Exploring Co-op Potential with John Restakis

Two sources of excellent examples and thoughtful questions about cooperatives and their potential:  John Restakis, author of Humanizing the Economy: Cooperatives in the Age of Capital and of online commentary at johnrestakis.net/blog.  His book, published in 200x, is a survey of important cooperative enterprise and experiments around the world and is alternately inspiring and surprising in where it finds co-op success:  from well-known examples in Italy, Spain, and U.K. to fishermen and sex workers. 

The latest commentary by Restakis is from Ecuador, where an international team of researchers and activists are working with the government to transition from a neo-liberal, free-market economy to what it is calling a social knowledge economy based on the commons, cooperative models of production, open-source systems of sharing, and free access to information.  The book and blog provide fascinating ideas and commentary, highly recommended for cooperators who are trying to think about these larger issues of economic justice