected. Only by directing our attention beneath the surface of mainstream media consciousness can we see the structural causes of these horrors. Films like Avengers condition us to be satisfied with incoherency. Unlike in the film, though, in the real world, underneath the cacophony of the news, which has shattered reality into disconnected fragments, there is a deeper story. A couple levels down, there is a story of dollar hegemony, the ideology of development, and the role of corporations and finance in serving the compulsion of economy to grow in a debt-based system. That story brings some order to the chaotic appearance of world affairs; it also gives birth to new questions, new why’s, which in turn open a portal to a deeper story still.: Separation, humanity separate from nature, individuals separate from the world, an objective reality outside ourselves to dominate and control. To perceive that story, we must become intolerant of the senselessness born from it. *Society of the Spectacle* An odd thing has happened with the development to near-perfection of CGI (computer generated image) technology: as the verisimilitude of the images increases, so does the unreality of the story the images tell. This might exemplify a more general principle: the more control one has over the representation of reality, the farther from reality one strays. The Marxist philosopher Guy Debord described something quite similar in his 1967 classic <https://default.salsalabs.org/T521e9efb-724c-48bb-94ab-e1f3a849cdf2/c02a818…>, *The Society of the Spectacle*. He wrote: When ideology, having become absolute through the possession of absolute power, changes from partial knowledge into totalitarian falsehood, the thought of history is so perfectly annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. The totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present where everything that happened exists for it only as a place accessible to its police. The project already formulated by Napoleon of “the ruler directing the energy of memory” has found its total concretization in a permanent manipulation of the past, not only of meanings but of facts as well. But the price paid for this emancipation from all historical reality is the loss of the rational reference which is indispensable to the historical society, capitalism. It is known how much the scientific application of insane ideology has cost the Russian economy, if only through the imposture of Lysenko. The contradiction of the totalitarian bureaucracy administering an industrialized society, caught between its need for rationality and its rejection of the rational, is one of its main deficiencies with regard to normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the question of agriculture the way capitalism had done, it is ultimately inferior to capitalism in industrial production, planned from the top and based on unreality and generalized falsehood. The 3D animation of CGI technology exacerbates this tendency by suggesting that reality can be whatever we declare it to be. It exemplifies the divergence between what we portray, and what actually is, a key characteristic of Debord’s spectacle. We live, he said, in a spectacle, a show, performing the roles of consumer and producer, occupying a job description, alienated from the totality of the production process of commodities (which themselves are real things rendered into economic things, defined in terms of human convention, stripped of uniqueness and relatedness, abstracted from the matrix of being; i.e. part of the show). As commodity production takes over the world, we plunge into a world of representations, a spectacle masquerading as the real and, through our immersion in it, becoming the real. The digital world, increasingly realistic thanks to CGI and VR, is just one of its manifestations. By a “totalitarian bureaucratic society,” Debord was referring primarily to the Soviet Union. Fifty-two years later, it is hard not to notice how our own society has gelled into the same mold, as it assumes more and more the character of a totalitarian state, particularly in its use of surveillance and its control of narratives. Who would not give a start of recognition at the phrase, “...the permanent manipulation of the past, not only of meaning but of facts as well.” The past means, “That which has happened. That which is already real.” We live at a time when the authorities seem simply to declare reality into existence. When, some years or decades thereafter, their declarations are revealed as arrant lies, no one much notices, at least not enough to stop them from doing it again. Today’s cinematic CGI is also very much a declaration of something into reality. To the eye, it looks real. There it is happening before us. Yet as I said already, despite (or perhaps because of) its verisimilitude, the story the images tell is increasingly ridiculous. Much the same could be said for the political stories fed to the public, which grow increasingly unmoored from both common sense and lived experience. The same digital technology that allows the cinematic declaration of something into seeming reality also allows the altering of existing records: text, audio, and video. We cannot necessarily return to a website to verify that so-and-so actually said what we remember. Orwell imagined a cumbersome process by which past newspaper articles were modified or replaced, and the newspapers reprinted for the archives, to keep them current with the official narrative of the day. Now that is possible with a few keystrokes. Articles and video footage can be excised from the record, or modified to fit the current “reality.” I am told that many of the original TV broadcasts in the hours and days after the 9/11 attacks substantially contradict the official narrative, but have been expunged from the Internet. More commonly, heterodox “meanings and facts” are squeezed to the margins of Internet reality through manipulation of search engine algorithms to give greater weight to “reputable” sources. Thus it is that in the last year, anti-war websites, anti-vaccine websites, anti-GMO websites, and sites discussing unconventional cancer cures have become harder to find on Google and Facebook. It would be unfair to pick on *Avengers: Endgame* for its reliance on CGI to create its pretend reality. It is far from the most extreme example in film. I mention it here because it complements the rest of the film’s unrealism: the contrived and flimsy plot, the cartoonish characters, the simplistic good-versus-evil storyline. It is as if by making the images loud and lurid enough, the filmmakers could force the viewers to accept the story, aid their suspension of disbelief, overcome their resistance to poor screenwriting. That is why CGI is an enabler of lazy and arrogant filmmaking. Instead of acting or plot drawing us into an alternate reality, the filmmaker can rely on mere image. The corollary powers of image manipulation in the political sphere are used in the same way, to overcome the inconsistencies and absurdity of official narration of reality. At the gross level, there are faked photographs and staged videos used to support questionable storylines. These are in addition to the more subtle “camera tricks” of the pre-digital era: for example, featuring a tiny violent minority of an otherwise non-violent gathering of protestors. As technology progresses, it is becoming possible to fabricate fake “recordings” out of whole cloth. “Deep fake” videos can depict a public figure, or anyone actually, speaking words that he never said. As on the movie screen, we can no longer judge what is credible and what is not by the realism of the images that present it. *Return to Reality* *Avengers* may seem to offer a gloomy diagnosis of American political consciousness, but the extremity of its aesthetic shortcomings also suggests the end of an era. I think again of the bored children who shared the theater with us. Despite the lurid CGI special effects, despite the awesomest badass monsters, despite the jaring, attention-grabbing sound effects (we wore ear protection), despite the hyperinflated threat level (the fate of the universe is at stake), and despite scene after scene of superheroic exertion, we the audience did not much care what was happening. Just as monetary hyperinflation precedes economic collapse, so does the hyperinflation of sounds, images, and threat levels portend a crisis in blockbuster cinema. Its tools, however intensified, are not working anymore. The campy asides in Avengers are an admission by the filmmakers of their incapacity to create an absorbing dramatic reality. The characters’ quips and jests amid dire circumstances signal, “We don’t actually believe this is happening.” We the audience don’t believe it either, so we join them in their remove, holding a cynical distance from the scenes. Perhaps there are people out there who were emotionally devastated by the death of Ironman or touched and inspired by Black Widow’s noble sacrifice. I hypothesize, though, that most people observe the cues