Archive for March, 2011

Mondragon as a Bridge to a New Socialism

by @ Wednesday, March 16th, 2011. Filed under Economic Democracy, Marxism, Mondragon, Socialism

 

Worker-owner in Mondragon coop factory

The Mondragon Cooperatives and 21st Century Socialism:

A Review of Five Books with Radical Critiques and New Ideas

From Mondragon to America:

Experiments in Community Economic Development

By Greg MacLeod

UCCB Press, 1997

The Myth of Mondragon:

Cooperatives, Politics and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town

By Sharryn Kasmir

State University of New York Press, 1996

Values at Work:

Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragon

By George Cheney

Cornell University Press, 1999

Cooperation Works!

How People Are Using Cooperative Action

to Rebuild Communities and Revitalize the Economy

By E.G. Nadeau & David J. Thompson

Lone Oak Press, 1996

After Capitalism

By David Schweickart

Rowman & Littlefield, 2002

Reviewed by Carl Davidson

Solidarity Economy Network

Something important for both socialist theory and working-class alternatives has been steadily growing in Spain’s Basque country over the past 50 years, and is now spreading slowly across Spain, Europe and the rest of the globe.

It’s an experiment, at once radical and practical, in how the working-class can become the masters of their workplaces and surrounding communities, growing steadily and successfully competing with the capitalism of the old order and laying the foundations of something new—it’s known as the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC).

Just what that ‘something new’ adds up to is often contested. Some see the experiment as a major new advance in a centuries-old cooperative tradition, while a few go further and see it as a contribution to a new socialism for our time. A few others see it both as clever refinement of capitalism and as a reformist diversion likely to fail. Still others see it as a ‘third way’ full of utopian promise simply to be replicated anywhere in whatever way makes sense to those concerned.

(more...)

email2friend

Japan’s Natural Disasters Are Not So Natural—Nor Limited to Japan

by @ Sunday, March 13th, 2011. Filed under Green Energy, Japan

Emergency Special Report:

In the Wake of Japan's Earthquake,

A Hidden Nuclear Catastrophe

By Yoichi Shimatsu

SolidarityEconomy.net via Global Research, March 13, 2011

Fourth Media (China)

Emergency Special Report I

The Wave, reminiscent of Hokusai's masterful woodblock print, blew past Japan's shoreline defenses of harbor breakwaters and gigantic four-legged blocks called tetrapods, lifting ships to ram through seawalls and crash onto downtown parking lots. Seaside areas were soon emptied of cars and houses dragged up rivers and back out to sea. Wave heights of up to10 meters (33 feet) are staggering, but before deeming these as unimaginable, consider the historical Sanriku tsunami that towered to 15 meters (nearly 50 feet) and killed 27,000 people in 1896.

Nature's terrifying power, however we may dread it, is only as great as the human-caused vulnerability of our civilization. Soon after Christmas 2004, I volunteered for the rescue operation on the day after the Indian Ocean tsunami and simultaneously did an on-site field study on the causes of fatalities in southern Thailand. The report, issued by Thammasat and Hong Kong Universities, concluded that high water wasn't the sole cause of the massive death toll. No, it's buildings that kill - to be specific, badly designed structures without escape routes onto roofs or, in our greed for real estate, situated inside drained lagoons and riverbeds, or on loose landfill. In the Tohoku disaster, an ultramodern Sendai Airport sat helplessly flooded on all sides while nearby a monstrous black torrent swept entire houses upstream.

Other threats are built into the vulnerabilities of our critical infrastructure and power systems. The balls of orange flames churning out of huge gas storage tanks in Ichihara, Chiba, should never have happened if technical precautions had been properly carried out. Whenever things go wrong, underlying risks had led to a liability and, in a responsible society, accountability.

(more...)

email2friend

Why New Nukes Are a Bad Idea

by @ Saturday, March 12th, 2011. Filed under Environment, Green Energy

Nuclear Power and Earthquake Zones Overlap in the U.S.

