false 20 6 6 true 5693160 read 0 true 1674236 currently-reading 0 true 1674235 to-read http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13405397 to: Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Hardcover) by Ted Nordhaus
Amazon.com: You argue that global warming is a "monumental" crisis that demands a response beyond the more limited (and limiting) environmental policies of the past. On the other, you acknowledge that, despite a great deal of press attention, "global warming" still ranks at the very bottom of voters' concerns. How do you confront a crisis that voters don't care about?

Shellenberger and Nordhaus: By getting it out of the global warming/environmental ghetto. We know that things like energy independence, getting off oil, getting out of the Middle East, and creating jobs and economic development in the new clean energy industries of the future are much higher priorities for most voters than capping carbon emissions or taxing dirty energy sources. So why not redefine our agenda as the solution to those problems? We can still cap carbon, but that needn't be at the top of the agenda that we communicate to voters. Making big investments to get off oil, making clean energy alternatives widely available and cheap, and creating millions of new jobs in clean energy industries is a winner with American voters and can carry the whole suite of policies that we need to address global warming....

More notes and comments on thirdwavestudygroup.blogspot.com ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/826514-solidarity Solidarity made a comment on Solidarity Economy's profile:

By Jenna Allard and Julie Matthaei

The solidarity economy is a new way of naming and conceptualizing the many types of transformative economic values, practices, and institutions that exist in the U.S. and all over the world. These include, but are not limited to, egalitarian and participatory economic behavior by individuals, workers, and producers, such as by an individual who is an ethical consumer, worker, and/or investor, or by a worker-coop, fair trade business, or progressive union. Solidarity production processes can also take many forms, from self-employed entrepreneurs and local small-scale businesses, to high road businesses and corporations, to worker-owned cooperatives and collectives, to community businesses. Many of these practices and organizations have arisen in response to the injustices and imbalances of neo-liberalism.

The solidarity economy is also the process of uniting these various forms of transformative economics in a network of solidarity: solidarity with a shared vision, solidarity with shared values, and solidarity with the oppressed. Thus, the work of building the solidarity economy is both to grow transformative economic values, practices, and institutions, and also to connect people and organizations that are already doing solidarity-based work in their own communities.

The solidarity economy is being defined from the grassroots, by the many diverse groups and individuals who are building transformative economic institutions. Thus, the term has a variety of meanings which are sometimes contradictory. In the United States, many solidarity economy practices, institutions, and networks already exist, but there is no conceptual framework linking these enterprises, or overarching network of solidarity economy organizations.

This paper, which is a work in progress, aims to provide an introduction to the solidarity economy. We include a summary of key aspects of the solidarity economy, written by the Solidarity Economy Coordinating Group for the U.S. Social Forum, some definitions from all over the world, and summaries of key values. Please visit www.transformationcentral.org for more information and to contribute to our blog.

The Emerging Solidarity Economy: Some Common Themes

The Solidarity Economy constitutes an alternative economic model to neoliberal capitalism, one which is grounded on solidarity and cooperation, rather than the pursuit of narrow, individual self-interest, and that promotes economic democracy, alternative models of local economic governance, equity and sustainability rather than the unfettered rule of the market.

While noncapitalist, cooperative forms of economic organization have always existed, solidarity economy is a recent and evolving concept and practice, which is being defined from
the bottom/up: The term "solidarity economy" emerged about 10 years ago, and solidarity economy organizations and networks now exist in Latin America, most European countries, Africa, Asian, and Canada. While the U.S. has many solidarity economy practices,
institutions, and networks, the term itself is not well known in the US. As of yet, we do not have a either a framework that unites them conceptually as an overall system, or an overarching network of solidarity economy organizations.

Solidarity economy involves three overlapping but distinct types of solidarity:

* Values-based solidarity: solidarity with people, movement groups, NGO's, worker cooperatives and other businesses who share economic justice values - e.g. Fair Trade, ethical consumption, and socially responsible investment practices.

* Anti-oppression solidarity: solidarity with oppressed countries or with oppressed groups of people, especially the poor, women, indigenous peoples, people of color, gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered peoples, and workers.

