This week we spoke with Luis Bracamontes, an agronomist and currently a doctoral student, manager along with 30 other people, most of them women , of the “La Imposible” Cooperative located in the Colonia Obrera in the Mexican capital. We were surprised by his youth and tenacity to create and above all to persevere in a management model that, as his name indicates, may seem unfeasible. And it is that if there is any difficulty in this type of process is to build an alternative to achieve a fair price.
They were born in 2015 as a collective response of small producers and food processors that supply markets in the capital of Mexico. They had in common the discomfort with the forms of dominant relationship generated by supermarkets, which in most cases are harmful to the producer, the consumer and the environment. Thus, that group decided to embark on a challenging dream that they called the Impossible because, according to what they say, “It is hard for more and more people to join in solidarity.” But it is that in addition to the difficulties inherent to these projects, although the cooperative apparently resembles other experiences of alternative food networks, it has a substantial difference and it is the novelty of its mechanism for establishing food prices.
Similar to other projects, La Imposible sells food grown or processed by its partners who are small producers and processors; Its offer includes, among other things, vegetables, fruits, eggs, chicken, grains, dairy products, chocolate, beer and artisanal bread. Every two weeks they ask the producers, through an electronic platform, what products they can offer because some of them grow seasonal foods or sometimes they do not produce the necessary volumes to guarantee permanent availability. With the response received, they make up a list that they send to consumers, so that they can place their orders, also using the same electronic platform. A small group of 15 people manages this process, organizes food on the premises, which they share with others solidarity community projects and everyone prepares for the delivery day, which is on Saturdays every two weeks. That day consumers go and take their order. Each provider sets the price of their product. The consumer knows that value recognized to the producer, which at the same time is the basis of what he or almost always she must pay and freely chooses to contribute between 5 to 20% more, due to the administrative management carried out.
The innovative system for setting prices has allowed them to guarantee stability for consumers and producers throughout the year. Obviously, that confidence in the criteria and commitment of the consumer caught our attention. We also learned that they have had cases in which people justify that they cannot make a contribution to administrative management and it is also valid. We asked Luis how much they trust in the fairness of consumer decisions, and he told us clearly: “When an organization promotes a logic of solidarity in its practices, people react in the same way.”
He also told us that within their activities they also advise groups from all over the country, which fortunately are more and more, willing to change the ways of producing, exchanging and marketing food. For example, they will carry out this June 22 the “Fourth workshop on the organization of alternative food networks.”
The Laimpossible cooperative shows us that it is necessary to turn to creativity to achieve the objective of a fair price for both links in the chain, which have lost their connectivity and their sovereignty in the hands of the decisions made by the large supermarket chains. A face-to-face meeting between those who guarantee us food and consumers can bring out the face of solidarity.
This week we spoke with Luis Bracamontes, an agronomist and currently a doctoral student, manager along with 30 other people, most of them women , of the “La Imposible” Cooperative located in the Colonia Obrera in the Mexican capital. We were surprised by his youth and tenacity to create and above all to persevere in a management model that, as his name indicates, may seem unfeasible. And it is that if there is any difficulty in this type of process is to build an alternative to achieve a fair price.
They were born in 2015 as a collective response of small producers and food processors that supply markets in the capital of Mexico. They had in common the discomfort with the forms of dominant relationship generated by supermarkets, which in most cases are harmful to the producer, the consumer and the environment. Thus, that group decided to embark on a challenging dream that they called the Impossible because, according to what they say, “It is hard for more and more people to join in solidarity.” But it is that in addition to the difficulties inherent to these projects, although the cooperative apparently resembles other experiences of alternative food networks, it has a substantial difference and it is the novelty of its mechanism for establishing food prices.
Similar to other projects, La Imposible sells food grown or processed by its partners who are small producers and processors; Its offer includes, among other things, vegetables, fruits, eggs, chicken, grains, dairy products, chocolate, beer and artisanal bread. Every two weeks they ask the producers, through an electronic platform, what products they can offer because some of them grow seasonal foods or sometimes they do not produce the necessary volumes to guarantee permanent availability. With the response received, they make up a list that they send to consumers, so that they can place their orders, also using the same electronic platform. A small group of 15 people manages this process, organizes food on the premises, which they share with others solidarity community projects and everyone prepares for the delivery day, which is on Saturdays every two weeks. That day consumers go and take their order. Each provider sets the price of their product. The consumer knows that value recognized to the producer, which at the same time is the basis of what he or almost always she must pay and freely chooses to contribute between 5 to 20% more, due to the administrative management carried out.
