From their website:

“We want a strong, growing and self-reliant network of successful workers’ co-operatives.
We will achieve this by creating a permanent common fund, paid for by members.

• You help SolidFund to strengthen worker co-operative solidarity
• You’re a member of a common wealth resource, paid for by individual and group subscriptions
• You support industrial democracy and collective ownership
• You help SolidFund develop worker co-operative support activities
• You and other members discuss and decide on the Fund’s activities and future growth”

Find out more at their website: https://solidfund.coop

The post SolidFund: Supporting Worker Cooperatives appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Practical guidance for teams to thrive without a management hierarchy.
This PDF booklet is a collection of design patterns naming the most common challenges faced by self-organising teams, and practical responses you can adapt to your local context and apply immediately.
​
It’s a distillation of 7 years experience, packed down into 2000 words, and offered free for you to use, share, and remix :)”

You can download the booklet from their website here.

The post Patterns For Decentralised Organising: PDF Booklet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What the attainment of 1:1 signifies is a practical example of a successful deployment of a large-scale, cutting-edge technological venture connected to cooperativist organisations in the real world. It is at the forefront of connecting a desire for autonomy, with the advances offered by blockchain technology and digital currency. Moreover, it is precisely these radical principles that have lead to positive results: slow and realistic growth, basic anti-speculative measures in the management of the coin to avoid counter-productive fluctuations, and a focus on practical use in economic cooperative networks. This means on the one hand the necessity of asserting a different conception of success compared to the dubious benchmarks of today’s malfunctioning world, but also an acceptance of acting within the world as we find it, not as we might like it to be. This is the actual way to successfully change the world.

It is possible that the FairCoop project has found a way (I hesitate to use the term “third way” as that has been heavily tainted by Blairism in the UK at least) between the volatile anarcho-capitalist ‘disrupt everything and to hell with the consequences’ philosophy, and the governmental ‘protect the economic status quo at all costs’ attitude.

A utopian faith cannot be put in markets (which does not differ ideologically from the preconceptions of neo-liberalism); an equally Utopian faith cannot be put in the state, which was the error of most of 20th century radicalism. The true solution is to take the best from both sides: putting faith in the choices of individuals and decentralized networks, but refining this idea and focusing it via the conscious political decision-making of self-managed cooperatives. And on the other hand, political decisions have to be coherent and focused on a clear ethical difference from speculative and acquisitive methods, while also not needing to fit into the bureaucratic structures of the state and parliamentary campaigns.

Read the whole article here.

The post Theoretical Considerations on the Development of FairCoin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The software has been adapted by FairCoop developers with the help of Bob and Lynn to fit the needs of the project, one of the most important innovations being the introduction of FairCoin wallets within the software, which means that people can seamlessly be paid in the project’s own cryptocurrency for their work.

As the post points out:

Many hours of volunteer work have made it possible for us to reach the point where we are now. However, the growth of the FairCoop community and the corresponding increase of the value of our currency has put us in a position where collaborations can now be fairly remunerated when necessary. We have tried to find a scalable system in order to be able to respond to our growing needs in an open, fair, decentralized, horizontal and transparent way.

This highlights the ongoing success of the ‘hack’ of the cryptocurrency markets carried out by FairCoop: buy a cheap cryptocurrency in large quantities, and grow its value by creating a community around it, based on shared ethical values. Use the inevitable speculation taking place on the open markets in relation to its value as a positive – guarantee an ‘official price’ for merchants and consumers which maintains trust in, and stability of, the project, which in turn makes the coin seem a worthy investment, making its value rise again in a ‘virtuous circle’.

Once sufficient gains in value have been achieved (FairCoin is now above parity with the US$ and almost 1:1 with the Euro), the project has essentially funded itself to the point where developers can be paid to create open source software for the Commons, and the previously-voluntary activists can now receive remuneration. At this point the payments are still somewhat ‘symbolic’ as the consensus was to keep them low so as to avoid a possible overshoot of capacity. ‘Slow and steady’ is the project’s unofficial motto…

So the Open Coop Work is creating value for the Commons, and is entering a stage where it will be possible for activists to work full-time on the project, in a voluntary and non-hierarchical way, and be paid in an alternative, non-state currency (easily convertible to government currencies when required), and support themselves without having to seek work outside of the FairCoop ecosystem. In this way we can see the possible dawn of a new era where the chronic ‘work to live’ problem is finally solved, and people can dedicate all their time to working on projects close to their hearts, without having to compromise their values in order to pay for food and housing.

