Co-convened with Universidad de los Andes (Venezuela)
& RIPESS-NA (Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of the Social Solidarity Economy - North America)

*
Background: About the Forum
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Forum Schedule (.xls download)
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Registration & Workshop Proposal Form (.doc download) Please note: Deadline for submissions extended until January 23!

* Co-sponsor the Forum on the Solidarity Economy
* Program Booklet ads - support the Forum by taking out an ad
* Logistical information: travel, accommodations

An Historic Opportunity

The current economic crisis and the possible death throes of neoliberalism (corporate-led globalization), offers us an historic opening to advance a new framework for economic development. We have an opportunity to push for a fundamental transformation in our economic and social system, one that puts people and planet before private profits and power.

The exhibition project “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” by Oliver Ressler focuses on diverse concepts and models for alternative economies and societies, which all share a rejection of the capitalist system of rule.

The book “Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies” is a collaborative effort of the artist and Wyspa Insitute of Art (www.wyspa.art.pl), following the presentation in the “Health and Safety” exhibition at Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdansk, 2004 and shows the current status of the ongoing project.
It includes an introduction by Aneta Szylak, the new essay “Questions from an Artist Who Speaks (and Reads, Writes, Thinks, and Acts)“ / “Pytania od artysty który przemawia (a także czyta, pisze myśli i działa)“ by Gregory Sholette, and the following texts, which are based on transcriptions of video interviews that were carried out by Oliver Ressler for the project between 2003 and 2007:

Chaia Heller: Libertarian Municipalism / Komunalizm Libertariański
Takis Fotopoulos: Inclusive Democracy / Demokracja inkluzywna
Michael Albert: Participatory Economics / Ekonomia uczestnicząca
Heinz Dieterich: The Socialism of the 21st Century / Socjalizm 21. wieku
Paul Cockshott: Towards a New Socialism / W kierunku Nowego Socjalizmu
p.m.: bolo’bolo
Marge Piercy: Utopian Feminist Visions / Utopijne idee feministyczne
Ralf Burnicki: Anarchist Consensual Democracy / Anarchistyczna Demokracja Konsensualna
Maria Mies: The Subsistence Perspective / Perspektywa naturalna
Nancy Folbre: Caring Labor / Praca opiekuńcza
Christoph Spehr: Free Cooperation / Wolna Współpraca
John Holloway: Change the World Without Taking Power / Zmieniaj świat bez przejmowania władzy
The Zapatista Good Government / Dobry Rząd Zapatystów
Todor Kuljic: Yugoslavia’s Workers Self-Management / Samozarządzanie robotników w Jugosławii
Salomé Moltó: Workers’ Collectives during the Spanish Revolution / Kolektywy robotnicze podczas rewolucji hiszpańskiej
Alain Dalotel: The Paris Commune 1871 / Komuna Paryska 1871 roku

The book is published under Creative Commons license.

Editors: Aneta Szylak (Wyspa Insitute of Art) & Oliver Ressler, 240 pages (20 pages in color), languages: English and Polish, ISBN 978-83-924665-0-5, EUR 18,- (+ EUR 7,35 postage fees)

Purchase inquiries: roma.piotrowska@wyspa.art.pl or oliver.ressler@chello.at (only Euro-zone)

The guy who started it is walking from Ireland to India with no money. Check it out: http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/p_story.php

By Scott Malone

GREAT BARRINGTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A walk down Main Street in this New England town calls to mind the pictures of Norman Rockwell, who lived nearby and chronicled small-town American life in the mid-20th Century.

So it is fitting that the artist's face adorns the 50 BerkShares note, one of five denominations in a currency adopted by towns in western Massachusetts to support locally owned businesses over national chains.

"I just love the feel of using a local currency," said Trice Atchison, 43, a teacher who used BerkShares to buy a snack at a cafe in Great Barrington, a town of about 7,400 people. "It keeps the profit within the community."

There are about 844,000 BerkShares in circulation, worth $759,600 at the fixed exchange rate of 1 BerkShare to 90 U.S. cents, according to program organizers. The paper scrip is available in denominations of one, five, 10, 20 and 50.

In their 10 months of circulation, they've become a regular feature of the local economy. Businesses that accept BerkShares treat them interchangeably with dollars: a $1 cup of coffee sells for 1 BerkShare, a 10 percent discount for people paying in BerkShares.

