Birth, Death, and Resurrection of the Issue of the Common: A Historical and Theoretical Perspective

Just stumbled upon this recently published (Oct. 2019) issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (SAQ), which is dedicated to the commons. Featuring articles by theorists such as Silvia Federici, Massimo De Angelis, Ugo Mattei and Carlo Vercellone, which explore various themes related to the commons from a theoretical as well as historical perspective, it is a must-read for those who wish to delve more deeply into the subject.

Materialities and socialities of postcapitalism: Commons, peer to peer sharing and solidarity

With the aim of inquiring ‘into the organising for the potential collapse of the current dominant mode of production and consumption’, this year the annual Ephemera Conference will be held in Tzoumerka, Greece on 25-26 March 2020.  Here’s the call for participation: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/events/materialities-and-socialities-postcapitalism-commons-peer-peer-sharing-and-solidarity

If I Only Had a Heart: Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons and Distributed Cooperative Organizations

We just finished reading If I Only Had a Heart: Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons and Distributed Cooperative Organizations, a brilliant synthesis of the ideas of the Commons and P2P, open cooperativism, open value accounting and feminist economics. Written by Stacco Troncoso and his colleagues from the Guerilla Translation team, this is a must-read for those interested in the theory and practice of commons-based peer production.

Demystifying the Digital Economy

The Research Group for the Digital Economy and Private Law (at the Faculty of Law at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) is hosting a very interesting seminar cycle that begins tomorrow at 19:00 (Room 8, 3rd Floor) with a presentation from Alex Pazaitis (of the P2P Lab) themed “Demystifying the Digital Economy“.

The seminar cycle includes three more talks:

  • Fri 8 Nov: Alex Pazaitis – The Commons and peer production: A short introduction
  • Fri 15 Nov: Alex Pazaitis – The political economy of peer production: Two general approaches
  • Fri 22 Nov: Angelos Kornilakis – Legal mapping of small-scale economic networks of peer production

Who Owns The World? The 5th Platform Cooperativism conference

The 5th conference on platform cooperativism will be held on November 7-9 at the New School in New York.  Convened by Trebor Scholz, the conference will bring together researchers and founders of  platform cooperatives to explore topics such as “worker power in the platform economy, antitrust, misogyny and racism in co-ops, ecological sustainability, best practices for cooperation including the allocation of startup funding, the potential of platform co-ops for data trusts, data co-ops, new models for distributed governance, and data sovereignty”.

Industrious modernity

Readers of our website are familiar with the work of Adam Arvidsson, which explores the relationship between Capitalism and Commons-based peer production.  In his new book titled Changemakers: The Industrious Future of the Digital Economy, which has just been published by Polity, Arvidsson “argues that, as industrial capitalism enters a period of prolonged crisis, a new paradigm of ‘industrious modernity’ is emerging. Based on small-scale, commons-based and market-oriented entrepreneurship, this industrious modernity is being pioneered by the many outcasts that no longer find a place within a crumbling industrial modernity”.

Continue reading “Industrious modernity”