The OCW overall plan is considered a breakthrough in terms of organizing FairCoop’s work on a more stable basis, which will enable free and willing collaborations, empower commitment and the sharing of a common budget. It is therefore a plan that will provide a significant boost to the ecosystem; especially now that our common value is rising consistently we need to take advantage of that by expanding to a whole new dimension. The challenge is out there for all of us to grasp and participate even more actively in this amazing journey that’s been going on successfully for 3 years now!

As a participant in the project, I can report that the OCW schema really does work, even if it is necessarily chaotic and in need of streamlining at this early stage of its development (issues which are being worked on by dedicated devs – of which we need more, please contact us via the website for details if you are interested). It is extremely exciting (even if at times confusing!) being involved in a project which is at the forefront of so many innovations at once, and heartening to see that the original vision of the project is now beginning to come to fruition. Of course there is much more to be done, but having solidified this new way of coordinating cooperative work, progress should be even more dynamic in the future.

For more details about the OCW process itself, please see the blog post.

The post FairCoop Activates Open Coop Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On the same theme, Paul Kingsnorth writes in The Guardian about the Austrian author Leopold Kohr, a major influence on E. F. Schumacher, and his criticisms of large unwieldy systems: “Wherever something is wrong, something is too big.”

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world’s problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative. On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.

To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr’s vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for “whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions”. Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where “instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence”. Kohr’s “crisis of bigness” is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

Read more…

The post A ‘crisis of bigness’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To give some background on the project for those who have not been following its development, and with apologies for repetition for those who have, FairMarket is only one piece in a much larger jigsaw, that of the FairCoop ecosystem, which is a global open cooperative designed to ‘build a new system in the shell of the old’. The full details are at the website, but in summary we aim to create a network of services which allow anyone to break with the current capitalist hegemony either partially or entirely, should they choose to: a self-managed network of mutual support where commons takes precedence over profit and there are no barriers to entry other than being in harmony with the FairCoop principles of Integral Revolution, P2P Organisation, and Hacker Ethics.

One of the keys to this proposed emancipation is getting out of the monopoly of State-imposed fiat currency, to ‘hack the foreign exchange market by inserting the cooperation virus as a tool for global economic justice’; to this end we are using the cryptocurrency Faircoin as the official currency of FairCoop, although it will soon be joined by FairCredit once Faircoin has achieved sufficient growth to function as a store of value for the cooperative. FairCredit will only be available to members of the cooperative, whereas Faircoin is an openly-traded crytpocurrency in the mould of Bitcoin. FairCredit is intended as a mutual credit system and will be the primary means of exchange for coop members once it has been rolled out.

FairCoop can seem a dauntingly complex project and in fact for those who want to get into the theory of it, it does go very deep, especially if we consider those parts which are as yet only on the roadmap as conceptual waypoints, however for the present it is enough to think of it as a cooperative open to all who share its principles and which can facilitate an alternative economic system of exchange between its members. In fact we think people will be surprised at how easy it is to use the services that FairCoop offers.

This brings us to FairMarket, which of course is the central marketplace for FairCoop members to buy and sell; in fact one does not have to have had any dealings with FairCoop before to interact with the market; to buy it is sufficient only to have some Faircoins (which can be bought at www.getfaircoin.net) and to sell one only has to apply for an account and have a Faircoin wallet address in which to receive funds.

These low barriers to entry, plus the fact that almost any good or service, including non-physical informational or downloadable goods, can be bought and sold using the platform, mean that people who are excluded by the current system, such as refugees, economic migrants or stateless people who are unable to open bank accounts (and thus unable to participate in online commerce) can, as long as they have a means of accessing the internet, start taking advantage of this worldwide platform to participate in an alternative economy which could potentially be both a lifeline, and a way out of the the trap in which the incumbent system has placed them.

