ed's website

Source

After putting in a Freedom Of Information request, the minutes for the East Sussex County Council Pension Fund Investment Panel - from 1974 to 2007 - have been released for the first time. As I noted in my analysis of the minutes:

After writing a couple of blog posts (one and two) about how Cranks could be clearer about its politics for its members and the general public, I was happy to see when I went in the other day that there were three sheets of paper on the wall explaining the politics of the place.

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My friend, Lisa Lewinsohn, has just written her thesis at the Centre for Alternative Technology on Planning Policy and Low Impact Developments - What are the planning barriers to low impact developments in rural areas in Britain and how might they be overcome? (.pdf 1.4MB).

As I said in my last blog post, after I sent an email to the Cranks mailing list we discussed the politics of Cranks in one of our bi-weekly meetings. I haven't been able to post these thoughts up sooner because I have been offline for a month building a roundhouse with Tony Wrench in South West Wales. More on that later, but for now..

I have been helping out in Cranks, a community bike workshop in Brighton, since last September. A few days ago I sent the email below to our mailing list about the politics of Cranks. I thought I'd put it online because it reflects some of my current thinking as well as giving an insiders view of Cranks. Yesterday we discussed some of the points in the email in a group meeting. I'll be posting in a few days some of the outcomes from the meeting and my thoughts on them.

Have been editing the wikipedia page on workers' co-operatives. Over the next few years, I will try help make it into a great source of information on workers' co-ops. I've already made some very substantial changes, which will hopefully stay - and be improved upon - over time.

When you search for workers' co-operatives in Google it is the first thing that comes up.

UPDATE: Also check out this excellent update by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis on the state of workers' co-operatives in Argentina.

Just read this following article on workers' co-operatives in Argentina and thought I'd post it up here.

The surge of workers' co-operatives after the economic crisis in 2001 is well documented in the film The Take (you can download it here).

(The Fairtrade shop at Pentrehafod School is run by a pupil workers' co-operative - Source: Times Educational Supplement)

At the recent co-operative congress, I went to a fringe meeting hosted by the UK Society for Co-operative Studies on 'Where are the co-operators of the future to be found?' Kevin McGrother (Young Co-operatives), Kirsty Palmer (Woodcraft Folk General Secretary), Mags Bradbury (Membership Diversity, Co-op Group) and Pam Walker (East of England Co-op Education Dept.) all spoke about their experiences in this field.

Below are my notes from a talk I recently went to at Sussex University by Derek Wall, Principal Speaker of the Green Party, on 'Real Alternatives to Capitalism'. The talk was very thought provoking although I do wish he had expanded on the politics and power of introducing some of the alternatives he suggested (for example, how the hell do you get from an 'exchange value' system to a 'use value' system?)

Before you read it, please note that Derek expands on the points he made in the talk in his blog post on Real Alternatives to Capitalism as well as in his book BABYLON AND BEYOND: The Economics of Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Globalist and Radical Green Movements

My friend, Rebecca Napier-Moore, has written the following paper about power within workers' co-operatives in the UK. We interviewed workers together for our different papers (see mine here) and it was an absolute pleasure to work with her. In my opinion, not only is her paper extremely well-written and concise but it also intelligently draws on - and challenges - the academic literature surrounding Steven Lukes' 3 dimensions of power in relation to the workers' co-operatives that we visited. It received an A+ mark. I am putting the paper below for you to read but you can also find it online as a Word Document or as a pdf.