Come and knit with algae. Get acquainted with blockchain. Take part and think about what a peer-to-peer justice system could look like. Try out Linux and Arduino. Cook duckweed in the food lab. Delve into permaculture…

Koppelting is made by the combined contributions of all the participants themselves.

When: Monday 21 up to and including Sunday 27 August
Where: De WAR, Geldersestraat 6 in Amersfoort, the Netherlands

Visit koppelting.org to check out the line-up and how you can register for a single or multiple days. If you want, you can also directly add your own program item there.

Photo by laurabillings

The post Koppelting: the great gathering of the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

After two years of development and testing, Faircoin’s blockchain is ready to change its consensus algorithm from Proof of Stake (PoS) to Proof of Cooperation (PoC). The PoC protocol has been argued to present significant advantages, in relation to energy consumption and control by its community.

The following post has been published by FairCoop on 18.07. 

Have you ever asked yourself why bitcoin uses such a huge amount of electricity? And why it is controlled by a small amount of mining farms? The new version of Faircoin is the complete opposite in that sense: it barely needs energy to confirm transactions (nodes can work with minimalist hardware, such as Raspberry Pi3 and similar) or to guarantee the security of the system. In addition, the use and distribution of FairCoin are based on social justice and equality criteria.

Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Faircoin 2 doesn’t involve mining or minting systems, which are based on competition. Transaction blocks are generated by Cooperatively Validated Nodes (CVNs). These nodes cooperate to maintain the security of the network. This is why we call the system Proof of Cooperation.

Faircoin is becoming the essential digital currency for a totally decentralized payments system that uses the minimum possible amount of processing power. Faircoin is the currency of a system that is being accepted by more and more people. It’s the basis for FairCoop, FairMarket, FreedomCoop and also now for Bank of the Commons an alternative banking cooperative of which Faircoop is one of the founders.

Faircoin is the fundamental element of a system that facilitates currency transfers at very low or zero cost between continents, countries, users and also between ordinary bank accounts. In the Faircoin ecosystem, collective intelligence creates useful tools that people can share, including point of sale systems for merchants, prepaid cards, instant currency exchange, exchanges to euros via ATMs, payment of direct receipts and all the banking services that have until now been in the hands of an elite.

Micropayments are an important tool to meet the needs of people’s real economies and for its use in regions and societies where money is scarce. Faircoin’s high network efficiency, the relationship between trusted nodes, minimal energy costs and, consequently very low transaction fees make Faircoin one of the best currencies for micropayments.

On the 18th July 2017, the 53.193.831 Faircoin in circulation was transferred to a new blockchain. From that date on no more coins will be created. This way, being a finite good it is anticipated that its value in respect to other currencies will grow alongside the progressive extension of its use in the real economy. This will be a big incentive to the community of Faircoin users and allowing for a level of self-management that will allow us to become progressively empowered to face the capitalist system based on infinite growth and loss of people’s purchasing power, in a constant struggle for the distribution of resources in the hands of a few.

Faircoin is an open, horizontal self-organized currency. The community decides, based on a previously established consensus in the online economic strategies group, when and in what proportion a revaluation should be realized. It is a transparent process according to the current situation. So it is a completely stable currency, which cannot be devalued and is absolutely reliable for its community of users in personal or commercial transactions. Its algorithm is based on Proof of Cooperation and contributes to the distribution of wealth by preventing the richest from producing more and more coins and getting richer and richer. It is probably the most important technological innovation in the field of blockchain technologies since the creation of Bitcoin. This outstanding contribution doesn’t come from a company or group of people with private interests but from a social movement!

“We have been planning, developing and testing the cryptographic algorithm for two years. Now is the time to switch to a Proof-of-Cooperation system, which is the most stable and trustworthy concept ever seen in the world of Blockchain.”
Thomas König, Faircoin’s lead developer.

One-fifth of all circulating faircoin were bought by Enric Duran in 2014 and donated to FairCoop. With the value generated by cooperative activity and for the common good, today its value already exceeds one million euros, and remain in a communal wallet used for various FairCoop social funds, such as the commons fund or the global south fund. With FairCoop, an entire self-sustaining ecosystem for a fair economy is being built.