We have come a long way in the alternative system we are building, and FairMarket is an important step, but really this is just the start. Join us now and participate in the revolution!Photo by _SoFie

The post FairMarket Is Here appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As Appropedia notes:

Manufacturing in areas of the developing world that lack electricity severely restricts the technical sophistication of what is produced. More than a billion people with no access to electricity still have access to some imported higher-technologies; however, these often lack customization and often appropriateness for their community. Open source appropriate technology (OSAT) can over­come this challenge, but one of the key impediments to the more rapid development and distri­bution of OSAT is the lack of means of production beyond a specific technical complexity. This study designs and demonstrates the technical viability of two open-source mobile digital manufacturing facilities powered with solar photovoltaics, and capable of printing customizable OSAT in any com­munity with access to sunlight. The first, designed for com­munity use, such as in schools or maker­spaces, is semi-mobile and capable of nearly continuous 3-D printing using RepRap technology, while also powering multiple computers. The second design, which can be completely packed into a standard suitcase, allows for specialist travel from community to community to provide the ability to custom manufacture OSAT as needed, anywhere. These designs not only bring the possibility of complex manufacturing and replacement part fabrication to isolated rural communities lacking access to the electric grid, but they also offer the opportunity to leap-frog the entire conventional manufacturing supply chain, while radically reducing both the cost and the environmental impact of products for developing communities.

Here you can see a video of the ‘the world’s first solar-powered RepRap’ 3D printer:

“The trick behind keeping the RepRap running for such a long time with the sun as its only power source lies in the RAMPS board [Mark] uses. He has the 1.3 revision of the shield, which enables him to print objects loaded from an SD card rather than requiring a computer to be connected at all times.”

RE3D.org has instructions for running a GigaBot 3D printer off the grid:

“One of our values at re:3D is to provide 3D printing technologies to communities around the globe, many of whom don’t have the resources we take for granted.  Access to plastic feedstock, a consistent power infrastructure, and reliable shipping services have always been a requirement to play in the 3D printing space. We want to change that. One of the microsteps in this direction is to find other ways to power our 3D printer, the Gigabot, while still allowing multi-hour (and sometimes multi-day) prints to emerge from our 600mm X 600mm (2ft X 2 ft) build platform.

I started experimenting this past week using a 40W solar panel and a car battery, and had some success printing a small test print. I’ve gotten some questions since then and wanted to explain a little more about my setup, and also find out if there were any other (successful or not) attempts to take YOUR 3D printer off-the-grid.”

Connect with the author on twitter @guyjames23

Photo by yoan64

The post Solar-Powered 3D Printers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To the latter reading list could be added the name of Carolyn Baker whose previous books, Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition and Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, tread this sort of path. This review deals with the book ‘Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times’ which came out in 2013 and is reviewed here at resilience.org by Dianne Monroe.

Our culture is relentlessly positive. We’re trained to trust there will always be a solution, to believe in happy endings, to turn away from what is painful or frightening. Joanna Macy calls it a “cult of optimism.” It leaves us unprepared for life’s challenges and sorrows, in ordinary times and even more for the cataclysmic changes and challenges our future holds.
As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, “There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.”
Baker shows us how to walk the path of existential courage, in the face of whatever life hands us, including and especially living in today’s uncertain and disturbing times.
In her opening essay, The Joy of Mindful Preparation, Baker writes,
The tremendous losses we are likely to encounter will result in savoring and appreciating incredibly simple experiences and sensations, and doing so is likely to evoke deep feelings of joy…the more we lose in the future, the more crucial it will become to savor what we still have.

Baker makes an analogy to the indigenous practice of initiation, an ordeal or challenge that calls forth the transformation from child to adulthood. She doesn’t see the coming collapse as the end of our species but instead as a worldwide initiation into a more mature human existence requiring humans to leave behind a culture based on personal consumption to arrive at a time of human renewal.
She invites us to “hold in our hearts and minds – as much as is humanly possible – the reality of the pain collapse will entail alongside the unimaginable opportunities it offers.”

Baker’s latest book is titled “Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse“.

Connect with the author on twitter @guyjames23

Photo by IainBuchanan

The post Book Review: Collapsing Consciously by Carolyn Baker appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A prominent French whistleblower and Spanish anti-corruption activists who triggered an investigation of a former International Monetary Fund chief announced Thursday they are designing a digital payment system aimed at excluding middlemen companies that make money from online purchases.

Herve Falciani and the Xnet group said their peer-to-peer payment system would work like PayPal on a local basis within European cities for citizen payments to participating businesses and governments.

Falciani and Xnet said it will be nonprofit, with a pilot program in Italy starting in March. They said excluding online payment companies would mean savings for local consumers and businesses.

Following a worldwide wave of ongoing corruption probes sparked by his document leaks from the HSBC bank, Falciani said he next wants to prevent online payment companies from profiting so much and transform the transactions to “keep money local.”

“There was a time for leaks, there was a time for politics, and now it is time for business.”

Read more on the Associated Press website.

