Issue 4 of our magazine: 76 color pages of essays, artworks, scores and music relating to our theme of community, economics, and capitalism. Includes free DL of an accompanying album.

Sunbathing in the shallow end of late-stage capitalism, it is easy to think of ‘the economy’ as an abstract imposition, something that directs the tenor of our lives but over which we except little control. Mortgages, credit scores, inflation, the stock exchange, each some fiscal boogieman that lives forever in  the bylines of newspapers, looming down upon us from afar. In contrast, ‘economy’ is at its heart a subset of ‘community’ - referring to the way a group of people shares its resources: how it distributes, produces, and consumes. Whist the capitalist economy is concerned with increasing profit - often at the expense of those involved in the production of its resources (goods and services), a participatory economy, in contrast, is interested in how we produce, and who benefits from the distribution of a societies resources. 

In this issue of Means we have invited artists to respond to the notion of a participatory economy, exploring both critiques of the dominant capitalist system, and the affordances of art as another form of economy, a creative sharing of ideas. Inside, you will find resistance strategies, new artist models for the distribution of goods, reflections on gender (as it pertains to economics), and more. We take a moment to consider the often hidden workers who keep capitalist structures going, the role of art festivals in embodying alternative economic models, and the reimagining of power dynamics found in improvisation and graphic scores.

Given the current economic climate, it seems more pressing than ever that artists strive to imagine and present alternative possibilities - each a potential model for what might come next, the much-needed successors to our current, unsustainable economy.