Yesterday, we talked for a long time about the video above. It’s worth watching. Sinek’s thesis is that the culture of adherence “hooks” us, creating real addiction, because receiving “likes,” retweets, and silly chat messages from friends makes us release dopamine. Immediate satisfaction. Dependence. And inevitably, a mechanism substitution is produced: in any difficult situation, just like someone who relieved stress with alcohol during adolescence says as an adult “I need a drink,” the adherence addict looks at their cellphone, disconnects from the immediate surroundings, and seeks approval in the form of little hearts. Whether they are venting online or not, they disconnect from interpersonal relationships. The correlation between depression and use of Facebook beyond a certain number of hours seems to show that he’s right.

What Sinek points out about the generation born since 1984 is that this substitution has a disastrous cultural effect: in the first place, friends stop being a community, people you lean on, and become people you have fun with. If there’s a better option, they’ll toss you aside. Nobody gets too involved. Deep interpersonal relationships are not developed. Secondly, work inevitably becomes frustrating, because work or professional experiences cannot be gratifying and create meaning if you don’t feel that you’re building, and that building is a communal activity. The result is unhappiness. According to Sinek, “millenials” are running into two “inescable” obstacles: moments in which deep personal relationships are needed, and work.

Platform cooperativism

When we created the term “platform cooperativism” a few years before it became fashionable in the English-speaking world, we were seeking quick solutions to the crisis at a time when unemployment was beginning to take off in more and more countries. The idea of a platform that took advantage of the possibilities of automation to aggregate the services of independent freelancers was appealing to us as a fast and simple tool capable of bolstering the economic situation of those who were weakly situated in the market.

But we weren’t fooling ourselves: “platform cooperativism” basically means cooperativism without community, and therefore without learning, without knowledge shared and developed in common. A “cooperativism without touching,” without even meeting, that lost all meaning of worker cooperativism, and which only was interesting in the framework of a cataclysmic wave of unemployment in which any tool had to be considered good. It didn’t occur to us that anyone would turn it into the banner of “a new cooperative movement” with pretensions of “overtaking” traditional cooperativism.

But if we connect the dots, the result is obvious: “platform cooperativism” is a way to overcome the “obstacle” that the logic of belonging and commitment presents to the culture of adherence. Instead of learning to make community, rather than finding what the Adlerians call “the courage to belong” and enjoy fraternity, it redefines work with the logic of the books of faces to make it “easy,” so there’s no need to get involved, make contact, be appreciated, commit to others…

If cooperativism has value, it’s precisely because it isn’t emotionally “low cost”; because it requires us to learn to discuss, to disagree, to be appreciated, to come to consensus. It has value because isn’t a sugar-frosted or truncated experience. It’s powerful, it’s personal, it’s full of life. If we want conquer work to reconquer life we  must not fear life and try to protect ourselves from it, but embrace it.

PS. When “platform cooperativism” is not proposed as a form of work, but as a way of economically sustaining and distributing the eventual benefits from a service in the so-called “sharing economy,” there is a different critique, which we have made many times. In the first place, for every centralized service in the “sharing economy” a free (in both senses) and distributed alternative can be created that does not need a hired bureaucracy. We have demonstrated this with functional and useful code. So, what sense does it make to maintain a centralized structure? The answer is obvious: to create a bureaucracy that “mediates” between the “members” by taking a cut to pay for wages and infrastructure. It’s a way of “inventing” unnecessary jobs by creating scarcity artificially.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

Photo by zimpenfish

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If we study the productive reality of the last thirty years, the changes turn out to be amazing. Among all of them, the most striking, the most unexpected, the one that most strongly contradicted the idea that the great economic systems of the twentieth century had about themselves, was not that the future would be full of computers, cellphones, and electronic equipment. That idea had already appeared in the ’40s and ’50s in science fiction and popular futurism. Nor was it globalization. The idea of a world united by free trade had been part of the Anglo-Saxon liberal ideal since the Victorian era, and from the foundation of the League of Nations, between the wars, it was part of the declared objectives of the great English-speaking powers.

No, the most shocking thing was the beginning of the end of business gigantism. From the State businesses of the USSR, to shipbuilding and metallurgy in Asturias, from Welsh mining to United Steel or the big automotive companies, the oligarchs that had been the model of “enterprise” for the contemporary industrial world, stopped hiring, collapsed, and fired tens of thousands of workers. It wasn’t just “de-localization”: the new Chinese or Vietnamese plants didn’t grow indefinitely, either. Markets like electronic products expanded year after year, and yet personnel and capital global used were reduced. It was said that the new labor-intensive industries would be services, especially services connected with the new dominant form of capital: finance. But soon, banks and insurers that employed hundreds of thousands of people at the turn of the century started to reduce personnel. Today, the great banks are on track to reduce personnel by 30% over the next decade.

What happened?

What had happened was, in fact, amazing. Following the Second World War, the United States had become the great provider to the world. When the war ended, US GDP was around half of the global GDP. Benefiting from the European need for reconstruction and from peace treaties that, while not reaching the level of humiliation of Versailles, were openly asymmetrical, big Anglo-Saxon businesses globalized at great speed speed. It was a dream come true for their shareholders. It wasn’t at all strange to economists. At the time, if Marxists, Keynsians, and neoliberals agreed on anything, it was that businesses were able to, and in fact tended to, grow indefinitely. But by the ’50s, it was already obvious that something was going wrong. In the USSR and the countries of the East European, you could always blame the arbitrariness of the political system or the mistakes of the planners. But in the USA, it was different. And yet, it was there, present and invisible, like an elephant in a high-society gala. The first to realize it was a economist called Kenneth Boulding. Boulding noted that American businesses were reaching the limit of their scale, the point at which inefficiencies due to having to manage a larger size were not compensated for by the benefits of being bigger. Looking at the America of his time, he also warned that big businesses would try compensate for their inefficiencies using their weight in the market and in the State. We were under pressure long before “too big to fail” in the crisis of 2008, but he could already tell that Big Businesses would not hesitate to use the power they had as a result of employing tens of thousands of people to get made-to-fit regulations and thinly-veiled monopolies. Business over-scaling, warned Boulding, could end up being a danger to the two main institutions of our society: state and market.