Connect with the author on twitter @guyjames23

Photo by Backbone Campaign

The post New European P2P ‘PayPal’ System appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cartoon by Stephanie McMillan

In my case, I woke up this morning and read two articles on my kindle. This device, of course, is mass produced by Amazon (mine says ‘Assembled in China’ on the back), is sold cheaply as a loss-leader for their ebook platform so they can tie you into their proprietary format and bookstore, and does indeed allow me to hold literally thousands of books and articles in my two hands. I rarely pay for the content however – such is the abundance of good material on the internet that the bulk of my time using the device is spent reading articles saved for later when using Facebook or Twitter. In three years of owning it, I don’t think I have bought more than five books from the kindle store. The books I have bought have been mostly from independent online publishers such as OR Books or Synergetic Press.

Whether ‘information wants to be free’ (as in liberty), or not, the fact is that information does apparently ‘want’ to be free (as in beer, as in gratis). None of this is news, of course – we are all pretty much drowning in free or very low cost information, some of which is of an extremely high standard, to a degree unimaginable to previous generations.

I am of course adding to this flood of information right now by writing this article, unpaid, as in the case of almost all bloggers, and am happy to do so. Not that I wouldn’t prefer to be paid, but I understand that this is not feasible for a small organisation such as the P2P Foundation which simply could not survive without significant voluntary efforts. They would certainly pay me if they could.

Bloggers do this kind of thing for one because they enjoy it, find it interesting, support the aims of the organisation (if writing for one and not just on their own blog), and like to have a platform in the world where their voice can be heard. This is especially true of sites such as this which have a wide readership. Most bloggers don’t have that privilege and end up talking to audiences which can often be measured in single figures.

One related factor is of course, ‘exposure’. I write articles on here, and then maybe a magazine or even larger website asks me to write something for them. This is exciting for the writer as it promises an even wider readership. The company tells me that they are operating within very tight margins however, and cannot pay me any sort of financial compensation. The message here, either explicitly or implicitly, is that I am doing it for further exposure. So one day, a few more links up in the chain, I may actually get paid for writing something. However, even content creators with millions of views and followers into the hundreds of thousands on YouTube can hardly make ends meet; they have levels of exposure which in the old paradigm would have placed them into a comfortably remunerated elite, and yet in the current paradigm they can barely raise the relatively low amounts of money needed to create more content.

So, as The Oatmeal eloquently points out, ‘exposure’ is a myth. Nothing times nothing still equals nothing. The whole thing is a mirage to keep you churning out content unpaid. I concede that there are bloggers and YouTubers who do ‘make it’; who do manage to generate enough ‘eyeball minutes’ that their tiny cut of the advertising revenue does actually add up to something with which they can buy food, clothing and shelter, and even become very rich; but this always reminds me of the basic capitalist ‘carrot and stick’ propaganda – look at this billionaire on the chat show sofa who raised himself up from nothing! If you work hard enough, it could be you! And if you don’t, well consider the fate of the tramp or bag lady, abandoned by society, sleeping in the street. That could also be you, so get back to work.

Cartoon by Stephanie McMillan

These narratives always leave out exactly who did most of the hard work which enabled the billionaire to become so wealthy, and of course the intense societal pressures which pushed the bag lady into penury and probably addiction and madness as well. But let’s not get too far off the track here – the trouble with considering these sorts of subjects is that it’s like deciding to remove an old shopping trolley from a canal – you don’t realise until you start to do it that it is tangled up with tons of other things which also will have to be pulled out of the water in order to remove the trolley…

Anyway I think we have established that it is difficult nowadays to make a living by means of increasing the amount of information in the world. If you do manage, via increasing exposure, to get to a position where a newspaper, magazine or website with a very large readership is willing to pay you, it will never be much, and from my perspective it seems pretty much certain that you will have to knock the edges off your most radical views and at least to some extent conform to a mainstream perspective. Which is to say: conform to the logic of capitalism.

Anyone doing anything which might seriously damage capitalism and which it cannot find a way to water down or co-opt is relentlessly pilloried by its servants in the media (consider the cowardly and inaccurate media reports on Wikileaks and Julian Assange just for one example; no character assassination angle left unexplored).

So basically if you want things to change, there is an easy way of knowing which of the proposed alternatives to capitalism does or does not pose any real threat to the incumbent system – if all the media (including the so-called left wing media outlets) are intensely invested in destroying it then it probably is something you should support. If they are in favour or only one side of the political ‘spectrum’ is against it, it is probably just being used as a distraction and has been or is in the process of being co-opted by the logic of capitalism already.

