In this follow-up to our first video, Frithjof Bergmann discusses the concept of community production in more depth. To what extent is this actually happening now? Is it actually cheaper to produce goods in this setting than via mass production? Who pays for all of this? Some lingering questions get answered.
-Mark Linsenmayer
it seems to me that cut off from a political program/party any real attempts to secure peoples’ working lives are going to be undercut by what is happening in the surrounding environs/systems,
but I’m most pleased by this John Dewey like turn in the PEL trajectory towards examining how we are living today. Facing the crony-capitalist undercutting of their own livelihoods many folks in the academy are now talking about being of some direct public use but they by and large fail to actually engage with the public(s), and perhaps one of the benefits of working on these issues outside of the Ivory Towers is the freedom to shape one’s research projects to suit the problems/interests at hand instead of the other way around.
Jane Addams was supposed to have told her academic colleagues that while they were welcome to come work with the communities that she was serving they were not welcome to come and work on them and I have always found this to be an attitude worth striving for.