Turbulence: Ideas for Movement Issue #1

the intro reads like someone's swallowed a copy of 'multitude' and developed hiccups :D

i'll have a read through a few though, always interesting to see what lessons are learned from summity stuff.

Solidarity Economics

This meant that solidarity finance could enable the emergence and maintenance of worker-managed productive enterprises that employed low-impact technologies and promoted the highest social benefit. The products of these enterprises started being commercialised in circuits of solidarity trade through shops, fairs, international fair trade systems and even internet sales. This in turn enabled consumers to replace the products and services they bought from capitalist enterprises with products and services produced within the solidarity economy, feeding back into a system of promotion of welfare for workers and consumers, environmental protection and sustainable development.

sounds a lot like 'ethical capitalism' - the whole notion of a parallel 'solidarity economy' based on need not profit relies on this:
Solidarity Economics

Beyond social forums and summit mobilisations, the defence of sovereign economies must happen in the choice of products we consume, and the ethical decision to employ our income to strengthen certain economic sectors rather than others.

i.e. ethical consumerism; either workers having enough disposable income to buy premium-priced 'ethical' commodities, or 'solidarity producers' successfully undercutting the costs of regular capitalist firms by managing their own exploitation better than a private boss. the author disputes this and says it isn't capitalism or subject to competitive forces, but i'm not sure how.

i mean there's a workers' co-op supermarket in brighton, even if they especially buy from zapatistas and the like, how does buying from them instead of tesco challenge the commodification of our world and our labour?

none of this is to say that a self managed capitalism is exactly the same as regular capitalism (though the author provides little info on workers conditions in the 'solidarity economy,' complaining that the burden of proof should lie with skeptics/critics) - just that i can't see how it constitutes "a revolution in the mode of production" - i mean what are we meant to do, accumulate enough 'solidarity capital' to buy-out non-peripheral enterprises and add them to the network? or are we back to the old-fashioned route of appealing to the state (to co-opt our co-ops with copious cash? he seems to like the 'popular governments' in latin america) or just seizing the means of production, in which case settling for self-managed commodity exchange/accumulation seems to be setting our sights a bit low.

scanning the other stuff looks like the usual activist mish-mash of postmodernism and social democracy. nick dyer-witheford's argument of 'the common' as a cell-form alternative to the commodity is interesting, though he looks to the 'solidarity economics' above as an example, and says it should be protected by governments like in latin america, so looks like 'radical' social democracy again ... :|

i mean i haven't read all of it by any means, so call me out if i'm talking shit or if i've overlooked anything good, but it looks like most of the 'lessons' learned by northern activists blockading summits is that things look really great in latin america through a thousand-mile rose-tinted telescope.

The two best articles are
http://www.turbulence.org.uk/compositionalpow.html
and
Organise local, strike global
http://www.turbulence.org.uk/organiselocal,st.html

Yeah tbh most of it read pretty poorly to my eyes, an awful lot of attempted summit-activism justification in the early sections, weak ideas for what to aim for in future. Couple of interesting articles though, the hostile interview of the IWW organiser is fun, as are disconnected bits of the critique of a global basic wage.