What organizing and resident-run community land trusts make possible....

An inspiring news story for a change. A collective of single parent mothers, Moms 4 Housing, reclaimed a home they were about to be evicted from. They paired up with the Oakland Community Land Trust. The Mayor and Council gave them first rights of refusal for all of the properties from the company they were fighting, Wedgewood.

This is what is possible with strong organizing- heat from the bottom that leads to heat from the top!

Moms 4 Housing Collective. Photo: Guardian

Studying Economics? Read outside the box. The box is part of the problem.

Someone asked what they should be reading that is interesting in terms of economics. I’d recommend first reading something close to the ground and organizing, social movements. This is paper on feminist economics put out by Womankind Worldwide. This is what social and feminist movements globally have analyzed with respect to macroeconomics, the Bretton Woods institutions, illicit financial flows, corporate accountability, decent work, social protection, public services and human rights. The first thing to know is that these are all economic issues. https://world-psi.org/uncsw/word...

Then, get beyond Friedman and Smith. Elinor Ostrom (only woman to have received the Nobel prize for economics), Henry George, Karl Polayni have shaped our economic-political understanding of “commons” and more solidarity approaches to economics. For more contemporary writers, I would add feminist economists Silvia Frederici, Naila Kabeer as well as Kate Raworth.

Silvia Frederici, Italian-american scholar, activist. She critiques Marx and explores links between capitalist accumulation, women’s reproductive labour and bodily exploitation. Also alternative pathways and the political philosophy of the commons and public freedoms. See “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

Naila Kabeer is an London School of Economics scholar, originally from India. She has shaped a lot of practice and thinking around women’s economic empowerment. That it isn’t, first of all, only about financial and economic matters. It includes and is intimately tied to gender-based violence and other structural gendered norms. It includes policy levers like social protection, child care policy, recognition and supports for the care economy.

A more mainstream economist doing some interesting work is Kate Raworth from the UK. She founded the idea of doughnut economics. Instead of simple measures of wealth, even linear trends, she explores environmental and climatic thresholds in combination with human and economic development measures. The country closest to finding the sweet spot in these is Vietnam, so the question is: could we all live like Vietnam? In Canada or Turtle Island, we’re doing well on the social and abysmal on the bio-physical transgressions. What are we each willing to give up, willing to risk is the big question here?

(Source: Kate Raworth, The Earthbound Report).