The innovative system for setting prices has allowed them to guarantee stability for consumers and producers throughout the year. Obviously, that confidence in the criteria and commitment of the consumer caught our attention. We also learned that they have had cases in which people justify that they cannot make a contribution to administrative management and it is also valid. We asked Luis how much they trust in the fairness of consumer decisions, and he told us clearly: “When an organization promotes a logic of solidarity in its practices, people react in the same way.”
He also told us that within their activities they also advise groups from all over the country, which fortunately are more and more, willing to change the ways of producing, exchanging and marketing food. For example, they will carry out this June 22 the “Fourth workshop on the organization of alternative food networks.”
The Laimpossible cooperative shows us that it is necessary to turn to creativity to achieve the objective of a fair price for both links in the chain, which have lost their connectivity and their sovereignty in the hands of the decisions made by the large supermarket chains. A face-to-face meeting between those who guarantee us food and consumers can bring out the face of solidarity.
The tentacle of mining extractivism has been present in the southwestern region of Antioquia; but thanks to the resistance from the defense of the territory, predatory greed has not been able to get away with it to date. Resistance goes hand in hand with a dynamic of regeneration towards good living and post development.
We build a document in which we explore this proposal in light of the lessons of feminist economics and as a possible option to fight against poverty and inequality. Today we launch it at the Bogotá International Book Fair.
A young jewelry designer develops her own idea of luxury and entrepreneurship. Gold mines with poor working conditions and polluted soil are not among them.
Whether as thalers or bars: gold has been in great demand for thousands of years and has shaped the world like no other commodity. Whether in ancient Rome, in the colonial empire of Spain or today on Wall Street: the precious metal enchants, intoxicates and destroys at the same time. In Germany, the shiny form miracle is most often used in the manufacture of jewelery and jewellery.
Pforzheim, the sunny city on the edge of the Black Forest, is a traditional stronghold of German jewelery and watchmaking. In the so-called Gold City, the precious metal also entered Guya Merkle’s life. The daughter of jewelery designer Eddy Vieri Merkle got to know the jewelery hype of gemstone fairs and champagne evenings at an early age. Today, the 32-year-old scratches the facade of pomp and showmanship in search of new splendor.
Guya Merkle | Photo: Valentin Rickert
But for now she had other things on her mind. She studied entrepreneurship in Potsdam. Just grown up, the 21-year-old wanted to make a difference socially and started at the betterplace lab in Berlin . But the jewelry world caught up with Merkle again. After the sudden death of her father, she took over the family business. Without any practical experience in company management and the jewelry trade, she began to rediscover her once childhood environment. For professionalization, I went to London to the GIA , the Gemological Institute of America, the hotbed for today’s gemologists and gold specialists. With the common good in mind, Merkle quickly asked herself where and, above all, under what conditions the gold for her jewelry was mined. The GIA was of little help in this regard, which is why Merkle called fairtrade without further ado .
Searching for gold
Back then, in 2009, the fair trade organization had only just begun to take an interest in gold. She invited Merkle on a trip to a Peruvian mine. And so it went, despite the fear of flying, to Lima and further over bumpy roads in the direction of the gold mining community. A journey that got the cornerstone of the Merkle corporate philosophy rolling. The landscape was “great great great”, but at the end of the street a slum was waiting at over 3,000 meters above sea level. Merkle was advised against eating and drinking because the water and food quality at that location was too poor. The problems were omnipresent: rampant poverty, difficult working conditions and extreme health and environmental burdens due to mercury.
Merkle looked at everything: she climbed into the mine, talked to the people and – plagued by hunger – ate the food. What did you take away from your visit? Disbelief – “Dear jewelry industry, you can’t be serious!” – and food poisoning.