of what they are supposed to feel, and narrate themselves as having felt it, without really feeling it. There just isn’t a compelling story or characters within which we can lose ourselves. On the political scene a parallel situation prevails: watching the talking heads on TV, one gets the impression that they too do not actually feel what they narrate themselves as feeling. So immersed are they in world of spin, PR, optics, and “messaging” – in another word, lying – that they have lost their mooring to any underlying real convictions. It is all a game now, the game of power. They are not actually afraid of Russia (not like we were of the Soviet Union in my youth). They are not really outraged about the suffering of the Venezuelan people. And they are most certainly not actually indignant when they pillory one of their number for some ethical transgression. The indifference of the children (and even the actors and screenwriters) to the characters and events of *Avengers: Endgame* stirred within me an irrational hope. Perhaps the American public too is growing inured to the spectacle we are offered. Perhaps it too has become so conditioned to image masquerading as reality, that it automatically discounts all images as unreal. Maybe the gaping plot holes in today’s dominant political storylines are endowing us with a prophylactic resistance to all such storylines. Maybe years of threat inflation has deafened us to those who are crying wolf. Perhaps the fundamental trope of good versus evil that drives war narratives is losing its grip, even as its narrators expand it, as in *Avengers*, to cosmic, apocalyptic proportions. Recently we have seen several failures of the manufacture of consent: to a ground war in Syria, armed intervention in Venezuela, and the bombing of Iran. It isn’t that the general public overtly disbelieves the narratives or could cogently rebut them. It is simply that they no longer pay much attention. The stories have lost their hypnotic effect. In tandem with rising distrust in mainstream media, the authorities’ declarations of reality are losing traction. Whatever techniques of VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality) they apply – in fact, all the more as we see the capabilities of these technologies – we come to doubt reality as it has been presented us. In days gone by we accepted the photograph and the video recording as proof of what was real, oblivious to how their selection and framing could powerfully manipulate the viewer. One would think that photoshop and deep fake videos would magnify this manipulative power, but it is perhaps becoming the opposite as we learn to distrust these key instruments of the spectacle. The public’s distrust of official portraits of reality will spread even as the means to produce them become more powerful. Until recently, most people trusted the portrait of reality called Google search results, assuming it to be an unbiased catalog of what was actually on the Web. Then, as Google and the major social media platforms suppressed first hate speech sites, and then conspiracy sites, and now more and more sites that diverge from official narratives (the aforementioned anti-war, anti-vaccine, and holistic health sites, to name a few), people are starting to distrust the dominant Internet players; hence the move by the technological avant garde toward alternative search engines like duckduckgo and, more fundamentally, toward decentralized and distributed internet architecture. This is not to say that internet censorship and narrative management is not working. It still is, to a degree, although the recent failures to manufacture consent for war are significant. Rather, as people recognize that it is happening, it works less well even as the techniques advance, in the same way as CGI images, despite their verisimilitude, make the overall film, the show, the spectacle, less believable. As we lose faith in the show, where are we to turn for truth? Without a commonly agreed source of truth, society breaks up into mutual exclusive realities: red and blue, left and right, pro and anti, each with their own disjoint “meanings and facts.” It is as if each lives in its own universe, its own spectacle that apes the dominant one in its methods and mindsets even if it rejects some of its meanings and facts. Whichever side prevails, it too wanders into delusion, unmoored from the reality that it ultimately must draw from to exist. So it is that the spectacle is killing the planet: when the abstraction called money or GDP becomes more real to us than the earth, water, and life from which it springs, our pretense that we can actually declare reality into existence dissolves into humiliation. So it is, inevitably, with every castle of lies. In the context of theater or fiction, the audience must collude with the storyteller in order to uphold the story. The same is true with the Spectacle put on by the dominant powers of civilization today: the public has an interest in suspending its disbelief. In particular, the affluent classes in affluent societies do not want to know what their affluence is built upon. They have a vested interest in a narrative that obscures the real workings of the world: the exploitation and ruin of people, places, cultures, and ecosystems, even the planet itself. The world we live in today is tolerable only because so much of it is hidden from view. In the political realm as in the personal, the dupe gains temporary benefit from the liar’s lies. The parent unconsciously agrees to believe that the teenager is indeed studying with her friends. Liar and dupe collude in maintaining the lie. Do we really want to know the truth? It is understandable why many people would not. Newly revealed truth is certain to bring discomfort, the shattering of familiar certainties, and the disruption of existing social arrangements. Fearing all that, the public and the elites join in a vast game of let’s pretend. The elites tell the lies, the public pretends to believe them, and everyone pretends the pretense isn’t happening. That is how we get lost in the spectacle. To transcend this matrix of image, representation, hype, spin, and narrative, we have to want the truth more than we want to maintain a comfortable, familiar story-of-the-world. That story is already becoming less comfortable, both because of social and ecological breakdown and because of an evolution of consciousness from separation, competition, and scarcity toward cooperation, compassion, and empathy. Yet still, fear of the unknown keeps us there, as a society and, more than many of us would like to admit, as individuals. *Avengers: Endgame* clings to familiar storylines, resisting that step into the borderlands of a new story. I imagined an entirely different endgame. The Avengers find Thanos on his retirement planet and find him in his vegetable garden. Thoughts of vengeance flee them as they realize both its futility and, more important, that Thanos the cosmic criminal is undergoing a change of heart. The Avengers decide to nourish that change of heart by showing Thanos that his plan to improve the universe through total dominating power has produced the opposite result. And it dawns then on the Avengers themselves that maybe they are not so different from Thanos, sharing with him what Walter Wink called the “myth of redemptive violence” – the improving of the world through force. Their violent superpowers rendered useless with the retirement of their arch-nemesis, they put them aside so that they may discover other kinds of gifts. Wouldn’t that be a better formula for our future? To move into that new story, we would have to cease our collusion with the old one. We have to release the grip of nostalgia for an imaginary time when superior force could solve our problems by destroying our enemies. We have to be dissatisfied with the contrived, cartoonish plotlines and dehumanized actors of the political narrative we are offered. We have to doubt the spectacle presented to us as reality, and understand that faked photographs and staged events are just the most overt level of a grand deception and self-deception that encompasses not only politics, but psychology too. Most of the political observations in this essay could equally apply to me and maybe to you. Do you have a personal narrative in which you are the good guy? Do you weave flimsy storylines (called rationalizations and justifications) that maintain a certain meaning to your life? Do you project images onto other people and the world that are every bit as fake as movie CGI? This is not to suggest that we put an end to the human drama. We are story-making animals. Stories and symbols, that say who we are and what is real, are a fundamental way that human beings create the world together. Today though, we are stuck collectively in a story that does not serve us and does not serve life. For many this is true on the personal level too. At such times as today, we are repelled by inauthenticity, posturing, and pretense, and we want to come back to the real. *__* *Charles Eisenstein* *is a speaker and writer. His most recent books are *Sacred Economics* and *The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible. *Click below to share this article on the platform of your choice!* * <https://default.salsalabs.org/T0aa6c969-8227-4ebb-8723-80fc6c75a88e/c02a818…> <https://default.salsalabs.org/T336cd43d-e78e-4d5f-b912-e7f783ea76f3/c02a818…>* *Independent progressive media such as ours relies on independent donations such as yours. **Click here <https://default.salsalabs.org/Tc8c448c0-66d3-4f30-91cd-8cfca2d4454c/c02a818…> to make a tax-deductible contribution to *Tikkun. Contact Us *Tikkun* & the Network of Spiritual Progressives 2342 Shattuck Ave #1200 Berkeley, California 94704 (510) 644-1200 magazine(a)tikkun.org Unsubscribe <https://tikkun.salsalabs.org/manage-your-subscription?eId=9071e3d1-80a6-4e0…> -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: [P2P Foundation - Commons Transition Network WorkGroup] 4: New co-signed letter to the Pope
