Co-operatives and Liberation, not necessarily in that order
Recently I’ve been returning over again to late Heidegger’s thinking, partly for ecological reasons, as an attempt to cope with the climatic disasters we’re approaching. But environmental collapse aside, there are good reasons for me to do this: as I shifted away from philosophy to focussing on co-ops, I never really sat back and reflected […]
Read More Heidegger and Co-ops: Ever Learning to Dwell?Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the Dark Mountain manifesto: https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ It’s easy to get caught up in the eschatological aspects, but I think the basis of the project is that it “sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own – […]
Read More Eschatology and Utopia (Dark Mountain)Marxists will often tell you that under capitalism, labour is “exploited”. This invokes images of workers toiling in factories, but what is meant by “exploitation” is actually quite technical, and can exist even in working conditions which may seem opulent. “Exploitation” for Marx is the objective source of profit, growth and expansion in the economy, […]
Read More Marxism vs. Owenism: Labour ExploitationThis weekend five co-opers from Toronto made the short (distance) trip down to Buffalo, NY, to visit the Nickel City Housing Co-op. I have lived in the Co-ops in Toronto for more than ten years, and visited other co-ops across Canada and the US, but I’ve never actually set foot in Toronto’s closest American neighbours. […]
Read More Nickel City Cooperative: a very simple site visit19th century American worker co-ops practiced co-operative federalism – they put portions of their surplus towards creating new co-operatives, and they belonged to federations that participated in creating and managing new co-op firms. “In 1885, the Solidarity Watch-Case Co-operative, was organized in Brooklyn, New York, by the Knights of Labor (KOL) after a strike against […]
Read More What Happened to Worker Co-op Federalism?Hi Friend, It was really good to see you and your family yesterday. I hope we can hang out again soon. I am writing this letter because I feel the need to say something in response to this notion of “complexity” that you used in one of our conversations to characterize the situation in Syria. […]
Read More Letter to a friend about SyriaWhy do we call charities “non profit companies”? The idea of “non profit” seems to imply that the surplus would be shared out towards some socially desirable end. This is, I believe, a general site of confusion for anti-capitalists: there is nothing inherently capitalist about the notion of an economic surplus. Under capitalism, the surplus […]
Read More On the terminology of “non profits”Campus Co-op Residence Inc. was formed by four University of Toronto students who, after seeing Toyohiko Kagama speak at a conference in Indianapolis during the 1935 Christmas break, returned to Toronto determined to start a co-operative of their own. Our first house at 63 St George was leased for a nominal fee from Victoria College […]
Read More Campus Co-op’s LegacyIn my first paper I defined CD as processes that lead to an increase in social capital as well as an increase in equitable access to social capital across a place based community. I would modify this by including the possibility that this same kind of equitable increase in social capital can occur across a […]
Read More Market Based Approaches to Community DevelopmentIn my first assignment I defined community development as the process by which “an increase in generalized reciprocity erodes the barriers that prevent the flow of social capital between social fields, corroding barriers to access to social capital across a locality”. After considering the role of the Canadian State in the provision of humanistic services, specifically health […]
Read More Community De-Development
Only a Northern Song 