“With FairCoop, we are building a partnership based on cooperation and mutual support. In this way, FairCoin is showing itself to be a key tool, with which to interconnect globally and finance the transition. With the arrival of the “Proof of Cooperation”, the code stands at an equal level to our political vision “
Enric Durán, activist in cooperative ecosystems and alternative economies.

The post FairCoin activates the first Cooperative Blockchain appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nature Play is seeking to become Europe’s first Agile Learning Community on Evia Island, Greece, and across Europe. The campaign concerns the hosting of the first ever Agile Learning Facilitators (ALF) training in Europe: ALF Summer Europe.

A project coordinated by Marcus Letts from One Planet Productions, a project development agency working in North Evia (Origin Club, Transform Evia).

Learn more about the project and make a pledge here

What is Nature Play Agile Learning Community?

Nature Play Agile Learning Community (ALC) is an Agile Learning ecosystem in the making located on the Aegean island region of North Evia in Central Greece. Inspired by the growing ALC model in the USA, a distributed network of Agile Learning Communities is nurtured in the region, in wider Greece and across Europe.

Specifically, the programme is focused on a diverse offering of activities and experiences for children and young people in the municipality of Limni-Mandouthi-Agia Anna on Evia island. Initially these will include:

• Pre-school in the mornings.
• Youth clubs in the evenings.
• Forest schools and work experience days.
• Weekend pop-ups and agile expeditions.
• Week-long summer camps.

Nature Play ALC attempts to become accessible to local children by adopting a complementary rather than confrontational approach, and also affordable to everyone – including the island’s refugee community. This entails making the programmes attractive to tourists and then actively cross-subsidising their offerings to local children. Simultaneously, it is embracing opportunities for oversees educators and volunteers to join in a co-learning adventure.

The bigger picture mission is to transform Evia into a leading European destination for regenerative culture design and applied social economics. This vision and strategy begins and ends with self-directed learning and intentional culture creation that needs to be based on a foundation of agile principles and practices.

Photo by Pensive glance

The post Crowdfunding for Nature Play: An Agile learning Community appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Photo by quapan

The post Decisive vote on European Community Networks appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The article has been co-authored by Alex Pazaitis, Primavera De Filippi and Vasilis Kostakis.

Abstract: This article explores the potential of blockchain technology in enabling a new system of value that will better support the dynamics of social sharing. Our study begins with a discussion of the evolution of value perceptions in the history of economic thought. Starting with a view on value as a coordination mechanism that defines meaningful action within a certain context, we associate the price system with the establishment of capitalism and the industrial economy. We then discuss its relevance to the information economy, exhibited as the techno-economic context of the sharing economy, and identify new modalities of value creation that better reflect the social relations of sharing. Through the illustrative case of Backfeed, a new system of value is envisioned, comprising three layers: (a) production of value; (b) record of value; and (c) actualisation of value. In this framework, we discuss the solutions featured by Backfeed and describe a conceptual economic model of blockchain-based decentralised cooperation. We conclude with a tentative scenario for blockchain technology that can enable the creation of commons-oriented ecosystems in a sharing economy.

Full text available here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162517307084 (find this and more publications of the P2P Lab openly accessible here).

Photo by portalgda

The post Blockchain and value systems in the sharing economy: The illustrative case of Backfeed appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“A smaller and different economy with higher welfare needs to be distinguished from recession or depression. The question is how do we land there by design and not by collapse?”

Following up on Jeroen van den Bergh’s excellent review of the growth versus climate debate, Giorgos Kallis points to a fundamental misrepresentation of the quoted research on degrowth: degrowth is not a strategy „aimed at reducing the size of the GDP“.

In fact, the degrowth proposition is that the relationship between fossil fuels/carbon emissions and GDP growth is mutual, and that a serious climate policy will slow down the economy, and a slower economy will emit less carbon – notwithstanding historical exceptions such as collapsing regimes burning their fossil fuels. Viable scenarios for successfully limiting climate change at a 2 ⁰C rise involve both a slowing of the economy and a reduction of its carbon content. The question then is how to slow down while securing wellbeing?