by Michel Bauwens 21 Jul '19

21 Jul '19

have you noticed that times are changing, also generationally, I saw three signs recentlly one, erik davis on a Rebel Wisdom video, explaining how the occult has gone mainstream two, the legalization of cannabis and three, this one here, UFO's taken seriously by the mainstream press, these three things are unprecedented and a sign that the sixties underground themes are now mainstream, ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Daniel Pinchbeck (Loomio) <notifications(a)loomio.org> Date: Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 9:15 PM Subject: [P2P Foundation - Commons Transition Network WorkGroup] 4: New co-signed letter to the Pope To: <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> [image: Daniel Pinchbeck] *Daniel Pinchbeck* gaf commentaar in: 4: New co-signed letter to the Pope <https://www.loomio.org/d/fuL3WAa9/comment/2045759?utm_campaign=discussion_m…> Looking at UFOS, alien abductions and visitations, through a Gnostic / Anthroposophic lens View this email in your browser ( https://mailchi.mp/evolver/is-there-a-hyperdimensional-occult-control-syste… <https://mailchi.mp/evolver/is-there-a-hyperdimensional-occult-control-syste…> ) ------------------------------ Announcing a New Little Book! ------------------------------ All of a sudden, the mainstream media has turned its focus on the subject of UFOs, a global phenomenon they have derided and dismissed until now. The tone has shifted drastically in recent articles in The New York Times ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ) (“‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects”) and Washington Post ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ) (“UFOs Exist and Everyone Needs to Adjust to that Fact”), partly due to ‘Unidentified’, a new series on the History Channel. The series exhaustively chronicles military encounters with what appear to be diverse alien craft. The Times reports on myriad anomalies encountered by pilots as recently as 2015, including an object akin to a “spinning top moving against the wind” and another “like a sphere encasing a cube.” These objects accelerate to hypersonic speeds, make sudden stops and instantaneous turns with no visible engine or exhaust plumes. For some conspiracy theorists, the new spate of articles suggests we are approaching a threshold of disclosure - the long-awaited release of withheld information on UFOs and ETs. Others suspect that this partial disclosure is orchestrated by intelligence agencies whose motives remain opaque and unclear. The alien question fascinates me. In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ), I wrote at length about alien abductions and crop circles, another complex subject that the mainstream media routinely dismisses and ridicules. I have taken the new spate of media attention as an opportunity to advance my thinking on this edgy area. The result is a 50-page essay that explores the phenomena through a multi-dimensional lens, integrating ideas from thinkers as diverse as Richard Dolan, Patrick Harpur, Laura Knight-Jadczyk, Carl Jung, Lisa Renee, Rudolf Steiner, and many more. The Occult Control System: UFOs, aliens, other dimensions, and future timelines ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ) is also a thrilling departure for me because it is an entirely self-published work, available through Amazon on Kindle, and soon as a print-on-demand paperback. I really hope that you will snag a copy and give it a read, then let me know what you think. I am eager to contribute to the cultural discussion around this subject, because I believe we need to develop a conceptual and philosophical approach as well as a narrative to make sense of it. Before I published my first book, Breaking Open the Head ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ) (2002), psychedelics were similarly a taboo topic in mainstream society. Now they are being integrated in extraordinary new ways. When something is unfathomable, people lack the capacity to see it or think about it. I hope this essay begins to create a new framework for conceiving of this global phenomenon, which seems to be coming closer to us with time. Twitter ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ) Facebook ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ) Website ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3ca3862889fa9a480…> ) –> Copyright © 2019 Daniel Pinchbeck, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 216 East 7th St, NY NY 10009 Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/profile?u=3ca3862889fa9a4809f01… <https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/profile?u=3ca3862889fa9a4809f01…> ) or unsubscribe from this list ( https://danielpinchbeck.us7.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3ca3862889fa9a480… ). — Beantwoord deze e-mail onmiddelijk of bekijk het op Loomio <https://www.loomio.org/d/fuL3WAa9/comment/2045759?utm_campaign=discussion_m…>. Zet E-mails af <https://www.loomio.org/email_actions/unfollow_discussion/121696/UGJR4F8ir8s…> voor deze discussie. Verander je e-mailvoorkeuren <https://www.loomio.org/email_preferences?unsubscribe_token=UGJR4F8ir8sdmUk2…>. [image: Logo] -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: Shareable's new book, The Response Film Premiere, and more
by Michel Bauwens 19 Jul '19

19 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Shareable <newsletter(a)shareable.net> Date: Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 6:01 PM Subject: Shareable's new book, The Response Film Premiere, and more To: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=PhRuiz4x_CuV-VTdUGsue13cPnOdv3cMWgT-yA4Gp…> Have you donated to Shareable’s summer fundraiser yet? <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=jEwrsdSML4cvgLsZN8iFIHb47tWCnJwSMpAKE4sK3…> This week we’re continuing efforts to secure 100 new donors. Thank you so much to those of you who have already made a generous donation or become a monthly sustaining donor! If you’ve ever read a story from this newsletter, shared one of our articles on social media, or used one of our how to guides to make your life better, then now is the time to show your appreciation with a tax-deductible donation <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=jEwrsdSML4cvgLsZN8iFIHb47tWCnJwSMpAKE4sK3…>. Become a part of Shareable’s people-powered solutions for the common good. This week’s newsletter showcases our new book and communities responding to natural disasters and climate change through mutual aid. Together, we are the change the world needs! Please join us today <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=jEwrsdSML4cvgLsZN8iFIHb47tWCnJwSMpAKE4sK3…> in our mission to empower people to share for a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world! ------------------------------ Latest stories Get Shareable’s free ebook: “Community Solutions to the Loneliness Epidemic” <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=PhRuiz4x_CuV-VTdUGsuezw59F5mc8EAxHJ4iOoMY…> Shareable's latest book addresses the question “how can we respond as a community to address the loneliness epidemic and reduce social isolation?" As you'd expect from Shareable, it's packed with solutions. Click here <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=PhRuiz4x_CuV-VTdUGsuezw59F5mc8EAxHJ4iOoMY…> to get your free copy today. Please read it, share it, and send feedback to info(a)shareable.net. Announcing the world premier of Shareable’s new documentary, ‘The Response’ <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=PhRuiz4x_CuV-VTdUGsue8-O1KdPO9C2R0FGe4g67…> Shareable’s first documentary film, “The Response: How Puerto Ricans are restoring power to the people,” will premier in Oakland, CA on July 24th. See featured events below for more information. Long story short, you're invited! <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=uuUyPGiVHWR_V3cUbcvCWWVookhr5I-7v2Y5k-Yp8…> 5 communities building resilience to thrive in an uncertain future <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=PhRuiz4x_CuV-VTdUGsuezw59F5mc8EAxHJ4iOoMY…> In