Economy
From The Observatory
Economy
Women and girls are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, yet women’s leadership and local knowledge are critical to building more resilient communities.
From trading posts to tech empires, corporations continue to grow in strength. Without reform, their power may soon eclipse public control entirely.
As governmental authoritarianism intensifies, citizens “double down on democracy” through the participatory model.
The Community Enterprise and Solidarity Clinic is part of a growing mutual aid movement in Chicago, Illinois.
By Damon Orion
February 3, 2025
Sankofa Village Arkansas is building an “intentional community centering Black healing, liberation, and regeneration.”
Latino community members in Southern California use the tanda system for mutual financial support.
How the custom steel fabrication and design company Crucible built a “gravel road” for other Montana worker co-ops to follow.
The worker-owned collective ChiCommons helps Chicago residents find local mutual aid-based organizations.
By Damon Orion
Grassroots organizations are helping rebuild North Carolina communities after Hurricane Helene.
By Damon Orion
There are alternatives to the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates and curtailing money supply growth but they are ignored.
The role of the state is central to this decline of capitalism in one area and form and its ascent in another area and form.
How the worship of unregulated capitalism broke the unions, impoverished workers, and destroyed the great middle class.
In China today, like the USSR a century ago, transition to a post-capitalist society has been stalled.
China concluded that in the United States, achieving prioritized social goals happened more when public and private resources were coordinated and focused to do so.
Capitalism’s hierarchy within workplaces contradicts democratic ideals. Learn how economic power undermines real democracy and freedom for most people.
Inequality isn’t a bug of capitalism; it’s a feature.
Capitalists claim credit for reducing poverty, but history shows that gains were won despite their opposition.
The obscenely rich have thus driven the U.S. economy and society further from anything remotely resembling a “level playing field.”
Raising the minimum wage can and should be one basis for a mutually beneficial alliance between wage workers and small businesses.
Inflation deeply affects societies that suffer them, yet no democratic process determines where, when or how employers’ decisions to inflate prices lead to those impacts.
Every other economic system in human history was born, evolved, and ceased to exist at some point. The most reasonable expectation is that capitalism will also cease to exist one day.
Defenders of capitalism criticize kinds of capitalism that lack the particular adjectives that matter most to them.
“Free” and “unregulated” markets simply do not define capitalism, and are not marked by anything like “liberty.”
Fascism can indeed “happen here,” but in unique fashion.
Democratic impulses, similarly provoked and suppressed inside workplace autocracies, have not yet matured into social movements that are strong and focused enough to overthrow autocracy inside workplaces.
In reality, markets are useful institutions for capitalists to manipulate for profit.
Capitalism’s political problem arose from its intrinsically undemocratic juxtaposition of an employer minority and an employee majority.
Jobs, real wages, consumption, profits and investments are growing more in China, India and Brazil than old capital centers.
A new socialism unites democratic workplaces, households, and governance—beyond state-only focus.
Direct sales and the organic label are not enough to keep family-scale farms viable.
We could describe the transition from capitalist to worker co-op enterprise organizations as a revolution, the only way finally to secure progressive reforms.
The Boston Ujima Project’s assembly All About Love: Community Care Systems asks: What would it take to love and care for the most marginalized people in the city?
This Greenfield, Massachusetts collective fights housing insecurity and promotes racial, environmental, and economic justice.
By Damon Orion
Bike co-ops uphold a tradition of self-empowerment through cycling.
Time banking is easing financial strain and promoting societal health.
How Paicines Ranch in California works to bring business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature—prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices.
Removing the taboo around talking about money, two collectives are helping people work toward securing their financial well-being.
Law professor Mary Wood breaks down how people can protect their right to clean air, water, and land as well as fortify their climate change resiliency.
A people-powered effort to move to fossil fuels to alternatives at the local level is building across the U.S. and the globe.
