Seeds for a happy planet

I’m posting some quotes from an article Collapse and Uprising in Europe:
The Right to Insolvency and the Disentanglement of the General Intellect’s Potency, by Franco Berardi. I’m fascinated by what this Italian autonomist philosopher and media activist is writing. What follows are just a few quotes that give you an impression of what he is writing about.

A new concept is coming out from the fogs of the present situation: a right to insolvency. We’ll not pay the debt.

Try to imagine that all of a sudden we stop organizing daily life in terms of money and debt. Nothing would change in the concrete useful potentiality of society, in the contents of our knowledge, in our skills and ability to produce. We should imagine (and consequently organize) the disentanglement of the living potentiality of the general intellect from the capitalist Gestalt…

The concrete useful productive ability of the social body is forced to accept impoverishment in exchange for nothing.

But the present situation is paradoxical – simultaneously exciting and despairing. Capitalism has never been so close to the final collapse, but social solidarity has never been so far from our daily experience.

We know what makes us happy—
but too often
our economic decisions stand in the way.

This I find is such a great, true quote. I would say ‘our economic beliefs’ stand in the way. The quote is related to a new documentary The Economics of Happiness.

For me this is a must read about one of the current new developments: understanding more about what The Commons is about. Here you find an interview with Silke Helfrich, one of the leading ladies of this ‘movement’ of commoners.

I thought you could do this one click to read it, instead of copy/paste it over here. You might find other interesting stuff over there, who knows?

I want to share this story, that led eventually to a book The Power of Half. It’s a story about an american family that made an unusual decision… they sold their house (the american dream) and bought a much smaller house and gave money to the Hunger project. Here the article in The New York Times, and here the video – made by the son:

I have long been looking at money and the whole money system to know that something needs to change. But my knowledge is and was too small to get my finger behind it.

I now came across an interview and a description of a new book, written by Thomas Greco. With thanks to the PeertoPeer website and Michel Bouwens who did the interview, and Dave Pollard for the link.