If you want to get into “international relations”, here’s my advice (New Statesman, November 2013)
This is from the New Statesman’s “Guide to Political Studies”. They asked me what I would say to someone wanting to get into “international relations”. You can download the guide, including my bit, here. And here it is in text form:
Citizens of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your data!
The Guardian asked me to comment on the NSA revelations. I looked at this through the lens of anarchist concepts of democracy and complexity theory. The article is online here, and text is below.
Flattering video on the work of Independent Diplomat
Prepared by the Skoll Foundation, who gave us an award recently.
“Rebel with a cause” Interview with Shaun Randol in Los Angeles Review of Books
Big interview in LA Review of Books. Full text:
Rebel with a Cause: An Interview with Carne Ross
September 1st, 2013
Photo by: Ahmet Sibdial Sau
Capital Flight and what it tells us about how to address global problems
1. Rapid capital flight from so called emerging economies like Brazil and India demonstrates the profound and inherent volatility of global financial markets
2. Also shows Minsky-ian nature of markets: speculators get out because they fear others may do so first, creating self-sustaining cycle
3. And it’s not at all clear that tools of international cooperation, including the IMF, are adequate to mitigate this volatility and prevent negative consequences (indeed, there’s a strong argument that IMF prescriptions in eg Greece have made things much worse)
The Nation: Occupy Bank Cards!
The Nation published an article about The Occupy Money Cooperative by Alissa Quart. I have taken the liberty of pasting the text below.
Occupy Bank Cards! A band of finance wizards take on the system they now say is corrupt. By Alissa Quart August 12, 2013
Der Spiegel: Occupy’s Bank for the other 99%
A great article in Der Spiegel, for now still in German only, about the Occupy Money Cooperative. Here’s the text:
Animated: David Harvey’s critique of capitalism
This is a great short video which puts David Harvey’s Marxist critique of capitalism into animated form. It’s a compelling analysis, but notably Harvey fails to offer any solution. For that, well, my views are in my book. In a few words: direct action, participatory democracy, recapturing agency.
Cooperative Banking is the Wave of the Future: Ellen Brown
In my Occupy banking group, we are gearing up to launch a fundraising appeal for The Occupy Money Cooperative. More details about this will appear on this site, and on the Coop’s own site, in the near future. Meanwhile, here’s a good article from 2012 about cooperative banks – and indeed an incisive critique of contemporary banks – by Ellen Brown.
“Our forms must reflect our fundamental political values”, Interview in The Guardian
Liam Barrington-Bush is exploring new forms of political action and organization, from Mexico to the UK. His book, “Anarchists in the Boardroom” is out soon. I met him at the Left Forum in New York City a few weeks ago, where he had invited me to a panel on horizontal forms of organization. This led to this interview in today’s Guardian, which I am also pasting below, with apologies to The Guardian’s copyright guardians (all property, including intellectual, is th