From a left perspective, the network ppg (privatization, public goods) examines impacts of privatization on the (re-)distribution of social ressources, on the (re-)distribution of political “goods” (effects of domination, democracy, participation, and access) and on the dimension of political/social conflicts. The network analyzes the interrelations between property, domination and equality.
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Potatoes and computers
Ann St | 9. March 2010 | Filed under: General | Leave a comment
The future commons really boils down to two elements: access to land (i.e. food, fuels), equals bites; and access to knowledge (capacity to use and improve all means of production, material or immaterial), equals bytes. It’s all about potatoes and computers, writes p.m., author of bolo bolo, in Turbulence.
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potatoes and computers.
Commons in turbulent times
Markus Euskirchen | | Filed under: Commons • Revolution • Transformation • Debates: Theories/Alternatives • Public Goods | Leave a comment
After several decades of relentless neoliberal enclosures, the idea of ‘commons’ is enjoying a renaissance amongst some neo-Keynesian economists and commentators, while political scientist Elinor Ostrom has just been award the Nobel prize ‘for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons’. Massimo De Angelis explains why capital’s commons will always be distorted – because they are based upon social injustice – and why we can only reclaim the commons from capital by constructing common interests. Read more about the tragedy of the capitalist commons
If the cell form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond capital is the common. Nick Dyer-Witheford discusses the circulation of commons and the conditions they would create for new collective projects and waves of organising. Read more about Commonism
Gift Economy: The Really Really Free Market
Markus Euskirchen | 5. March 2010 | Filed under: Commons • Municipalities • Cooperative Economy • Debates: Theories/Alternatives • Practical Struggles | Leave a comment
According to the capitalist lexicon, the “Free Market” is the economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Any sensible person can recognize immediately that neither human beings nor resources are free in such a system; hence, a “Really Really Free Market” is a market that operates according to gift economics, in which nothing is for sale and the only rule is share and share alike. In the interest of not taxing the reader’s patience, a single apostrophe stands in for the two “Really”s throughout this text. Read more
Who Owns the World? A new book
Ann St | 2. March 2010 | Filed under: Education/Knowledge • General • Literature/Books • Political Alternatives • Privatization • Public Goods | Leave a comment
A new book on the commons has been published in Germany.
An anthology of essays with the title “Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons”, has now been published by oekom Verlag in Berlin. (German title: “Wem gehört die Welt – Zur Wiederentdeckung der Gemeingüter”.) The list of authors includes Elinor Ostrom, Richard Stallman, Sunita Narain, Pat Mooney and many others.
The editor Silke Helfrich also blogs about the commons at www.commonsblog.de (all contributions in German). Another international book on the commons was published in 2009: “Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice”, by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. More information can be found at MIT Press. (Source: www.onthecommons.org).
For more information in German, visit www.oekom.de.
PRESOM: Project is over
Markus Euskirchen | 11. February 2010 | Filed under: Europe • Privatization's Consequences • Debates: Theories/Alternatives • Literature/Books • Privatization | Leave a comment
There are no more conferences. The final product of the CA PRESOM is the book: Privatisation against the European Social Model – A critique of European policies and proposals for alternatives, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK, November 2009.
Pirates save fishes
Markus Euskirchen | 26. January 2010 | Filed under: Africa • Ernährung • Meer • Food • Nature • Piraten • Biodiversity/gen.Ressources • Distribution of Wealth • Practical Struggles | 1 Comment
In past years, illegal commercial trawlers parked off Somalia’s coast and scooped up the ocean’s contents. Now, fishermen on the northern coast of neighboring Kenya say, the trawlers are not coming because of pirates. “There is a lot of fish now, there is plenty of fish. There is more fish than people can actually use because the international fishermen have been scared away by the pirates,” said Athman Seif, the director of the Malindi Marine Association. Read more
WikiSym 2010 Gdańsk, Poland
Markus Euskirchen | 25. January 2010 | Filed under: Internet • Media • Open Source • Knowledge • Communication • Public Goods • Upcoming Events | Leave a comment
| 7. July 2010 | bis | 9. July 2010 |
WikiSym is a symposium (conference) series dedicated to wiki and open collaboration research and practice. A wiki is a website-based collaboration tool and content management system where everyone with access to the website can read, edit, and organize the contents, usually through a simple browser interface. The technology is so flexible, however, that wikis are being used for almost any conceivable purpose. Read more
Feral vs. capitalist trade
Markus Euskirchen | 21. January 2010 | Filed under: Cooperative Economy • Communication • Debates: Theories/Alternatives • Political Alternatives | Leave a comment
Feral Trade is a public experiment trading goods over social networks. The use of the word ‘feral’ describes a process which is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). The passage of goods can open up wormholes between diverse social settings, routes along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel. Read more
Open Cola and Cube Cola
Markus Euskirchen | 12. January 2010 | Filed under: Ernährung • Intellectual Property • Open Source • Open Source Ecology • Cooperative Economy • De-Privatization • Education/Knowledge • Fun Stuff/Oddities • Health/Social Issues • Public Goods | 3 Comments
The principle of Open Source now set Cola free from monopolist capital. It was reconstructed via reverse ingeneering, published as Open Cola under the GPL and since then optimized by global community under the conditions of free cooperation. One of the approaches is Cube Cola: Besides working on the recipe a group of artists from the “Cube” in Bristol produces “information material” like a poster and a tea towel with the recipe, as well as a hand book and a set of tools necessary for the production of free cola. Finally it is distributed besides other goods via Feral Trade Courier. That is a live shipping database for a freight network running outside commercial systems. The database offers dedicated tracking of feral trade products in circulation, archives every shipment and generates freight documents on the fly.