The social vein
Gold mines like this: not with Merkle! That much was certain. In Germany, however, doubts were already waiting. How could it be otherwise? How to continue “Dad’s life’s work”? In any case, the public should learn about the grievances. Merkle established a foundation, the Earthbeat Foundation. It should be a mouthpiece for gold mines, their workers and their families. Over 100 million people worldwide depend on gold mines.
A mine shaft in Uganda | Photo: Robert Hörnig
A trip to Uganda came about with friends from Viva con Agua . The Earthbeat Foundation made initial contacts with a gold mining community and local activists and made a film. That alone wasn’t enough: “First you’re a beacon of hope and then you’re gone again quickly.” E arthbeat wanted to provide lasting help and organized new equipment for the work in the mine. But when the workers put on their helmets, safety shoes and goggles, they just laughed at the ballast and said: “We’ll never do that, it takes us 20 times longer”.
The mistake became clear: the conditions in the mine were the wrong starting point. The community lacked alternative sources of income. People mine gold because they have no other options. So they have to take the risk of spills and mercury poisoning and keep gold supplies at rock-bottom prices. Only the other beads in the supply chain earn money.
A “learning” from the initial phase, Merkle sums up. That is why the foundation now focuses on creating alternative sources of income. She promotes permaculture gardens whose plants clean up the contaminated soil, donates goats and teaches imbeekeeping craft. The Earthbeat Foundation has declared war on the gold mines per se. Building fair trade mines is too complex, explains Merkle. The market is too complicated to be transparent. In case of doubt, poverty remains. So the goal: no more people underground.
The foundation would also like to continue to provide information, but it is easier to make progress in Uganda than to make a difference on the consumer side in this country. Merkle should know, because as an entrepreneur she still deals with consumption on a daily basis. Your family business continues. However, it has undergone a few restructurings. Named after Merkle’s father, the company is now called Vieri and only produces jewelery from recycled gold. There are refineries that recover the precious metal from cell phones, laptops and old jewelry.
Merkle combines many things that appear contrary. As a jewelry designer, she is against gold mines, and as an entrepreneur, she says the unusual: “Less consumption!” That is her credo. She wears little jewelry herself. She shares her office in Berlin with others. And Merkle prefers to give away time, beautiful experiences and emotions. Jewellery, these are ultimately just objects on which emotions hang. A luxury that no one really needs, but which can be beautiful. Merkle doesn’t understand why some people don’t care where these objects come from: “You can’t call anything a luxury if you know that the world will perish because of it.”
The new luxury
Liquid Gold | Photo: Timon Koch
The small company and its principles are well received. With the #VieriWoman campaign , the company presents women who are enthusiastic about Vieri jewelry and its ideals. Among them are prominent names, such as blogger and journalist Kübra Gümüşay. Merkle is happy about that: “I have really great customers”. And it’s not just an upper class that buys their ethically correct jewellery. Sometimes eight months are saved for a new chain.
The fruitful mixture of company and foundation should continue in the future. For E arthbeat to other countries and hopefully to the first complete decommissioning of a mine. For Vieri in the trade, to compete with the conventional products and to stimulate discussions. And Merkle? She has bigger plans: “I would really like to turn the economic system upside down”.
Beyond Money: A Postcapitalist Strategy urges twenty-first century social and environmental movements to seriously consider a non-monetary vision and strategies to achieve socio-political and economic equality and ecological sustainability. The supporting argument is that monetary economies are based on socially divisive dynamics, that monetary economies are the source of dualism between nature and us, and that no tinkering with money can overcome such failings.
In short, post-capitalism must be conceived of, and operate, using non-monetary practices. This might appear like a bolt from the blue, but intellectual and practical thinking of this kind is not new. My initial suspicions about money were confirmed when I read Karl Marx’s early work, the thought of non-market socialist currents, and practical debates in both the Soviet Union and Cuba on the role of money in a transformation to socialism. Throughout the final decades of the twentieth century questions were raised around money by feminists such as Silvia Federici, who threw a light on questions surrounding women and work, and the German ecofeminist Bielefeld School, which developed concepts of subsistence economies. Moreover, occupiers, communalists, radical activists and no-barter (no-trade) communities regularly engage in solidarity economy practices that eschew money.