But what came next was even more surprising. Businesses bet on improving their systems and processes. They discovered that information was important—crucial—to avoid entering the phase in which inefficiencies grew exponentially. It also became obvious that a business size that was inefficient for one market became reasonably efficient for a larger market. As a result, they used all their power to promote a branch of technology that had shone only marginally in the great war: information. With this same objective, as soon as the opportunity arose, they pushed governments to reach commercial agreements and, above all, frameworks for the free movement of capital, since the industry that had scaled fastest and had begun to give alarming signs of inefficiency was finance. Meanwhile, the champion in business scale, the USSR and the whole Soviet bloc, collapsed, to the astonishment of the world, in an obvious demonstration that operating life wasn’t infinite.

A true revolution in support of the feasibility of large scales in crisis was implemented in the West. The political result was called “neoliberalism.” It basically consisted of the extension of free-trade agreements, which expanded markets geographically; financial deregulation, which allowed the rise of “financialization,” or extension of markets over time; and a series of rents and monopolies for certain businesses, which were assured by regulations, like the hardening of so-called “intellectual property.”

The technological result was known as the “IT revolution,” which is to say revolution of information technology. But it came with a surprise, following a series of apparent coincidences in the search for ways beyond the limits on efficiency imposed by the rigid hierarchical systems inherited from the previous century. At the end of the ’60s, the structure of networks that connected big university computers, which was financed by defense spending, took a distributed form. This would not have brought about a radical change if a new field, domestic information science, had not evolved towards small, completely autonomous computers, known as “PCs.” The result was the emergence in the ’90s of an immense capacity for distributed and interconnected calculation outside the fabric of business and government: the Internet.

The revolution of scale

The Internet brought profound changes in the division of labor, which overlapped with the ongoing reduction of optimal scales, and changed the social results expected from delocalization, the first trend in globalization.

In the ’90s, when the “end of history” seemed go hand in hand with the consolidation of a new string of industrial technology giants (Microsoft, Apple, etc.), free software, which had been a subculture until then, built the first versions of Linux. Linux is the “steam engine” of the world that is emerging: the first expression of a new way of producing and, at the same time, a tool to transform the productive system. Over the next twenty years, free software would come to be the greatest transfer of knowledge and value in the contemporary era, equivalent to several times all foreign aid to development sent from developed countries to those on the periphery since WWII.

Free software is a universal public good and, in an era in which information infrastructure is a fundamental part of any productive investment, a free form of capital. Free capital drove an even greater reduction in the optimum scale of production. But it also helped make value chains of the physical goods with strong technological component distributed. Globalization and delocalization had broken the links in value creation in thousands of products throughout the world, especially in the less-developed nations of the Pacific basin, but all those chains were re-centralized in the US, and to a lesser extent, in Japan, Germany and other central countries, where big corporations (from Apple to Nike) branded, designed, marketed, and hoarded the benefits of intellectual property. The possibility of free software was key for many of those chains to “insource” in countries like China, and produce all the elements, including those of greater value added.

The immediate result was prodigious economic development, the greatest reduction in extreme poverty in the history of humanity, the greatest increase in real wages in the history of China, and the appearance of new global centers of innovation and production in coastal cities. These cities play by a new set of rules that, not surprisingly, include an extreme relaxation of intellectual property, an accelerated reduction of scales, and production chains systems and assembly systems that allow a formidable increase in scope, which is to say, the variety of things produced.

The Direct Economy

As all these changes were set in motion in Asia, in Europe, the free software model was expanding into a whole spectrum of sectors. Soon, groups would appear that replicate the mode of production based on the commons (“the P2P mode of production“) in all kinds of immaterial content—design, books, music, video—and increasingly, in the world of advanced services—finance, consultancy—and industrial products—drinks, specialized machinery, robots, etc.

But while the “P2P mode of production” is a fascinating path for a transition from capitalism to abundance, its direct impact—how many people live directly from the commons—is relatively small. As in Asia, Europe, and the US, structural change will begin in an intermediate space that is also based on the digital commons: the Direct Economy.

The Direct Economy is all those small groups of friends—and therefore, a basically egalitarian organization—that design a product that generally incorporates software and free knowledge into itself or its process of creation, sell it in advance on a  crowdfunding platform (making bank financing or “shareholders” unnecessary), produce it in short runs of a few thousands in a factory, whether in China or on the side of their house, and use the proceeds to improve the design or create a new product.
The Direct Economy is bar owners who invest 10,000 euros in equipment and begin to produce beer 100 liters at a time, or a few tens of thousands of euros and gain capacity to prepare almost 1,500 liters every 12 hours in continuous production—and then go on to bottle and begin distributing nearby and in networks of beer artisanal lovers.  And of course, they will have more varieties than the big brewery in their are, higher quality, and a better quality/price ratio.

The Direct Economy is the academy or the high school that installs a MOOC or Moodle to be able offer its students services over the summer, independent app developers, the role-playing bookstore that buys a 3D printer and starts selling their own figurines, or the children’s clothes store that starts designing and producing their own strollers, toys, or maternity bags.

All of them are small-scale producers making things that, until recently, only big businesses or institutions were able to make. All of them have more scope than the scale model. All of them, at some point in the process, use free software and knowledge, which reduces their capital needs even further. All of them take advantage of the Internet to reach providers and customers for low costs—for example, by being able to reach very geographically dispersed niches or find very specialized providers. Most will not have to resort to banks or investors to finance themselves, but rather, will use pre-sale and donation systems on the network to raise money. And some of them use the “commodification” of the manufacturing industry and its flexible production chains for the process.

As for internal organizing, we’re generally looking at models that are much “flatter” and more democratic than conventional businesses. While traditional businesses are autocracies, or at best aristocracies based on hierarchical command and responsibility, the large majority of projects in the Direct Economy are “ad-hocracies,” in which the needs of the moment shape teams and responsibilities. This even happens in cases where big businesses decide to take a gamble on creating a spin-off and competing in a new field. Instead of an org chart, there are task maps. Rather than “participation in management,” there emerges the type of energy that characterizes any group of friends that make something “spontaneously.” If the legal process wasn’t still so arduous, if it didn’t require notaries and endless paperwork, we would say that the natural way to the Direct Economy is worker cooperativism.

