Mutual Aid and Economics Essays

The Opening, Cooperatives, and Natural Development

This book (which is open source and you can download free here) gathers a set of fierce, lyrical essays that refuse the bland consolations of our age. From a mordant meditation on debt and “I-Phone lawyers” to a blueprint for cooperative medicine, from a Swiftian lament for children cut from care in Texas to a hymn for open source and the common good, these pieces cut through abstraction to the work of real life: feeding people, healing neighbors, building shelter, sharing knowledge. With a voice that is part prophet, part builder, the author marries moral clarity to practical design—guilds over gatekeepers, mutual aid over monopoly, labor over ledger. The result is a field guide for living sanely in an economy of make-believe, and a summons to re-imagine value itself: not as numbers on a screen, but as the bread we break, the roofs we raise, and the songs we keep teaching each other to sing.