The theoretical possibility of absolutely decoupling carbon emissions from GDP cannot be logically refuted, but it is unlikely to be physically or empirically possible. But let’s agree to disagree. Both agnosticism and conviction about limits to growth are reasonable positions. My point here is to clarify the misunderstanding of what degrowth is.

A shrinking GDP by design or by disaster?

 Right or wrong, the diagnosis of Limits to Growth, and the degrowth camp today is that by the end of the century there are two possibilities. Either a collapse of output and welfare after crossing resource or carbon limits or a smaller economy with higher welfare. In the mid-term a decrease of welfare is also possible as climate disasters strike while GDP growth is  still sustained by use of fossil fuels and reconstruction or defense expenditures.

The possibility space for a ‚degrowth‘, or ‚prosperous way down‘ or, in other words, a smaller and different economy with higher welfare needs to be distinguished from recession or depression. On this basis the policy and research question posed by degrowth scholars is not: „Which negative growth rate will get us there?, but „How do we land there by design and not by collapse? How do we create an economy that is low-carbon, low-output and secures well-being for all? This is the question that motivates interdisciplinary work on degrowth.

Ecological economists study macro-economic models and the social and policy conditions under which contraction can be stable and welfare-enhancing. Anthropologists, historians and social scientists examine how pre-capitalist civilizations prospered without growth, or how and why indigenous or intentional communities today manage without it. Engineers and legal theorists ask what technological and intellectual property models can sustain innovation without growth. Political theorists rethink democracy for a post-growth era. Focusing on „degrowth in a narrow sense of GDP decline“ – which is not what those who write about degrowth understand by degrowth – van den Bergh misses this exciting research agenda.

Watch also the video of a recent debate “Agrowth or degrowth” between Jeroen van den Bergh and Giorgos Kallis

¹Giorgos Kallis is an environmental scientist working on ecological economics and political ecology. He is a Leverhulme visiting professor at SOAS and an ICREA professor at ICTA, Autonomous University of Barcelona. Before that he was a Marie Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley. He holds a PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the University of the Aegean in Greece, a Masters in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and a Masters in Environmental Engineering and a Bachelors in Chemistry from Imperial College, London. Research & Degrowth (R&D) is an academic association dedicated to research, awareness raising, and events organization around the topic of degrowth.

Photo by Desazkundea

The post Degrowth is anything but a strategy to reduce the size of GDP appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The article has been co-authored by Alex Pazaitis, Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens. Special thanks to Alanna Krause and Joshua Vial for their valuable input and support, as well as to all Enspiral people.

Abstract: This article explores how autonomous workers/contributors, involved in peer-to-peer relations, can organise their productive efforts so that they have sustainable livelihoods. The discussion is guided by the concept of ‘open cooperativism’, which argues for a synergy between the commons-based peer production movement and elements of the cooperative and solidarity economy movements. To this end, we review the case of Enspiral, a network of professionals and companies that empowers and supports social entrepreneurship. We explore its values, operation and governance as well as the chosen strategies for autonomy and sustainability. Finally, some lessons are summarised for the cooperative and union movement, which point to open cooperativism as an integrated vision.

Full text available here: http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/cQtJrUauKHrIGGYmMZtq/full (find this and more publications of the P2P Lab openly accessible here).

Photo by mimitalks, married, under grace

The post Digital economy and the rise of Open Cooperativism: The case of the Enspiral Network appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The idea of degrowth is contentious, often misunderstood, and (perhaps paradoxically) growing in popularity. In this book, Giorgos Kallis, one of the movement’s leading thinkers, presents an accessible, inspiring, and enjoyable defense. The book’s chapters—a compilation of his opinion essays, newspaper articles, blog posts, and ‘minifestos’—range from topics such as eco-modernism, the history of economics, science fiction, the Greek crisis, and Hollywood films. The book also features debates and exchanges between Kallis and degrowth detractors. In defense of degrowth is intended as an introduction for the curious, a defense against the skeptics, and an intellectually stimulating conversation for those already convinced but willing to learn more.

