Articles by The Next System Project
We found 54 results.
Democratic Ownership Funds: Creating Shared Wealth and Power
Peter Gowan and Mat Lawrence | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jun 2019
12 Jun 2019 – A combination of concentrated wealth, the primacy of shareholder interest in shaping company behavior, and the institutional weakness of labour has helped turn many companies into engines of wealth extraction for external owners, institutional investors, and senior management, often at the expense of the workers and communities who generate value. Any attempt to transform our economy will therefore require reshaping company ownership so that it is democratic, inclusive, and purposeful by design.
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Right to Own: A Policy Framework to Catalyze Worker Ownership Transitions
Peter Gowan | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Apr 2019
16 Apr 2019 – Age-old questions of ownership, control, and distribution in our economy remain as important as ever. In fostering the creation of communities and workplaces driven by values of solidarity, cooperation, and justice, workplace democracy and worker ownership are crucial, powerful tools, and they can and should play an important role in the next economic system.
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Social Wealth Fund
Adam Simpson | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Apr 2019
28 Mar 2019 – A social wealth fund is a publicly owned pool of money and other assets, such as stocks or land, which can be used for socially beneficial purposes.
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Elements of the Democratic Economy: Municipal Enterprise
Stephanie Geller | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Jan 2019
15 Jan 2019 – From public water companies to municipal broadband, millions are served by municipal enterprises that provide important services as a public good instead of as a profit center. This latest entry in the “Elements of the Democratic Economy” series is a primer on the benefits these enterprises offer over the private-sector alternatives. Stay tuned as we uncover more Elements of the Democratic Economy throughout 2019.
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Employee Stock Ownership Plan
Stephanie Geller | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Dec 2018
An employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) enables full or partial ownership of a business by its employees through a pension plan or trust.
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A Nobel Prize-Winning Cancer Therapy Will Be Unaffordable for Most. Public Pharmaceuticals Can Help Change That.
Dana Brown | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Oct 2018
9 Oct 2018 – Cuba has, perhaps, the most developed public pharmaceutical sector in the world and is actually known for its achievements in biologics. It nationalized the pharmaceutical sector in 1960 and consolidated a number of pharmaceutical manufacturing companies under the auspices of the Ministry of Health. By 2013, the Cuban biotechnology industry held around 1,200 international patents and was marketing pharmaceutical products and vaccines in more than 50 countries.
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The Constitutional Turn: Liberty and the Cooperative State
Dan Hind | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Sep 2018
7 Sep 2018 – A provocative essay that challenges readers to think beyond the politics of revolution and redistribution to consider what deep democracy actually means. It stands “for making the state a site for radical reform.” To do that, however, “we need to develop a constitutional imagination” based on direct citizen engagement in the political economy.
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Solidarity Economy: Building an Economy for People & Planet
Emily Kawano | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 May 2018
1 May 2018 – This paper presents a vision of an alternative economic system that puts people and the planet at its core. More than an academic model, Solidarity Economy is an organizing strategy that seeks to transform all sectors of our economy by proliferating and connecting existing practices outside the mainstream of capitalism. The goal is to ultimately move the system away from a focus just on what works for homo economicus and towards an economy grounded in solidarity, equity, participatory democracy, sustainability, and pluralism.
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A Socialist Economy for the 21st Century
Richard Rosen | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Apr 2018
Richard A. Rosen explores the changes necessary for a modern definition of “socialism” and describes key concepts and issues that arise when aiming to restructure the American economy to include social and environmental sustainability in the Twenty-First Century.
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Addressing the Systemic Challenge at the Heart of Escalating Inequality and Environmental Destruction
Ted Howard | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Apr 2018
2 Apr 2018 – To cite just two figures: in the United States, just 400 people own as much wealth as the bottom 204 million people.1 Globally, just 8 billionaires own as much wealth as 50% of the entire population of our planet.2 And this negative trend – representing a medieval concentration of wealth and power that is deeply problematic for democratic culture – is escalating.
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Stress Test: Democracy Confronts Climate Change
Gus Speth | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Jan 2018
29 Dec 2017 – Can American democracy rise to the climate occasion? Unprecedented measures must be put in place both to move completely out of fossil fuels by mid-century and also to pursue far-reaching and costly adaptation.