the face of disasters, resident-led initiatives to build resilience in their own communities are gaining momentum in North America, and across the world. ------------------------------ Featured events "The Response" documentary premiere & discussion, with special guests <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=uuUyPGiVHWR_V3cUbcvCWWVookhr5I-7v2Y5k-Yp8…> Oakland, United States | July 24 We're linking up with Pro Arts Gallery & Commons in Oakland for the premiere of our 30-minute documentary, "The Response: Community-led resilience initiatives and disaster response" on July 24 at 7:00 p.m. The screening will be followed by a discussion with local experts exploring what community-led resilience and disaster response could look like in the Bay Area, and, importantly, connect you to solutions. Join us! <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=uuUyPGiVHWR_V3cUbcvCWWVookhr5I-7v2Y5k-Yp8…> Crowdsourcing Week <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=Y9Bl_NqL_lFZWbtBO675EwQ25SvZb2y6O8vpgMin4…> San Francisco, United States | September 12-13 Crowdsourcing lives on the web, but this September it's touching down in San Francisco for #Breakthrough #CSWGlobal19. Secure an exclusive SHAREABLE 10% discount using CSWSHAREABLE10 via https://crowdsourcingweek.com/csw-global-2019/ <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=Y9Bl_NqL_lFZWbtBO675EwQ25SvZb2y6O8vpgMin4…> Sharing Cities Summit Sweden <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=kCcEV-ssxtl6y8CEN2k7XY1IDeBKADbxKOorMZzQb…> Lund + Malmo, Sweden | October 10-11 Our partner, Sharing Cities Sweden <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=PhRuiz4x_CuV-VTdUGsue_iO6bdpikYW5g88vkpRD…> , is organizing a conference and exhibition exploring the role of sharing cities in advancing the sustainable development goals. We'll be there. Join us! Click here <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=kCcEV-ssxtl6y8CEN2k7XY1IDeBKADbxKOorMZzQb…> to get more information. CoMotion LA <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=6RVzQoxhLXPXznrvNw-mmC4jJR1mhBZF_BomhTSYU…> Los Angeles, United States | November 14-15 Through curated discussions, expert meetings, press conferences and private receptions, the event will bring together key players across disciplines and industries to emerge with new policy and innovation mandates for a more connected, innovative and sustainable urban future. ------------------------------ Donate to Shareable Shareable is a reader-supported organization. If you enjoy our work, please consider making a tax-deductible donation <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=jEwrsdSML4cvgLsZN8iFIHb47tWCnJwSMpAKE4sK3…> today: *Donate now*. <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=jEwrsdSML4cvgLsZN8iFIHb47tWCnJwSMpAKE4sK3…> Shareable · 487 Central Ave, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States This email was sent to michelsub2004(a)gmail.com. To stop receiving emails, click here <https://www.sharingcities.net/unsubscribe?e=ceceb67696e2ef7bae91b06758c2cd2…>. Created with NationBuilder <https://www.sharingcities.net/r?u=SWqLExi-4iBlEOa5qgO58jA2d62deOsOLwOgchKDe…>, software for leaders. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: Evolutionary Toolbox for the Great Transition
by Michel Bauwens 18 Jul '19

18 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Smart CSOs Lab <do-not-reply(a)smart-csos.org> Date: Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 4:24 PM Subject: Evolutionary Toolbox for the Great Transition To: Michel <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Now available in ebook form in addition to the paper copy. View this email in your browser <https://mailchi.mp/c77d9c91a8bd/switching-off-the-autopilot-2988461?e=331c7…> [image: Smart CSOs logo] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> July 2019 Dear Michel, We are glad to announce that our new book *Switching off the autopilot: An evolutionary toolbox for the Great Transition* is now also available in ebook form as well as in a pdf with a single-page layout. You can order the book <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> and ebook <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> or download the pdf <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…>. <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> This book is about the ecological crisis that threatens to collapse our entire civilisation. It is about the crisis of liberal democracy unfolding before our eyes. And it is about a new approach that aims to tackle both crises. [image: front cover of Switching off the autopilot] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…>Here are some excerpts from the book: “We are currently experiencing a continuous spiral of polarisation in our societies. It is unlikely that we can successfully transform our whole economic system to tackle the ecological crisis in the face of growing opposition to this project by a significant segment of our societies. Progressive civil society in the Western world is far from having understood the dynamics that are at play in this process of polarisation and what role they themselves play in this process. Everybody who supports the Great Transition should also support ways to stop and reverse polarisation.” Tribalism is a deep-seated human drive. History shows how the right circumstances can activate our genetic predispositions, put us into tribal mode and make us capable of committing the worst atrocities. Culturally, we need to develop much more awareness of the fact that the enemy is within us. It is not some kind of outside group of bad people – it’s us. We need to develop systems, institutions and a culture that prevent us from getting into tribal mode. This requires first developing a good understanding of the social mechanisms that make the situation likely. Preventing significant segments in our societies from feeling threatened is a good starting point.” “A systemic approach is open-ended and looks at the world from diverse perspectives. It is an open-minded and science- based attempt to understand the system, its grievances, its potential causes and solutions.” “Instead of dividing the world between bad and good people or seeing it mainly as a result of structures of oppression created by the dominant classes, activism would gain much from taking an evolutionary worldview. It much better explains how we have arrived to where we are now. It explains the ugly part of human history (domination and oppression), but it also shows that hierarchy, competition and our groupish instincts have played a positive role in creating the amazing civilisation that we have. Most importantly, an evolutionary worldview will help us find better solutions and strategies for our (intentional) cultural evolution. Nicholas Christakis: ‘We should be humble in the face of temptations to engineer society in opposition to our instincts.’ ” “As an important first step to get out of the current mess, we the Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic (WEIRD) people should indeed realise that we are the WEIRD minority, globally speaking. We have to learn to live alongside this majority of people who don’t fully share our morality. Only from a position of respect will we be able to focus on what unites us as citizens of this planet. Our fate depends on each other.” “This book is presenting a preliminary set of ideas for how we should approach the project of intentional cultural evolution for the Great Transition. My impression is that we are still in an early stage of developing the evolutionary toolbox for a successful transformation of our societies. As a next step we need to set up processes with multidisciplinary teams who have the capacity, skills and energy to get involved in prototyping for intentional cultural evolution. In the spirit of evolution, these teams would be seeding and supporting a pool of cultural evolution experiments. The goal would be to design variation and selection systems that will allow alternative institutions or organisational forms to compete with each other.” [image: Smart CSOs Lab] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> [image: @smartcsos] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> [image: Smart CSOs website] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> *Copyright © 2019 Smart CSOs, All rights reserved.* You are receiving this e-mail as a member of the Smart CSOs community or because you opted in at our website. *Our mailing address is:* Smart CSOs . ., . Spain Add us to your address book <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681ceefb4&id…> Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681ceefb4&…> or unsubscribe from this list <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> . [image: Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp] <http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm…> -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: "How I Launched the First Legal Cafe in Ohio!"