The post In defence of degrowth: 27 Essays and Thoughts on Degrowth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Whether the twenty-first century will be the most radical of times or the most reactionary … will depend overwhelmingly upon the kind of social movement and program that social radicals create out of the theoretical, organizational, and political wealth that has accumulated during the past two centuries… The direction we select … may well determine the future of our species for centuries to come.

— Murray Bookchin, The Communalist Project (2002)

Originally posted by Eleanor Finley at ROAR Magazine

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, devastating images and memories of the First and Second World Wars flood our minds. Anti-rationalism, racialized violence, scapegoating, misogyny and homophobia have been unleashed from the margins of society and brought into the political mainstream.

Meanwhile, humanity itself runs in a life-or-death race against time. The once-unthinkable turmoil of climate change is now becoming reality, and no serious attempts are being undertaken by powerful actors and institutions to holistically and effectively mitigate the catastrophe. As the tenuous and paradoxical era of American republicanism comes to an end, nature’s experiment in such a creative, self-conscious creature as humanity reaches a perilous brink.

Precisely because these nightmares have become reality, now is the time to decisively face the task of creating a free and just political economic system. For the sake of humanity — indeed for the sake of all complex life on earth as we know it — we must countervail the fascism embodied today in nation-state capitalism and unravel a daunting complex of interlocking social, political, economic and ecological problems. But how?

As a solution to the present situation, a growing number of people in the world are proposing “communalism”: the usurpation of capitalism, the state, and social hierarchy by the way of town, village, and neighborhood assemblies and federations. Communalism is a living idea, one that builds upon a rich legacy of political history and social movements.

The commune from Rojava to the Zapatistas

The term communalism originated from the revolutionary Parisian uprising of 1871 and was later revived by the late-twentieth century political philosopher Murray Bookchin (1931-2006). Communalism is often used interchangeably with “municipalism”, “libertarian municipalism” (a term also developed by Bookchin) and “democratic confederalism” (coined more recently by the imprisoned Kurdish political leader Abdullah Öcalan).

Although each of these terms attempt to describe direct, face-to-face democracy, communalism stresses its organic and lived dimensions. Face-to-face civic communities, historically called communes, are more than simply a structure or mode of management. Rather, they are social and ethical communities uniting diverse social and cultural groups. Communal life is a good in itself.

There are countless historical precedents that model communalism’s institutional and ethical principles. Small-scale and tribal-based communities provide many such examples. In North America, the Six Nations Haudenasanee (Iroquis) Confederacy governed the Great Leaks region by confederal direct democracy for over 800 years. In coastal Panama, the Kuna continue to manage an economically vibrant island archipelago. Prior to the devastation of colonization and slavery, the Igbo of the Niger Delta practiced a highly cosmopolitan form of communal management. More recently, in Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista Movement have reinvented pre-Columbian assembly politics through hundreds of autonomous municipios and five regional capitals called caracoles (snails) whose spirals symbolize the joining of villages.

Communalist predecessors also emerge in large-scale urban communities. From classical Athens to the medieval Italian city-states, direct democracy has a home in the city. In 2015, the political movement Barcelona en Comú won the Barcelona city mayorship based on a vast, richly layered collective of neighborhood assemblies. Today, they are the largest party in the city-council, and continue to design platforms and policies through collective assembly processes. In Northern Syria, the Kurdish Freedom Movement has established democratic confederalism, a network of people’s assemblies and councils that govern alongside the Democratic Union Party (PYD).

These are just a few examples among countless political traditions that testify to “the great theoretical, organizational and political wealth” that is available to empower people against naked authoritarianism.

Power, administration and citizenship

The most fundamental institution of communalism is the civic assembly. Civic assemblies are regular communal gatherings open to all adults within a given municipality — such as a town, village or city borough — for the purpose of discussing, debating and making decisions about matters that concern the community as a whole.

In order to understand how civic assemblies function, one must understand the subtle, but crucial distinction between administration and decision-making power. Administration encompasses tasks and plans related to executing policy. The administration of a particular project may make minor decisions — such as what kind of stone to use for a bridge.

Power, on the other hand, refers to the ability to actually make policy and major decisions — whether or not to build a bridge. In communalism, power lies within this collective body, while smaller, mandated councils are delegated to execute them. Experts such as engineers, or public health practicioners play an important role in assemblies by informing citizens, but it is the collective body itself which is empowered to actually make decisions.

