New Book: Basic Income

Basic Income is a policy idea that could help us revolutionise the way we organise society. This book is the first proper guide to basic income — what it is, how we can organise it, and how it can benefit the majority in different spheres of their lives. Read more at the publishing house.

A reviewer writes:

Raventos concludes that BI can effectively confront most of the evils of poverty and equality, and provide the material conditions for freedom. The real point of any guaranteed income is to allow a true democracy. Raventos’ book is worth reading by Canadian advocates of a Citizen’s Income for that, and because we need to understand the European movement for a Basic Income, and the debates around it. Raventos gives us a good grounding, free of the over intellectualising that impairs most European writing on BI. More

New Book from FORBA

New Book from PIQUE inside FORBA:

“Public services throughout Europe have undergone dramatic restructuring processes in recent years in connection with liberalization and privatization. While evaluations of the successes of public services have focused on prices and efficiency, much less attention has been paid to the impacts of liberalization and privatization on employment, labor relations, and working conditions. This book addresses this gap by illustrating the ways in which liberalization has contributed to increasing private and foreign ownership of public services, the decentralization of labor relations has amplified pressure on wages, and decreasing employment numbers and increasing workloads have improved productivity partly at the cost of service quality.”

Read more at Routledge

Stefan Merten about “Com’on!”

Stefan Merten reported to oekonux mailinglist from “Com’on!”:

“Last Saturday I attended the workshop “COM’ ON! – Die alte Eigentumswelt dreht sich”.

The workshop has been organized by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung which
is the foundation of the party “Die Linke” in Germany. “Die Linke” is
the socialist party in Germany. As far as I understood the Keimform
people co-organized this event.

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Community Gardening and Grassroots Politics in the Neoliberal City

When community garden activists of the 1970s and early 1980s clandestinely planted tomatoes, cucumber and sunflowers in abandoned backyards and on run-down lots, they probably never imagined that a time would come when city administrations would embrace urban gardening as an important “cultural, ecological and social resource”.1  Many of today’s community gardens in North America and Europe started out as squats or informal “guerilla style” gardens and were influenced by, if not a substantial part of urban social and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s.2 

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The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’ or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital?

The current issue of new formations contains an interesting article on “the future of the commons”:

The ‘commons’ has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last fifteen years, from a word referring rather archaically to a grassy square in the centre of New England towns to one variously used by real estate developers, ‘free software’ programmers, ecological activists and peasant revolutionaries to describe very different, indeed conflicting, purposes and realities. I believe that this resurgence of ‘commons’ thinking is due to a confluence of two streams coming from opposing perspectives.

Read more: Caffentzis: Future of the Commons

Image Collection Palastine 1917-1918

Sorry, only in german language: A collection of more than 1.500 photographs mostly taken from airplanes that have been shot by bavarian air force soldiers on the base of their cooperation with the Ottomanic Empire. The Bavarian State Archives digitalized and published the pictures in very high resolution. I can not find any hint about the license the images are published under. See more

Commons – a big issue in India..

IASC2011, the 13th (!) Biennial Conference of the International Association for Study of the Commons, taking place on january 10th to 14th in Hyderabad, India, will take a critical look at the interface between human and natural systems, Commons in particular, to build on our understanding on the elements and interconnectedness that sustain life, collective action and our future. The Conference will contribute rich lessons and principles for managing local, complex, as well as Global Commons such as international arrangements to respond to climate change. Read more

Berlin Commons Conference

The International Commons Conference connected about 150 leading figures in commons-based studies and activism for a multidisciplinary, international conference in Berlin, Heinrich Böll Foundation. The general objective was to emerge with a set of principles and long-term goals that can foster the planning and development of commons based organisations and policy as well as their networking capacity. Read more about the outcomes of the conference.

See also: Workshop report: Commoning through the Crisis: creating commons power and resisting enclosures and cooptation

Science 3.0 meta-blog

Science 3.0 is a meta-blog that combines the hypothesis based inquiry of laboratory science with the methods of social science research to understand and improve the use of new human networks made possible by today’s digital connectivity. This website is a community where those interested in the advancement of research can share ideas, tools and build connections. With Science 3.0 it is easier to find net pearls like Maitri Erwin’s always entertaining ‘A Pirate Scientist’s Life For Me’ focusing on public access to science education and open publishing.

OpenOffice goes LibreOffice – not only free but independend from Oracle

The Document Foundation released the beta of LibreOffice, to speed up the rate of changes to the notoriously slow OpenOffice office suite software project under the lead of the software corporation Oracle. This suggestion received support from all the major open-source and Linux powers: Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu. Even Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced that they’d place LibreOffice in next spring’s update of Ubuntu. Only Oracle does not like the fork and insists of keeping the name OpenOffice for its own free office suit. Read more