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A New Hedonism: A Post-Consumerism Vision
Kate Soper | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Dec 2017
Consumerism is the major cause of global warming and wrecking the planet for future generations. It is driven by a growth economy that favors the ever-expanding consumption of the already very affluent and has allowed the gap between the richest and poorest to grow to inflammatory proportions, both within the nation-state and globally. Today 16 percent of the global population consumes 80 percent of its resources. Americans alone are responsible for around 25 percent of global carbon emissions, and their ecological footprint is five times the global capacity of 1.8 hectares per capita.
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Prisons and Policing: Community Control Over Police – A Proposition for the USA
Max Rameau | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Nov 2017
10 Nov 2017 – While it might be fair to say that the police enjoy support among the majority of the white population, the police enjoy no such support among the majority of Black people, who endure more frequent and harsher interactions with cops than whites. This historic moment calls for something more significant than additional training or even civilian oversight boards.
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Prisons and Policing: Beyond the Carceral Logic of Civil Commitment in the USA
Toshio Meronek and Erica R. Meiners | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Nov 2017
10 Nov 2017 – A key component of the current system is its reliance on imprisonment as a response to behaviors and populations which are understood as sources of actual or potential harm. How can a harm reduction lens help us understand why really protecting our communities means imagining alternatives beyond incarceration?
→ read full articleNext System Media: An Urgent Necessity
Laura Flanders | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Oct 2017
Laura Flanders, creator and host of the Laura Flanders Show, explores how new media models grounded in cooperation, community, and robust public support are needed to fight back against the corporate concentration that is strangling the public sphere.
→ read full articleEmployee Ownership and the Next System
Joseph Blasi, Thomas Hanna and Dana Brown | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Sep 2017
29 Aug 2017 – What role should employee ownership and profit-sharing play in the next system? Are they part of that system itself or part of the strategy to help create the transition to it? Can they be both?
→ read full articleLatin America’s “Pink Tide” and the Challenge of Systemic Change: Ecuador
The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Sep 2017
7 Aug 2017 – In the late 1990s and the 2000s, Latin America experienced a “pink tide” of sorts, with a number of self-proclaimed socialist governments coming to power. By 2010, leftist governments were in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, with Peru joining the ranks in 2011. We asked three analysts to describe some of the institutional innovations implemented in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador during this time, and to reflect on the relationship between organized citizenry and the state in these transitions in order to elicit lessons learned.
→ read full articleLatin America’s “Pink Tide” and the Challenge of Systemic Change: Bolivia
The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Aug 2017
7 Aug 2017 – In the late 1990s and the 2000s, Latin America experienced a “pink tide” of sorts, with a number of self-proclaimed socialist governments coming to power. By 2010, leftist governments were in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, with Peru joining the ranks in 2011. We asked three analysts to describe some of the institutional innovations implemented in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador during this time, and to reflect on the relationship between organized citizenry and the state in these transitions in order to elicit lessons learned.
→ read full articleLatin America’s “Pink Tide” and the Challenge of Systemic Change: Venezuela
The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Aug 2017
7 Aug 2017 – In the late 1990s and the 2000s, Latin America experienced a “pink tide” of sorts, with a number of self-proclaimed socialist governments coming to power. By 2010, leftist governments were in power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, with Peru joining the ranks in 2011. We asked three analysts to describe some of the institutional innovations implemented in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador during this time, and to reflect on the relationship between organized citizenry and the state in these transitions in order to elicit lessons learned.
→ read full articleReversing Inequality: Unleashing the Transformative Potential of an Equitable Economy
Chuck Collins | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Aug 2017
The US economy’s deep systemic inequalities of income, wealth, power, and opportunity are part of global inequality trends, but US-style capitalism and public policy make inequalities more acute. Their observable and felt harm to our civic and economic life is corroborated by research from many disciplines. Yet, by the same token, moving toward a more egalitarian society would realign most aspects of economic and social life for the better. So how can we bring these changes about?
→ read full articleThe Joyful Economy
Gus Speth | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 May 2017
In this essay, I will explore the transition from a Joyless Economy to a Joyful one. In the Joyful Economy, the goal of economic life is to sustain, nourish, and restore human and natural communities, so that the material and non-material blessings of life are available to all. It is a new system of political economy that gives true and honest priority not to profit, production, and power but rather to people, place, and planet. Its watchword is caring—caring for each other, for the natural world, and for the future. I will argue that promoting the transition to such a new political economy should be the central task of a new environmentalism.
