This open-access article analyzes the role of law and legal theory at major transition points in capitalism, particularly the Gilded Age and the rise of neoliberalism. Repeatedly, in all these battles, academics and judges harnessed legal theory and transposed the broader emerging ideological trends of the professional and managerial class to legitimate and contest the newly emerging, often more exploitative relations. The article ends with implications for the design and justification of a post-neoliberal regime.

_

Entrenched systems see new ideas and logics as threatening and even incomprehensible. We’re at an impasse today because contemporary institutions keep bringing the same mindset to solving problems that need some fresh and strikingly different approaches. The many problems afflicting agriculture and the food system today are fundamentally similar to those afflicting the rest of society. They are just another theater for rentier capitalism, which relies on market/state collusion, extractivism of nature, and systemic precarity for many ordinary people.

What is most needed is creative experimentation in developing a new, more wholesome paradigm. This presentation focuses on how we can make some ambitious, creative leaps forward, and how the commons – as a discourse, social practice, ethic, and worldview – can be very helpful in meeting this challenge. The presenter explains how the commons can provide a strong, coherent framework – and many actual, practical projects – that open up some promising vistas of change.
_

Bollier, David. (2024, January 5). Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society. [Conference presentation]. Oxford Real Farming Conference, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Repost on Grassroots Economic Organizing:
https://geo.coop/articles/commons-and-commoning-progressive-vision-good-society

Multiple global crises—including the pandemic, climate change, and Russia’s war on Ukraine—have recently linked together in ways that are significant in scope, devastating in effect, but poorly understood. A growing number of scholars and policymakers characterize the situation as a “polycrisis.”

This article offers a theoretical framework to explain the causal mechanisms currently entangling many of the world’s crises. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with slow-moving stresses to push a global system out of its established equilibrium and into a volatile and harmful state of disequilibrium.

The authors identify three causal pathways—common stresses, domino effects, and inter-systemic feedbacks—that can connect multiple global systems to produce synchronized crises. Drawing on current examples, the authors show that the polycrisis concept is a valuable tool for understanding unfolding crises, generating actionable insights, and opening avenues for future research.

_

This review explains how and why the United States has systemically high poverty. Descriptive evidence shows that U.S. poverty is (i) a huge share of the population, (ii) a perennial outlier among rich democracies, (iii) staggeringly high for certain groups, (iv) unexpectedly high for those who “play by the rules,” and (v) pervasive across various groups and places. This review then discusses and critiques three prevailing approaches focused on the individual poor rather than the systemically high poverty: (i) behavioral explanations “fixing the poor,” (ii) emotive compassion “dramatizing the poor,” and (iii) cultural explanations both dramatizing and fixing the poor. The essay then reviews political explanations that emphasize the essential role of social policy generosity, political choices to penalize risks, power resources of collective political actors, and institutions. This review demonstrates a long emerging but ascending and warranted shift away from individualistic explanations of the poor toward political explanations of poverty.

_

Brady, David. (2023). Poverty, not the poor.  Science Advances, 9(34), eadg1469

Javier Milei’s warm welcome at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos was the latest stage in the seemingly baffling rise of radical right-wing libertarianism to political respectability. The recently elected president of Argentina, who brandished a chain saw during campaign rallies to symbolically cut through regulatory red tape, has become the new hero figure of the libertarian right.

We should see libertarianism’s bid for the political mainstream in relation to the development of its closest ideological ally, neoliberalism, alongside which it emerged as a right-wing phenomenon in the 1930s. The fact that libertarian leaders are gaining popularity just as the neoliberal era appears to be coming to an end points to a consolidation of market-radical ideologies rather than their dissolution. >>>

The world faces twin crises of climate breakdown and runaway inequality. The richest people, corporations and countries are destroying the world with their huge carbon emissions. Meanwhile, people living in poverty, those experiencing marginalization, and countries in the Global South are those impacted the hardest. Women and girls, Indigenous Peoples, people living in poverty and other groups experiencing discrimination are particularly at a disadvantage.

The world needs an equal transformation. Only a radical reduction in inequality, transformative climate action and fundamentally shifting our economic goals as a society can save our planet while ensuring wellbeing for all.

_

This report is based on findings from a nationally representative survey – Climate Change in the American Mind – conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. Interview dates: October 20 – 26, 2023. Interviews: 1,033 adults (18+). Average margin of error: +/- 3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

Majorities of Americans think global warming is affecting many environmental problems in the United States, including extreme heat (75%), droughts (71%), wildfires (70%), air pollution (66%), water shortages (66%), flooding (66%), rising sea levels (66%), hurricanes (64%), reduced snow pack (61%), tornados (61%), agricultural pests and diseases (59%), water pollution (58%), and electricity power outages (57%).

_

There is a gap between concern about environmental degradation such as climate change and effective action taken against the forces that drive degradation. This open-access paper argues that real helplessness, a social condition producing powerless, stupefied, and repressed actors, is a fortified barrier between climate concern and effective climate action.

Political-economic analysis has theoretical and methodological implications for environmental social science and helps explain a current conundrum in critical sociology: Why are alternatives to a system that drives climate change and other catastrophic risks still seen as unrealistic? We suffer from a political-economic system impervious to transformation before we suffer from a lack of alternative ideas.

_

Gunderson, R. (2023). Powerless, Stupefied, and Repressed Actors Cannot Challenge Climate Change: Real Helplessness as a Barrier Between Environmental Concern and Action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 53(2), 271–295.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jtsb.12366

Plastic pollution is one of the most serious environmental crises facing the world today. Underpinning this crisis is a campaign of fraud and deception about the recyclability of plastics that fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies have created and perpetuated for decades.

Through new and existing research, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” report shows how Big Oil and the plastics industry have deceptively promoted recycling as a solution to plastic waste management for more than 50 years, despite their long-standing knowledge that plastic recycling is not technically or economically viable at scale. Plastics industry falsely promoted—and continues to promote—plastic recycling as a means to achieve a “circular economy”.

_

Allen, D., Spoelman, N., Linsley, C., & Johl, A. (2024). The Fraud of Plastic Recycling. Washington, DC: The Center for Climate Integrity.