by Michel Bauwens 18 Jul '19

18 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Elizabeth Burnett <elizabeth(a)theselc.org> Date: Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 5:30 PM Subject: "How I Launched the First Legal Cafe in Ohio!" To: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Dear Michel, You’ve probably heard about the Law Center’s Resilient Communities Legal Cafe <https://www.theselc.org/cafe?e=5af0fb96cc323505133b237ae4b8287128238f30&utm…> s <https://www.theselc.org/cafe?e=5af0fb96cc323505133b237ae4b8287128238f30&utm…>, our award-winning drop-in legal clinics that happen 3x each month in East Bay cafes and community spaces. But can a Legal Cafe happen in a mid-sized town in Southwest Ohio, where no one’s ever heard of it? Yes it can! Read the story <https://www.theselc.org/guest_post_how_i_launched_the_first_resilient_commu…> of how Jacqueline Radebaugh, a Legal Fellow <https://www.theselc.org/fellows?e=5af0fb96cc323505133b237ae4b8287128238f30&…>, launched a Legal Cafe in Dayton providing free legal support to community-entrepreneurs in her own town. <https://www.theselc.org/guest_post_how_i_launched_the_first_resilient_commu…> Our work supports many rad lawyers like Jacqueline who are trying to remove the huge barriers that exist for community-based entrepreneurs! We’re growing a network and creating an entire ecosystem where *community * *change-makers* can afford to access social enterprise lawyers and resources. But we can’t keep expanding our impact without people like you. *Support our **#PeoplePoweredLaw Fundraising Campaign* <https://www.theselc.org/people_powered_law_fundraiser?e=5af0fb96cc323505133…>* by becoming a monthly **community member* <https://www.theselc.org/people_powered_law_fundraiser?e=5af0fb96cc323505133…>*! *Don’t wait till later or for someone else -- your support is crucial to transforming the legal landscape right now for community-led solutions. Movements start in the street and thrive through the leadership in our communities. *The Law Center works to make sure that big ideas in our movements are legally supported, giving them a lasting effect on today’s most pressing issues. *To support these big ideas we need people-powered lawyers advising our community entrepreneurs and change-makers. We want to live in a world where everyone has the legal support they need to come together and begin developing their own sustainable sources of food, housing, energy, jobs, and other vital aspects of a thriving people-powered community. Your monthly contribution helps create that world where attorneys are available to empower just and resilient communities everywhere! Chip in what you can today. <https://www.theselc.org/people_powered_law_fundraiser?e=5af0fb96cc323505133…> Thank you for your support! Elizabeth Burnett http://www.theselc.org/ <http://www.theselc.org/?e=5af0fb96cc323505133b237ae4b8287128238f30&utm_sour…> PS: Where do you want to see new legal cafes pop up? Imagine what could be possible with your help! <https://www.theselc.org/people_powered_law_fundraiser?e=5af0fb96cc323505133…> -=-=- Sustainable Economies Law Center · 1428 Franklin St, Oakland, CA 94612, United States This email was sent to michel(a)p2pfoundation.net. To stop receiving emails, click here <https://www.theselc.org/unsubscribe?e=5af0fb96cc323505133b237ae4b8287128238…>. -=-=- Created with NationBuilder <https://www.theselc.org/r?u=SWqLExi-4iBlEOa5qgO58jaIKgKczHxVzJjETsQU5Jg&e=5…>, the essential toolkit for leaders. -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Koppelting 2019 subscription has opened
by Michel Bauwens 12 Jul '19

12 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Koppelting <info(a)koppelting.org> Date: Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 9:56 PM Subject: Koppelting 2019 subscription has opened To: <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Dear all, >From the 19th of August we will be joining our forces to kick off Koppelting, a week long p2p festival at De WAR. During the weekdays we will work in-depth on a few dedicated projects. Work along on hardware for citizen science. Build DIY sustainability solutions. Make your own bra. Or bring your own project! In the weekend, 24 and 25 August, there will be an unconference on a broad variety of topics that participants bring in, ranging from grassroots democracy and the biosphere as a commons to public debate on culture. There will be the occasion to meet like-minded people, share a good meal and engage in conversation. We would like to invite you to sign up for the event at koppelting.org/en/festival2019/signup and share your knowledge, ideas and concerns with your peers this summer during the event. All types of contributions are welcome: presentations, workshops, debates, theatre performances; you name it! Watch the line-up as it automatically expands here koppelting.org/en/festival2019/lineup. The cost of organising the conference will be distributed amongst all participants, speakers and non-speakers alike. It will be pay what you want, but if we meet an average of €50 per person we can afford to cover some basic costs of the venue, serve free coffee, tea, breakfast and lunch and have all the talks streamed and recorded. Best regards, Diana, Harmen, Henk-Jan, Maranke, Nicole -- *disclaimer* If you do not wish to receive further updates, please reply with 'unscubscribe' and we'll remove you from our mailing list. -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: New book: Switching off the autopilot
by Michel Bauwens 06 Jul '19

06 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Smart CSOs Lab <michael(a)smart-csos.org> Date: Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 4:43 PM Subject: New book: Switching off the autopilot To: Michel <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> View this email in your browser <https://mailchi.mp/dcd0685ed3de/switching-off-the-autopilot?e=331c725150> [image: Smart CSOs logo] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> July 2019 Dear Michel, I’m excited to announce the launch of my new book, *Switching off the autopilot: An evolutionary toolbox for the Great Transition*. This book is about the ecological crisis that threatens to collapse our entire civilisation. It is about the crisis of liberal democracy unfolding before our eyes. And it is about a new approach that aims to tackle both crises. [image: front cover of Switching off the autopilot] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…>Over the last few years, campaigns and activist approaches to tackling systemic problems have increasingly looked at the world through a lens of identity, power and privilege. I’m deeply concerned that this approach is highly divisive and counterproductive. Instead of bringing us closer to tackling our most pressing issues, like climate change, they contribute to further political polarisation and increase the risk of authoritarian regimes. The current political climate might set us back many years from tackling the ecological crisis, years we don’t have. It might also reverse some of the enormous social progress made in recent years instead of contributing to a fairer world. I haven’t written this book with the hope that everybody would agree with the ideas I set out. In fact, I have written it because over the last few years I have felt that the strategy discussions about the Great Transition I have been involved in have too often operated within an ideological echo chamber, where arguments and evidence are selected to justify the pre-existing intuitions. I hope to provide an impulse towards bursting the ideological bubble. The book argues that civil society leaders and funders have a lot to gain from adopting an evolutionary worldview. Evolutionary science teaches us how we got to where we are now, and how understanding our gene-culture co-evolutionary heritage will make it much easier to switch off our destructive deep-seated tendency for tribalism and design a good society. We have to shift all our attention to tackling the hard problem of evolution: figuring out how to adapt to the new conditions on Earth much faster than humanity has ever done or has had to do. Order a hard copy <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> of the book or download the pdf <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> . You can reach me at michael(a)smart-csos.org and @MichaNarberhaus <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> on Twitter. Best wishes, Micha [image: Smart CSOs Lab] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> [image: @smartcsos] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> [image: Smart CSOs website] <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> *Copyright © 2019 Smart CSOs, All rights reserved.* You are receiving this e-mail as a member of the Smart CSOs community or because you opted in at our website. *Our mailing address is:* Smart CSOs . ., . Spain Add us to your address book <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/vcard?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681ceefb4&id…> Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681ceefb4&…> or unsubscribe from this list <https://smart-csos.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=5cf566bc194b8a0b681cee…> . [image: Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp] <http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm…> -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally? (GTN Discussion)
