#postcapitalism — Public Fediverse posts

‘We cannot simply dust off old formulas to repeat; we need take the time necessary to invent a new strategy and new organizational forms adequate to the current conjuncture.’

Michael Hardt calls for a radical reinvention of political strategy in his contribution to Berliner Gazette’s Pluriverse of Peace series:

https://berlinergazette.de/the-end-of-mediation-radical-democracy-and-the-reinvention-of-strategies-for-planetary-liberation/

#politics #RadicalDemocracy #Pluriverse #MichaelHardt #PostCapitalism #marxism #postmarxism

The People's Union has called for a boycott of General Mills from April 21 to 28: https://thepeoplesunionusa.com/

People have the power. ✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽✊🏼✊🏻✊

#peoplepower #democracy #strike #solidarity #postcapitalism #thepeoplesunion #thepeoplesunionusa #us #usa #america #unitedstates #unitedstatesofamerica #economics #generalmills #food

[Paper] Varieties of #Anticapitalism: A systematic study of transformation strategies in alternative economic discourses

by Querine Kommandeur, Juliette Alenda-Demoutiez, Maria Kaufmann, Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers. Published January 2025.

Abstract

"The confluence of multiple crises has prompted a growing recognition of the need for transformations. Economic systems, including patterns of consumption and production, play a key role in sustainability transformations. The notion that capitalist systems are at the root of current ecological and social crises has led to the emergence of different alternative economic discourses, that seek to address the indirect drivers of #unsustainability. In this article, we aim to contribute to moving the debate beyond critiques of capitalism by focussing on the paths of transformation towards alternatives. To this end, we analyse several alternative economic discourses in order to show the breadth of the debate, and to better understand the roles and strategies of various discourses in societal transformation. Seven discourses are included, of which Buen Vivir, Degrowth and Wellbeing Economy are analysed in-depth. This is done through a systematic analysis of literature published between 2015 and 2022, using an enhanced conceptual framework based on the works of Wright (2019) and Chertkovskaya (2022). Our analysis suggests that the discourses represent different modes of transformation, and that these differences exist both between, as well as within the different discourses. We argue that transformations cannot be achieved through single discourses, or modes of transformation. Rather, concerted efforts of different discourses aimed at addressing indirect drivers of unsustainability can provide the multi-faceted processes of societal change, in which they can support and reinforce one another through alliances and mutual learning."

Introduction

"Humans are putting ever-increasing burdens on the #environment, causing severe damage to #nature (IPBES, 2019; United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development, 2015). This damage is operationalised through the planetary boundaries, showing how several of them have already been crossed, which increases the risk of unleashing #ecosystem changes on a global scale (IPBES, 2019; Lade et al., 2020). Besides the innumerable injustices towards non-humans that result from the destruction of nature, such processes also have severe impacts on structures that sustain human livelihoods, by impacting health and wellbeing, food security and infrastructure (IPCC, 2023; United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development, 2015). These processes are driven by #capitalist accumulation, which relies on the continuous production of new frontiers of accumulation, often through the #exploitation of #MarginalizedCommunities and nature (Moore, 2017). These adverse impacts on nature and people disproportionately affect the most vulnerable people and systems (IPCC, 2023).