→ read full articleNavigating System Transition in a Volatile Century
Michael T. Lewis | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 May 2017
There is a blessed unrest roiling across the planet; millions of creative, innovative, indignant, dedicated, hopeful individuals are cogitating, communicating, animating, educating, innovating, agitating, and advocating for change. Banding together in diverse groups, organizations and movements, they are trying to figure out how to navigate the unprecedented economic, social, ecological and cultural challenges of the twenty-first century.
→ read full articleDiversifying Public Ownership
Andrew Cumbers | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 May 2017
This paper advocates a form of economic democracy based around diverse forms of public ownership. It does not prioritize one particular scale but recognizes the importance of decentralized forms of public ownership, to encourage greater public participation and engagement, mixed with higher level state ownership, for strategic sectors and planning for key public policy goals (e.g. tackling climate change). It takes a deliberately pluralistic definition of public ownership, recognizing both state ownership and the role that cooperatives and employee ownership could play in a more democratic economy.
→ read full articleCooperative Commonwealth & the Partner State
John Restakis | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Apr 2017
Among capitalism’s many critics, it is standard procedure to state that neoliberalism has failed and that unless our societies construct a new paradigm for how economies work, human societies will collapse under the weight of an unsustainable and environmentally catastrophic capitalist system.
→ read full articleTowards an Integrated Progressive Agenda
Riane Eisler | The Next System Project,
10 Apr 2017
I invite you and your organizations to take leadership in forming a coalition to develop, disseminate, and implement the integrated progressive social/political agenda that is today more urgently needed than ever before. With an integrated progressive agenda focused on the four cornerstones of childhood, gender, economics, and narratives/stories, we can build the foundations for a world where all children can realize their capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity – the capacities that make us fully human.
→ read full articleCultivating Community Economies
J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, Kelly Dombroski, Stephen Healy and Ethan Miller | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Apr 2017
Building on J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of political economy, the CEC challenges two problematic aspects of how “the economy” is understood: seeing it as inevitably capitalist, and separating the economy from ecology. We understand the economy as comprised of diverse practices and as intimately intertwined with planetary ecosystem processes. In a complexly determined world there are multiple ways of enacting change; we are energized by possibilities that are afforded by this framing of economy.
→ read full articleThe Promise of a Million Utopias
Michael Shuman | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Mar 2017
Here is a fun question guaranteed to stump your friends, family, and party guests: Can you name the leader of Switzerland? Trust me—no one ever knows the answer. And the reason is simple. It hardly matters. Switzerland is arguably the most decentralized nation in the world. Each of its twenty-six states, called cantons, retains a high degree of autonomy for governing its own affairs, including the official language spoken.
→ read full articleEarthland: Scenes from a Civilized Future
Paul Raskin | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Mar 2017
This essay is written as a dispatch from the future. We visit Earthland in 2084, the flourishing planetary civilization that has emerged out of the great crises and struggles that today still lie before us. We learn how decades earlier a “global citizens movement” had coalesced and gathered momentum, becoming the key agent of the Great Transition that bent the arc of history from catastrophe to renewal.
→ read full articleTowards Gender Liberation
Cecilia Gingerich | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Mar 2017
Asking whether we might be at the beginning of an emergent “Fourth Wave” of feminism synthesizing important elements from previous waves, the paper critically examines both existing visions for an alternative political economy and some of the steps that have been taken towards them. It calls for further work to clarify the transitional steps, models, and policies we need to adopt in order to begin moving towards a better system of gender relations in the hope of inspiring the development of still more developed visions and pathways to change.
→ read full articleThe Economy for the Common Good
Christian Felber and Gus Hagelberg | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Mar 2017
An economic model that aims to establish an “ethical market economy.” By focusing on increasing the quality of life for everyone, promoting values such as human dignity and rights, ecological responsibility, and ensuring social justice, the economy can be finally controlled by the citizens to serve the public good. But the ECG is not only limited to the economic system. To fully achieve it major changes are required in institutions and practices across all areas of life.
→ read full articleA Socialist Economy for the 21st Century
Richard Rosen | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Dec 2016
16 Dec 2016 – Richard A. Rosen explores the changes necessary for a modern definition of “socialism” and describes key concepts and issues that arise when aiming to restructure the American economy to include social and environmental sustainability in the Twenty-First Century.
