How to end domestic servitude
Today I found myself in the local supermarket counting the number of shelf feet displaying home cleaning products. The total came to 60 feet, four shelves tall. I then walked over to the shelves with kitchen utensils and gadgets – 25 feet.
By Bernard Harcourt (Reviewed by Bernard Marszalek)
It occurs occasionally that someone outside of a problem will have an insight that escaped those who are focused on finding a solution. This phenomenon has achieved the unenviable status of a phenomenon that can be commoditized by the Consultancy Industry, even if the insights produced for the fee fail.
Abigail Susik’s recent essay devoted to Silvia Federici’s work delved into her evocative response to an inquiry about threats to social reproduction. She approached the subject in a wholistic manner:
I call it a war—a war on people’s reproduction. Wherever you turn your eyes you can see that.
The Center for Global Development (CGD), a think tank with former US Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers as head of their Board of Directors, announced that “we may have reached Peak Progress.” The CGD believes that a declining population coupled with “diminishing returns .
One summer during my youth I was hired to work the assembly line at a television manufacturer. This was in the days when America had a manufacturing base and actually produced consumer goods.
Living In A World That Can’t Be Fixed is not a guidebook to terminal melancholy. Curtis White, the author of this book, also wrote The Spirit of Disobedience along with other social criticism, hardly advocates that course of inaction. On the contrary, White’s provocative title poses a challenge.
A review of Cooperatives Confront Capitalism (Zed, 2016) by Peter Ranis, Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2017) by Nick Srnicek and Ours to Hack and to Own (O/R Books, 2016) by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, eds.
Worker Cooperatives
For almost two decades various pundits, activists and developers have been shoehorning worker cooperatives into a mainstream narrative usually based on the notion of ownership – of course, “democratic” ownership.
Book review of Buddhist Economics by Clair Brown and Zen Economics by Rob Urie
The opposition to the pillaging by the founders of what came to be called capitalism took many forms: from utopian colonies and secret societies of craftsmen to dissenting religious congregations, among other insurgent formations.
No More Work: Why Full Employment is a Bad Idea by James Livingston
To refer to economists as a priesthood has become a commonplace. Economists practice “a religion couched in the language of mathematics and statistics,” say Yanis Varoufakis. Their church, to carry the symbolism further, has a magnificent gold and marble altar where they offer praise to Capital.
Our Postwork Future
A Prospect to Win or to Lose?
by Peter Frase
It borders on a disservice to characterize Four Futures: Life After Capitalism as a
primer on contemporary political philosophy, since Peter Frase, the author,
explodes any expectation of pedantry in his prose, or more importantly, in his
approach to political theory, which he calls “social science fiction.”