Reviews and Comments

"We are living in an era where mutual aid and trust in others has been thoroughly dismantled by the forces of neoliberalism. The only way to rebuild these trust relationships is through face-to-face community building and local municipal politics, at least at the start.

There are surely those who say that such humble actions will never bring about change in time. But communities, regional associations, and social movements whose reach seems restricted to the local are finding ways to link up with comrades all around the world in solidarity, and it is here that hope for the future resides. We are already seeing how various local movements are beginning to construct networks with other movements around the world to fight global capitalism. As Via Campesina puts it, “Globalize the Struggle, Globalize Hope!” "

"The state becomes the manager of the representations through which class society as a whole comes to know and regulate itself. The rise of a vectoralist class put an end to this arrangement. The vectoral class uses the state to extend and defend the privatization of information. It attacks the socialized science, culture, communication and education that other ruling classes for the most part left in the hands of the state. “There is an intellectual land grab going on.”"

Any similarity with the state of the big tech and its "AI" development is NOT a coincidence!!!

"There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work. We need to go beyond having a critique/counter analysis/alternate systemic plan for society — we have to actually do everything differently, aligned with a different set of core principles for existence. Especially our movement building. How do we live compassion, justice, love, accessibility, in alignment with this planet and with the people on it? How do we live our values?"

"The other thing Piketty emphasizes is the difference between participatory socialism and Soviet-style socialism. As a regime where all decision-making power resided with officials and experts who also controlled information and thought, the Soviet Union was antithetical to the democratic nature of participatory socialism. In contrast to the authoritarian Soviet Union, participatory socialism is an attempt to transition to a sustainable society through nurturing the seeds of mutual aid and citizen self-rule."

"My life felt as if it was being pulled apart (...) It was as if some dispassionate tinkerer had made a series of small cuts and extracted the spine, the plot and structure of my life as it to say, 'Let's see what happens now.'" -- David Treuer

"Individualism was a luxury that sharecroppers simply could not afford." -- Jones (1985)

I am impressed by how long it took me to encounter this connection between individualism and luxury, even more considering I have studied cultural individualism for many years. It shows me I was not reading about collectivism from the perspective of marginalized communities (in this case, black farmers in the US.)

It is also very impressive how clearly Jones's statement can be applied to most working groups in current days (40 years in his future). The concept of the "individual success" is a huge barrier to be transposed before we can start inventing a sustainable future.

"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)."

"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."

"The easier “being wrong” is for you (the faster you can release your viewpoint), the quicker you can adapt to changing circumstances. (...) consider that the place where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground for connecting with and receiving others. And in a beautiful twist, being soft in your rightness, as opposed to smashing people with your brilliance, can open others up to whatever wisdom you’ve accumulated."