Conclusion

But none of this is as important as the broader meaning of the Direct Economy to people’s possibilities in life. In Wage Labor and Capital, one of his more accessible works, Marx explained the trap in the narrative that exalts social mobility and equality of opportunities: wages can’t become capital. Or, rather, couldn’t… and it’s true that it continues to be unable to in a good part of the world and in many branches of industry. But we’re seeing something that is historically shocking—the reduction to zero of the cost of an especially valuable part of capital, which materializes directly knowledge (free software, free designs, etc.). And above all we see, almost day by day, how the optimum size of production, sector by sector, approaches or reaches the community dimension.

The possibility for the real community, the one based on interpersonal relationships and affections, to be an efficient productive unit is something radically new, and its potential to empower is far from having been developed. This means that we are lucky enough to live in a historical moment when it would seem that the whole history of technology, with all its social and political challenges, has coalesced to put us within reach of the possibility of developing ourselves in a new way and contributing autonomy to our community.

Today we have an opportunity that previous generations did not: to transform production into something done, and enjoyed, among peers. We can make work a time that is not walled off from life itself, which capitalism revealingly calls “time off.” That’s the ultimate meaning of producing in common today. That’s the immediate course of every emancipatory action. The starting point.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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In order to rescue the following story in this series, we will travel with Henri Pirenne to the times of the birth of the merchant class and the rise of the arts between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. Pirenne was one of the great historians of the Middle Ages, and although his work focused on what would later become Belgium, the story we are interested in affects all Western Europe, because:

The “brotherhoods,” “charities” and commercial “companies” of the Romance-language countries are exactly analogous to the hanses and guilds of the Germanic regions. There is even a similar organization in Dalmatia. What has dominated economic organization are in no way “national genius,” but social needs. Primitive trade institutions were as cosmopolitan as the feudal ones.

So let’s go to the 10th century. The first merchants don’t have the glamor of their Renaissance descendants:

The sources allow us to get an accurate idea of trade groupings that, from the tenth century onwards, are becoming more numerous in Western Europe. You have to imagine them as armed gangs whose members, armed with weapons and swords, surround the horses and carts loaded with sacks, bales, and barrels.

They are armed because their life is nomadic and risky, constantly subjected to the dangers of the trips of those times.

In the same way that the navigation of Venice and Amalfi, and later, that of Pisa and Genoa, make far-reaching voyages from the start, mainland merchants spend their lives wandering through vast areas. It was the only way for them to obtain significant profits. In order to be able to sell at high prices, they had to travel far to the areas where products were in abundance, in order to then be able to resell them profitably in places where they were scarce, and therefore more valuable. The farther the merchant’s trip was, the more advantageous it was for them. And this is easy to understand assuming that the profit motive was powerful enough to counteract the fatigue, the risks, and the dangers of a wandering life, exposed to all hazards.

It is this continuous and dramatic risk that strengthens the social cohesion of the group. Neither can survive without the other. They themselves are considered a phratry, a group of “brothers”:

The standard-bearer marches at the head of the caravan. A boss, the Hansgraf or Dean, assumes command of the company, which consists of “brothers” united by an oath of fidelity. A strong spirit of solidarity encourages the whole group. Goods are apparently bought and sold in common, and profits distributed in proportion to the contribution made by each to the association.

This new kind of real community collides with the prevailing values at the time due to its nomadism and meritocratic ethos.

Other than in winter, the merchant of the Middle Ages is permanently on the road. Interestingly, the English texts of the twelfth century called them “dusty feet” (pedes pulverosi). These wandering beings, these vagrants of commerce, must have amazed the agricultural society with whose customs it clashed, and where there was no place reserved for them, due to their extraordinary lifestyle. It represented mobility among a people with strong bonds to the land. It introduced, in a world faithful to tradition and respectful of a hierarchy that determined the role and range of each class, a calculating and rationalist mentality for which fortune, instead of being measured by the condition of man, only depended on his intelligence and energy. We cannot be surprised, then, if it caused scandal. The nobility had nothing but contempt for those foreigners, whose origin was unknown and whose insolent fortune was unbearable. It was enraged for seeing them in possession of larger amounts of money than them; it felt humiliated by having to rely, in difficult times, on the help of these new rich.

Nor will the Church approve of them:

As to the clergy, their attitude to traders was even more unfavorable. For the Church, commercial life endangered the salvation of the soul. The trader, says a text attributed to St. Jerome, can hardly please God.

Freedom as identity

Because the merchant is a freedman who breaks the social scale, an upstart son of servants who “improves without improving his blood”:

The legal status of traders eventually provided them, in this society for which they were original for so many reasons, a totally unique place. Due to the wandering life they led, they were foreigners everywhere. No one knew the origin of these eternal travelers. Most came from non-free parents, whom they abandoned very young in order to live a life of adventure. But servitude is not pre-judged, it must be proved. The law establishes that a man that cannot be assigned to a master is necessarily free.

It so happened that it was necessary to consider traders, most of whom were undoubtedly sons of servants, as if they had always enjoyed freedom. In fact, they became free by loosing their attachment to their native soil. Amid a social organization in which the people were tied to the land and each member depended on a lord, they presented the unusual spectacle of going about without being claimed by anyone. They don’t demand freedom: it was given to them as a result of the impossibility of showing them that they did not enjoy it. In a way, they acquired it by use and by prescription. In short, just like the agrarian civilization had made the peasant a man whose habitual state was slavery, commerce allowed the merchant to become a man whose habitual state was freedom.

Gradually, fairs and markets become stable, and with them, the presence of merchants-artisans:

For these newcomers, association was the surrogate, or even the substitute of family organization. Thanks to it, a new, more artificial and at the same time simpler social grouping emerged among the urban population, together with the patriarchal institutions that had prevailed until then.