by Michel Bauwens 03 Jul '19

03 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork(a)greattransition.org> Date: Tue, Jul 2, 2019 at 9:12 PM Subject: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally? (GTN Discussion) To: <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> >From Brian Tokar [briant(a)pshift.com] ---------------------------------------------------------- *[Moderator's Note: This follows from Paul's note from yesterday. Brian will be kicking the discussion off for us. I look forward to your contributions. -- JC] * Comment for GTN Forum * Think Globally, Act Locally?* Brian Tokar 7/1/2019 *The Promise and Pitfalls of Localism * Today we are seeing an inspiring resurgence of progressive action at the local level, even as reactionary nationalist movements in Europe and beyond seek to position themselves as the true voices of a renewed localism. What are the prospects for such locally centered political engagement in a time of rising political polarization and conflict? How can local action help advance personal liberation and social justice? More broadly, how can it further our goals for global transformation? The current upsurge of local action by both progressives and radical municipalists is fueled by several complementary impulses. First, the limitations of national politics and contemporary international institutions have caused growing frustration. The stranglehold of corporate influences—from fossil fuel interests to the financial sector—over national and transnational institutions often overwhelms resistance, whether the focus is on the US government, the European Union, or comparable structures around the world. For people seeking meaningful action on the global climate crisis, rising economic inequality, or various immediate threats to people’s health and well-being, local measures often allow the most attainable initial steps toward the broader transformations we seek. Frustration with the limitations of national or transnational politics can thus be channeled toward a pragmatic pursuit of attainable steps toward justice and community renewal. Other motivating factors are more aspirational in nature. The aim to bring important decisions closer to home reflects a desire for engagement over anonymity, right relationship over polarizing conflict, and hope for a meaningful role in decisions that affect our lives. The appeal of “democracy begins at home” has deep historic roots, including the participatory Town Meeting structures that shaped the colonial uprising against British rule in late eighteenth-century North America. While important choices about social, environmental, and technological policies appear inherently global in character, the principle of subsidiarity—enshrined in EU legal codes among others—speaks to the widespread desire for decision-making as close to the local level as possible. At their best, local solutions to social and environmental problems may be more amenable to an open and accessible democratic process, and their implementation can remain more accountable to those most affected by the outcomes. Local measures can help build closer relationships among neighbors and strengthen the capacity for self-reliance in a time of increasingly extreme climate-related disruptions. Local actions enable us to see that the ruling institutions that often dominate our lives may be far less essential than people tend to believe, and that we can effectively challenge regressive policies at the national and supranational levels that favor powerful outside interests. At the same time, local initiatives often raise the question of how to spark a broader social transformation that can offer a systemic change greater than the sum of its dispersed local expressions. Indeed, the rise of regressive, nostalgic, and profoundly reactionary forms of populism around the world has served to illuminate the limitations of a politics of localism for its own sake. Some years prior to initiating the national campaign for “Brexit,”the reactionary UK Independence Party proclaimed that “real decision-making should be given to local communities”—only thinly veiling an agenda to marginalize immigrants and oppose renewable energy, and even ban discussions of climate change in local schools. Racist organizations in the US South have long hidden behind localist rhetoric, as do the militia movement and other far right neo-populist formations. Suburbanites in Detroit, as well as in southern US cities, have established new local jurisdictions to exclude people of color from decision-making and create newly segregated school districts. Wealthy homeowners in major California cities have bankrolled efforts to halt an increase in the housing supply through a statewide easing of zoning rules. In the lead-up to the recent European Parliament elections, right-populist formations came together in a new political grouping that called itself “Freedom and Direct Democracy,” directly co-opting some of the most advanced language of the emerging new radical municipalism. How then can we steer clear of such cooptation—and best reap the benefits of the liberatory potential of local action? *Theories of Transformation* >From Kurdish militants in Syria and Turkey to dynamic young organizers in North America, many current activists cite social ecology as a central underlying inspiration for their political outlook. Social ecology offers a unique synthesis of utopian social criticism, historical and anthropological investigation, dialectical philosophy, and political strategy. The foundational texts of social ecology were written by the Vermont-based social theorist Murray Bookchin between the 1970s and 1990s. Among the first thinkers in the West to identify the growth imperative of capitalism as a fundamental threat to the integrity of living ecosystems, Bookchin consistently argued that social and ecological concerns are fundamentally inseparable. He described his distinct approach to political strategy as libertarian (or confederal) municipalism, and sometimes as communalism, highlighting the roots of key ideas in the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871. Bookchin argued for liberated cities, towns, and neighborhoods, governed by open popular assemblies, which actively confederate in order to challenge parochialism, encourage interdependence, and build a genuine counterpower to dominant institutions. [1] Social ecologists also believe that the limits of local action and the problems of parochialism and reactionary nationalism can be overcome through confederations of cities, towns, and neighborhoods that join to advance a broad liberatory agenda. While institutions of capitalism and the nation-state often tend to heighten social stratification and exploit divisions among people, social ecologists insist that the lived experience of direct democracy can foster expression of a general social interest that strengthens human solidarity and advances a transformative social and ecological agenda. “It is from the municipality,” Bookchin wrote, “that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into a creative body politic and create an existentially vital…civic life that has institutional form as well as civic content: the block committees, assemblies, neighborhood organizations, cooperatives, citizens’ action groups, and public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic acts as demonstrations and retain a lived as well as organized community.” [2] The act of civic engagement through face-to-face deliberative structures can help transcend divisions and build solidarity. Still, physical decentralization *per se* cannot guarantee progressive social transformation in the absence of an inclusive civic ethics, participatory self-governance, and a holistic ecological outlook. For social ecologists, confederation and internal education through praxis offer essential counterpoints to localist tendencies