→ read full articleWhat’s Next? Parecon, or Participatory Economics
Michael Albert | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Dec 2016
People now fighting economic injustice have no right to decide how future people should live. But we do have a responsibility to provide an institutional setting that facilitates future people deciding for themselves what their own conditions of life and work should be. To this end, participatory economics, or parecon, describes the core institutions required to generate solidarity, equity, self-management, and an ecologically sound and classless economy.
→ read full articleWell-being Economy: A Scenario for a Post-Growth Horizontal Governance System
Lorenzo Fioramonti | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Nov 2016
For the past half century, western societies have used a narrow definition of economic growth as the route to development. Growth has become an end in itself. As a result, the true meaning of development has been lost. Rather than an end goal, development should be viewed as a process towards an improved state of existence for humanity and the ecosystem.
→ read full articleTowards a New, Green Economy
Peter A. Victor and Tim Jackson | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Nov 2016
This paper explores what we will call the green economy as a potential solution to the multiple challenges from climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource scarcity to social injustice, and financial instability.
→ read full articleSix Theses on Saving the Planet
Richard Smith | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Nov 2016
From the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, workers, trade unionists, radicals, and socialists have fought against the worst depredations of capitalist development: intensifying exploitation, increasing social polarization, persistent racism and sexism, deteriorating workplace health and safety conditions, environmental ravages, and relentless efforts to suppress democratic political gains under the iron heel of capital.
→ read full articleThe Next Health System
Jamie Harvie | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Nov 2016
Western medicine uses the term inflammation to describe symptoms of heat, swelling, pain and loss of function. These are warning signs of an alarmed immune system, red flashing lights that our condition needs attention. One need not be a nurse or doctor to perceive from the daily news headlines or our daily interactions that modern life is grossly out of balance and discordant with how we are designed to exist. The health and well-being of individuals is inseparable from nature and inseparable from the health of community.
→ read full articleAdvancing the Next System with Advanced Manufacturing
Max Ogden, Nina Gregg, Doug Gamble, Andrew Dettmer and David Schweickart | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Oct 2016
27 Sep 2016 – This essay is a polemic. As such, we argue with broad strokes. We welcome debate on the broad strokes as well as the details, knowing that such an exchange will refine and improve the discussion. The foundation for a society that is economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.
→ read full articleThe Good Society
Henning Meyer | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Sep 2016
Henning Meyer argues that a values-based, social democratic system, with a mixed economy, holds considerable promise as a new model, and as the mechanism to change the current system. Such system “seeks to combine an activist cosmopolitan outlook on global issues with a re-foundation of social democracy’s communitarian roots.”
→ read full articleStart with Worker Self-Directed Enterprises
Richard D. Wolff | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Aug 2016
Richard Wolff describes a next economic system centered on worker-directed cooperatives. To transition to a non-capitalist system we must change the “who and the why of key economic decision making.” To do so he proposes changes at the “basic enterprise level” by “making workers their own bosses.”
→ read full articleDemocratizing Wealth: A Next System Model for the U.S. South and Beyond
Ed Whitfield | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Aug 2016
Ed Whitfield presents the Fund for Democratic Communities vision for a next system based on communal ownership of productive assets. The goal must be total economic democracy and community control over production, in order to place “the wealth created by human labor back into the commons for the benefit of all.”
→ read full articleThe New Economy: A Living Earth System Model
David Korten | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Aug 2016
Treat the visible problem—a defective product or an underperforming employee—as the symptom of a deeper system failure. Look upstream to find and correct the system conditions responsible for the system failure. Otherwise the problem will simply reoccur. David Korten contrasts what he calls the self-destructing “suicide economy” we have and a “living Earth economy” that self-organizes toward ecosystem health and balance, shared prosperity, and living democracy.
→ read full articleGrowing Justice: Transcending the Oppressive History of Our Food System
Michelle Stearn | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Aug 2016
Transforming our system into one rooted in provision means more than just creating new organizations that aim to do well for the community; it will require that we rewrite the beliefs, exchanges, and rules of our own interactions.
→ read full articleThe Mousai House: A Cooperative Vision for a New Creative Economy
Jennifer Bryant | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Jul 2016
Bryant’s exposition of The Mousai House gives us a glimpse into a thriving local economy rooted in Washington D.C. that has blossomed despite struggle, displacement, and oppression, exemplifying a rich cooperative culture that transcends the current system.
