buen vivir and
sumak kawsay (“good living”) are written into the constitutions. While mechanisms for enforcement still need considerable strengthening, these principles establish a powerful alternative to extractive practices, offering a legal and ethical platform for legislation based on harmony both with nature, and between humans.
In Europe, large-scale thriving cooperatives, such as the Mondragón Cooperative in Spain, demonstrate that it’s possible for companies to prosper without utilizing a shareholder-based profit model. With roughly a hundred businesses and 80,000 worker-owners producing a wide range of industrial and consumer goods, Mondragón proves that it’s possible to succeed while maintaining a people-focused, shared community of life-affirming values.
As a new, saner administration sets up shop in Washington, D.C., there are plenty of policy initiatives this country desperately needs. Beyond a national plan for the COVID-19 pandemic, progressives will strive to focus the administration s attention on challenges like fixing the broken health care system, grappling with systemic racial inequities, and a just transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
These are all critically important issues. But here s the rub: Even if the Democratic administration were resoundingly successful on all fronts, its initiatives would still be utterly insufficient to resolve the existential threat of climate breakdown and the devastation of our planet s life-support systems. That s because the multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of an even more profound problem: The underlying structure of a global economic and political system that is driving civilization toward a precipice.
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