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sabato 28 giugno 2014

Visions of a Better World - through self-governed, sustainable cities based on common ownership and cooperative management

Here below are some images showing the millennia-long tradition that self-governed cities have historically been the key to human freedom. Today we need this tradition more than ever and we need to renew it and make it universal. This blog is an appeal for concrete alternative to capitalist globalization. A world in which we are first and foremost citizens, capable of self-government. In which politics is our common cause, not economics as universal competition and a war of all against all. A world of common ownership and common management of resources through the city and through cooperative workplaces. Of less work, more time, greater community AND greater freedom to move and live where we choose. With enough for all based on universal citizenship and guaranteed income for all so all are truly free to choose what work to do and how to do it. A world where no one is a foreigner, yet where we all have a greater sense of place and belonging. 

In the coming months I will post a proposed world constitution for a 21st Century Cosmopolis, a world civilization based on cities and townships governed directly by citizens, free of national states, of capitalism and corporations and finance, without the wage system, prisons, borders, bosses or poverty. And how we can begin wherever we are to struggle for it and put it into practice to make it a reality starting today. An orderly withdrawal from the horrors of capitalism and states and the conscious and common construction of a different and better world. 

For now, here are two details from the famous painting of Good Government in the City that hangs in the city hall of Sienna, and reminds us of the legacy of the Italian city republics, a representation of the world's first social revolution, 9,200 years ago in the city of Catal Huyuk which created a truly egalitarian society in that city that lasted for hundreds of years, the entrance to a Zapatista Good Government Town, local currency used in Ithaca, New York by hundreds of city residents, Ancient Athens, a sign for the Cleveland cooperative network that is transforming that city, participatory budgeting by citizens in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Come, join the feast ! We can have a world civilization with room for all and all of us citizens of cities and towns we govern, where we protect and nurture the local ecology through common ownership, where we work together and are free to move where we like and live as and where we want. A common home, Earth. 













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