otherwise Cic and FairCoop are based in diversity, this means that can include different experiences and ideological visions inside, that can not being put together as a point in a map
]]>“Considerations of distributional equity, of genuinely sharing, trump economistic considerations of allocation and of the size of the pie. Thus: We need to talk more about SHARING. We all know that growthism is a SUBSTITUTE for real fairness, a more equal society, serious redistribution. (It is what ‘socialists’ turned to once they abandoned hope of achieving socialism.) Let’s start saying so! Let’s let go of ‘trickle down’ nonsense once and for all.” Rupert Reade. ().
Framed that way, can we vouch for the growth and resilience of the Cooperative Commons movement so it can protect itself from attacks from big capital? And, conversely, for the de-growth of pervasive financialization of everything, speculative assets and share-holder profit oriented extractivist nonsense?. I think we need more nuanced semantics to discuss these issues, rather than treating the term “de-growth” as an absolute with immovable connotations.
]]> I think that this is the P2PF’s position on this, at least it’s the one I feel identified with. From “Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy” by M Bauwens and V Kostakis. This is the source material las Indias should be evaluating to determine the P2PF’s position on the quadrant. It’d be interesting to post this as comments on the blog though, Michel Bauwens and not only here on FB.
“The local focus of the resilient communities quadrant becomes, however, evident. In extreme forms, this scenario contains simple lifeboat strategies and initiatives, aimed at the survival of small communities in the context of generalized chaos. They may build on the idea that we must accept the reality of considerably more expensive energy and food (Lewis and Conaty, 2012). What marks such extreme initiatives is arguably the abandonment of the ambition of scale while the feudalization of territorial integrity is considered mostly inevitable. Though global cooperation and web presence may exist, the focus remains on the local. Most often, political and social mobilization at scale is seen as not realistic, and doomed to failure. In the context of our profit-making versus Commons axis though, these projects are squarely aimed at generating community value. We consider them a healthy reaction against global problems and environmental degradation. Resilient communities try to be immune to the dominant system and they use P2P practices and technologies for good reasons. They try to support individuals’ physical and psychological well-being by generating a positive sense of place, localizing the economy within ecological limits, and securing entrepreneurial/community stewardship of the local Commons (Wilding, 2011). They do not, however, build global structures. According to our understanding, the issue is how to organize a global counter-power able to propose alternative modes of social organization on a global scale. For Sharzer (2012), ‘localism’ is the fetishization of scale, as some positive benefit is ascribed to a place precisely because it is small. He (2012) argues that resilient communities and other similar projects inevitably become parts of the broader capitalist economy, because they do not confront capitalism, but rather avoid it. Initiatives like Transition Towns are growing movements, though with local focus. They can co-exist in harmony within the next scenario of global Commons by the logic that whatever is heavy is local (for instance, desktop manufacturing technologies), and whatever is light is global (for instance, global knowledge Commons).
In addition to the focus on the local, the degrowth narrative is central to the resilient communities’ scenario. We believe, quoting Foster (2011), ‘that the ecological struggle, understood in these terms, must aim not merely for degrowth in the abstract but more concretely for de-accumulation – a transition away from a system geared to the accumulation of capital without end’. To realize such a transition it is crucial to develop pragmatic alternatives. Similar to how we began talking about ‘alter-globalization’ when the ‘antiglobalization’ movement became counter-intuitive, we now need to become more positive and start talking about ‘alter-growth’ scenarios instead of thinking in anti-growth/degrowth terms. Arguably, the issue is not to produce and consume less per se, but to develop new models of production which work on a higher level than capitalist models. We consider it difficult to challenge the dominant system if we lack a working plan to transcend it. A post-capitalist world is bound to entail more than a mere reversal to pre-industrial times. As the TEPS theory informs us, the adaptation of current institutions and the creation of new ones take place in the deployment phase of each TEP. We claim that the times are, finally, mature enough to introduce a radical political agenda with brand new institutions, fueled by the spirit of the Commons and aiming to provide a viable global alternative to the capitalist paradigm beyond degrowth or antiglobalization rhetorics.”
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