We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, June 20, 2010

There is an alternative: “Coop Video” [2:54m video]

from P2P Foundation. Unfortunately, cooperatives, in the legal sense, function like any other profit seeking body of people. The main difference between a coop and a corporation is that the former is guided more by humanitarian set of principles. This, of course, makes it difficult for them to compete with strictly profit oriented enterprises. Hence coops must compromise those principles if they are to survive, and inevitably they must also act like their profit-seeking rivals.

A true alternative would be to design an economy to serve the needs of people (as a society) as democratically determined by them.