toward provincialism and isolation. Organizers in urban neighborhoods can aim to rewrite city charters and restructure municipal governance as a confederation of directly democratic neighborhood assemblies. Then, like-minded neighborhoods, cities, and regions can continue to confederate at wider geographic levels to realize common projects, better satisfy essential needs, and ultimately create a viable counterpower to today’s ruling institutions. Another core principle of today’s municipal movements is horizontalism, a political practice that aims to equalize decision-making across various sectors of society. The term (horizontalidad in Spanish) was first articulated during the Argentine uprising in response to the economic collapse of 2001, but has numerous historical antecedents. Prefigurative practices aimed toward dissolving social hierarchies and elevating popular voices have emerged in recent decades during periods of heightened social contestation on nearly every continent. Further clues to an expansive conceptual framework for “glocalism”may be found in the legacy of bioregionalism. Peaking in popularity during the 1980s and early 1990s, this movement helped ecologically minded activists imagine how to transform governance so as to transcend the limits of state and national boundaries and move toward a more Earth-centered vision. Bioregionalism’s ideas of governance based on watersheds rather than political boundaries have significantly shaped contemporary practice in such domains as regional planning and water resource management. Bioregionalists have also embraced a movement-of-movements approach, where advocates for various spheres of social and ecological praxis formed committees to draft proposals at biennial continental congresses, which then came before the committee of the whole for final amendment and adoption. Finally, in an era of increasing nationalism, it is essential to heed the warnings of prominent anthropologist Arturo Escobar. At the apex of the worldwide global justice/alter-globalization movements in the early 2000s, Escobar embraced the “defense of constructions of place” by social movements that seek to advance ecological democracy, while firmly rejecting the attitudes of essentialism, nostalgia and exclusion that can tend to link “boundary making around places… to reactionary politics.” [3] *Scaling Sideways and Up* Dynamic, people-powered progressive grassroots movements are on the rise in many parts of the world. Some confront corporate-driven threats to people’s health and livelihoods, such as the expanding pace of fossil fuel production due to fracking and other new technologies. Indigenous and other land-based communities in the Global South actively resist the extraction of timber and mineral resources, as well as misguided climate mitigation measures, such as carbon sequestration schemes that substitute distant bureaucratic management of forests for traditional commons regimes. In France, rural workers have been in open revolt against tax policies that favor the rich, filling the streets to denounce the extreme isolation of national elites. An Irish citizens’ assembly, with delegates chosen at random, launched the national referendum that ultimately voted down a long-standing constitutional ban on abortions. Here in the US, towns in some of the most conservative pockets of Pennsylvania and other states have organized to assert community rights over corporate rights, and successfully fought off expansion plans by polluting industries. We see increasingly bold public expressions of human compassion, through the creation of sanctuaries and “cities of refuge” to protect threatened immigrants, offer direct aid, and sometimes grant local citizenship rights in defiance of exclusionary national policies. Food and farm activists are reinvigorating urban farming and regional food systems around the world, demanding food sovereignty, and advancing local alternatives that save energy and water, improve public health, empower marginalized communities, and challenge the hegemony of global agribusiness. Visionary planners, designers, and on-the-ground activists are working to reshape their cities to reduce commuting and minimize energy use. An international alliance of trade union representatives has launched a worldwide campaign to democratize energy systems under increasing public ownership, and a youth-initiated rebellion against rising transit fares in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries helped spark a global network advocating free public transportation, among countless other recent examples. [4] More than 2,500 cities from Oslo to Sydney have submitted plans to the United Nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, frequently in defiance of their national governments’ far more cautious proposals; well over 9,000 municipalities have joined a Global Covenant of Mayors to reinforce their commitments to climate action. Some of these plans are rather modest, drawing upon cities’ existing jurisdiction over matters such as zoning, building codes, and local infrastructure, but some cities are also moving to limit automobile use, expand public transportation, and accelerate the transition to renewable energy. Furthermore,we are seeing the emergence of a grassroots “municipalist” movement that directly challenges national centers of power and raises the potential for a more thoroughly transformed political order. In cities as different as Barcelona in Spain, and Jackson in Mississippi, municipal movements rooted in well-organized neighborhoods have elected radical mayors and city councilors with a mandate to defend the rights of tenants, strengthen the public sector of the economy, and implement transformative approaches to community development. In Jackson, an organization known as Cooperation Jackson established neighborhood assemblies and successfully ran candidates for office on a program emphasizing human rights, local democracy, and neighborhood-based economic and ecological renewal. The project is rooted in the historic legacy of Black Liberation struggles and celebrates their inspiration by movements throughout the Global South. In the heart of the war-torn Middle East, Kurdish activists along the border between Syria and Turkey have adopted a unique model of municipal governance, with a focus on equity for women and new models of ecological reconstruction. [5] A youthful network known as Symbiosis now involves hundreds of individuals and dozens of affiliated local groups. The network’s founders have facilitated several major North American gatherings on municipal politics over the past two years, and the group is now planning a congress of directly democratic municipal movements. As Symbiosis’s founders explain, “[W]e can’t actually make the necessarily large-scale changes without taking control over the places where we live and creating the alternatives necessary for a new system.” [6] Progressive, locally rooted movements have long proven their ability to influence wider social and political trends, whether by force of example, concerted political pressure, or active resistance to centralized power. The passage of landmark national environmental legislation in the US in the early 1970s during the Republican administration of Richard Nixon was in part a response to the proliferation of grassroots mobilizations leading to local anti-pollution measures and lawsuits during the 1960s, with corporate interests ultimately choosing uniform national regulations over a patchwork of increasingly restrictive local measures. [7] Local measures to address inequality, such as campaigns to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15, have spread across the US, as have countless other innovative policies whose feasibility has first been demonstrated at the local level. In other cases, a heightened conflict between local values and centralized power structures brings the potential for lasting change. The idea of confederated democratic municipalities actively rebelling against centralized authorities to create revolutionary institutions of dual power is central to social ecology’s communalist political strategy and to the political outlooks of several contemporary municipalist movements. It seems clear that local action is often the best remedy for the failings and excesses of the present system, and a proven approach to catalyzing wider changes. But what about problems that are inherently global in nature? How can locally based movements provide the underpinning for the broader global transformations we seek? Can we envision networks of locally rooted continental and perhaps global structures that reflect a comprehensive vision of