With clear distinctions between administration and power, the nature of individual leadership changes dramatically. Leaders cultivate dialogue and execute the will of the community. The Zapatistas expresses this is through the term cargo, meaning the charge or burden. Council membership execute the will of their community, leadership means “to obey and not to command, to represent and not to supplant…to move down and not upwards.”

A second critical distinction between professional-driven politics as usual and communalism is citizenship. By using the term “citizen”, communalists deliberately contradict the restrictive and emptied notion of citizenship invoked by modern-day nation-states. In communal societies, citizenship is conferred to every adult who lives within the municipality. Every adult who lives within the municipality is empowered to directly participate, vote and take a turn performing administrative roles. Rather, this radical idea of citizenship is based on residency and face-to-face relationships.

Civic assemblies are a living tradition that appear time and again throughout history. It is worth pausing here to consider the conceptual resources left to us by classical Athenian democracy. Admittedly, Athenian society was far from perfect. Like the rest of the Mediterranean world at that time, Athens was built upon the backs of slaves and domesticated women. Nonetheless, Athenian democracy to this day is the most well-documented example of direct, communal self-management:

Agora: The common public square or meetinghouse where the assembly gathers. The agora is home to our public selves, where we go to make decisions, raise problems, and engage in public discussion.

Ekklesia: The general assembly, a community of citizens.

Boule: The administrative body of 500 citizens that rotated once every year.

Polis: The city itself. But here again, the term refers not to mere materiality, but rather to a rich, multi-species and material community. The polis is an entity and character unto itself.

Paeida: Ongoing political and ethical education individuals undergo to achieve arete, virtue or excellence.

The key insight of classical Athenian democracy is that assembly politics are organic. Far more than a mere structure or set of mechanisms, communalism is a synergy of elements and institutions that lead to a particular kind of community and process. Yet assemblies alone do not exhaust communal politics. Just as communities are socially, ecologically and economically inter-dependent, a truly free and ethical society must engage in robust inter-community dialogue and association. Confederation allows autonomous communities to “scale up” for coordination across a regional level.

Confederation differs from representative democracy because it is based on recallable delegates rather than individually empowered representatives. Delegates cannot make decisions on behalf of a community. Rather, they bring proposals back down to the assembly. Charters articulate a confederacy’s ethical principles and define expectations for membership. In this way, communities have a basis to hold themselves and one another accountable. Without clear principles, basis of debate to actions based on principles of reason, humanism and justice.

In the Kurdish Freedom Movement of Rojava, Northern Syria, the Rojava Social Contract is based on “pillars” of feminism, ecology, moral economy and direct democracy. These principles resonate throughout the movement as a whole, tying together diverse organizations and communities on a shared basis of feminism, radical multi-culturalism and ecological stewardship.

A free society

There is no single blueprint for a municipal movement. Doubtlessly, however, the realization of such free political communities can only come about with fundamental changes in our social, cultural and economic fabric. The attitudes of racism and xenophobia, which have fueled the virulent rise of fascism today in places like the United States, must be combated by a radical humanism that celebrates ethnic, cultural and spiritual diversity. For millennia, sex and gender oppression have denigrated values and social forms attributed to women. These attitudes must be supplanted by a feminist ethic and sensibility of mutual care.

Nor can freedom cannot come about without economic stability. Capitalism along with all forms of economic exploitation must be abolished and replaced by systems of production and distribution for use and enjoyment rather than for profit and sale. The vast, concrete belts of “modern” industrial cities must be overhauled and rescaled into meaningful, livable and sustainable urban spaces. We must deal meaningfully with problems of urban development, gentrification and inequality embodied within urban space.

Just as individuals cannot be separated from the broader political community of which they are a part, human society cannot be separated from our context within the natural world. The cooperative, humanistic politics of communalism thus work hand in hand with a radical ecological sensibility that recognizes human beings a unique, self-conscious part of nature.

