The following text is from a presentation by Heike Loeschmann of the Heinrich Boell Foundation on Transformational Change at the recent EDGE Funders Alliance Conference in Baltimore. Special thanks to Heinrich Boell who have supported our work on Commons Transition and facilitated meetings of commoners and cooperators last year that lead to the development of the Report on Open Cooperativism.
Good morning everybody, I am very pleased to be here.
Let me set start by saying that since 2008, politics and society have been in a state of constant crisis alert. Politics are rather reactive, and they are aimed at propping up the current system of neoliberal economics and policy. They do not seek the transformational change that could address the structural problems that we face.
We see this in the UN climate and biodiversity negotiations and around the financing of the new post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Market based instruments such as payment for ecosystem services or habitat banking and the creation of new asset classes are sold as win-win solutions.
In addition, the G20, the club of the most powerful industrialized and emerging economies, prioritizes a 2% global growth goal over the 2 degree climate stabilization goal. It is promoting an investment model to be implemented through public private partnerships for regional integration by installing an oversized infrastructure hardware globally. These ideas are not primarily induced by national development plans and reasonably sized projects resulting from the participation of citizens and the assessment of priorities and needs for local and national economies. In times of low interest yields in finance markets the driving force is the creation of large infrastructure as a new asset class. This means banking on the future of our pension systems. And, it makes an exit from the growth dependent pathway and crisis ridden financial systems even more difficult.
What’s going on is a double-enclosure: a massive privatization and commodification of the physical world – the atmosphere, land, forests, genes, life forms, and more – and a massive privatization and commodification of economic decision making and democracy themselves.
The enclosure of nature is alarming in itself, but the enclosure of democracy may be even more troubling because it is the only means that we have to stop the first enclosure. We have to mobilize against a systematic shut down of democratic accountability, participation and transparency.
So how, in the face of such political realities, should we move forward? We at the Boell Foundation believe that we need to build new alternatives from the ground up and take a long term perspective. We have been investing heavily in this idea for many years. It’s about developing a new economic narrative – not just as a matter of theory, but in terms of actual, functioning practices and policies.
After years of experimentation, our experience and advice is: open up new spaces for creative experimentation. The answers cannot simply be declared – they must emerge over time….and that requires the right conditions and patience.
That’s what we at the Boell Foundation have done with the Commons over the past six or seven years. We have helped seed an ecosystem of important players in Europe and globally by sponsoring independent theoretical work. We have hosted major international conferences on the commons in 2010 and 2013, as well as a series of workshops too bring together key players on four continents. We have sponsored a trilogy of anthologies by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier that explore the commons as an alternative economic and cultural paradigm. The first of these, The Wealth of the Commons, was published in 2012, and the second volume, Patterns of Commoning, will be published in two months.
I like to think that by helping to change the climate of discussion, especially in Europe and the Global South, we have contributed to advance the discourse around building the alternatives and to changing the terms of debate. Italians are now developing partnerships between municipal governments and groups of commoners as a substitute for public/private partnerships that sell out the public interest. There is now a robust network of Francophone commoners extending from Africa to Paris to Quebec. Law scholars will meet next week to discuss European legal strategies for the commons. An official EU task force has been formed to explore commons-oriented policy approaches to managing public goods and services.
Again, it bears repeating: the visions of change that we have promoted are deliberately kept separate from short-term, pragmatic politics. The whole point is to open up people’s imaginations and give them the room to experiment.
If you dare to take this kind of approach, you will soon discover that you have more friends than you ever realized was possible. Things take on a life of their own! We have worked closely with the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind, also known as FPH, a Swiss foundation that has also supported the commons and alliance-building. Together with FPH, we have actively explored what we call “convergence strategies”.
I am happy to say that this work is bearing fruit. Thanks in part to a workshop we organized together with FPH last September prior to the 4th Degrowth Congress in Leipzig, a new network of people from the Social Solidarity Economy movement, the co-operative movement, the Degrowth movement, the Transition Town movement, the Sharing and Collaborative Economy movement, and the commons world are now working more closely together. They are tackling a variety of projects on their own, such as an online course called Synergia to help people learn about the new economy. There is a project seeking to blend peer production practices and co-operatives, often known as “open co-operativism.” There is a new website called Commons Transition, which is showcasing innovative policy ideas for the new economy.