The artisans/traders didn’t recognize children of a marriage of a slave and a freedman man as subject to bondage. Moreover, if a servant came to town and was accepted as an apprentice, he was freed, for all practical purposes, and protected by the community. The law allowed the Lords to claim the children of mixed marriages or urbanized servants, but,

For the trader, the mere idea of such interference must have seemed monstrous and intolerable.

The arts and equality

Enter the arts. Their aim is to consolidate, through economic equality, that which originally had been a close cooperation between different “bands” of merchants/artisans to ensure survival. Within each art, competition was regulated to the point of making revenues and way of life equal for all members.

Among these men of equal profession, equal fortune and equal longings, close ties of friendship were created or, to use the expression that appears in contemporary documents, of fraternity. A charity was organized in each trade: brotherhood, charité, etc. The brothers helped each other, took care of the livelihood of widows and orphans of their comrades, jointly attended the funerals of the members of their group, participating side by side in the same religious ceremonies and in the same celebrations. The unity of feelings corresponded with economic equality. It constituted their spiritual guarantee, while reflecting the harmony between industrial legislation and the aspirations of those it was applied to.

The Arts were real communities, groups of artisans/merchants who knew each other and reproduced and developed in their organization a specialized expertise of their own. But their weight in cities is such that their lifestyle becomes the spirit of the city itself:

Rural organization was patriarchal. The idea of paternal power gave way to the concept of brotherhood. The members of the guilds and the charités already called each other brothers, and the word passed from these associations to the entire population, “Unus subveniat alteri tanquam fratri suo,” says the “keure of Aire”: “one shall help the other as a brother.”

Taking fraternity to city government

And that’s when the fraternity that characterizes the arts inwardly starts to become a project and a political myth, together with the demand for freedom associated with the end of the “right of womb” and their practice of internal egalitarianism. Their way of materializing this was simply hacking the feudal order by occupying public services, taking them for themselves:

They were no longer content with their corporate competencies. They dared to assume public functions and, facing no opposition from the authorities, usurped their place. Each year in Saint-Omer, the guild allocated its surplus revenues to the common good, that is, to road maintenance and construction of gates and walls in the city. Other texts suggest that something similar happened, from very ancient times, in Arras, Lille, and Tournai. In fact, during the 13th century, the urban economy in these two cities was controlled, in the first, by the charité Saint-Christophe, and in the second, by the count of the Hansa.

Officially, it had no right to act the way it did; its intervention is explained by the cohesion that was reached by its members and the power they had as a group

And by then the committees mercatorum of Carolingian times has already become Count of the Hansa, a title that did not come from royal or feudal merit, but from a tradition that was based on the very organization of the original caravans of merchants.

The contradictions between the first urban patricians and the arts will not take too long to arise. The latter would eventually end up openly fighting for the representation and the the power to organize the cities. In Liege, they will earn it intermittently beginning in 1253, and definitively as of 1384, and in Ghent, intermittently during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries until the fifteenth.

This brings about a novel form of political legitimacy: the judges of the boroughs exercise power on behalf of the communitas (community), or the universitas civium (all citizens), and not on that of the civil Prince or the Church, but neither on that of the fraternity or brotherhood that binds together the artisans and builds the obligation to belong to a trade to exercise full citizenship (as in the Florence ruled by the arts). The community, however, was not defined in a trivial way. On the contrary, it required an identity and strong material relationships of each to the whole.

In the cities where there were courts, as well as in those lacking them, citizens were a body, a community whose members were all in solidarity with each other. Nobody was a bourgeois without paying the municipal oath, which linked him closely with the rest of the bourgeois. His person and property belonged to the city, and both could be, at any time, required if need be. You could not conceive the bourgeois in isolation, nor was it possible, in primitive times, to conceive of man individually. At the time of the barbarians, one was considered a person thanks to the family community to which one belonged, and one was a bourgeois, in the Middle Ages, thanks to the urban community that one was part of.

Fraternity, which was born as the characteristic relationship among caravan traders, had grown to define the foundation of the body politic. The result in Liege — according to Pirenne, “the most democratic system that ever existed in the Netherlands” — required that

All major issues should be submitted to the deliberation of the thirty-two guilds, and settled on each of them by recess or “sieultes” (verbal process through which the discussions of the diets are deposited.)

Urban communitas is actually a confederation of arts in which, although the commitment of each is made towards the whole city, deliberation and decision remained in the space where relationships did not require mediation or representation.

Conclusions

Brotherhood as a political myth is born of mutual aid among medieval merchants and artisans. It meant bringing the open and strongly cohesive logic of the arts to the government of the bourgeois city. This is why it would become the longing of the urban popular classes, but as we shall see, with the dilution of the rigid organizational framework of the art, the original idea of fraternity is transformed and becomes confused. It will no longer be the product of a series of interactions among peers that scale only through the guild confederation.

In the next installment, we will go back to the Greek classics to understand why “fraternity,” even if it remains one of the founding values of European political thought, became so difficult to define.

Translated by Alan Furth from the original in Spanish.

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While our conversation and its results took place on the Internet, everything was easy. If we published an online book and there were two possible covers, we did not choose between them, but published both and left the readers to choose which to download. If we wanted to protest against a law because we thought that it ruled against our civil rights and there were two strategies… We followed both and each member of the community chose which one to do… Or even to do both. We call this system “plurarchy”. Plurarchy is the essence of distributed networks: nobody can filter anybody, everybody can do, say and publish what they want without subtracting from the opportunities for other’s expression, and the “decisions” are seldom a clear yes or no, but usually “more or less”. As our conversation deepened, we became closer and more consensual but our diversity did not decrease. In fact, just the opposite happened. We had more diversity. To the external world we might look like a crazy rainbow of surprisingly passionate nuances.

But in some cases it was necessary to make a decision. If we published a book on paper, there usually were big savings of scale and we could not afford publish two different editions with the money we had. That is, sometimes we were in situations of scarcity and scarcity makes it necessary to decide. And to make a decision means to renounce a certain degree of diversity.