While managing our own needs and desires, we have the capacity to be outward-thinking and future-oriented. The Haudenasaunee (Iroquis) Confederacy calls this the “Seven Generations Principle.” According to the Seven Generations Principle, all political deliberations must be made on behalf of the present community — which includes animals and the broader ecological community — for the succeeding seven generations. 

While even a brief sketch of all the social changes needed today far exceed the scope of a short essay, the many works of Murray Bookchin and other social ecologists provide rich discussions about the meaning of a directly democratic and ecological society. From the Green Movement, the Anti-Globalization Movement, Occupy Wall Street, to Chile and Spain’s Indignados Movements, communalist ideals have also played a growing role in social and political struggles throughout the world. It is a growing movement in its own right.

Communalism is not a hard and rigid ideology, but rather a coherent, unfolding body of ideas built upon a core set of principles and institutions. It is, by definition, a process — one that is open and adaptable to virtually infinite cultural, historical and ecological contexts. Indeed, communalism’s historical precedents in tribal democracy and town/village assemblies can be found in nearly every corner of the earth.

The era of professional-driven, state “politics” has come to an end. Only grassroots democracy at a global scale can successfully oppose the dystopian future ahead. All the necessary tools are at hand. A great wealth of resources have accumulated during humanity’s many struggles. With it — with communalism — we might remake the world upon humanity’s potential for reason, creativity and freedom. 

The post Reason, creativity and freedom: the communalist model appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For freedom is an ambiguous word. It can be seen as freedom from something or freedom for something; freedom for action or freedom for inaction; freedom to own and freedom to share; freedom for people and freedom from people.

Free trade and the global political economy

A large part of the modern global construct of institutions is justified on one particular interpretation of freedom: freedom of trade. From the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, to the institutions of Washington Consensus (IMF, World Bank and the US Treasury Department) and the EU common market and the Eurozone; to the controversies of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership, a large volume of the world-wide struggle and conflict concerns the regulation of international trade and the related financial flows.

And this is something more than a certain political choice of the time. The exchange of commodities is a practice that is hard-wired into the very core of the industrial production and capitalism. From the very beginnings of the industrial revolution the protrusion of exchange as a social practice has been recognised. Adam Smith in the first chapters of the Wealth of Nations unveils this trade-off in early industrial society, which is traced back to the division of labour, a central aspect in the development of industrial production. In a society with developed division of labour individuals produce only a small fraction of the goods or services that are necessary to satisfy their needs. Therefore, they have to exchange the products of their own labour to those of other people’s labour. Labour, in turn, becomes itself a commodity, valued and exchanged like any other, rationalising human exploitation in economic affairs.

Admittedly, Smith’s era was not the first time when the practice of exchange appeared in human societies. Trade has been around for much of the documented human history. But in the industrial society it was the first time that a certain level of technology and the organisation of the production rationalised trade as a crucial function for societies. In turn, the price system institutionalised markets as the determinants of the value of things.

Subsequently, the pursuit of freedom become institutionalised through the promotion of free trade. The idea of free trade as an emancipatory force for nations also has its roots back to the classical political economy and the theory of David Ricardo. The main concept justifying the Ricardian theory of free trade is the comparative advantage. Ricardo suggested that when a nation concentrates its productive resources to that sector where there is an advantage in terms of the cost of production in comparison to other nations, it can become more competitive and dominate the international markets in this sector.

However, what Ricardo widely dismissed is that there are qualitative differences between different economic activities. It is easy to understand how a nation producing agricultural products and raw materials cannot compete with a nation producing high value-added manufactures and technological products. For the first one, becoming competitive is a race to the bottom, constantly pushing wages and prices down, as well as its national income, while for the second one, competitiveness comes from technological innovation and higher productivity. Moreover, similarly to individuals, when nations produce only a fraction of the goods they need, based on their comparative advantage, they cannot abstain from importing the rest of them. The declining terms of trade against nations with lower levels of technology will eventually lead to the explosion of their trade deficits and international debt. Thus the only comparative advantage they are developing is one in becoming and remaining poor.