"While capitalism manifests itself in a variety of ways across time and place (Hall and Soskice, 2001), there are several fundamental aspects that lie at the heart of its problematic nature. In capitalist societies, societal wealth manifests itself as an accumulation of commodities, and production is oriented towards profit rather than societal needs. Such profits, or surpluses, are extracted and privately appropriated for further expansion, forming the main force of growth. As such processes rely on the continued exploitation of labour and nature, inequality is not an outcome but the foundation of capitalist structures (Brand et al., 2021; Chertkovskaya and Paulsson, 2021; Moore, 2017). The continued inability to decouple environmental degradation from economic growth has made capitalism increasingly questionable in terms of its desirability and sustainability (Parrique et al., 2019). Such capitalist structures, both material, institutional, and discursive, are entrenched in societies, including institutions and governance mechanisms such as nation states and international political regimes, and are underpinned by societal values such as the appropriation of nature and non-human animals as resources to be exploited for human benefit (Brand et al., 2021; IPBES, 2019).
This confluence of multiple crises has prompted a growing recognition of the need for transformations. Since the 2015 inception of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the term “transformation” has gained broad usage among policymakers, academics, activists, and others, resulting in diverse interpretations and literatures. Transformations imply “...changes in the generic societal causes, including institutions, governance structures, developments, power relations, paradigms, goals and values” (Kok et al., 2022, p. 8). The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) defines transformative change as “a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values” (IPBES, 2019, p. 14). Visseren-Hamakers and Kok shift the focus of this definition by replacing ‘system-wide’ with ‘society-wide’, emphasizing changes in general, societal structures (Visseren-Hamakers and Kok, 2022a, p. 8). We therefore consider capitalist structures to be the indirect drivers of unsustainability (IPBES, 2019).
The notion that capitalist systems are at the root of current ecological and social crises has led many activists, civil society groups, academics, policymakers, and politicians to seek for alternative economic approaches that focus on justice and sustainability (Charonis, 2021; Westra et al., 2017). We consider alternative economic discourses to be embedded in broader transformation discourses, as they address, to varying degrees, the indirect drivers of sustainability. While alternative economic discourses are generally strong in imagining alternatives, working towards such alternatives requires strategic efforts (Barlow et al., 2022; Visseren-Hamakers and Kok, 2022b). The main objective of this article is to elucidate how various alternative economic discourses align with and differ from each other concerning their modes and strategies of transformation as presented in the academic literature. To do this, this article builds on the work of (Wright, 2019), who conceptualises different ‘modes’ of transformation, i.e., sets of strategies that have been historically important in anti-capitalist struggles. Chertkovskaya (2022) expands on this framework to better capture the efforts of alternative economic movements. We further build upon both Wright's original conceptualisation and Chertkovskaya's additions to develop the framework further (Chertkovskaya, 2022).

"This paper contributes to the literature on #PostCapitalism and transformations by providing a comprehensive overview of different modes and strategies of transformation by focusing on the Degrowth, Buen Vivir and Wellbeing Economy discourse. In doing so, we aim to contribute to moving the debate beyond critiques of capitalism by focussing on the paths of transformation towards alternatives. Through our categorization, we facilitate a more conscious reflection on often implicit approaches to change while also revealing sensitivity to similarities and nuances within and between the discourses, showing the breadth of the debate (Sandberg and Alvesson, 2021). The selected discourses are #BuenVivir, Degrowth, #DoughnutEconomics, Economy for the #CommonGood, Foundational Economy, Social and #Solidarity Economy, and Wellbeing Economy. We first provide a brief overview of these seven alternative discourses and then proceed to an in-depth examination of the Buen Vivir, Degrowth, and Wellbeing Economy discourses."

Read more:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924003203
#SolarPunkSunday #DeGrowth #PostCapitalism #CircularEconomy #Polycrisis #EnvironmentalRacism #HumanRights #Colonialism #CorporateColonialism

[Book reviews] #Solarpunk, #utopian and #AntiCapitalist fiction for imagining brighter futures

Novels with political under- and over-tones that have captivated me recently

by Katy Nightingale, Nov 28, 2024

"All of the books I’m including here are unique in their styles - some encompassing all of these visionary genres, and some just a few of them. Here’s a little glossary I came up with:

- futurist 🔮 - taking place in the future

- utopian 🌈 - taking place in an idealistic society where everything is designed to be harmonious, just, and fulfilling for all people

- solarpunk ☀️ - a sub-genre of utopian literature, solarpunk fiction takes place in a sustainable, eco-friendly future where humanity lives harmoniously with nature, often featuring renewable energy, green cities, and with a focus on social equity

- anti-capitalist 🌹 - the characters and plot tell a story that illustrates the pitfalls of capitalism and shows resistance and possible alternatives"

Read more:
https://wanderingk.substack.com/p/solarpunk-utopian-and-anti-capitalist

#PostCapitalism #Degrowth #Novels #SolarPunkSunday #SolarPunkFiction #Books #Reading

Which way #liberal?