* Vision-based solidarity: solidarity among people, economic organizations, and social movements based on shared visions for local and global economic development that are economically, socially, and environmentally restorative, and shared advocacy of transformative institutions and policies such as Bolivia's People's Trade Agreement, participatory budgeting and labor-based investment funds

Solidarity economy involves two levels of solidarity:

* Micro-solidarity: egalitarian and participatory economic behavior by individuals, workers, and producers, such as by an individual who is an ethical consumer, worker, or investor, or by a worker-coop, fair trade business, or progressive unions.

* Macro-solidarity: the development of networks aimed at supporting and growing the solidarity economy among individuals and institutions. This involves networks of organizations involved in micro-solidarity, such as the
Fair Trade Federation, SAS (Students Against Sweatshops), and national, regional, and international networks of solidarity economy organizations such as RIPESS (The Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of the Social Solidarity Economy), and NANSE (North American Network for the Solidarity Economy). A key aspect of macro-solidarity is organized activity by these networks, in coalition with other progressive groups, aimed at transforming the state and global institutions so as to make them supportive to the growth of the solidarity economy.

Reform and Revolution:

Solidarity economy involves both transforming current economic institutions, and growing alternatives to them. Solidarity economy values, practices and institutions currently coexist with neo-liberal capitalist ones in all sectors of the economy. The ultimate vision is:

* to grow these values, practices and institutions through conscious activity designed to transform civil society, the market, and the state; and

* to link these solidarity economy activities in a network of mutual support, such that they transform neo-liberal capitalism into a just, democratic, and sustainable economic paradigm and system.

Solidarity economy involves a continuum of forms of relations of production, and different solidarity economy networks link various subsets of these:

* From landless workers to family farmers to agricultural cooperatives

* From self-employed entrepreneurs and local small-scale businesses, to high road businesses and corporations, to worker-owned cooperatives and collectives and community businesses

* Indigenous, collectivist forms of production

Solidarity economy involves a range of social sectors and focuses:

* The Canadian social economy involves cooperatives and non-profit enterprises in many sectors, which are often supported by government programs obtained through the mobilization of social movements, especially in Quebec province

* The Brazilian solidarity economy
relies heavily on unions, landless worker organizing, and the creation of cooperatives among those living in informal settlements

* The European platform for ethical and solidarity-based initiatives focuses on anti-materialism and ethical consumption

* NANSE (The North American Network for the Solidarity Economy) is committed to organizing against the neo-liberal vision on all levels and in all sectors

Solidarity economy simultaneously promotes unity and diversity:

* Unity around shared values of equality (especially gender, race, and economic equality), participatory democracy, cooperation, sustainability, community

* Diversity is not only accepted but valued, encouraged, and celebrated, including diversity of culture, of conceptual frameworks, of ways of structuring economic institutions, of priorities, and of ways of movement building.
]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13410584 to: Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Paperback) by Chandra Talpade Mohanty
Amazon Book Description

Bringing together classic and new writings of the trailblazing feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders addresses some of the most pressing and complex issues facing contemporary feminism. Forging vital links between daily life and collective action and between theory and pedagogy, Mohanty has been at the vanguard of Third World and international feminist thought and activism for nearly two decades. This collection highlights the concerns running throughout her pioneering work: the politics of difference and solidarity, decolonizing and democratizing feminist practice, the crossing of borders, and the relation of feminist knowledge and scholarship to organizing and social movements. Mohanty offers here a sustained critique of globalization and urges a reorientation of transnational feminist practice toward anticapitalist struggles.

Feminism without Borders opens with Mohanty's influential critique of western feminism ("Under Western Eyes") and closes with a reconsideration of that piece based on her latest thinking regarding the ways that gender matters in the racial, class, and national formations of globalization. In between these essays, Mohanty meditates on the lives of women workers at different ends of the global assembly line (in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States); feminist writing on experience, identity, and community; dominant conceptions of multiculturalism and citizenship; and the corporatization of the North American academy. She considers the evolution of interdisciplinary programs like Women's Studies and Race and Ethnic Studies; pedagogies of accommodation and dissent; and transnational women's movements for grassroots ecological solutions and consumer, health, and reproductive rights. Mohanty's probing and provocative analyses of key concepts in feminist thought—"home," "sisterhood," "experience," "community"—lead the way toward a feminism without borders, a feminism fully engaged with the realities of a transnational world. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13407244 to: Building the Bridge to the High Road (pdf or paper) by Dan Swinney
From the clcr.org website:

What is 'High Road' Political Economy?

