GEO Original

The Valley Alliance of Worker Co-operatives has set up a revolving loan fund for their members.

This chapter offers a framework for analyzing the “ecological problem” that should be useful to those seeking to make sense of the economic aspect of the current planetary crisis. Razeto summarizes the crisis, considers the importance and insufficiency of existing approaches at the level of the State and Civil Society, and the difficulty of controlling nature and then offers a “theory of the ecological question” that focuses on the economy and its “mode of action and organization.”

In this chapter Razeto examines a question that has been central for the vast majority of people in the world: the question of development. Like many before him, Razeto questions the meaning of development and the objectives sought, opposing an alternative “desirable development” to the dominant model centered on industrialization, capital accumulation, and structural inequality.

Razeto starts with an analysis of two perennial sources of transformational energy: the “impoverished and untenable” situation of those who are marginalized and subordinate in the existing order, and the profound dissatisfaction of those better situated who nonetheless hope for a better society in which higher values and ideas are made real. Challenging the wide-spread notion of “system change,” the idea that “the existing social order – understood as a “system” – must be replaced by a different one: a new type of society,” Razeto critiques the focus on conquest of power, and the emphasis on politics as the “proper arena for the application of forces tending to the construction of a better society.”

Why Black women teachers are especially well-suited for teaching life skills.

Having previously identified the participation of workers in decision-making as the key to the emergence of solidarity in labor and the recuperation of work’s “rich meaning and content,” Razeto deepens and expands his analysis of participation and self-management. A “bottom-up” analysis of management, power, and authority – understood as a gift the subordinated make to those in power – enables a powerful critique of centralization, bureaucracy, delegation, and co-optation.

In this chapter, Razeto explores the human meaning of work and its social organization, showing how this fundamental creative process has been impoverished and expropriated under a regime of dependency and wage labor.

In this chapter, which should be of special interest to activists and organizers working in non-profit organizations aiming to contribute to social justice and transformation, Razeto addresses the role of charitable donations, foundations, and the “intermediary organizations” – typically non-profits – that transform grants and donations into goods and services for the beneficiaries.