Commons

LabGov, the Laboratory for the governance of the commons in Italy, aims to foster innovative forms of public collaboration in the city of Bologna and beyond.

In this interview, commons scholar Silke Helfrich discusses the connection between degrowth and the commons, and how these two concepts can help us build a sustainable economy.

The ecological production project of the Green European Foundation (ECOPRO) centralises its focus on the development of sustainable green technologies in a post-growth society.

Paul Mason, economics correspondent for the UK’s Channel Four news, argues in his new book Post-Capitalism that capitalism is failing and will be replaced by a new system. Everyone should read this provocative and inspiring account of how, if we want to, we can transform our present economy to one based on sharing, democracy and participation.

At first glance, sharing initiatives would appear to be important elements for building an economy based on solidarity and sustainability. Yet, these different models of sharing do not generate the same societal and financial return. Some of them, such as Uber, are forms of ‘sharewashing’. In fact, Uber’s business model, financed by Goldman Sachs, is at the polar opposite of sharing.

The coming upheaval in our ways of living and working will require us to live an ecological lifestyle based on new forms of democratic participation that enable us to collectively and comprehensively reshape our social and physical environment.

Yann Moulier Boutang thinks of us as bees. Each day we pollinate millions of digital platforms producing intelligence, information and interactions that form the core of the new economy. As part of an on-going reflection on the form capitalism will take in the future, the magazine Usbek & Rica interviewed Yann Moulier Boutang, an economist close to the Italian philosopher Toni Negri and also to the French Greens.

Once you make a commons together, you can have different political visions, but what you share is this desire to construct and protect the commons. Interview with Michel Bauwens, theorist and activist, co-founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation.

Placing our society and economy within an ecological framework will require a radical rethink of what ‘progress’ means as to date this has become synonymous with economic growth. This will mean a change in our relationship with technology and a rebuilding of our social relations.

How to approach intellectual goods, information and knowledge in the 21st century?