what the digital brings to the commons is the ability to mutualize knowledge, including knowledge about the physical productive resources such as the machinery, on a global scale, but also to organize institutionally as market entities (phyles) or as political-social movements, and thus to project power. Mere localism, to my point of view, can only produce dwarfish forms that can be more easily repressed and remain marginal. It depends on your/our ambition, but if we want to move to a new productive and social paradigm, we will have to combine both the local and the global in a new way.
Michel
]]>‘We’ are a young male couple who moved out here and have only been building this farm for just under a year now. Subsequently, it’s a bit difficult for me to share any sort of vast experience that we do not yet have, however, these inter-related issues are extremely important to us and our project.
To be honest, I’m not sure that I really get what the digital brings to the commons picture either. The digital world is much more my partner’s strength than mine. The conflict between the necessity for localism (in terms of food and much of commodity production and distribution as well as local control over commons resources) and the necessity to have a global structure capable of negotiating between competing localisms and, in some sort of way, setting leading paths, is an intellectual conflict that we believe will have extremely fruitful outcomes.
In terms of digital commons, we have just released a new wiki for cultivating useful plants called Practical Plants. It is a fully open information commons that we hope can become a good global resource for just about anyone as food production becomes something that almost everyone does at least a little bit of. The more political side of our project, we’re still trying to figure out. My partner has been following with great interest ideas concerning open software empowering democratic principles and structures.
As far as this great conversation I think needs to take place, our project is sort of placed squarely in the middle between old fashioned political activism and localist permaculture development. We bring these pulses together and aim to participate in each, politicising (in a leftward sense) the innovative green movement and localising and greening the movment for economic justice and social empowerment. The, still too nascent, eco-socialist movement, has given birth to some theoretical works, but there is a bit of a hole in the practical, tactical, on the ground fleshing out part for farmers, or activists like ourselves. We’re working on writing a book to move that area forward. Mostly because we see it as crucial, and also slightly as one of our many attempts to find some sources of funding to keep building our project!
]]>Thanks for this thoughtful post Francesca. I actually generally agree with Harvey in this text, though I’m not sure, from what I know about Harvey, that he really gets what the digital brings to the commons picture.
To my mind, it is exactly the global scaling of small group dynamics. By using global social and technical cooperation through shared knowledge (code and design) and commonly developed distributed machinery as well as distributed funding mechanisms, the local can now scale and achieve global coordination.
The great promise of the age is therefore that a relocalized production, under the condition od digitally enabled global cooperation, can outgrow its dwarfish forms and become hyper-productive compared to the centralized capitalist alternatives.
This is not a call for horizontal/p2p everything, but for a strategic use of stigmergic coordination amongst emancipatory forces.
True, a lot of localizing efforts are not seeing this picture either, and therefore, are themselves an expression of the decomposition of the current system, choosing survivalist/resilience strategies for an age of compression and decline. My contention is that we can avoid this, through the hyper-empowerment afforded by the digital commons,
and that I think, I don’t think Harvey gets either,
Would be nice if you could write about your experience in Spain,
Michel
]]>Øyvind has jumped straight to Harvey’s conclusion, hasn’t liked it and so responded with a re-emphasis of his own world perspective. What we need is to take a proponent of politically radical permaculture and work though the arguments that Harvey made to get to his conclusion.
First of all, Harvey makes the argument that non-hierarchical localism does not provide answers to problems on a different scale:
“The possibilities for sensible management of common property resources that exist at one scale (such as shared water rights between one hundred farmers in a small river basin) do not and cannot carry over to problems such as global warming, or even to the regional diffusion of acid deposition from power stations. As we “jump scales” (as geographers like to put it), so the whole nature of the commons problem and the prospects of finding a solution change dramatically. What looks like a good way to resolve problems at one scale does not hold at another scale. Even worse, patently good solutions at one scale (the “local,” say) do not necessarily aggregate up (or cascade down) to make for good solutions at another scale (the global, for example). This is why Hardin’s metaphor is so misleading: he uses a small-scale example of private capital operating on a common pasture to explicate a global problem, as if there is no problem whatsoever in shifting scales. This is also, incidentally, why the valuable lessons gained from the collective organization of small-scale solidarity economies along common-property lines cannot translate into global solutions without resort to “nested” and therefore hierarchical organizational forms. ”
Harvey points to an example that shows where decentralisation currently is an agent of higher inequality.
“Decentralization and autonomy are primary vehicles for producing greater inequality through neoliberalization. Thus, in New York State, the unequal provision of public education services across jurisdictions with radically different financial resources has been deemed by the courts as unconstitutional, and the state is under court order to move towards greater equalization of educational provision. It has failed to do so, and now uses the fiscal emergency as a further excuse to delay action. But note well, it is the higher-order and hierarchically determined mandate of the state courts that is crucial in mandating greater equality of treatment as a constitutional right.”