This article refers to certain concepts examined in Beyond Money. On the one hand, the Janus nature of a ‘universal equivalent’ and ‘equal exchange’ that alienates, divides and regenerates dominance and subservience. On the other hand, ‘real values’ — the real, non-monetary, social and ecological values at the heart of any economy dedicated to fulfilling basic needs and respecting Earth’s limits. I offer the key principles of how a world based on real values might operate. Then, I discuss how characteristics of such a world are embodied in the Zapatista movement and how relevant skills that focus on direct democracy and material justice are emerging in ‘green materialist’ tendencies of contemporary anti-capitalist currents.
A post-capitalist world would have to take into consideration the value people put on material justice and direct democracy. Pic. Ashish Kothari
Universal equivalent
The Roman god Janus was believed to embody, and rule, exits and entrances. Janus stood at the point of transition, looking two ways, as if both sides of the one door (in and out). Or, the head and tail of a coin, joined, symbiotic, interdependent. Even like starkly different sides of an act of exchange with a seller and a buyer in opposing roles – an act in which money represents a credit and debt all at the same time. And neither credits nor debts exist without debtors and creditors. Thus the two-sidedness of money, acknowledging something done or given in the past at the same time as promising a good or service in the future. Karl Marx referred to money in all its functions as a ‘universal equivalent’ and ‘the god of commodities’.
Money is central to a capitalist economy. Capital reduces to money making more money. All capitalist practices are formed monetarily. Capitalism cannot be defined without recourse to money. All trade, debts and credits take place using money both as a unit of value and as a measure of value simultaneously and through time. Where different monies exist, typically an exchange rate emerges along with a dominant currency or unit of value. Yet the nature of that value — or how prices are formed — is controversial. And, everywhere, everyday acts of exchange and money breed dualities, between people and between nature and us.
If advocates of trade promote it as a voluntary act, many experiences of trade seem forced and violent. ‘I have to work to live.’ ‘I had to pay the fees otherwise I could not go to hospital and would not be alive.’ ‘I cannot buy the food: I am starving but I have no money.’ Income and expenditure are so imbalanced that most consumers are indebted to some degree or another and must work. How much ‘free will’ is involved in all this?
Private property is not just the result but also the premise of trade; you can’t sell what you don’t own. As trade increases so does private property, encroaching on commons and collectively governed resources on lands and in water. Trading disables practices of commoning and sharing while enabling disruptive and damaging freedom of movement to invest, develop and destroy. As holistic analyses show, the Global South and the poor display this counter-movement, paying for growth in the Global North and for the rich.
Capitalist practices cause us to abstract from nature, human nature and nonhuman nature. Trading embraces people and things in prices formed by influences that are substantially separate from Earth’s and people’s regenerative requirements. The influential ‘market’ is a socially constructed matrix of credits and debts determined by ideal and material practices, including fierce competition, aspiration and desperate need. As trading embraces more and more activities and relationships, the market submerges any real sense of Earth, and the real ecological values actually sustaining it.
The contemporary society can continue to abstract itself from nature only at its own peril. Pic. Ashish Kothari
Equal exchange
Trading and production for trade is often promoted in terms of ‘equal exchange’, as if there is an implicit rationality to market exchanges and production for trade. Capitalism is celebrated for equal exchange and one-vote one-value representative democracy, even though a tiny minority of the world live in ‘full democracies’. Even there those with money have most power and speak loudest while the planet, our host, is dying. Moreover, it is hard to see anything equal about the objects-cum-subjects of any monetary exchange except that money itself projects some false appearance of equality. We know that money as a unit of value waxes and wanes in its worth. What other measure has such contradictory characteristics?
Where monetary exchange is misconceived as somehow intrinsically grounded, just and fair, the notion ‘equal exchange’ remains a keystone. Yet unfair, indeed ‘inequitable’, terms of trade riddle the exchange between a capitalist employer and their workers just as they have contorted histories and current dynamics between certain countries and regions, including the deleterious ecological and social dimensions of production for trade and of trade itself. As such, ‘equal exchange’ will have no utility in a socially and ecologically just postcapitalist society. The universal equivalent offers no promise or potential as a rational form of calculating the benefits and disadvantages of producing for communal sufficiency while observing Earth’s limits. In a real value framing — where actual human and ecological needs are the foci — the notion of equal exchange is unnecessary and even absurd.