Through this we discovered that every conversation that acted as if there was only one output from all the inputs of our members was condemned to centralization, as democratic as it might be. The problem is that, once you create a mechanism for centralizing, it is very easy to generate artificial scarcity.

For example, why is it that a newspaper–however democratic–cannot reflect as many points of view as there are? Why are not all articles in Wikipedia approved? Why is that the “Towel Day” article is “relevant” in the English Wikipedia but “irrelevant” in the Spanish version and thus remains unpublished? The short answer: because each incorporation, each extra text, increases the global costs and therefore subtracts opportunities for the other contents that are published thanks to a limited amount of money. It is necessary to choose. It can be done through authoritarian methods–as it happen in the usual newspapers–or through oligarchy–as with Wikipedia’s bureaucrats–or democratically–as in some alternative media. But you must choose, because scarcity is real…

Yes, it is real… but unnecessary, we said. It is a kind of artificial scarcity because there were other way to organize the media or a wiki which makes abundance and thus maximum diversity, possible. There is no bureaucracy or voting system in BitTorrent. Nobody decides which contents can be published in the blogsphere or in the world wide web, because distributed networks make abundance possible: a new page, a new point of view, is not an extra cost for anybody. Choose a distributed structure for publishing your book, your magazine or your encyclopedia and we are back to the world of diversity!

Since then we have investigated distributed networks and how apply their logic to more and more fields of the human activity, even physical production. We learned something extremely important: diversity lives in distributed networks… but not necessarily in its nodes.

Take other example: we used to insist that a blog is not media, the blogsphere is. Why? Because a blog has the same problems that a newspaper or Wikipedia has. Alone it lives in scarcity. But as part of the distributed world network of blogs, it takes part and contributes to abundance and diversity.

Why am I telling you this story? Because when I listen the concerns about the diversity of American communes, I feel they are like a blog trying to include the whole content of the world in itself. And I think that is not their role or what they should want from themselves, but from their network.

Nodes, communities, have to be free and distinctive to contribute to a really diverse network, and not try to substitute for the role of the network we must build.

Take las Indias. We are sociologically not representative of our environment in many issues. For example: the number of females is double the number of males. It also happens that the percentage of us born in South America, 50%, is a lot higher than the percentage of people born out of Europe living in Spain… but it is a lot less than the percentage of South American born people in the global map of Spanish speakers… and so on, and so on…

The question is, are we more or less diverse than the society we live in? I cannot say. We are just different, as it is different today to live in an egalitarian community. We have a distinctive culture and it attracts–and selects by itself–distinctive persons. We have had in our history more male sympathizers than female sympathizers but, the fact is, our way of living has been more attractive for women. Are we doing anything wrong? Should we worried about not being representative? Should we refuse the application of new female members for a while in order not to become sexually biased in our way of looking the world? We don’t think so.

I understand the concerns of American communities. It is shocking for me that you have so few “foreigners”. English is one of the three most spoken languages in the world and there is a vibrant conversation in English online. Shouldn’t you represent these diversities in your composition? Or is it the diversity of your suburb, your state, the USA or English speaking North America that you should represent? I think the answer is that you should not represent anything but yourselves. It does not mean a community should not be concerned about diversity. But the diversity we have to be worry about is not about how our fellow communards “are” according to sociological divides, but what the communal life allows them/us to do. The kind of diversity directly linked with what we call “abundance”. I think the main ethical commitment of the commune life is not to artificially produced scarcity and I also believe that abundance, diversity in what we do, is the real measure of success for a community.

The kind of diversity many of you are concerned about, even looking for, sex, sexual orientation, race, etc. will come by itself, but probably not to every community, but to the network we must build together.

Originally published in «Commune Life Blog»

Photo by art around

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Photo: “We don’t worship work: basic income”

A few days ago, Yanis Varoufakis defended the idea of a universal minimum income independent of work and social coverage, the basic income, as the structural reform needed to end the crisis.

The first thing to do with Varoufakis, as with anyone who makes an argument, is to understand their frame of analysis and its objectives. The center of Varoufakis’ economic thought is an old idea that has tortured many of the great economists of history, like Ricardo, Marx, or Keynes. The idea is simple and powerful: crises happen because, by itself, capitalism is unable to create an effective demand capable of absorbing all of its production.

Varoufakis’ critique of Keynes

For Keynes, the main way to escape from this tendency is rebalance the relationship between consumption and investment. The way is monetary policy—making credit more accessible to produce inflation and incentivize families to spend more before their savings lose value—and, as an exception, public spending, making the State a substitute for the nonexistent increase in family spending. But in general, Keynesians have also applauded redistribution of rents (which might or might not mean direct public expense). Basically, the Keynesian solution consists of using the State (the central bank or government apparatus) to turn chronic over-accumulation into effective demand, preferably from families, but also from the State. In reality, Keynes didn’t care how that was produced, with a “New Deal” or with a “welfare State,” but it’s logical that in the postwar consensus, Keynesianism converged with social-democratic models.

What Varoufakis tells us is that this model isn’t going to work any more. On the one hand, it’s the legacy of neoliberalism, financialization, that makes it impossible to significantly expand credit even more.

On the other hand, there’s a peculiar idea: that the robotification of services through Artificial Intelligence represents a new kind of innovation for him, a new way of increasing productivity in which—according to him—for the first time in history, unemployment created by the conversion of the affected sectors (services) wouldn’t be absorbed over the long term by new sectors (we’ll comment later on this idea). This structural trend of growing unemployment would make social security systems as we understand them today nonviable, which is to say, labor organized via the State that makes payments towards the pensions and health expenses of not only active workers, but pensioners and the unemployed. The global result, Varoufakis tells us, is Keynesianism’s vision of hell: an insurmountable imbalance between savings/investment/accumulation and family and State consumption (effective demand) that produces a permanent deflationary trend.