Named for the local Berkshire Hills, BerkShares are accepted in about 280 cafes, coffee shops, grocery stores and other businesses in Great Barrington and neighboring towns, including Stockbridge, the town where Rockwell lived for a quarter century.

"BerkShares are cash, and so people have transferred their cash habits to BerkShares," said Susan Witt, executive director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, a nonprofit group that set up the program. "They might have 50 in their pocket, but not 150. They're buying their lunch, their coffee, a small birthday present."

Great Barrington attracts weekend residents and tourists from the New York area who help to support its wealth of organic farms, yoga studios, cafes and businesses like Allow Yourself to Be, which offers services ranging from massage to "chakra balancing" and Infinite Quest, which sells "past life regression therapy."

LOCAL PRIDE

The BerkShares program is one of about a dozen such efforts in the nation. Local groups in California, Kansas, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin run similar ones. One of the oldest is Ithaca Hours, which went into circulation in 1991 in Ithaca, New York.

About $120,000 of that currency circulates in the rural town. Unlike BerkShares, Ithaca Hours cannot officially be freely converted to dollars, though some businesses buy them.

Stephen Burkle, president of the Ithaca Hours program, said the notes are a badge of local pride.

"At the beginning it was very hard to get small businesses to get on board with it," said Burkle, who also owns a music store in Ithaca. "When Ithaca Hours first started, there wasn't a Home Depot in town, there wasn't a Borders, there wasn't a Starbucks. Now that there are, it's a mechanism for small businesses to compete with national chains."

U.S. law prevents states from issuing their own currency but allows private groups to print paper scrip, though not coins, said Lewis Solomon, a professor of law at George Washington University, who studies local currencies.

"As long as you don't turn out quarters and you don't turn out something that looks like the U.S. dollar, it's legal," Solomon said.

FULL CIRCLE

The BerkShares experiment comes as the dollar is losing some of its status on international markets, with governments shifting some reserves into euros, the pound and other investments as the U.S. currency has slid in value.

But the dollar is still the currency that businesses in Great Barrington need to pay most of their bills.

"The promise of this program is for it to be a completed circle," said Matt Rubiner, owner of Rubiner's cheese shop and Rubi's cafe. Some local farmers who supply him accept BerkShares, but he pays most of his bills in dollars.

"The circle isn't quite completed yet in most cases, and someone has to take the hit," Rubiner said, referring to the 10 percent discount. "The person who takes the hit is the merchant, it's me."

Meanwhile, Berkshire Hills Bancorp Inc., a western Massachusetts bank that exchanges BerkShares for dollars, is considering BerkShares-denominated checks and debit cards.

"Businesses aren't comfortable walking around with wads of BerkShares to pay for their supplies or their advertising," said Melissa Joyce, a branch officer with the bank, which has 25 branches, six of which exchange BerkShares. "I do hope that we're able to develop the checking account and debit card, because it will make it easier for everyone.

There's an overview of "freegans" in the Home and Garden Section (!) of the NY Times. Here's an excerpt:

Freegans are scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism. They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.

and this one does too: http://www.globalfreeloaders.com!

Here are some articles about this idea. It seems there are some formal ways to do it but it seems like the informal way works just as well.
http://web.uvic.ca/bcics/research/social/Child_Care/what.htm
http://parents.berkeley.edu/recommend/groups/coop.html
www.associatedcontent.com/article/160741/how_to_plan_and_start_a_babysitting.html
http://www.babycenter.com/refcap/baby/babychildcare/51.html

in Forbes 2006 http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/11/local-currencies-ithaca_cz_el_money06_0214local.html

in World Changing 2006 http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//005224.html

in Utne Reader 2004 http://www.utne.com/web_special/web_specials_2004-06/articles/11286-1.html

in Zmag 1995 http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/july95lowry.htm

Argentina Autonomista Project

Federation of Energy Workers of Argentina (FeTERA)

Please distribute widely...