Real values: Social and ecological values
If a local community wants to satisfy all their basic needs within Earth’s limits, the easiest and most efficient way to achieve this is by producing for collective sufficiency. This means producing in situ as many needs as possible and obtaining any extra necessities within the shortest distance possible or by some other method, which is as Earth-friendly as possible.
Imagine the world covered by such communities, varying in density according to the bounty of the Earth they inhabit, and engaging in a relatively small amount of non-monetary exchange according to ‘compacts’, arrangements made to ensure basic needs are fulfilled for neighbouring communities in both ecologically and humanely efficient ways. Residents of such eco-habitats or ‘ecotats’ care for Earth in terms of its regenerative needs.
This is production on demand, production determined and conducted communally. Money or marketability evaporates as the sole or dominating ‘measure’ of all things. Decision-making centres on ‘real values’ that are relevant to actual and holistic human and ecological needs, i.e. the actual and potential diverse values of living things, plant, animal and rock in landscapes and the atmosphere. Real values are appreciated quantitatively using different measures according to different qualities. We live within a plethora of such values, appreciating everything directly for its worth for a generic ‘us’, not only a communal us but also an us which includes Earth.
How a world without money might operate
An ecologically sustainable, money-free world fulfilling everyone’s basic needs would be characterised by three principles.
1. Instead of producing for trade, for the market, local communities oriented around collective sufficiency would collectively plan and produce for local demand, real demand, fulfilling their real needs, neither more nor less.
2. Instead of using the logic and language of monetary values (prices), real production would be oriented around real values, i.e. humane and ecological values, with the aim of preserving and enhancing humanity and Earth.
3. Instead of political (mis)representation in powerful states dedicated to reproducing capital, we as global and local individuals and communities would attain and maximise autonomous power over our lives. We would live within substantive direct democracies.
In other words, we would meaningfully and powerfully control our material existence and relationships within, for and by Earth. Currently monetary power and calculations usurp potential participatory democracy whereby we might collectively decide what we produce, where and how we produce it, and for whom. A world beyond money and based on “commoning” allows us to gain collective control over production to satisfy basic needs within Earth’s limits, creating a community mode of production.
A world based on “commoning” would allow us to control our production to satisfy basic needs within Earth’s limits. Pic. Ashish Kothari
Community mode of production
A successful postcapitalist movement following that brief is informed, even driven by, relevant autonomous Indigenous people’s cultures and economies. Beyond Money discusses the Kurdish and Zapatista movements in such a vein, referring to the work of Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano. In particular, Galeano’s statement that ‘It’s out of hope, not nostalgia, that we must recover a community-based mode of production and way of life, founded not on greed but on solidarity, age-old freedoms and identity between human beings and nature.’ This identity is expressed by the Aboriginal peoples of the territory now known as Australia. Ngunnawal Elder Jude Barlow explains ‘Country is everything. It’s family, it’s life, it’s connection.’
The Zapatistas represent a peculiarly twenty-first-century movement with a horizontal organisation (horizontal autonomy, mutual respect and collective practices) influenced by Indigenous, Marxist and anarchist thought and practices. Zapatistas have global impacts and networks, such as with the food sovereignty, Occupy and alter-globalisation movements. Even as they are challenged by, and resist, the Mexican state militarily — through occupation of land that they have redistributed — Zapatistas hold firm to a revolutionary strategy of not taking power, eschewing state forms of hierarchical dominance and control.
As outlined by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater in Autonomy is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government Through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (2019), Zapatista visions and practices centre on grassroots substantive democracy through various forms of autonomous governance, educational, health and media services, and continuous resistance to the Mexican state. Seven guiding principles clarify distinctions between their practices and those of mainstream capitalist economies and polities. They stand in stark contrast to the selfish, individualistic and competitive homo economicus. Instead one serves others, genuinely represents rather than stands in place of others, constructs rather than destructs, obeys rather than rules, proposes rather than forces, convinces rather than conquers, and is humble rather than arrogant.