But, following Keynesian logic, given that those who have the least are the ones can save the least, creating a minimum income that’s delinked from work, “just because,” would increase effective demand without substantially increasing savings (which equals investment, or what the Marxists would call “accumulation”). To put it crudely: everything distributed through the minimum income would become consumption without affecting investment and savings. The economy would grow again, and would do so in a much more balanced way. The amount of the minimum income would become a simple, standalone lever, and the economic planners of the twenty-first century would play with it in very much the way the central bankers of the twentieth century played with interest rates. That way, a minimum equal income for everyone, Varoufakis tells us, is the most effective way to confront the deflationary trends that manifest capitalism’s inability to balance itself.

At this point, the idea of the State giving up insurance systems (health, unemployment, retirement) and a part of social policies (direct grants for social inclusion) in favor of a equal minimum universal income for everyone is already sufficiently justified for him. As of this moment, the discussion is settled, and the rest of the arguments are already merely “politics,” enticement, rhetoric, or making the case. He makes this quite clear in his presentation. After the description of the problem of the crisis and the reasoning of his solution, he puts all those arguments into a little box that he calls “narrative” and instructs the audience on how to use it. And that’s where Varoufakis is mistaken.

He’s thinking not like the good economist that he is, but like a typical economist of a financial institution, or like a consultant for an international organization, providing a solution to a single problem—the deflationary trends that weaken growth—without considering anything else. He’s not thinking like Keynes thought, except insofar as Keynesians now run the World Bank and other temples of the “international class.” And he’s wrong because the impact and social meaning of public policies are measured by much more than their effect on interest rates.

What would Europe be like with a basic income?

First off, there’s a series of important economic critiques of Varoufakis’ argument. By centering on the monetary aspect of the crisis, he leaves aside the transformations in the productive base of capitalism, the seeds of which have been there since its origin, and which financial capital only magnifies. What’s more, he’s missing something fundamental that Mason and Bauwens could see: that the reduction of optimal productive scales—of which AI is a part—together with distributed networks, provide an opportunity for a profound change in the economic system: going from producing value to producing abundance. As a result, he doesn’t see the most basic thing: just because big businesses aren’t going to absorb the surplus of labor that they themselves produce, that doesn’t mean that this surplus is going to be permanent, or that the working class has no other alternative than living life subsidized by State rents.

But beyond theory and the existence of alternatives that go beyond Keynesian patches, the narrative of the “guaranteed minimum income” (previously known as “basic income”) hides a good part of its moral, social, and political costs.

The loss of the centrality of work feeds xenophobia

To begin with, it places most of the middle class and the working class in a situation of direct dependence on the State. The logic of the public insurance system was that the State administered pension, health, and unemployment funds. But these, in the end, depended on labor. As says Varoufakis: “labor insured itself.” By becoming a purely redistributive system, disconnected from work, the center definitively becomes the State. But the “really existing” State is not a universal State, and not even a “universalist republican State.” It is fundamentally and universally a nation-State. It is the kind of State that manufactures national identity and is legitimized through it. In the nation-State, being a citizen is the result of having its nationality, which is why it’s inherited from parents. That’s why hundreds of thousands of Argentines, for example, vote in Spain, even in local elections, without having ever resided there and without anyone minding much.

That perverse logic, which questions the citizenship of many who contribute and exalts that of many others who haven’t so much as visited, would be reinforced in the world of the universal minimum income. In the world of the basic income, it’s not creative citizenship—what you contribute to society through your work—but national identity that guarantees you a minimum income. As Varoufakis himself says, in a regime of “guaranteed minimum income,” it’s the transfers from the State that make you a citizen, independent of your contribution. To me, that seems like a true moral perversion. But its political consequences are still worse.

The Europe of the basic income would no longer be the Europe that considers migrants on the basis of what they contribute to social security, but a double-walled Europe that would see migrants as more people the “social dividend” that Varoufakis talks about has to be distributed to. They become competitors in the zero-sum game that the distribution of a given benefit always is, and not as workers whose work creates value and supports everyone’s social security and pensions.

One of the main reasons that racism is growing across Europe is the loss of the centrality of work, due to the increasing importance of grants and social assistance to many precarious families. That’s why the narratives of the extreme right are again gaining traction in the working class. Do we want to reinforce them?

The story that Varoufakis proposes puts us in a world where xenophobic narratives would be legitimated. It’s no coincidence that the country where we’re seeing the most openly discriminatory and xenophobic public policies is Denmark, where the link between work and public rents is already almost non-existent. It’s hard to believe that someone like Varoufakis doesn’t see the causal relationship between change in the narrative that’s fundamental to redistribution and the growth of an ethnic and xenophobic nationalism.

Basic income at the cost of more inequality?

But he also doesn’t seem to realize, as we’ve seen in the Swiss campaign for the referendum, that it opens the door to a brutally regressive tax system and an exponential rise in inequality.

In Switzerland, the promoters of the referendum proposed to finance the basic income with a VAT of 50%. That’s very high, they recognized, but they assured us that there would no longer be an income tax or social taxes, that fraud would automatically be reduced, and that there would be less interference in prices mechanisms, which is why the economy as a whole would be more efficient and competitive. That’s all true. But there’s a problem: someone who has little income spends it all on survival. They pay 50% in taxes on what they earn. But as income increases, the percentage that we use for consumption is smaller and smaller. The percentage they would pay in taxes is the same. It’s the drama of indirect taxes. They’re regressive, which is to say, the more you earn, the smaller the percentage of your revenue you have to pay. Indirect taxation favors inequality, taking proportionally more from those who most need that money. So, the weight of modern tax systems falls on direct taxes, in which each income “bracket” pays a higher rate than the one below.

It wouldn’t necessarily have to be this way. A basic income can be built on a more balanced tax system, but advocates of the basic income can’t just gratuitously advocate a move to a tax system based only on indirect taxes. They know that superimposing a real basic income, equivalent to a minimum wage, on a system of direct and progressive taxes would raise fiscal pressure to the point of making most small businesses nonviable, which would drive unemployment up.

Why is the basic income an attractive strategy?

The basic income is an attractive proposal because fits very nicely into the spirit of our time.

On the one hand, there’s the argument from individual empowerment, which is very important. The social experience of unemployment, with all its stigma and guilt, makes it odious for us to deal with the State, and even more so to tell some functionary about our misfortunes, to have to bear the scrutiny of a functionary or a family doctor to get sick leave. The basic income is as desirable as the abolition of customer service by telephone operators. It has the same kind of attraction that makes more and more people replace visits to their bank with a web page or an app.

