The Institute for Local Self-Reliance

September 5, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

The Institute describes its mission as providing “innovative strategies, working models and timely information to support environmentally sound and equitable community development“. This group is another excellent example of some of the concrete work being done to forge new economic realities. Please visit their website to learn more: ISLR.org

Mondragoon

March 14, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

Content Coming Soon! For now please visit their website

The Democracy Collaberative

March 14, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

Content Coming Soon! For now please visit their website and the website of another of their projects Community Wealth.org

The Cleveland Model

March 14, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

Content Coming Soon! This is another project of the Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio called the Evergreen Cooperatives.

The contradiction between the general social power into which capital develops, on the one hand, and the private power of the individual capitalists over these social conditions of production, on the other, becomes ever more irreconcilable and yet contains the solution of the problem, because it implies at the same time the transformation of the conditions of production into general, common, social conditions. This transformation stems from the development of the productive forces under capitalist production, and from the ways and means by which this development takes place.

Marx, Capital vol.III

In considering such [societal] transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production... and the legal, political, religious, esthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become consciousness of this conflict and fight it out.
Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.

- Karl Marx

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future.
But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions.

-Friedrich Engels, Socialism; Utopian and Scientific (1880)

The Excellent Situation

There is Great Chaos Under Heaven; The Situation is Excellent

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Mondragoon

The Democracy Collaberative

The Cleveland Model