E-book — Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy by Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright

New Left Project’s new e-book, Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, is now available for download. 

In it the leading radical thinkers Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright take on the crucial but all-too neglected question: what kind of society should we be fighting for instead of capitalism? 

Hahnel favours ‘participatory economics’. Wright advocates ‘real utopian socialism’. Alternatives to Capitalism puts these practical proposals through their paces in an in-depth, frank and extremely instructive debate about the central question of our time. 

•   Download the book for kindle, free. 

•   Buy the book on Amazon. 

•   If you don’t have a kindle, you can read it by downloading a kindle previewer. 

•   A pdf version will be available soon - watch this space. 

We will be posting excerpts from the book on NLP over the coming weeks. First up, read the introduction.

 New Left Project
Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy
Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright
h/t Jan Milch

Glynn Moody — The FLOK Society Project: Making The Good Life Possible Through Good Knowledge

One of the most striking and important developments in the world of technology over the last two decades or so has been the rise of an alternative mode of production that is open, collaborative and global. This began in the world of software, with Richard Stallman's GNU project, but has now been extended to the realms of text, data, science and hardware, among others. The free sharing of information to form a kind of digital commons, which lies at the heart of these projects, has also been applied to business, albeit in the modified form of collaborative consumption -- things like Airbnb. These different manifestations of fundamentally similar ideas have sprung up in a largely uncoordinated way, but an interesting question is whether they could be drawn together into a unified approach, applied to a whole country, say. That's what Ecuador's FLOK Society (original in Spanish) has been exploring. "FLOK" is derived from "free", "libre" and "open knowledge"; here's how David Bollier, an expert on the commons, describes the project…

TechDirt

The FLOK Society Project: Making The Good Life Possible Through Good Knowledge

Glynn Moody

Chris Dillow — The Transition To Socialism

...the creation of non-capitalist forms of organization in the interstices of capitalism which, if they can expand, could eventually marginalize capitalism itself....

It's already happening in the alternative economy, where it has been possible to live peripheral to the mainstream. Alternatives have been for some time as new frontier, so to speak. Now we are seeing a new push.

Stumbling and Mumbling
The Transition To Socialism
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle (UK)

Poor Richard — Building a dictionary for an economics of the commons

This is a proposal in response to “Help us build a dictionary on commons economics!”, an article recently posted at The Economics of the Commons Conference (ECC 2013) Communications Platform website (commonsandeconomics.org)

P2P Foundation
Building a dictionary for an economics of the commons
Poor Richard