#meme #philosophy #liberalism #libertarian #libertarianism #Georgism #HenryGeorge #Georgist #LibertarianLeft #LeftLibertarian #DavidEllerman #leftism #leftist #EconomicDemocracy #WorkplaceDemocracy #WorkerCoops #coops #cooperatives #selfmanagement #ThomasHodgskin #ElizabethAnderson #FrankKnight #Bastiat #mutualism #capitalism #capitalist #anticapitalism #anticapitalist #postcapitalism

Our new paper just got published in Human Technology journal:
"On designing Shareish, an open-source, map-based, web platform to facilitate diverse solidarity practices" ! Check it out if you want to know more about our motivations, influences, design methodology, and results: https://doi.org/10.14254/1795-6889.2024.20-2.4
Online server: https://shareish.org/
#opensource #solidarity #cscw #hci #humangeography #map #openstreetmap #mutualaid #sharing #postcapitalism #postgrowth #hcisocial #solidarityhci #onlinemap

The latest blog in our #CollectingRealUtopias series is embracing winter and darkness with a celebration of rest and #slowness.

Speaking to our addiction to #productivity, to #usefulness, about how this feeds #capitalism, colonial violence, environmental destruction and personal burnouts, Malaika Cunningham argues that rest and slowness might actually be the most important act of resistance we can enact. → https://cusp.ac.uk/themes/a/blog-collecting-real-utopias-no9/
___
cc #Utopia #PostGrowth #PostCapitalism #Colonialism

#FutureHistories #Podcast S02E33 - Pat Devine on Negotiated Coordination

#PatDevine, #JanGroos, #Interview, #Podcast, #FutureHistories, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #Planning, #Sozialismus, #Socialism, #Democracy, #Demokratie, #SocialistDemocracy, #DemocraticEconomicPlanning, #Cooperation, #Decisionmaking, #Participation, #Capitalism, #Kapitalismus, #Postcapitalism, #ParticipatoryEconomics, #NegociatedCoordination, #Socialownership, #SelfgoverningSociety, #ScienceandSociety, #RobinHahnel, #DavidLaibman, #Marxism, #MarxistEconomics

https://futurehistories.podbean.com/e/s02e33-pat-devine-on-negotiated-coordination/

S02E21 - Robin Hahnel on Parecon

Participatory Economics (Parecon) – developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel – is one of the most popular models for democratic economic planning.

#RobinHahnel, #JanGroos, #Interview, #Podcast, #FutureHistories, #FutureHistoriesInternational, #Planning, #Sozialismus, #Socialism, #Democracy, #Demokratie, #Parecon, #MichaelAlbert, #Cockshott, #Cottrell, #Marxism, #VonMises, #Hayek, #Friedman, #Capitalism, #Kapitalismus, #Postcapitalism, #EconomicPlanning, #Communism, #ParticipatoryEconomics, #PlannedEconomy, #SystemicSocialism, #HetrodoxEconomics, #MarxistEconomics, #PoliticalEconomy, #DemocraticEconomicPlanning, #ReproductiveLabor, #ParticipatorySocialistSociety

https://futurehistories.podbean.com/e/s02e21-robin-hahnel-on-parecon/

Is There Any Point to Protesting?

... In “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work” (Verso), a book published in 2015, then updated and reissued this past year for reasons likely to be clear to anyone who has opened a newspaper, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams question the power of marches, protests, and other acts of what they call “folk politics.” These methods, they say, are more habit than solution. Protest is too fleeting. It ignores the structural nature of problems in a modern world. “The folk-political injunction is to reduce complexity down to a human scale,” they write. This impulse promotes authenticity-mongering, reasoning through individual stories (also a journalistic tic), and a general inability to think systemically about change. In the immediate sense, a movement such as Occupy wilted because police in riot gear chased protesters out of their spaces. But, really, the authors insist, its methods sank it from the start by channelling the righteous sentiments of those involved over the mechanisms of real progress....

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/21/is-there-any-point-to-protesting

#NickSrnicek #AlexWilliams #InventingTheFuture #PostCapitalism #PoliticalProtest #PoliticalChange

Book Review: Inventing the Future

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ illuminating and radical new book Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work is as ambitious and global as its title implies. It looks at the political left’s ‘emancipatory visions’ to date with the notion of technology as a liberating tool. It notes the changes brought about in democracy through the internet and social media giving voice to individuals around the world, but still maintains that this democracy is ‘in disrepair’. ...

http://www.thestateofthearts.co.uk/features/book-review-inventing-the-future/

#NickSrnicek #AlexWilliams #InventingTheFuture #PostCapitalism #BookReviews