Invitation to participate in…

“The Workers’ Economy:
Self-Management and the Distribution of Wealth”

First international gathering to debate and discuss self-management
(Autogestión)

Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, University of Buenos Aires

Dates:
July 19-21, 2007

Location:
University of Buenos Aires
217 – 25 de Mayo Avenue
Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PROPOSALS FOR: COMPLETED OR ONGOING PROJECT
PRESENTATIONS, PAPERS, ROUNDTABLE THEMES, DEBATE AND DISCUSSION THEMES

Please send a 250-word (max) abstract by May 15, 2007, or any other
correspondence to:
Correspondence in Spanish: fabierta@filo.uba.ar
Correspondence in English: UBA.selfmanagement@gmail.com

+++

Workers’ struggles have reemerged with force in the last decade in
numerous forms—union-based grassroots struggles, self-managed
workspaces, rural movements, unemployed workers’ movements…. These
are all responses to the hegemony of neoliberal globalization
imposing itself throughout the world with absolutist pretensions
after the debacle of so-called “real socialism.”

At the same time, the old methods and strategies of struggle—class-
based parties and traditional unions, amongst others—have by now
shown themselves to be, at minimum, insufficient. Old debates and
ideological frameworks are now in crisis. The dominant discourses
used to describe the functioning of the capitalist world system can
no longer explain quickly enough (never mind predict) the changes
that have been occurring within this system over the past few
decades. At the same time, popular struggles have had to create new
paths without having a clear horizon in sight from which to map out a
final destiny. And the plethora of means ever available for
capitalism to respond to threats against it, as well as the sheer
force and relentlessness of its repressive power, can in myriad ways
overcome the popular sectors’ capacity for change…with tragic
consequences for these sectors.

Wavering between these situations and the theoretic-ideological
debates that attempt to define them, thousands of workers throughout
the world have been generating—through their actual practices—an
alternative course for steering life between inaction and resignation
on the one side and the fight for total political power on the other.
Subjected to the permanent crisis provoked by neoliberal capitalism,
a growing number of workers are playing an increasingly key role in
the re-creation and self-management of greater portions of the means
of production and the economy; this role is an immediate outcome of
their struggles and resistances.

Thus, worker recovered factories, diverse kinds of self-managed
microenterprises, rural cooperative settlements, new types of
unionized workers’ movements, networks of fair trade and fair work,
and numerous other kinds of self-managed organizations and forms of
struggle are part of a new, emerging, and alternative social
landscape. At core, these struggles are not only about managing
production from below, they are also about the (re)distribution of
wealth and the liberation of life itself from the clutches of global
capital. Sometimes they take on autonomous forms. In certain
situations they are fragmented. In other situations they form part of
powerful and popular political movements, larger social movements,
political parties, leftist fronts and coalitions, and even programs
that are at times stimulated by the State or, more directly, by a
government’s actual public polices. But regardless of the size and
shape of these worker-contoured social-political expressions, there
is no doubt that the alternative landscape they are creating is
putting back on the table the question of the legitimate role of
workers in the management of a society’s economy.

>From the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of
Buenos Aires and its Open Faculty Program (Programa Facultad Abierta)
and the Interdisciplinary Program in Scientific and Technological
Transference with Worker-Recovered Enterprises (Programa
Interdisciplinario de Transferencia Científico Tecnológica con
Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores), we invite workers,
activists, academics, the labour movement, and any other interested
individuals to this First International Gathering to engage in
discussions centred on the socialization of the economy through self-
management. We envision the gathering as a space to move beyond mere
academic debate, however. The discussion, after all, is essentially a
political one that should be moved forward only with the
participation of workers and their organizations.

Following are some of the questions that will most likely frame this
First International Gathering: What conclusions and lessons can we
take from these experiences of self-management? What connections do
these workers’ struggles have with more traditional social and
political struggles? How do they relate to, or weave themselves
within, the popular, grassroots-based governments that are
increasingly taking hold of power in Latin America? How can these
experiences of economic self-management survive within the hostile
markets of global capital? How can they generate a new business logic
of self-management within the framework of a suffocating system? Can
they survive without change to the actual economic system and without
transforming those very forms of organizations that they are
attempting to overcome? Are they isolated instances of resistance,
consequences of the very crisis of global capital, or do they show a
path toward a new way of organizing production within a more just
social system? Can workers already organized in unions once again
come to pressure capital and dispute capital’s power-base, or should
the struggle to overcome capital now be engaged from within the
actual spaces of production and be about the actual self-management
of production by workers? Will these struggles actually be used and
appropriated by capital in order to more efficiently accumulate capital?

