During the summer of 2017 the P2P Foundation’s Maïa Dereva travelled throughout France. Now she shares the stories of the commons she met along the way, never knowing what she would find in advance.
The rise of Podemos has provoked no shortage of stern omens in the international press, warning of hellish scenarios and dark times ahead were the breakout party to rise to office. One Spanish journalist has summarized those fears in four tidy paragraphs listing the legacy of the present establishment, reframed and handed back in cool satire.
“What does it mean to have €10K in fines? It’s money that never existed, so it can’t be claimed as missing from somewhere. If I pay, would it create wealth? Increase GDP? Socialize wealth, perhaps? Or only change hands? Whose hands are better?”
“Municipal Recipes”, a short documentary which Guerrilla Translation subtitled for the 2015 Zemos98 Festival, features a small group of activists involved in emerging post 15-M municipal initiatives sharing their experiences and expectations over lunch.
“Her intervention, full of circus and theatre, was a clear show of what each individual is, or could become — a powerful social actor. To achieve this, you need only perform an action similar to hers, a sign, a gesture capable of disrupting the usual programming.” A reflection on Art, Beauty and Glitter-bombing Mario Draghi by Leonidas Martín
Guerrilla Translation co-founder Ann Marie Utratel describes Guerrilla Translation’s journey in the last year and gives an overview of our new websites and our plans for 2015.
My dear friend, I know what you’re going through. Neoliberalism has you possessed and you don’t know how to get rid of it. If it’s any consolation, let me tell you that you are not alone. Neoliberalism, more than an ideology or a policy, is a demon that has possessed everything. It has possessed the State and all its institutions, the hospitals, the schools, and the workplaces. It has also possessed us. It has taken our bodies, our desires and yearnings, our ideas and dreams. And once possessed, the demon of neoliberalism governs us under its one law: the law of competition.
“We met with John Holloway in the city of Puebla, Mexico, to ask him if, after everything that has happened in the past decade, from the progressive governments of Latin America to Podemos and Syriza in Europe, along with the problems for self-organised practices to exist and multiply, he still thinks that it is possible to “change the world without taking power”.
“In traditional contracts, each party is free to decide whether to fulfill the contract, whether to only partially implement the contract (by leaving out some obligations), or whether to breach the contract (and pay instead for damages or compensation). By contrast, in the case of smart contracts, parties have no choice but to implement the contract, because the contract has been encoded, written into the code. It cannot be breached unless one actually manages to break into the code.”
An interview with Enric Duran, who’s currently busy organizing the FairCoop Open Cooperative, a community-built effort to alleviate global economic inequalities through the use of mutual credit, reputation systems and cryptocurrencies.
OuishareFest was a blast, we really did have a great time. My overall impression is that both polarities present –