To assist labor, communities, and business to pursue the High Road of economic development guaranteeing the building of a strong, participative and productive economy, social justice and the equitable distribution of wealth.

In short, the High Road for development calls for:

-- a vision of development in the context of the global economy;

-- a fundamental change in economic policy to define leading roles for labor and community, premised on labor and citizen participation in all aspects of the economy, politics, and society;

-- development that is environmentally sustainable, which means that companies make products and use processes and technology that are good for the health of workers, consumers, and surrounding communities; and that they restore rather than damage the environment;

-- development that is economically sustainable, creating jobs and livelihoods that allow and encourage true human development. We want good jobs that can support a family and allow time for leisure, education, and social participation;

-- development that is socially sustainable, with an objective of overcoming historic divisions and oppressions in society connected to race, gender, class, and national origin;

-- a challenge to the limits of traditional redistributionist strategy for labor and community, recognizing that redistribution can best be achieved through popular control and leadership;

-- a strategic alliance between the labor movement and the political, democratic, environmental, economic, new immigrant, and social organizations within the concept of "community;"

-- recognition that labor and community must accept the responsibility to lead in creating wealth and developing productive capacity;

-- recognition that the business sector includes friends and allies as well as low roaders, and that we must leave behind a simplistic "anti-corporate" analysis;

-- identifying market forces as well as mass movements as our tools and terrain for change;

-- being entrepreneurial--seeking to be leaders in the market place as well as in the social and political world-- and defining the essential connection between the two; and

-- defining a clear role for government, including a responsibility to expand our civic structure and life and to measure success by progress at the company and community level. ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13406203 to: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beau (Paperback) by Paul Hawken
You suggest that the politics of the future are really about fostering unusual alliances that revolve around ideas. Strange bedfellows—evangelicals aligning with environmentalists, for example. Are you seeing this elsewhere?


Yes. At the same time, we find out that we’re not strange bedfellows. We’re human beings and what estranged us is far less important and almost meaningless compared to what is meaningful now. You’re seeing Wal-Mart, for example, quite authentically—and I don’t care what someone else says about them—they’re very committed to 100% renewable energy and a lot of other things that they have not talked about yet. Well, who would’ve thought it? Is that a strange bedfellow or just the American people awakening to core values that now need to be expressed?


This goes back to what you wrote about in The Ecology of Commerce. At the time it seemed an oxymoron to combine those two ideas of nature and business. You were among the first writers who tied sustainability to commerce.


I was and I didn’t get a lot of support at the time. But this week’s cover story of Business Week is called "Beyond the Green Corporation" and the first line is, "Imagine a world in which eco-friendly and socially responsible practices actually help a company’s bottom line." That’s the opening line of the lead story of Business Week. Fourteen years after The Ecology of Commerce was published. When it was published, not a single business publication here would review it. It was reviewed, by the way, but editors wouldn’t publish the reviews.

More from this interview at thirdwavestudygroup.blogspot.com ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13404857 to: Rust to Renewal (Paperback) by Joshua Reichard
Rust to Renewal:
A Case Study of the Religious
Response to Deindustrialization

Joshua D Reichard
Vision Publishing, 2007
180 pp, pb $12.99


Reviewed by Carl Davidson

‘Rust to Renewal’, as this book’s title implies, is about the decline of American steel towns in the 1970s and 1980s, the responses of their communities—most importantly, their churches—and whether there is still hope for the future in these places.

These are critical topics even in 2008, especially with an economic recession and growing unemployment on the horizon, along with debates over what does or does not constitute a proper ‘stimulus’ to the economy.

Author Joshua Reichard uses Youngstown, Ohio and the surrounding Mahoning River Valley as his case in point; and the story he tells may seem old news to many people still residing there. The Youngstown area, moreover, was only part of a wider region, stretching from Wheeling, W VA, through Pittsburgh, PA to Cleveland, OH. This was the country’s steel heartland, and by the end of the1980s, some 100,000 steel mill jobs were permanently abolished, with great distress to those concerned..

