Collaborative Futures  On The Invitation  A shadow hangs over
every discussion of social life today: the shadow of economism.
In its darkness, light emanates only from productivity,
efficiency, incentives and profits. To the epithet of ‘dismal’
famously ascribed to economics, on account of its pessimistic
commitment to the inevitability of scarcity for the many, one
could also add ‘dark’. The dimness of the prospect derives from
the poverty of its instruments of measurement, or rather its
reliance on the measurable as a sole index of the ‘good’. But
the edifice of economic organization sits atop a substrata of
generalized cooperation that conditions the very possibility of
its existence.  “The virtually preponderant importance
henceforth recognized of externalities bears witness to the
limits of the market economy and puts its categories in crisis.
It makes visible that the primary sources of wealth, virtual
source and condition for all the others, are not manufacturable
by any business, accountable in any fo