Chicago: Capital of Municipal Privatisation
Markus Euskirchen | 7. January 2010 | Filed under: Municipalities • Privatization • USA • Actors • Privatization | Leave a comment
As it happens, Chicago is the nation’s leader in municipal privatization efforts. That’s right: The city that conservatives portray as the citadel of the power-grabbing, government-growing left has been selling itself off in pieces for years. It signed a 99-year lease for the Chicago Skyway, a toll road in the city’s South Side, back in 2005. It did the same for its big downtown parking garages in 2006. Last year, it approved a deal to privatize Midway Airport; fortunately, the arrangements fell through. Read more
Prokla available online
Markus Euskirchen | 5. January 2010 | Filed under: Allmende • Commons • Knowledge • Debates: Theories/Alternatives • Education/Knowledge • Public Goods | Leave a comment
Prokla (Probleme des Klassenkampfes/problems of class struggle), one of the leading and long standing unorthodox Marxist journals in Germany, is now available from the internet. The older issues from 1971 to 2006 are even freely accessible. Of course Prokla as all left journals is dependent on subscriptions. Check out www.prokla.de
New Policy Paper: Beyond the crisis: Empowering the public!
Markus Euskirchen | 17. November 2009 | Filed under: Krise • Privatization's Crisis • Public Goods • Debates: Theories/Alternatives • Public Goods | Leave a comment
For decades now privatisation has been a part of the everyday practice of economic and property policy. Its analysis and critique have become established and substantial, and they show that the promises of neoliberal privatisation policy in terms of de-bureaucratisation, increase in efficiency, cost savings or price reduction and decentralisation or even democratisation have not been fulfilled; instead there is a multitude of problematic consequences, such as de-democratisation or growing inequality. The world economic crisis of 2008/2009 makes clear this policy’s enormous potential for crisis. However, if alternatives are at issue, then the uncertainty is considerable.What concepts can be used to embrace these alternatives? For if we do not succeed in holding up a publicly effective counter-concept to the «private» and to «privatisation», and in so doing create a conceptual political contrasting point of identification to the rhetoric and politics of the private, opposition to the politics of privatisation will lack precision, vision and the power of political persuasion and mobilisation. It is especially necessary to develop a precise conception of howto shape reality, that is a conception which is able to introduce concrete political changes in the institutional and regulatory orders of the economy, which represent a real and differentiated alternative to the world of the private,which has arisen almost everywhere in the last three decades. Read more
New Book: Global Auction of Public Assets
Markus Euskirchen | 10. November 2009 | Filed under: Municipalities • PPP • Public Goods | Leave a comment
Public infrastructure in the 21st century is confronted with new challenges – adapting to climate change, meeting the economic, energy, water, transportation and social infrastructure needs of megacities in Asia, megaregions in North America, European city regions and older industrial areas. Read more
Rick Wolff: Economic Crisis Hits States and Municipalities
Markus Euskirchen | 9. November 2009 | Filed under: Municipalities • Krise • Distribution of Wealth • Public Goods | Leave a comment
Crises expose the system’s irrationalities and wasteful resource allocations. For example, Madoff and his many, smaller imitators reveal the tips of corruption icebergs. More important, the crisis-induced fiscal emergencies looming in most of the 50 states demonstrate several absurdities in our economic system. … For those who are willing to look beyond the usual economic blinders, here’s an old suggestion that only seems new because of the effective ban put on public discussion for so long. At the present time, the vast majority of US states and municipalities exempt intangible property from property taxes. That is, stocks and bonds are kinds of property not subject to the taxes on other kinds of property (land, houses, etc.). If we imposed a very low rate of property tax on intangible property, it would cover the present and anticipated fiscal shortfalls of US cities, towns, and states. Moreover, an intangible property tax would fall on those most able to pay, those who fared best since the 1970s as the gap between rich and poor widened sharply. If coordinated across all states and cities (perhaps levied and collected by Washington and then returned to states and municipalities), intangible property owners would have no incentive to move it from one place to another. Read more
Conference: Surviving in the »Creative Industries«
Markus Euskirchen | 6. November 2009 | Filed under: Intellectual Property • Culture • Dates/Events • Debates: Theories/Alternatives • Practical Struggles • Upcoming Events | Leave a comment
| 13. November 2009 | bis | 14. November 2009 |
The »Creative Industries« are considered key to the city development in the 21st Century. Cities such as Berlin put them at the center of image and location policy. The debates are mainly of benefit to the economy and capital development at the forefront – the changed living and working conditions of creative people are in contrast scarcely taken into view. They will be the topic of the congress. The digital revolution in production and distribution, the struggles for intellectual property and realization rights, more flexible corporate structures and labour relations, the project form of work and the privatization of cultural institutions have changed jobs and lifestyles as subjectivities. An unwieldy number of opportunities face enormous competition for jobs and contracts, increased chances of expression the pressure of conformity by the market, more self-determination the self-exploitation in informal and precarious employment relationships and with unfettered income at the same time. Read more
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