Different structures of autonomous governance are subservient to the thousands of communities that instruct municipal governance, the caracoles and independent good government councils. All these types of institutions are necessarily fluid because they are determined autonomously in distinctive forms. Yet all rotate on the seven principles and
Zapatista rights, including women’s equality, eschewing the state and the right to defence. The assembly is the beating collective heart of autonomous governance, a forum for proposals, their acceptance or rejection, and evaluation for implementation via monitoring. Agreements in the form of working documents substitute for an ironclad constitution. Injustice is addressed via resolution not punishment, so there is no police force. Equally, the distributed use of force has the effect of decentralising and demilitarising power, disappearing the state as we well know it.
This is the style of polity in a community mode of production.
Guided by ecological sustainability, new forms of substantive democracy need to be based on material production for collective sufficiency. Pic. Ashish Kothari
Green Materialists
Many anti-capitalists within twenty-first century movements avoid traditional left union and party organising with their statist and workerist orientations. Anti-capitalist movements highlight human agency, as such corresponding to Marx’s ‘new materialism’ in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Marx’s ‘new materialism’ referred to those who perceived the world independent of capitalist or religious ideologies, humbly responsible for their collective being, forever adjusting their thinking to changing political, economic and ecological realities. As elsewhere, in Beyond Money I argue that the ‘green materialism’ of contemporary anti-capitalist currents offers the bases for replacing the organising principle of our society, money, by direct democracy.[i] Substantive democracy based on material production for collective sufficiency, using real values and the principles of social justice and ecological sustainability.
Akin to Marx’s new materialists, young anti-capitalists are green materialists who recognise a world out there that we only partly understand, that we constantly try to understand better in order to improve it. Could replacing money by direct democracy in collectively provisioning locales become the unifying process anti-capitalists need in order to create the integrated future to which all on the left aspire? Clearly, in order to achieve social justice, we need to assert the eminence of real values and manage all Earth’s resources as commons. This can only occur if we obliterate monetary values and create socio-political structures for direct democracy and management via real social and ecological values. A tree is a tree, full of qualities and potential; a field is a space for umpteen futures. We, the people, need to embody these understandings and co-govern our futures. Earth and sun as well as human energy determine the number of fruits we have to share between us. Why use money and markets when we can co-decide transparently, directly using real values and direct action? After all such models, some discussed in Beyond Money, exist.
In Anti-Capitalism, Argentinian Ezequiel Adamovsky distinguishes current anti-capitalists by their focus on operating in ways that are anti-power or counter-power, are autonomous, have immediacy and presence, use horizontalist structures, are de-centred, integrate a multitude of
people and causes, strategically respond to specifics, learn through listening rather than laying down a general program, act in glocal rather than national or state-focused struggles against capitalism, use nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, and develop constructive, creative, rather than ‘them–us’, cultures. These descriptors show a characteristic unity of purpose and organisation within anti-capitalist movements. They reflect an ecologist’s holistic framing of the way nature is interlocking, antagonistic yet balancing, self-sufficient and dynamic. They are remarkably close to Marx’s radical view of what it really means to be a social human aware that Earth is our very source of being.
Meanwhile, the culmination of successive appropriations over hundreds of years and all continents has left capitalists in control of Earth and their way of operating is both anti-social and anti-nature. As such, the contemporary social crisis requires us to fulfil everyone’s basic needs — no less, no more — rather than continue living in an unequal world of hunger and overconsumption. And ecological crises demand that we take account of the regenerative limits and needs of Earth. Rejecting money, at the hub of the capitalist steering wheel, non-monetary ways forward allow social and environmental values their natural and significant place in an ecologically sustainable and socially just future. Many activists, such as squatters and occupiers, learn through the experience of applying principles of degrowth and justice to reduce their reliance on monetary ways of operating. Degrowth households and community-based food activities, and degrowth community-supported agricultural models are examples where agents often intentionally withdraw from the market.