All of which brings us to Paul Mason, his announcement of ‘the end of capitalism’ (the seventh most read article on the Guardian website in 2015, more than many major news stories), and the so-called ‘sharing economy’.

The two articles which found themselves next to each other on my kindle were firstly this review by Stephanie McMillan of Paul Mason’s article, and secondly the article itself.
Reading the first of these, I was beset by the stinging realisation that she is right:

“The “sharing economy” is another huge restructuring of the employer/employee relationship that benefits investors at the expense of the masses. Our workdays are being stretched into a series of endless tasks, cobbled together out of freelancing and side hustles, with barely any compensation to speak of. Yet they tell us this is somehow liberatory, that we’re participating in some glorious manifestation of the commons because we have to rent out our bedrooms, drive strangers around in our cars, hawk ourselves with “self-branding,” sell our possessions on eBay for a few bucks, and crowdfund our creative work, while millions in fees are collected by… someone. Someone else. Someone not us. Someone not us who lives in a mansion.

This is not post-capitalism. It is humiliating and disgusting. It is capitalism in full effect.“

She lands the killer blow here:

“Only a self-serving Silicon Valley dreamer or a severely deluded business journalist can argue, with a straight face, that the falling price of ebooks translates into everyone on the planet being able to have plenty of free food. Perhaps Paul Mason ought to do a little experiment on himself: stay in a room with unlimited information. When he gets hungry, he can eat it.”

Of course there has been plenty of discussion in this blog of the rights and wrongs of Mason’s arguments (one review is here), but I think hers is the clearest takedown I have seen so far.

Stephanie McMillan

Some more details from the author’s life for real-world context purposes: this article is being sent to the P2P Foundation web server via my internet connection which is a community-owned mesh network known as guifi.net. I paid, and pay, extra for the privilege of supporting this commons-based initiative – because the locally-owned company who installed my connection don’t enjoy the economies of scale required to be able to install it for ‘free’ as do the large telecoms corporations here in the Spanish state. On the plus side they also don’t need to claw it back from me by not maintaining the infrastructure and then charging me €1 per minute to get through to their telephone helpline when it inevitably and frequently goes wrong (as all the big telecoms do here, and whose hours of downtime are as high as the numbers of official complaints about them). I have had, so far and touch wood, almost no downtime in over a year of using guifi.net.

I did find out however, that ultimately my internet connection does come, where the mesh network terminates, from one of the big telecom providers – Movistar (formerly Telefonica), which was a public utility under the fascist dicatorship of Franco and was then sold off and privatised, leaving an effective monopoly, which they duly abused to the absolute maximum, not only in Spain, but also in many countries in Latin America whose governments sold them the publicly-subsidised communications infrastructure in similarly corrupt privatisations. They have since slightly improved their once-atrocious customer service, although they have a nasty habit of ‘forgetting’ to stop charging you when you leave them.

I also get my electricity from a community-owned cooperative which sources all its energy from renewable sources – but is forced by the state to use the privatised power grid and charge the same rates as the big energy corporations (so much for ‘the free market’ the until-recently incumbent conservatives keep going on about). This is of course the same government which felt able to tax the sun itself.

And my mobile phone provider is another cooperative – which is forced, again by state regulations, to be a sub-contractor of Orange, the huge French telecoms multinational rather than being able to own its own infrastructure.

So in all three cases I can congratulate myself that I am supporting the commons and community-based initiatives, while in all three cases I am ultimately being provided with services by the same mega-corporations I was seeking to avoid in the first place. And these are genuine community attempts to free ourselves from the shackles of capitalist logic, not ‘sharewashing‘ corporate behemoths in disguise. It only goes to show that we are a long way from the promised ‘end of capitalism’.

The fact is that Mason appears not to have really considered that capitalism will not go down without a fight. This excellent letter to the Guardian also comes up with a sharp critique of his article’s misplaced optimism:

“Since I can’t sprinkle Wikipedia on my porridge, clothe myself with an open-source pattern for jeans, or access the internet by data alone, I’m puzzled about Paul Mason’s postcapitalist proto-utopia (Welcome to a new way of living, Review, 18 July).

How does he propose dealing with the non-virtual elephant in the middle of his sharing economy: ie that the means of production – the factories, mines, farms and power plants that make the stuff we need and use – are all owned by someone who expects payment? Is the missing detail to his argument the abolition of private property? Because surely it would take that, even to access the internet and its wealth of data for free, and be clothed, housed, etc.”