Earthquake in Japan raises concerns about what could happen in the U.S.

By Andrew Schenkel

Mar 11 2011

SolidarityEconomy.net via  Mother Nature Network

 

Nuclear power and earthquakes

IN THE ZONE: Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in California sits within the most active earthquake zone in the United States. (Photo: emdot/Flickr)

Nuclear power is under the microscope as much of the world watches the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and the resulting tsunamis.

Fires near Japanese nuclear power plants are forcing evacuations and concerns for all the obvious reasons. Those concerns have traveled across the Pacific to California, where nuclear power plants are being shut down.

Let’s take a look at which nuclear power plants sit in the seismically active areas of the United States.

(more...)

email2friend

Jobs of the Future – One Picture, One Thousand Words

by @ Monday, March 7th, 2011. Filed under High Road Economics

Technology Growth in the Near Future

From FastCompany.com



email2friend

Unmask the Banksters, Build the Power of Workers

by @ Saturday, March 5th, 2011. Filed under Financial Crisis, Marxism, Organizing

Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

By DAVID HARVEY
SolidarityEconomy.Net via Counterpunch

Does this crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? My answer is that it depends what you mean by neo-liberalism. My interpretation is that it’s a class project, masked by a lot of neo-liberal rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, privatisation and the free market. These were means, however, towards the restoration and consolidation of class power, and that neo-liberal project has been fairly successful.

One of the basic principles that was set up in the 1970s was that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. This is the principle that was worked out in New York City crisis in the mid-1970s, and was first defined internationally when Mexico threatened to go bankrupt in 1982. This would have destroyed the New York investment banks, so the US Treasury and the IMF combined to bail Mexico out. But in so doing they mandated austerity for the Mexican population. In other words they protected the banks and destroyed the people, and this has been the standard practice in the IMF ever since. The current bailout is the same old story, one more time, except bigger.

What happened in the US was that 8 men gave us a 3 page document which pointed a gun at everybody and said ‘give us $700 billion or else’. This to me was like a financial coup, against the government and the population of the US. Which means you’re not going to come out of this crisis with a crisis of the capitalist class; you’re going to come out of this with a far greater consolidation of the capitalist class than there has been in the past. We’re going to end up with four or five major banking institutions in the United States and nothing else.

(more...)

email2friend

China Think Tank: Gorbachev Correct, But Failed on Political Stability

by @ Thursday, March 3rd, 2011. Filed under China, Marxism, Socialism

China's Socialism Beats Democracies

From IndianExpress.com

Mar 02 2011, Beijing: China's experiment of mixing economic reforms with socialism has achieved more success than democracies and averted a Soviet Union style collapse in post Mao Zedong era, a think tank here said projecting it as a new socialist role model.

China's economic and political achievements since late 1970s owe to a unique socialism-featured development model, The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' (CASS), an official think tank's study on World Socialism said.

China's development path lies in implementing necessary structural reforms and in learning from others' success, while, at the same time, refusing any form of foreign intervention, it said.

(more...)

email2friend

PlastiSteel: Breakthrough in Materials for the Future

by @ Tuesday, March 1st, 2011. Filed under High Road Economics

High Design Revolution: New Material Combines

the Strength of Steel and the Moldability of Plastic

By Darren Quick
Solidarityeconomy.net via Gizmag.com

March 1, 2011 - Jan Schroers and his team have developed novel metal alloys that can be blow molded into virtually any shape

Scientists at Yale University have done what materials scientists have been trying to do for decades – create a material that boasts the look, strength and durability of metal that can be molded into complex shapes as simply and cheaply as plastic. The scientists say the development could have the same impact on society as the development of synthetic plastics last century and they have already used the novel metals to create complex shapes, such as metallic bottles, watch cases, miniature resonators and biomedical implants, that are twice as strong as typical steel and can be molded in less than a minute.

(more...)

email2friend

[SolidarityEconomy.net is proudly powered by WordPress.]