DONATE

CONTACT US

User login

Subscribe to the GEO E-Newsletter

A low-volume email list providing you with our e-newsletter highlighting updates to the GEO website, upcoming events, and more.

Your email address:

SPECIAL: The deal between Mondragon and the United Steelworkers

Oct. 27, 2009: The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada.

Go to GEO's meta-page on this historic agreement

Noncapitalist Markets?

A blog entry by Michael Bauwens

Following the relational typology of Alan Page Fiske, there are four intersubjective modes which have existed cross-culturally and historically: equality matching, authority ranking (feudal-type structures), market pricing, and communal shareholding (according to us: P2P). Societies have always been a mix, but it can be argued that historically we have seen a succession of dominant forms: the gift economy in the tribal era, authority ranking in feudalism, market pricing in capitalism, and my hypothesis is that communal shareholding forms may dominate in a future ?P2P-oriented era?...

Read more here...

| | | | |

A Reflection on Current SocioEcoEconomic Dimensions

Fascinating, Michel. I am still getting acquainted with economic terminologies and concepts, now in a related Master?s program from a background in biology, social services, and activism. I agree strongly with what I understand to be your perception that the current system is so powerful that large-scale, fundamentally coerced change is not desirable.
A fundamental issue I perceive is the abundance of natural resources, and the gap between the invented and reified currency accouting systems and the ecosystem limitations. Nevertheless, it is a dynamic recognizable in examples like Newfoundland where the Cod population crashed. Essentially no Cod, fishermen with limited voyage technology and resources had no choice but to stop fishing. I understand that retraining took place. I don?t know what the current status of the Cod population is there, but I have not heard that they have rebounded. A larger perspective is provided by the U.N. group 2005 Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, which describes 60 percent of studied areas as already used beyond restorative capacity. I believe the ecological concept is the ?replacement rate.? Another dimension is captured by the Stockholm Treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants from the last ten years. As described by the Center for International Environmental Law, it bans twelve chemicals, and is part of a broader international arrangement involving a Chemicals Management system. Perhaps this can be termed ?chemical emissions and biochemical interference?.
The dimension you refer to represented by fair trade is a vigorous effort in the direction of a peer to peer system, I agree. In attempting to understand the socio-cultural axes in this realm, perhaps it can also be helpful to refer to the examples of Science Applications International and St. Luke?s Advertising, both being high-revenue employee-owned companies and conceivably cooperative partnersips, with the former also a high-technology firm. I have no knowledge of their relationship to environmental sustainability. Interface Carpets is a manufacturing multinational corporation, however, that has made an outright commitment to ending any toxic environmental impact, and achieving a restorative impact. Another useful example exists in Equal Exchange, a company that has achieved significant success as an employee-owned cooperative partnership, also engaged in Fair Trade and Organic practices.
I appreciate your effort to identify alternative and past economic models. While I think we are ultimately creating a new scale and perhaps innovating slightly in applying these concepts to modern society, certainly previous efforts and conceptions are important, inspiring, and instructive.
Ultimately, I think much current valuation is largely a psychological, sociohistorical, and subjective construct. The true objective value must lie in the energetic units underlying labor and scientific structure. Nevertheless, with sufficient philosophy of science and epistemology, there must be a way there from here.
We can also benefit from referring to Herman Daly?s Steady State Economics. I need to review it further, but I understand it to mean the economic dynamic equlibrium involving a sustainable balance of resource inputs and recycling of outputs. Additionally, the academic and NGO community already involved in developing Whole Cost accounting frameworks, such as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare and environmental accounting systems being developed by such agencies as U.S. EPA and UNEP.
My time is limited at the moment, so I?ll return later and try to integrate my framework here with your proposal and economic conceptual categories. 

 

WakeUPDemocracy.org at We, the World.org- COPAC, UNEP, UN Development Group, Oxfam, Greenpeace, FLO, and IFOAM and many others- a fine look at a sustainable globalization- COPAC- the UN interagency committee for cooperatives; the