>From Buenos Aires, Argentina, then, the co-organizers convene this
First International Gathering to debate and discuss self-management,
its possibilities and challenges.

+++

“The Workers’ Economy: Self-Management and the Distribution of
Wealth”

Organizers:
The Open Faculty Program, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters,
University of Buenos Aires.
Co-Organizers:
Center for Global Justice, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (http://
www.globaljusticecenter.org/)
International Institute for Self-Management, Frankfurt, Germany
(http://www.iism.net/)
Argentina Autonomista Project (http://www.autonomista.org)
Federation of Energy Workers of Argentina (FeTERA) (http://
www.feteracta.org.ar/)

Conference format:

Debate Roundtables:
Debate and discussion roundtables based on central themes,
interspersed with panels to guide the discussion.

A final synopsis of each roundtable will be realized and made
available as conference proceedings.

Opening and closing plenary sessions will be held.

The debates and discussions will be filmed and recorded for archival
and educational purposes in order to make available materials and
resources for research purposes, consulting purposes, and for
assisting current and future self-management projects.

Thematic Roundtables:
More specific roundtables and panels will be convened focusing on
particular themes of interest to participants.

Presentations:
Presentations of documents and already completed or ongoing work for
discussion.

Those who forward their work to the gathering’s organizers with
enough lead-time will have their work published in a CD before the
conference to be available at the conference. Please forward
materials to include in the CD by April 30, 2007 to:
fabierta@filo.uba.ar

Preliminary conference schedule:
Thematic debates and project roundtables (first two days):
The capitalist economy today: Stages of global capitalism from the
perspective of popular movements.
The self-managed economy: Discussions concerning the experiences of
self-management in the era of global capitalism (recovered
enterprises, rural cooperatives, self-managed and solidarity
microenterprises, cooperative movements, alternative networks of
exchange, fair trade and fair work initiatives, etc.)
The challenges faced by popularly-based, grassroots-supported
governments regarding the social management of the economy and the
State.
A critical look at the cooperative movement.
New challenges faced by union movements; unions; new types of
workers’ organizations and collectives; co-management and
participatory decision making.

Plenary sessions (last day)
The (re)distribution of wealth: The social economy or the
socialization of the economy? Suggestions being offered by workers’
movements.
The limits of self-management: The political possibilities and
challenges of a production regime under workers’ control.
Articulations, expressions, and experiences of the struggle for self-
management with regard to other political struggles and other social
movements.

Special roundtables:
The environment and workers’ self-management.
Experiments in self-management with regard to other social-political
struggles and social movements.
Work from the perspective of gender.
The role of the university and intellectuals in workers’ struggles.

Free admission, donations accepted:
The gathering is free for participants and audience members. We
invite donations for assisting the travel expenses of workers from
outside of the Buenos Aires area. For U.S. tax-deductible donations,
checks in U.S. dollars should be made payable to: Research Associates
Foundation. Please write “Workers' Economy Conference” in the
memo, and send it to:
9902 Crystal Court, Suite 107, BC-2323, Laredo, TX 78045. Donations
can also be made on-line at www.globaljusticecenter.org Please again
note Workers' Economy Conference.?

Becca Tucker goes on a 3 day experiment eating only what she can forrage from trash in Manhattan. The results are impressive. An excerpt:

"The guided "trash tour" I'd participated in the night before left no doubt that this three-day experiment was a doable feat. If I'd had more hands, I could have gathered a week's worth of food from the garbage left on the sidewalk outside D'Agostino's, three Gristedes, and a Dunkin' Donuts. (Dunkin' Donuts tosses everything every twelve hours, according to an employee.) On top of uncountable loaves of bread and bagels, leaves of lettuce and slightly brown bananas, treasures that turned up included black-and-white cookies, ginger root, beets, Lunchables, and scallion pancakes. According to Madeline Nelson, who looks like your favorite librarian and dumpster dives for most of her food, dumpstering once a week can fulfill about 85 percent of your grocery needs. Twice-weekly dives can cover 90 to 95 percent. She didn't need to come out to the trash tour, because a friend recently stayed at her apartment, and as a thank-you gift he dumpster dove her fridge stock-full."