And he also points to future structural problems in a theoretically post-capitalist world:
“there is the vague and naïve hope that social groups who have organized their relations to their local commons satisfactorily will do the right thing or converge upon some satisfactory inter-group practices through negotiation and interaction. For this to occur, local groups would have to be untroubled by any externality effects that their actions might have on the rest of the world, and to give up accrued advantages, democratically distributed within the social group, in order to rescue or supplement the well-being of near (let alone distant) others, who as a result of either bad decisions or misfortune have fallen into a state of starvation and misery. History provides us with very little evidence that such redistributions can work on anything other than an occasional or one-off basis. There is, therefore, nothing whatsoever to prevent escalating social inequalities between communities. This accords all too well with the neoliberal project of not only protecting but further privileging structures of class power.”
I’m a farmer, an ecosocialist building a permaculture farm in Spain. I have an immediate and pressing interest in bringing together a clash and synthesis of the ideas that Harvey represents and the very real value coming from permaculture critique and activism. I want to participate and facilitate this clash.
Your response, described localism metaphorically:
“It’s the same thing in resilient communities and democracies, where the small local entities (localism) make up the larger institutions of society, being their source. Like in a healthy watershed, where the small local wells, pure and healthy, are the source of the larger rivers and lakes, together forming a healthy ecosystem.”
Metaphors help communicate the vision well, but if we’re interested in a future fair and sustainable for all then we have to show how those healthy watershed systems will overcome the potential pitfalls Harvey has identified.
]]>A typical top-down approach!
]]>“Nikos Salingaros, the mathematician and architectural theorist, recently published a new book, Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design (ISI Distributed Titles, 2010). It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented before.
As his readers know, his work continues Christopher Alexander’s work on the nature of architectural order, with more development of specifically scientific aspects. A basic point both make is that natural, biological, and urban systems have a great deal in common. In particular, they all function in complex, varying, and adaptive ways on many different levels. For that reason, they can’t be designed in any very comprehensive way but must largely be allowed to evolve through variation and selection. (The “algorithmic” and “sustainable” in the book’s title refer to the reiterated procedures needed to find adaptive designs.)
Such systems have certain common characteristics. One is a generally modular and hierarchical organization. That organization is always fractal, meaning that it has a similar degree of organized complexity at all scales. If you look at the system overall, it will have a few big pieces, more medium-sized pieces, and a great many smaller pieces. That appearance will repeat itself if you look at pieces of the system, and the same for pieces of the pieces, all the way down to the smallest dimensions. Thus, biological communities are composed of species, organisms, bodily organs, tissues, and cells; cities of urban quarters, neighborhoods, streets, plazas, and buildings.
The basis of such hierarchically ordered systems is the binding of complementary units, a tendency that is strongest at the most elementary level: the particles that form an atom; the organelles that constitute a living cell; the walls, roof, and foundations that make a building. Those elementary unities then link up to form ever more extensive systems that work in a way that preserves their nature as systems and also furthers the functioning of their components. A system that did otherwise would disappear, and something that works better would take its place.
The account is persuasive, but it’s very much at odds with post-1920s architecture and urban planning, which tend to eliminate detail and emphasize the dominance of simple concepts and images, and which are experienced as inhuman and alienating rather than living. So why do people stay with the current approach when it’s so much at odds with natural tendencies and no one likes the results? The answer, Salingaros tells us, is that we’ve boxed ourselves into a prison of images.
It seems that the door is nonetheless open if we want to leave, and with that in mind we talked with him recently to find out more about the problems and what to do about them.” – James Kalb
]]>“Watersheds can be considered a type of real-world network that is characterized by self-repeating or fractal-like patterns. Fractals are geometric patterns that possess the same proportions on different scales. Rivers and glaciers cut through the planet’s surface, leaving behind landscapes that may appear random or haphazard, but are actually quite precise. Whereas such patterns have been frequently ignored in designing or altering man-made landscapes, there is now interest in emulating them to create more sustainable and eco-compatible designs.” – D.L. Marrin, Ph.D
See: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-08-11/hydromimicry-water-model-technology-and-management
In a watershed the water is gathered from a lot of small sources making up large rivers and lakes, in a fractal pattern. The larger parts are entirely made up from lots of small sources. You might call this a bottom-up system, where the larger parts will cease to exist if the small sources of water dries up.
It’s the same thing in resilient communities and democracies, where the small local entities (localism) make up the larger institutions of society, being their source. Like in a healthy watershed, where the small local wells, pure and healthy, are the source of the larger rivers and lakes, together forming a healthy ecosystem.
Classical socialism, as David Harvey promotes, is a top-down model where the central rivers and lakes give away their water to the surrounding areas as they find it most suitable. Like a film moving backward. This is of course anti-nature! But as they equal anti-nature with culture it’s no wonder why they promote this kind of anti-ecological systems.
]]>What this guy means is that permaculture = right-wing survivalism. I’ve come to learn lately that most classical socialist look upon permaculture this way.
Ironically I’m sure this guy will put A Pattern Language in the same category, in spite of its hierarchical structure. The hierarchy should be in the language, which is made up from the human hand of the people.
This guy also means, like Ross Wolf, that culture = unnature. Of course he then hates resilient communities, as in nature every part is resilient by itself, made up from a multitude of connections being part of a larger whole.
Capitalists and socialists are the same thing, as they both define culture as unnature, and permaculture then becomes like a read cloth in their face: http://permaliv.blogspot.no/2012/06/permaculture-nature-civilization.html
]]>