→ read full articleWhole Systems Change
Riane Eisler | The Next System Project - TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Jul 2016
A Framework & First Steps for Social/Economic Transformation – Moving to a world that orients primarily to the partnership rather than domination model is a long-term enterprise. It will require time, perseverance, and the courage to challenge established beliefs and structures. But if we are to build a future where all children can realize their capacities for consciousness, caring, and creativity—the capacities that make us fully human—we have to start constructing its foundations now.
→ read full articleSocial Democracy
Lane Kenworthy | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Jul 2016
Not Socialism, and Coming to America – What changes are needed in the current system? Here I’ll take the contemporary United States as my reference point. The chief changes lie in the realm of social policy.
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How Does the Commons Work?
The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Jul 2016
How can we use “commoning” as a process to transform the social paradigm of our current system? Economist David Bollier suggests we rethink the traditional “tragedy of the commons” argument. In this stop-motion video animation, we illustrate some of the principal features of his vision for how we can manage “the commons” in an equitable fashion to transform our current system.
→ read full articleEconomic Democracy
David Schweickart | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Jul 2016
An Ethically Desirable Socialism That Is Economically Viable – The big challenges that capitalism now faces in the contemporary world include issues of inequality (especially that of grinding poverty in a world of unprecedented prosperity) and of “public goods” (that is, goods people share together, like the environment). The solution to these problems will almost certainly call for institutions that take us beyond the capitalist market economy.
→ read full articleParticipatory Economics and the Next System
Robin Hahnel | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Jun 2016
Only when a majority are sufficiently disgusted by capitalism and confident that workers and consumers can manage and coordinate their own economic affairs will it be possible to leave capitalism in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
→ read full articleQueerness and the Next System: Opening Up the Discussion on Homosexuality
Erik Lampmann | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Jun 2016
12 Jun 2016 – For centuries, the erasure of LGBTQ people from public policy has been the norm. Trapped within the confines of our closets by regimes of sexual and gender conformity enforced by brutal violence, sterilization, and incarceration, LGBTQ people have long been denied formal political agency, legal recognition, and the ability to live as our full, authentic selves. It can be tempting to forget that, even in 2016, a presupposition of heterosexuality remains an integral component of the cultural firmament.
→ read full articleToward Democratic Eco-socialism as the Next World System
Hans A. Baer | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 May 2016
Hans Baer proposes a new approach to what he calls “authentic socialism.” As opposed to past experiments with socialism – associated with sudden revolutions, violence, and adverse economic contexts – democratic eco-socialism in his vision would emerge slowly through a series of “system challenging reforms” and pressures from social movements.
→ read full articleCommoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm
David Bollier | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 May 2016
In facing up to the many profound crises of our time, we face a conundrum that has no easy resolution: how are we to imagine and build a radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change? Our challenge is not just articulating attractive alternatives, but identifying credible strategies for actualizing them. I believe the commons—at once a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices—holds great promise in transcending this conundrum.
→ read full articleBuilding a Cooperative Solidarity Commonwealth
Jessica Gordon Nembhard |The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 May 2016
The next system that we need, and that hopefully we are moving toward, is a cooperative commonwealth within interlocking local solidarity economies. Such a system is created from the bottom up, building upon multiple grassroots cooperative enterprises, and democratic community-based economic practices. These networks collaborate and federate from the local to municipal, regional, national, and international levels.
→ read full articleA Civic Economy of Provisions
Marvin T. Brown | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 May 2016
Marvin Brown presents a model for the next system in which economic activity is based not solely on property ownership or the free market but on civic membership in a “global civil society.” He advocates a new approach to system change that would re-frame our social structures around civic relations. Oriented around families, communities, attachments, and mutual identities, this civic economy of provisions would ensure that all people have access to food, housing, health care, and education.
→ read full articleNoam Chomsky on Organizing for a Next System
Noam Chomsky | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Apr 2016
24 Mar 2016 – Philosopher, linguist, and social critic Noam Chomsky recently spoke about his experiences in campus activism and his vision of a just society. An initial signatory to the Next System statement, Chomsky explores the connections between culture, mass movements, and economic experiments—which in “mutually reinforcing” interaction, may build toward a next system more quickly than you may think.
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