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"The Knights of Labor connected workplace issues and labor rights with local, state, and federal policies, and was active in politics and mutual aid as well as economic development. (...) Black members were known for their militancy, and were eventually forced underground in the face of antiunion and racist intimidation and violence. (...) the decline of the Knights of Labor was felt most strongly among the cooperatives. As Curl observes, “The entire economic system came down hard on the Knight cooperatives: railroads refused to haul their products; manufacturers refused to sell them needed machinery; wholesalers refused them raw materials and supplies; banks wouldn’t lend” (2009, 106). Most of the cooperatives were forced to close by the end of 1888."

"The commons consist of more than just power and water. The means of production must be returned to the commons as well, I'm talking here about workers’ cooperatives—organizations allowing workers to invest jointly in the co-ownership and co-management of the means of production without interference from capitalists and shareholders.

Workers’ co-ops play 2 crucial roles in workers regaining their autonomy and power of self-determination. Every member of a co-op invests in, owns, and operates the enterprise. It’s the workers who have the agency to discuss and determine what sort of work will be done and how it will take place."

"I wanted to be a writer. And I put the question to myself: Did I have any idea? (...) Were my ideas serious and important enough to justify my desire to write? (...) I knew that if I spent every moment of the rest of my life trying, I would never come up with a great idea, and that if I thought too much about whether my ideas were real, whether they were deep or a regional or serious enough, I'll never be able to write at all." -- Sigrid Nunez

"In worker cooperatives, labor rents capital instead of capital renting labor, which allows the “new assets and liabilities created in production” to accrue to the residual claimants (workers) (Ellerman 1990, 207)."

@sol2070 Eu sempre compro no pre-lançamento via Kickstarter! ;) Quase terminando!

"Its only by thinking about his break from Eurocentrism in conjunction with the break from productivism occasioned by his research into ecology that the true nature of Marx’s shift in thought comes into focus. (...) an even more surprising interpretation arises than the simple shift from a singular path to multiple possible paths to reach the promised land of communism. In short, it represents a fundamental change in the nature of Marx’s conception of communism itself, its new face revealed at the end of his life."

"The rule by code, characterized by the instrumentalization of computer code to serve the interests of powerful tech companies, thus presents itself as the software equivalent of the rule by law, characterized by the arbitrary wielding of laws to serve the interests of powerful sovereigns. (...) While both traditional online platforms and blockchain-based systems rely on code to regulate online behaviors, there is nonetheless a fundamental difference in the way these two systems operate. Because there is no centralized authority controlling a public and permissionless blockchain network (i.e., there is no sovereign), blockchain technology provides for the establishment of code-based rules that are difficult to co-opt for the benefits of a few."

"Responding to sociological work on trust, it [this book] argues that blockchain technology could best be understood as a “confidence machine” even though the need for trust is not eliminated but rather dispersed within a distributed network of actors."