On the other hand, it’s something “new” that can apparently overcome wearisome partisan divisions. The libertarian Right sees it as a corrected and expanded version of school vouchers. The new Left sees the centrality of the State as an acceptance of its values, and believes it’s found the alternative to the European social/Christian democratic model that was so rattled by neoliberalism.

It’s also logical that it would attract technocrats and academics, and even some critical economists as well-liked as Varoufakis. The idea of reducing the central part of social policies to a redistributive variable (the amount of the minimum equal income for everyone) opens up not only a theoretical playing field in macroeconomics, but the possibility of an independent agency that sets it the way central banks set interest rates. The economy and economists would return to the center of practical economic policy, and politicians would see their power reduced in favor of analytical arguments.

There’s no doubt: the basic income starts with good intentions. And yet, it would be a grave mistake.

The hidden face of the basic income

The main problem with the basic income is that it would mean the definitive end of the centrality of work in the social narrative. It’s not just a moral problem, it’s that we will only be able to win sovereignty over the economy if we take the other path. In this, Mason is completely right to once again defend the theory of labor value, even if only to put work, the transformative capacity of our species, at the center of the social and economic problem.

If worrying about the end of the centrality of work sounds too philosophical, its direct consequences are quite practical: the rise of the centrality of the nation-State and national identity in daily life, with the consequent legitimization of nationalism and xenophobia.

And if this wasn’t enough, a very possible reinforcement of the rising trend of inequality because of the kind of regressive tax system proposed as fiscal base of this model. And if it tries to balance itself, which seems inevitable, there will be a still greater reduction of the SME and freelancer community and jobs, to the benefit of Big Business.

In summary, it attacks everything in the world we live in that makes it possible think about and work for a good society that can advance towards overcoming scarcity and inequality.

Varoufakis is mistaken. Very much so.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original

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A year ago, when we proposed an ideological map of the movements emerging on the Internet, we laid out two axes: abundance–degrowth and centralized-distributed. Debate arose around bitcoin and currencies and services based on blockchain, because we placed those who bet on them closer to the origin, closer to centralization, than those who bet on pure distributed structures of servers like GNU Social.

The argument was simple: the growing dependence of the blockchain system on “miners” not only tended to make the stability of bitcoin and its derivatives dependent on a limited and shrinking number of agents, but over the long term, they could change the rules of the game.

In January, a similar argument by one of the main developers of Bitcoin started a global debate, and in a few months, all kinds of headlines appeared about “the collapse of bitcoin” just as we were hearing declarations of love for the blockchain from Davos.

But this week, as shown by public data, the general situation became dire: two Chinese “mines,” Antpool and DiscusFish/F2Pool, have more than half of all blocks created. With free electricity and calculating power, they already have the capacity to modify the rules to their liking. Why should we trust them any more than any other centralizer, like Google, Facebook or Twitter?

The problem is one of design: dependence on mining, an industrial activity based on the availability of infrastructure, puts any blockchain product in the custody of whoever manages to attract large-scale capital.

Davos, the great forum of overscaled capital, wasn’t so wrong. Nor were the “misfits and millionaires who wanted to reinvent money.” Bitcoin and blockchain are systems that, in the end, serve the logic of the large scale. Their own structure eliminates control/capture by central banks, and replaces it with the possibility of capture by those large masses of capital that that can’t find a place these days. If there’s already little democratic control over central banks by political representatives or the market, what can we expect from a couple of anonymous Chinese millionaires? Should we hope for them to be replaced by their still larger colleagues on Wall Street or in London?

PS. If anyone thought that blockchain could be the basis for a “redesign of money,” just today, some interesting news came out: the US Federal Reserve is prepared to globally regulate products based on blockchain which, as the interest coming out of Davos confirms, are created to centralize.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish).

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Let’s start with a fact: consumption is an individual activity, something that we generally do alone. So, thinking about society in terms of consumption leads us to think that the only way we can transform our surroundings is through the “sovereignty of the consumer”—basically, changing brands. As consumers, we’re alone and infinitely small. Not even by joining together by the millions will we be able to question the hegemony of the great corporations, their regulatory capture, or their attacks on competition. All we’ll be able to do is get them to change certain practices in favor of others that are “greener” or “more social.” And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s clear that isn’t a place that makes us freer or more responsible. That’s why any attempt to build community through consumption, whether through cooperative forms or through networks and platforms, won’t go anywhere.

On the other hand, productive activity, work, is a community act, something that links us to others on the basis of commitments and responsibilities. It is there, in production on a community scale, where building egalitarian relationships becomes “spontaneous,” because the center is in everyone, and each one is a decision-maker. And when those products that incorporate our knowledge and our work enter the market, they enter the world of exchange, a space that, in turn, demands a strong ethical base.

Recovering the centrality of work and an awareness of what it means transforms us and transforms the world. There is nothing more revolutionary for a generation that has been thrown out of the market than to conquer work.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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Listening is always the most important thing in a conversation. This is true to such an extent that the result of an online discussion can be predicted by the rhythm and the shape of the message thread. It’s not “protocol,” it’s not hiding your own ideas if someone happens to feel offended by having different values or context—the much-discussed “political correctness.” It’s listening and listening alone, in person and online.

You can discuss with peers with a very different ideology whether talking about gender is a bad idea, whether feminism has lost its way or whether human rights contain a trap. We can discuss “universal income” with all its twists and turns, and not be persuaded by contrary ideas. It doesn’t matter. If there was listening, if everyone read and understood the other’s arguments, if no one set malicious rhetorical traps or jumped to ad hominem attacks, even if no one was persuaded by the other, the result will be positive. Everyone will have learned something and will respect and better understand others with all their difference.

