Labour market trends that assess who is most impacted by precarious work all show up the same patterns; these folks are black and brown, often women, and often working class. Precarious work includes digital apps such as Uber, abuse of zero-hour contracts, or those most at risk from losing a job due to automation. As this ‘new economy’ thrives, we need to be aware that race inequality will worsen because white supremacy is a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism. This article suggests seven concrete steps that progressives can take towards a genuinely new and transformative economy for all workers. 

Play the race card 

Our economic system inherently disadvantages marginalised groups, and this trend is consistent through history. To better understand why this happens, we need to consciously develop a deeper analysis of the problem we are trying to address. In this case, how are Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers impacted by the rise of precarious work practices? 

Research conducted by the Resolution Foundation think tank shows that ‘minority ethnic’ families currently earn nearly £9000 a year less than their white British counterparts. This is supported further by the tuc’s Insecure Work and Ethnicity report that identified one in every 13 BAME workers were in insecure employment, compared to one in 20 for white workers. The same report also identifies that of the 3.1 million BAME workers in the UK, nearly a quarter were in insecure work or were likely to be underemployed. Additionally, the number of BAME workers in insecure jobs rose by 2% in five years, whilst the number of white workers remained the same. 

Wages and earnings aren’t the only issues here. Precarious work is often not a choice, but a result of systemic racism in which BAME workers find it harder to access stable employment. In addition, expecting digital platforms to deliver some utopian democracy ignores the reality of white supremacy. When your customer base is largely white affluent middle class, this plays into the race and class power dynamic, sometimes influencing who gets chosen for work. And as independent contractors, these workers are also at risk of abuse or attacks with very little protection. And in a society where the new norms are xenophobic rhetoric and hate crime, this leaves many unsupported workers vulnerable to discrimination, hurt, and shame. 

If you need any more evidence on the broader systemic failures around employment and work, the Race Disparity Audit commissioned by the government offers a sobering and heartbreaking reality check on the lived experience of the BAME population in the workplace. What is important to take away from this evidence is that marginalisation of communities is active, not passive. There are multiple systems at play that are responsible for race inequality; white supremacy, elitism, and patriarchy to name but a few. 

Decolonise economics 

How is this data shaped by the characteristics of neoliberal capitalism? For this we need to look to the origins of capitalism as an economic model and, as a result, how deep white supremacy is embedded in the functions of our society – even today. 

Many people argue that the modern economy has brought us substantial material benefits, better rights for workers, and flexibility in work practices. Whilst this may be the case, these benefits have, by design, been disproportionately distributed amongst a privileged few. For the global majority (non-white people/people of colour), capitalism is a system that is historically tied to colonialism and racism. Colonialism is a project that led to the demolition of sacred land and cultures, extraction of natural resources, sale of black bodies as property, and sent brown bodies to war for the British Empire. 

The colonial mindset continues to this day and is justified by the pursuit of economic growth that is centred around white superiority. We can connect capitalism with white supremacy, and come to understand racism as the tool by which white European colonisers wielded economic power over large parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Well known critical race theorist F.L. Ansley helps us understand the colonial mindset here:

By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

500 years of colonial rule and settler colonialism has created an economy so entrenched in systems of oppression that we must connect this to the reality of inequality today. In Britain, a colonial mindset dominates the way institutions control our media, legal system, education, financing and policing, and the way we respond to them. As a result, white supremacy is normalised as an invisible force that is subtle and powerful. The evidence for structural racism is clear, and the only justification that is viable is the lasting legacy of white supremacy. Future alternatives to neoliberalism need to be informed by confronting our economic history of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism. 

How to centre race in the new economy

Neoliberalism is a particularly vicious form of capitalism that has destroyed so much of the fabric of our society, including public services, decent housing, and stable employment. No one should be surprised that BAME workers are the first to be impacted by precarious work. If anything, it is evidence that neoliberal capitalism is functioning as intended: through the exploitation of people of colour. In responding to this, however, we cannot escape the rapid development of technology and the way this is reshaping our work practices. Wage equality and workers rights can only be realised if we centre the BAME community at the heart of our efforts to build alternatives, so that we can truly challenge the foundations of neoliberal capitalism. We can do this in many ways. 

Stronger movements

In the past century, people of colour in Britain have fought for equal rights alongside white-centred movements, be it through the Suffragettes or labour strikes. They’ve done this in the margins, achieving part but not all of the rights that have been afforded to their white British counterparts. By centreing the lived experience of BAME workers in all our actions, be it labour strikes, protests, or workplace organising, we can be sure to attend to those that are feeling the impact of the gig-economy now, not just the fear of it hitting us in the future. Investigate which sectors are predominantly BAME in identity, and understand their concerns, and do this without essentialising or tokenism of any one identity. Use your time to follow groups such as Hotel Workers Branch and Justice for Domestic Workers, and interrogate campaigns that are whitewashed or lack depth and integrity. 

Intersectional analysis

In our work, we need to recognise the overlapping – or intersecting – nature of discrimination that plays a role in our understanding of wage inequality. In this article I’ve concentrated on ‘people of colour’ as one group without doing the necessary work of breaking this down into gender, ability, class, sexuality, migration status and the many other social factors that influence how society influences the workplace. Uncovering this evidence will open our eyes to the reality of inequality, and a deeper understanding of the structure of the economy. Be mindful that using intersectionality as a tool to better understand different lived experiences does not absolve us of our privilege and the work we need to do on ourselves. 

Challenging narratives

An intersectional analysis also allows us to challenge ideas that are designed to divide us. An example of this is the widespread use of the term ‘white working-class’, which routinely excludes the reality of black, brown and Asian working class communities in Britain. Evidence consistently shows that a higher percentage of the BAME community are working class when compared to the white British population. Let’s also challenge the narrative of ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ that comes from a Eurocentric view of our globalised world. Whilst I have embraced this terminology in this article, a vision for a new economy should use terms such as people of global majority, people from formerly colonised nations, or people of colour in order to free us from our colonial mindset. 