There is always a question about what interventions are merely reforms, and what are transformational. The line separating these two are not always so clear. Sometimes reform can open policy space that helps transformation, and sometimes transformation ideas see too ambitious.
The point is that we need to understand transformation as a pathway. This means to address root causes of the crisis of the failed model. This will never be achieved through a single strategy or brilliant analysis. It is a process of coordinating many diverse players to build a new discourse, develop new relationships, and work together toward a shared vision.
Our guiding star should be a model of the political economy in which economic democracy subordinates capital to the service of society, and not the other way round.
We should ask: Are we empowering citizens to generate and expand democracy – in politics, in social life, and above all in the economy? This pathway is most likely to yield successful outcomes, even if the results take time. And they will take time.
While the Welfare State was never really rooted in the traditions of the United States, it remains very much a desired tradition in Europe. Yet in these times of economic crisis, neoliberal austerity and privatization, the Welfare State is declining – but hardly anyone is really exploring feasible alternatives. This issue urgently needs to be addressed.
We at the Boell Foundation believe that we should start by reconceptualizing the role of the state from that of the Welfare State towards the idea of the Partner State. This term was coined with others by Michel Bauwens, Founder of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives, who will speak later today and tomorrow. The Partner State is in essence an enabling state. Instead of viewing the citizen as a passive recipient of public services, the Partner State requires us to see the State as a vehicle for active citizens. Instead of making people “clients,” people need realistic opportunities to meet their basic needs and livelihoods in independent ways.
I’m thinking about the kinds of multi-stakeholder co-operatives developed in Italy and Quebec, and now, NYC, which will be discussed in the “cooperative commonwealth” panel at 4 pm today. I’m thinking of timebanks and co-learning commons such as Open Course Ware and the Open Educational Resources movement. I’m thinking of peer production communities like FabLabs and the Maker movement and the exploding open design and manufacturing world.
I’m thinking of subsistence commons that let rural people manage their own forests, farmland, traditional seeds and water. I’m thinking of the new urban commons in Italy. I’m thinking of the rural communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are asserting their “biocultural rights” in their land, agriculture, biodiversity and social traditions, as ways to protect them from predatory global markets.
The common denominator in these many initiatives is the attempt to de-commodify nature, work and knowledge – each of which has been appropriated for private market ends – and to empower citizens. This means everything from Creative Commons licenses and free and open source software licenses, to community land trusts, alternative finance, post-growth economic models, and the re-localization and decentralization of the economy, the later being a pre-requisite for a global energy transition and a low carbon development pathway.
If citizens are going to become actively involved in building new types of local economies, we need legislation to support and finance the work of the commons, co-operatives and social economy practices.
Last, but not least, let me hint at a blind spot in all these discussions: We need to expand our very idea of “the economy” to not only include care work, which for decades has been ignored or marginalized as unpaid and predominantly “women’s work”, but to see Care essentially at the center of a needs based economy. The German Federal Statistical Office has determined for every hour of paid work in the marketplace, people must perform 1.7 hours of unpaid work – for raising children, running households, caring for the elderly and so on. We have a vast army of economists studying the monetized economy, but no one seems to care about the “crisis of social reproduction” – the impossible burdens on unpaid care work to do what is needed to sustain the market economy. Juliet Schor can speak eloquently about this topic – overwork and market dependency. I like to call your attention to a brand new Boell Foundation essay on the “Care Centered Economy,” by theologian and feminist thinker Ina Praetorius, who provides a brilliant analysis of the politics of externalization of care work from the perspective of history of thought and anthropological and cultural dimensions. Check it out at www.boell.de/en !
These are some of the lessons we have learned about how to develop a new political economy and a new vision of social and economic development. I hope that we can collectively expand and elaborate on this vision in the next three days.