Back in 1977, on ‘Black Monday,’ after being told repeated lies and given false hopes, thousands of Youngstown area steelworkers were summarily fired. The mills were shut down, and a community lost what it perceived as a decent future.

The workers, however, and their community allies, mainly churches were hardly passive. During a series of protests, they formed the Ecumenical Coalition, which, together with the local Steelworkers Union, had considerable clout, at least for a time, and they forced the owners into negotiations. To make a long story short, they tried to buy out the failing mill, take it over, reorganize production, and run it themselves. They took the battle all the way to Jimmy Carter’s White House, but abruptly lost, sabotaged mainly by Beltway federal bureaucrats and rival steel bosses.

If you’re looking for a detailed critique of where the Ecumenical Coalition and the steelworkers went wrong, settling old scores, you won’t find it here. But if you think it important that workers and community allies waged a valiant battle, and want to look to the future with some fresh ideas to deal with ongoing problems, this slim volume is a good place to start....

Full review at carldavidson.blogspot.com ]]> http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/13402399 to: After Capitalism (Paperback) by David Schweickart
There Is An Alternative:
Market Socialism
with Radical Democracy

Some Notes On Reading
‘After Capitalism’
By David Schweickart

Published by:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002
PB: $23.95; 193pp.

Reviewed By Carl Davidson

In this short book, building on his earlier work, ‘Against Capitalism,’ David Schweickart has given us an excellent breakthrough in finding the road to a new socialism for the 21st century. Using both practical and ethical arguments, his main objective is to take on the ‘TINA’ argument-‘There Is No Alternative’-of the neoliberals. He convincingly shows there is at least one alternative, a ‘successor system’ that he calls ‘Economic Democracy.’ His critics will find it hard to dismiss his ideas lightly.

First, Schweickart’s Economic Democracy alternative is a working hypothesis, and not a rigid or doctrinaire model. While rooted in historical materialism, Schweickart’s Marxian notions of science are more in tune with the ‘open systems’ and critical instrumentalism of modern pragmatism. He casts a wide net to draw lessons from practice-from the failed Soviet-led command economies, to the ongoing surge of China’s market socialism, to the new smaller and more tentative projects in Spain’s Mondragon Cooperatives and Brazil’s Worker’s Party projects. He uses all these as resources, but he returns to American soil to work out his basic ideas and proposals.

‘Successor-system theory’, Schweickart explains, ‘is meant to be theory with practical intent. If it cannot offer a plausible projection as to how we might get from here to there, successor-system theory remains an intellectual exercise in model building-interesting in its own right, perhaps, and capable of providing a rejoinder to the smug apologists for capital, but useless to people trying to change the world.’ So what is ‘Economic Democracy’? The core idea is that the workers themselves democratically elect the managers of their firms. They also share the wealth they create by sharing the profit among themselves. They make their money the old-fashioned way: by finding consumer needs, meeting those needs with decent products, and selling them to satisfied customers at reasonable prices.

But how are things like costs, prices, new products and production goals determined? Here Schweickart departs from traditional socialist conceptions; he affirms the primary role of the market rather than relying on nationally centralized planning. What to produce is shaped mainly by consumer demand; what to charge for products or services is determined by competition for market share with other worker-controlled or private enterprises; and what to pay the workforce is limited by what’s left over after total costs are deducted from total sales.

What about ownership? Each Economic Democracy plant or workplace is controlled by each respective group of workers, but the firm is not owned by each particular group. The firms are socially owned by the public at large. Because of this public ownership, the local workers are also required to meet the cost of paying into two funds: a depreciation fund, to be used locally by the firm for capital expenditures, and a government-controlled capital investment fund. This latter payment is in the form of a capital assets tax also added to the firm’s costs. In a sense, the workplace is leased by the workers from the government. But what’s left after all the costs are met, the profit, the workers divide among themselves as they see fit. The capital assets taxes that the government takes in is used to finance new enterprises, to maintain and develop infrastructure projects, and other costs spread across the whole of society.

That’s the bare-bones model. Naturally, it has further implications and raises many more questions, not the least of which is how we get from today’s globalized capitalism to the ‘successor system’ of Economic Democracy . In the course of the book, Schweickart addresses a good deal of these problems; but for some issues, he has only hints or open possibilities...

For the full review, go to carldavidson.blogspot.com
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