So having read the critiques of Paul Mason’s article, I finally got around to reading the article itself, and I realised that he, despite the totally valid criticism, does have a point as well, and in fact despite the headline, he does include some important disclaimers into his own argument (emphasis mine):

“I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.””

I think the real issue is not that it is impossible in a practical sense that new technology and ways of organising could mean the end of capitalism, more that this ‘fundamental change in what governments do’ is pretty much nowhere to be seen at this point; in fact as my examples show, most governments are in fact doing the complete opposite and are effectively bought and paid for by the corporations, whose legislation they simply rubber stamp. The various ‘free trade’ agreements currently under secret negotiation could of course soon make it legally binding for governments to enact the wishes of corporations, under pain of huge financial penalties and potential lawsuits if they do not.

I personally do not see that the freemarket libertarian desire for no government at all can be feasibly realised at this moment in history, due to the inherent desire and tendency of private corporations to form monopolies – without some sort of ‘partner state‘ enacting regulations designed to break up monopolies it is inevitable that Amazon or something like it would eventually buy up all the competition and then control the market to its own advantage, ruthlessly excluding all those humans without sufficient purchasing power and condemning them, absent any sort of state safety net, to death, or at least to the most precarious form of subsistence imaginable, given that it would also effectively have absolute power to use up their natural resources.

I do therefore agree, at least in part, with Mason when he says:

“If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system.”

However the transition surely must come both from within and without state control, with of course effective controls on the same – which means a truly free media of course, or at the very least a free internet (another freedom potentially threatened by shadowy trade deals).

We do get a clue in the article of how Mason got where he is: a paid columnist writing for a mainstream newspaper like the Guardian, and reporting on business for Channel Four News in the UK, when he says:

“Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart. Watching these emerge, from the pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the Front National and the isolationism of the American right has been like watching the nightmares we had during the Lehman Brothers crisis come true.”

Likening pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the Front National in France seems like a laughable attempt to put the argument back into some sort of of establishment-friendly box lest the suggestions are starting to sound too radical. From my point of view, the whole point of why Greece still remains enslaved to the troika is that they were unwilling, for whatever reason, to follow Varoufakis and the left wing of Syriza’s plan to at least threaten a ‘Grexit’ – the only tactic by which they might have had some leverage in the argument. Mason’s own film on Syriza has in fact been criticised by Varoufakis for its inaccuracies. This is of course, one more thing entangled with the shopping trolley at the bottom of the metaphorical canal, and we will leave it there for now.

Mason includes this plea for optimism towards the end of the article:

“Is it utopian to believe we’re on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? We live in a world in which gay men and women can marry, and in which contraception has, within the space of 50 years, made the average working-class woman freer than the craziest libertine of the Bloomsbury era. Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom?”

The simple answer to this is that gay rights and contraception do not threaten capitalism at all, and in fact can be safely berthed within it – the ‘pink pound’, as the money spent by the LGBT community is known in the UK. True economic freedom is no more an option within full-on capitalism than not turning up for work would be for those poor souls in China who assembled my kindle.

To give Paul Mason his due, I am sure that his position is much more fully stated in his book on Postcapitalism, and the comments here by Pat Conaty certainly make me want to read it:

“Mason’s analysis is not rosy. It is balanced. Not to take action radically though he shows as socially and ecologically suicidal. He does address all the questions you are raising so pertinently Henry [he is speaking to Henry Tam]. This is why his book is so key. Both Rifkin and Naomi Klein in their latest books leave you concerned about how precisely we can make the transition practically. Both stress that a commons model of production is emerging potentially to provide us hope that is practical. Mason agrees and he uses Kondratiev and Marx and Benkler and Bauwens to argue and show the transition needs to be over a long cycle of a 50 year or so K-wave but the key thing about Kondratiev’s analysis as he shows so well is that the crucial part of the K-wave is the breakthrough required with new systems in the first 25 years.”

Ultimately there are two ways of looking at this – if we consider how things are right now, before the ‘perfect machine’ effects which Mason is proposing will bring about the end of capitalism have fully kicked in, or if we are assuming that he is wrong about them altogether; then we need to actively destroy capitalism ourselves or some form of it will exist until we are driven to extinction, probably sooner rather than later.

On the other hand, if he is right, then capitalism is going to destroy itself over the next generation or so and we need to be ready with a new cooperative model which will both act as a transitional ‘safety net’ and form the basis for an entirely new mode of production. I say we get started on the latter as soon as possible and replace the exploitative ‘sharing economy’ with an economy that has the commons at its heart.

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