abtw777

I had joined an arts project called ‘If the City Were a Commons’, based in the small city of Dundee on the East coast of Scotland. The Commons Group has been invited to visit an ‘art installation’ at a Dundee gallery, just before its official opening to the public. The installation was essentially a sauna, constructed from a polythene greenhouse and a couple of wallpaper strippers that produced steam. The idea of the installation was to see if people would be more sociable when they met with few or no clothes and thus with most of the usual clues to status removed. I suspect that those who put the installation together hadn’t met British people before! The visit was arranged for just after our regular meeting and noticeably most people made a very sharp exit when the regular meeting concluded! It was only four of us who made our way down the street to the gallery. This was our Commons group leader, his partner, another female friend and me. The sauna had been made ready for us a...

Imagine, if you will, a paddy field of rice ready for harvest. The nearby village has plenty of workers willing and able to bring in the harvest. If they press ahead with their work then everyone can eat. Such a simple model of subsistence farming is often given to show that societies can function without money, or indeed, without capitalism. But then comes a ‘but’! For those writers who are looking to celebrate the benefits of the capitalist system, a market economy, or some such, then the ‘but’ might take the form of: But what if there’s a drought or a hurricane or a flood? Hence, the subsistence farmer is vulnerable to disaster. Or it might be simply to say: But what if the farmers want to buy a truck, or go see a film, or gain access to the internet? Hence, there are things that a small group of people cannot do for themselves. So a more complex system of exchange – trade, money, debt – is a way that people gain access to a wider range of goods and services. On the other ha...

In my home town there is a man cycling his way along the road that runs beside the river. His shop is in the town, just beside the main bus stop. Here he gets off and ties up his bike ready for the day’s work. No matter the weather, he will greet you and tell you that it’s a wonderful day. He always has time for a chat and is always upbeat. The man lives in a big house and his business is thriving, so you might conclude that the man on the bicycle has good reason to be optimistic about life. However, it was not always so. Forty years previous and that same man — or so it seems to me — had a completely different character. I might have just been blind to his true nature, but back then it would have appeared highly unlikely that he would become the relaxed, friendly and positive person that he subsequently became. What happened to allow this to be? Well, despite his business success there had been struggles in the man’s life. Perhaps this was part of the story. But I think the ...