interdependent communities and simultaneously embody a holistic, cosmopolitan outlook and a truly humanistic general interest? How can confederations of municipally based movements begin to address the needs to redistribute wealth, transform economic systems, or manage the increasingly climate-driven crisis of migration around the world? Can they, as Bookchin insisted, tackle the fundamental question of where and with whom political power resides? We need to strengthen forms of coordination that emerge from the municipal context to support a growing network for change in synchrony with a global resurgence of solidarity, democracy, and justice. The recent upsurge of Green politics across Europe offers one source of hope, but many long-time Green activists are aware of how an earlier generation of Green Party functionaries in many countries succumbed to narrow electoral ambitions at the expense of the organic links to communities and social movements pointing to a more systemic alternative. [8] Confederations of democratic communities and regions need to develop new continental and global institutions that are no longer plagued by the global power politics of the UN, the narrow commercial imperatives of the WTO, nor the technocratic managerialism of the EU. Through creative experimentation, visionary forms of action, and life-affirming political struggle, we can discover ways to resist the tides of reaction and climate-driven collapse, and point the way toward a different world. Today’s increasingly severe climate disruptions are beginning to universalize the sense of precariousness long experienced by the earth’s most vulnerable peoples. If current trends continue, we face a grim future of ever-diminishing returns and a capitalist race to the bottom, with increasingly extreme deprivation on a global scale. But there is a better path. The odds may be diminishing with each passing year of climate inaction, but it is more necessary than ever to sustain a hope that humanity can unite to reject authoritarian false solutions to the climate crisis and social inequities, embrace the potential for an enhanced quality of life beyond fossil-fueled capitalism, and begin to realize the dream of a liberated and truly interdependent global community of communities. [1] These ideas are explored in detail in Murray Bookchin, *The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy* (London: Verso, 2015). [2] Bookchin, *Urbanization Without Cities* (Montreal :Black Rose Books, 1992), 283. [3] Arturo Escobar, “Culture Sits in Places:Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization,” *Political Geography* 20 (2001): 139, 149–150. [4] See http://unionsforenergydemocracy.org and https://freepublictransport.info/ . [5] See, inter alia, Internationalist Commune of Rojava, *Make Rojava Green Again* (London: Dog Section Press, 2018), and Meredith Tax, “The Revolution in Rojava,” *Dissent*, April 22, 2015, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-revolution-in-rojava . [6] Symbiosis Research Collective, “How Radical Municipalism Can Go Beyond the Local,” *The Ecologist*, June 8, 2018, https://theecologist.org/2018/jun/08/how-radical-municipalism-can-go-beyond… .See also https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org . [7] This history is explained in Chapter 3 of my book *Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash *(Boston: South End Press, 1997). [8] Seemy "The Greens as a Social Movement: Values and Conflicts,” in *Green Parties: Reflections on the First Three Decades*, edited by Frank Zelko and Carolin Brinkmann (Washington,DC: Heinrich Böll Foundation of North America, 2006). **************************************************************************** Monday, July 1, 2019 >From PaulRaskin [praskin(a)tellus.org] ------------------------------ Dear GTN, In May, we introduced a new format for the bimonthly GTN discussions. Rather than focus on a formal essay, we asked you to comment on a broad theme (the climate movement) and a structured set of associated topics. This revised approach got a thumbs up from many of you, so let’s stick with it. Our July forum—*THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY?*—will zoom in from a global panorama to the local scale in order to explore the scope for community action to drive a Great Transition. Please organize your comments as responses to one or more of the following topics: *The Promise and Pitfalls of Localism* Can bottom-up action and communitarian sensibility anchor a global movement? Or is localism inherently limited by granularity, particularity, and insularity? *Theories of Transformation* What conceptual frameworks provide effective guidance for a consequential glocalism? *Scaling Sideways and Up * What prefigurative approaches are advancing replicable change in the interstices of the dominant system? What new organizing initiatives and coordinating structures are needed to catalyze a transformational movement of local movements? Brian Tokar, a writer-activist in the social ecology tradition, leads off with his responses to each of these topics, available here <https://greattransition.org/images/Tokar-Think-Globally-Act-Locally.pdf> . What are yours? We welcome both succinct and extended comments (up to c. 1,200 words). The internal GTN discussion will go through *Thursday, JULY 31*. Then we will publish a curated selection of comments that samples a range of perspectives. Over to you, Paul ---------------------------------------------------------- Hit reply to post a comment on the GT Network Read all comments (or reply) here <https://greattransition.org/gti-discussions/thinking-globally-acting-locall…> Note: Expect a delay between posting and receiving your comment Need help? Email jcohn(a)tellus.org -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: [CommonGood] labour as a commons
by Michel Bauwens 03 Jul '19

03 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Dario Azzellini <dario(a)azzellini.net> Date: Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 4:26 AM Subject: [CommonGood] labour as a commons To: <commongood(a)listi.jpberlin.de> Dear all! I attach my article on "labour as a commons" published in 2018 in Critical Sociology. It includes a critique of Ostrom from a leftist perspective. The article has been published also (in slightly updated versions): - in German in recent my book: Vom Protest zum sozialen Prozess. Betriebsbesetzungen und Arbeiten in Selbstverwaltung. 2018. VSA. https://www.vsa-verlag.de/nc/detail/artikel/vom-protest-zum-sozialen-prozes… - in Turkish: In the Journal Praksis. http://www.praksis.org/tr/ Best, Dario -- New books: with Kraft, M. G. (Eds.): The Class Strikes Back. Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century (Brill 2018, paperback with Haymarket 2019) Vom Protest zum sozialen Prozess. Betriebsbesetzungen und Arbeiten in Selbstverwaltung (VSA 2018) Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela. Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill 2017, paperback with Haymarket 2018) Journal articles/book chapters: “Venezuela.” Staatenlexikon Amerika. Porsche-Ludwig, Markus; Gieler, Wolfgang (Eds.). (Verlag Peter Lang, 2019). “Wir können auch anders – Räte, Arbeiterkontrolle und Selbstverwaltung am Arbeitsplatz.“ Demirović, Alex (Ed.). Wirtschaftsdemokratie neu denken. (Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2019). “¡Ocupar, resistir, producir! La crisis actual y las recuperaciones de empresas por sus trabajadores en Europa.” Michelini, Juan J. (Ed.) La metrópolis creativa: innovación social y espacios de resistencia en el Sur de Europa y América Latina. 156-182. (Catarata, 2019) “The Commune in Venezuela: A Utopian Prefiguration.” In: Pro, J. (Ed.): Latin American Utopias: Past and Present (Sussex Academic Press, 2019) “Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker-Recuperated Companies.” Critical Sociology. 44:4-5. (2018) “The Legacy of Workers’ Councils in Contemporary Movements.” In: Muldoon, J. (Ed.): Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics. (Routledge, 2018) “La guerra ha llegado a ser la forma de hacer economía y no la interrupción de la economía.” Diferencias, 1.6: 113-130. (2018) ------------------------ Department of Development Sociology Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 www.azzellini.net www.workerscontrol.net --- Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _______________________________________________ CommonGood Mailingliste JPBerlin - Politischer Provider CommonGood(a)listi.jpberlin.de https://listi.jpberlin.de/mailman/listinfo/commongood -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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