Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On this episode, Nate is joined by systems scientist Riane Eisler to discuss her decades of work studying ‘domination’ and ‘partnership’ societies throughout history and what it might mean to transition to more sustainable societies in the future.
From small towns to large cities throughout the country, a significant shift towards workplace democracy and equitable wealth sharing is gaining momentum. At the forefront of this movement are worker-owned cooperative businesses, where employees work and share ownership and decision-making.
The Offers and Needs Market is one of the Post Growth Institute’s key programs in which we draw forth people’s kindness and generosity through markets that go beyond ordinary commerce and value the full range of human interests, skills, and aspirations.
In communities that have practiced a gift economy, valuables are not exchanged for money or for other goods but are instead given with no outward agreement that anything will be immediately returned
Taken to its logical conclusion, a human-centred global rationality will be imposed and should you – a peasant farmer or indigenous laggard – get in their way, then you should be offered up to the socialist gods, for the greater good. Jump on board, Comrade, the future is waiting.
Degrowth has been described even by its proponents as a ‘missile word’ – an idea so shocking and provocative that it is difficult to co-opt (though there are many who try). With the release of yet another poor critique of degrowth, this time authored by Eoin McLaughlin in The Conversation, it is clear that the knee-jerk hostility which faces degrowth is also a problem of understanding amidst uncertainty.
What is the “rational kernel” of the romantic world-view? It is a social and cultural protest against the modern industrial capitalist civilisation, in the name of past, pre-capitalist, pre-modern values.
Cosmolocal production, utilizing digital communication networks, connects local communities to minimize material and energy footprints.
While the dominant U.S. economic system operates on this principle of persistent financial coercion, there is (and always have been) an alternative way to organize individuals into collectives providing essential services, without the need for coercion: mutual aid networks.
This thrusting of tens of millions of Americans out of the national healthcare system at a moment when healthcare outfits, pharmaceutical companies, and health insurance corporations are making record profits has been termed “the great unwinding.” And it couldn’t be more cruelly ironic.
The time has never been riper to reach the heights of Mount Sustainability, and once there, plant trees under whose shade we can take wonder at the wide view in front of us. Perhaps then we’ll cease to behave as masters and start living as guests, treading lightly in a world that has been here long before us—one that’s certainly not of our own making.
Working within the limits of Earth and people, and celebrating the potential of both, they envisage a substantive democracy, direct action by people, with power distributed on the basis of subsidiarity and exercised in ways highly respectful of Earth, the source of human being.