And how is that manifested in daily life, in person? In a very simple golden rule: two people never talk at the same time. If someone interrupts or breaks into the conversation, it’s preferable, if you’re the one who’s arguing, to be quiet and wait to come back in where possible. It’s frustrating, certainly, but it’s more frustrating to accept that it’s not possible converse or learn or transmit anything by talking over people. Yes, this is just the opposite of the culture of trash TV debate, the first piece of the dreadful culture of adherence. And online, we have to assume that in 140 characters, we can’t discuss or learn anything, only exchange slogans or get mixed up in very long, tense threads in which no one is going to hear any argument that contributes anything to him/her.

And underlying it all, whether online or in person, there’s a ethical principle: either the person we’re talking with matters more to us that what we’re talking about—and therefore, more than “being right”—or we’re not in a conversation, but a battle. And that’s something different, which has its place, but it obviously doesn’t make community, or have a place at a family meal, or between work colleagues, or in a online debate.

Conclusions

Do you want to “make community” in your surroundings? The first three steps are simple… but have surprising results.

1. Listening is the most important thing. Don’t let two people talk at the same time. It’s preferable to be quiet after being disrupted than raise the tone or ignore the person who interrupted… even if it’s frustrating.
2. Conversation needs its own times and spaces, because it’s fed by arguments and references. Short messages, tweets, and 30-second sound bites create spaces that make discussion impossible and reduces it to a more or less ritual battle between slogans. This is pure culture of adherence.
3. The other person matters more than “being right” or being able to vent by pouring out your own arguments.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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In times of decomposition, culture turns dark, it’s taken for granted that’s “every man for himself (or woman for herself),” defeatism is embraced, the dream of a better world is substituted with the perverse desire for disasters that would exonerate alternatives of demonstrating on a community scale that they are capable of improving everyone’s life. In an environment where disasters are considered irredeemable, holding things in common is represented as a sacrifice of individuality and communalism, if it works at all, is considered the complex result of a Baroque system of rules that calls for its own bureaucracy. In a world where fear becomes ideology, authoritarian solutions are legitimized, and at the same time, feed a spiral of despair, passivity, and tedium. We “freeze up” like little birds after a shock, unable to reason, enjoy, or take risks, hopeless about having any kind of trust with loved ones, and, as a friend from Curazao said yesterday, “people aren’t united.”

Responsibility comes before trust

Belden Paulson is an old American communitarian activist. In the ’50s he started off on a adventure to settle the refugees stuck in Naples after the war in Cerdeña. After years on the run and a dependent life camping in fields with miserable conditions, social relationships were breaking down. The authorities didn’t trust his project and as he tells it, his beneficiaries even less. And yet, it worked. In Cerdeña, the refugees started doing physical work together, and with work in common, they started to learn new skills together and to enjoy doing so. As individual pride was recovered, the ability to trust in others took hold.

When the project showed itself to be a success, Paulson asked a psychiatrist how it had been able to turn out so well. The psychiatrist gave him two keys. According to him, the trust of others restored everyone’s faith in life, but the view of activists also helped: the dossiers that told of the life and miseries of each refugee were never read. According to the psychiatrist, thanks to that, to not learning about the problems and traumas they were burdened with, they believed in them and their potential without a shadow of a doubt, and that was transmitted in their proposals. The refugees didn’t need gentle, sweet experience that took their limitations into consideration. On the contrary: they needed to be given responsibilities, and for the bar to be set for them where it would be put for someone who was strong, sure of him/herself, and perfectly autonomous.

Conclusions

We can draw three very practical lessons from this story:

1. The supposed “way we are,” our past trauma and pain, is dead weight. To think that identity and intimacy are built by sharing them is a mistake made by teenagers. Trust is not born of what “we are” in that sense, but of what we are able to do for others and others for us.
2. Touristy experiences don’t help to improve the helplessness that the setting feeds. There’s no “vaccine” for the character and trust in oneself. Taking unsweetened responsibilities is the path.
3. Conquering work, transforming the setting, seeing the material results of your wits and your work, above all,, seeing that they serve those around us and raise expectations that they have of us and that all we have of working together, is what “makes community.”

Are people not united? Do they distrust each other? You don’t need courses, you need causes. You don’t need deep, emotional introspection, you need to distribute responsibilities and get to work.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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In practical terms, however, a problem arises: seldom any of the two models allows for the integration of participants as true peers in the situation. Some members are treated more as “peers” than others. The founding groups, the pioneers in almost any community, hold a different status: equal rights, more responsibility, and more prominence towards the outside world. This is not the result of a hidden power structure. When an intergenerational community proclaims itself to be egalitarian, it is usually sincere. But the truth is that those who go through a long foundational process, as is the case of a productive community, accept more responsibilities afterwards, tend to value more the associated risks and show greater concern with the global development than those who enter an “already-made” community and think that its stability is not an achievement but a starting point about which one doesn’t have to worry. In essence, we are talking about the same problem found in cooperatives or family businesses when they talk about “generational change.”

Any solutions?

What makes a community egalitarian is equality in responsibilities: all members are equally responsible for everything, starting with the smallest thing regardless of whether they have direct participation or not. That is a legitimate solution to deal with the invisible line separating “founding” members from “newcomers” in a community.

But, as in any other aspect of life, solutions are never found in “being”, much less in the imposition of a “collective being.” It is not about the creation of rules to manipulate people’s wishes let alone requiring from them a change in how they are.

In a community, inequality between members on account of their participation or not in the community’s foundation stems from the inequality of experiences. Thus this should be our starting point. The aim is that all members become founders –that is, allowing for everyone to have a foundational experience so that he can see the community from that experience. Of course, neither we can think that “all work is done and we can go home” nor we can expect the conclusions of each particular experience to be the same for all, something that is impossible. Learning will be different for each member, but it will be different under a basic equality in responsibility: having to “do it all”, erring on his own, having to “look at everything all the time,” and learning by himself how fragile is every construction. Ultimately it is a process of discovery: that all human constructs are kept alive only while they are in motion.

This is the reason why Mayra and Manuel created Enkidu two years ago and why we are so proud that the Christmas Project arose out of the Club de las Indias. They are two similar ways to build experiential equality in two different types of community, which is, at the end, the true meaning of “making community”.

Translation by Olaf Domínguez from the original post in Spanish.

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