A post-capitalist world would be structured around collectively sufficient communities responsible for the sustainability of their immediate environments. Pic. Ashish Kothari
Diving off from Adamovsky’s characterisation of young anti-capitalists, imagine a global network of collectively sufficient, cell-like communities, each responsible for the sustainability of the environments that sustain them. Imagine each diverse community empowered, relatively autonomous, present, organised horizontally internally, networked in seamless ways locally and globally, caring for the Earth. Imagine us collectively satisfying everyone’s basic needs. In these ways, we would be fulfilling our real human potential as creative active beings. In short, the defining characteristics of anti-capitalist currents offer the democratic and materialist bases for replacing money as the organising principle of society. The agenda is in front of us. This is what needs to be built on. This is what needs to be done.
—————————————————————————-
Activist scholar Anitra Nelson is Honorary Principal Fellow at Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, University of Melbourne (Australia), co-author of Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (2020), co-editor of Life Without Money: Building Fair and Sustainable Economies (2011) and author of Small is Necessary: Shared Living on a Shared Planet (2018) and Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (1999/2014, Routledge). Site: https://anitranelson.info/beyond-money/
Discount for RED readers: Pluto Press is offering a discount till the end of April using coupon code ‘NELSON30’, which gives purchasers 30% off the paperback and/or the ebook.
Reference:
[i]Beyond Money, pp. 161–3; Anitra Nelson, ‘New and green materialism’, Progress in Political Economy, 29 July 2015; Anitra Nelson, ‘New materialism is green materialism’, Historical Materialism Australasia 2015: Reading Capital, Class & Gender Today conference, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia, 17–18 July; worked up with reference to a chapter Anitra Nelson, ‘Changing ourselves: Marx on work’, in Joe Collins (ed.), Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st Century, London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
Johannes Dolderer 1, Christian Felber 2,* and Petra Teitscheid 3
1 Economy for the Common Good Baden-Wuerttemberg Association, c/o Impact Hub Stuttgart,
Quellenstraße 7a, 70376 Stuttgart, Germany; johannes.dolderer@ecogood.org
2 IASS Potsdam, Berliner Straβe 30, 14467 Potsdam, Germany
3 Institute of Sustainable Nutrition, University of Applied Sciences Münster, Corrensstr. 25, 48149 Münster, Germany; petra.teitscheid@fh-muenster.de
Abstract: The economy for the common good (ECG) has been developed as a practical economic model, starting in Austria, Bavaria, and South Tyrol in 2010. Nowadays, ECG is considered a viable approach for sustainable transformation across Europe, and also worldwide. Within economic policy, ECG expands social market economy concepts; from a theoretical perspective of economics the question arises, of whether the implicit theoretical model refines the neoclassical paradigm or actually transcends it. During the first scientific conference on the ECG, at the end of 2019 at the University of Applied Sciences Bremen, some 150 participants concluded that an investigation of ECG practices was necessary, and that the fundamental theory needs to be developed in an explicit and systematic way. This article is a first attempt at contrasting the theoretical basis of the ECG model with neoclassical economics, using core concepts and cornerstones of the latter’s paradigm. The outcome is the
cornerstone of common good economics.
Keywords: heterodox economics; neoclassical economics; economy for the common good; common good economics; market economy; welfare
Jules´ life revolves around kayaking and rivers, the veins of the territory. He shares his discoveries, from harmony with nature to the river´s tale of developmental tragedies. His socio-environmentally inspired tourism venture is part of a web with different threads of actions and his philosophy of life works for him, always in alliance with others and where possible in the kayak.
A study by Kai Kuhnhenn, Luis Costa, Eva Mahnke, Linda Schneider, Steffen Lange
To stop climate change, we have to limit global warming to 1.5°C. But can we still achieve this target? And if so, what pathways can society take in transiting towards a climate-just economy? One important yardstick emerging from it was the need for global emissions to reach net-zero by 2050, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says in his «Special Report on Global Warming to 1.5°C». One important problem with this and other scenarios is that virtually all rely on continued global economic growth.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie realised the importance of broadening the discussion’s perspective and considering societal pathways that are currently not included in either the IPCC reports or the public debate. Together with researchers from engineering and the natural and social sciences, Heinrich Böll Foundation and Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie developed a «Societal Transformation Scenario» for this publication – a global climate mitigation scenario that explores the climate effects of limiting global production and consumptions and of envisioning a broader societal transformation to accompany these transformations to reach a good life for all.