The rich and technologically advanced nations have widely exploited this function of global trade. They feed their manufactures to the countries that are practically deprived of the ability to industrialise and offer huge amounts of money in the form of loans, purported to help developing nations service their external debts. In return they force further liberalisation of trade and finance, so that indebted countries can keep buying their products, while they take advantage of the deregulation to take control of their resources, leading to devastating results for the developing economies. Seven decades of development aid programmes and other three of fiscal consolidation programmes for indebted countries testify to this direction. The neo-liberal fallacy has led to a new form of colonial expansion of rich nations against poor ones.

Joseph A. Schumpeter graphically summarises the Ricardian theory of free trade in one sentence: “It is a perfect theory that can never be refuted and lacks nothing but sense”. The divorce of the theory from reality is as vast as the inequality it has caused in the world. And all that global  institutions seem to be doing is feeding their disillusions, with policies that further strengthen the forces generating this inequality in the first place.

“Free as in freedom”: why free tech matters

Richard Stallman in 1983 initiated the free software movement and the pursuit of an alternative interpretation of freedom: the freedom of people to use, study, share and improve the technological means of computation. A different approach of people’s capacity to create and relate to each other. While the free software movement is focusing this effort on computers, it is in fact a struggle that concerns technology in general. It refers to the freedom of humans to control the fundamental means of their subsistence; the freedom to pursue their own meaning of freedom.

What would have happened if the international institutions were promoting free technology instead of free trade? What if TTIP stood for “Transatlantic Technology and Innovation Partnership” setting down the rules for the diffusion of knowledge and technology?

There is indeed one historical moment that illustrates the potential outcome of such an effort within the current global structure. President Harry S. Truman in his 1949 inaugural address announced the famous “Point Four” foreign aid program. With the Cold War pressure intensifying, Truman called for this “bold new program” as essential for combating  the appeal of communism to the impoverished nations. Instead of the provision of financial aid, point four consisted in the provision of technical assistance and foreign investment to developing nations. Even though a total of 400 million USD had been invested until 1954, including on-spot visits of technical experts to developing nations and the education of their students in the US, it is no surprise that in absence of predefined trade agreements and guarantees US business was reluctant to provide support. Simultaneously, like the Marshall plan, point four was directed by the US and never got adopted on UN level, while the plan has been harshly criticised by neo-liberal advocates.

Nevertheless, Point Four has arguably created a viable survival strategy for developing nations within the Cold War insanity, while it contributed to the emergence of the “non-aligned movement”, a group of states following their own political objectives without formally committing to either power bloc. Indeed, the free flow of technology and know-how can create unique opportunities for societies to prosper. Technological diffusion, in contrast to comparative advantage reinforces variety within the economy and generates the conditions for the development of synergies and balanced development.

Technological advance defines the boundaries of the sphere of the feasible. It is a fundamental force that pushes the ever-moving frontier of the human knowledge forward. Whereas freedom of trade merely relates to the maximisation of individual gain, freedom of technology means the freedom for humanity to improve as a whole. An this implies an emancipation of technology from capitalism; a new global political economy where technology enables and enhances people, societies and nature.

A global political economy based on the freedom of technology relates to the freedom of nations to choose how they mobilise and allocate their resources and the freedom of people to relate to each other. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all nations would reach the same level of technology and would stop competing with each other. Technological advance is a systemic and context-specific process, while cultural and territorial proximity matters. But it could instead allow for a fairer type of competition, one that is subsumed under cooperation and participation on equal footing. Individual and collective success would then be more genuine, rather than a result of exploiting the less advantaged. It could eventually lead to freer nations or to an international order beyond the nation-state.

It is obvious that free tech is not a much desired outcome from the supporters of free trade. They will not easily give up their own comparative advantage in being rich, even though it is becoming more and more obvious that the continuous deterioration of global inequality is feeding back to the rich economies as well. International trade is a zero-sum game: someone must lose in order for someone else to win; and right now it seems we are running out of “losers”. Likewise, technological advance can only create a positive-sum result, when coupled with freedom: the freedom for people to pursue the edge of their own capabilities.  

Free tech is indeed a better objective for the global political economy and most probably a more viable one. And it is surely one for societies to start fighting for.

Lead image by Wicker Paradise. Additional image by TODO

The post Free trade vs free tech appeared first on P2P Foundation.