Relevant alternatives

The progressive ‘new economy’ scene in the UK is full of ideas for alternative practices to neoliberalism when it comes to work and wages. Consider ‘new economy’ projects that build co-operatives or use the gift economy. They are often designed for a lived experience that is so disconnected from those who need it, it renders them inaccessible and irrelevant to the broader goal of economic systems change. The irony here is that many of the alternatives are rooted in a non-European indigenous history, and have been appropriated by those who already have social power. When designing alternatives, take inspiration from some excellent organisations who are decolonising these ideas to make them work for black and brown communities. Explore why Black Lives Matter adopted Universal Basic Income as a central demand in their manifesto, and how one black community in Jackson, Mississippi is using technology and data to reinvent their local economy. 

So, ask yourself now “where is this work happening in the UK, and who knows about it?” We all want to commit to building a new economy that works for everyone. To do so we need to get our analysis clear, and recognise that capitalism will always be one step ahead of us unless we are willing to centre people of colour in the solutions we build.

If we do so, we will have built the foundations for alternatives that are powerful enough to uproot neoliberal capitalism for good. If we don’t then the ‘new economy’ will be little more than the successor to what we already have.

Gurpreet Bola is an organiser, trainer, researcher, and writer. She is committed to political and social systems change. Her economic analysis has supported activists to identify the root cause of social inequalities and oppression.

This is a print first feature published in STIR magazine.

The post Race and Intersectionality in the New Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Beyond Disaster Capitalism — Jonny Gordon-Farleigh

“What if the expected responses during disasters either fail to occur or are only marginal? What if the temporary breakdown of social hierarchies allows for new ideas and systems to emerge? What if disasters resolve pre-existing conflicts? And what are the new political powers of this ‘community of sufferers’?”
The Blitz — Rebecca Solnit

“Some spread out to camp in forests, caves, and the countryside outside London. Many became so inured to falling bombs they chose to stay home and chance death for a good night’s sleep. Connelly says, “The people’s role in their own defense and destiny was downplayed in order to stress an old-fashioned division of leaders and led.”
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change — Ashley Dawson

“Cities are not homogenous, though, they are sites of extreme class and race inequality — it’s always the most marginalised communities that are affected.”
ORDER HERE

Beside the Bombs: Building a New Life with Bare Hands
Jo Taylor

After the Angry Sea: Co-operatives Rebuilding After the Tsunami
Stirling Smith

EPIC Homes : Extraordinary People Impacting Community 
Nadhira Halim

The Mondragón Experience to the Preston Model
Julian Manley

Uneven Burns: California’s Climate-Fueled Wildfires
Robert Raymond

Book review: Crashed by Adam Tooze
Hanna Wheatley

The post Co-operating out of Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We have created this resource for all of us to use, to help others understand the key thinking behind this transformative politics. We actively encourage you to use it yourselves and share it with others. We hope you find it useful in lectures, at conferences, on educational programmes, on your website, in your news stories, or simply to share over your social media.

Find out more at cura.our.dmu.ac.uk

The post New Municipalism: A video explainer appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Donate!

On July 7th, an accidental fire in a neighbouring studio wiped out Stir to Action’s office – we lost everything. We estimate we’ve lost around £15,000 in magazine stock and archive, new office furniture, office computer, and paperwork. And, of course, the office!

This loss has disrupted our whole organisation and recovering from the fire will delay selling our latest issue, which fortunately arrived a few days after the office went up in smoke, announcing our planned New Economy Programme to train a 1000 people, and other current projects.

To see us through the next six months we’re asking for support – we’re not expecting to recover everything, but here are the basics that will help us get back on our feet!

What do we need help with?

– Office computer (with creative design suite)

– Office Furniture: desks for our team, and equipment for workshops, evening classes, and other community events we plan to host over the next six months. We’ve already been offered free office space by a local organisation!

– Magazine restock: we are looking to reprint 1,000 copies of the last four issues only, so we can sell them at events, conferences, and through our online shop.

– Printing next issue: The most immediate challenge for our organisation is to fund and produce our next issue. Staying on our print schedule is important for our cash flow, but it’s also a symbol of our recovery and our supportive community. Our October issue be themed on the communities and co-operation that arise during and after disaster and crisis.

– Magazine archive recall: We’re looking to rebuild our print archive from our first issue, Spring 2013, to our 15th issue, Autumn 2016 (the remaining archive would be replenished by our restock print run). We are limiting our collection to 10 copies each for storage reasons. Please send a message on this page if you don’t mind giving up a few of your back issues!

– Time and patience as we rebuild and organise our upcoming New Economy Programme and other projects

Thanks for your support and solidarity!
The Stir to Action team

Donate!

The post Fire Appeal: Donate to Stir to Action! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

One of these activists was Robert Swann, co-author of The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America. In the book he explained that, “Israel has been one of the few countries in the world to be successful in preventing the process of uprooting the poor tenant farmer from taking place. The leasehold system has brought security of land tenure to the small farmer and his family and has prevented the control of land by absentee landlords, speculation in land, and the exploitation of farmworkers by a landowning class.”

After learning about the mechanics of a system that had demonstrably protected communities against these unwanted outcomes, Swann and other members of this group, such as the Albany Movement and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Slater King and Charles Sherrod, put their knowledge into practice. They would go on to form the first Community Land Trust (CLT) in the Southern US state of Georgia.

ABOVE: Robert Swann and Charles Sherrod with members of New Communities, Inc. at planning meeting circa 1970

Less than one year after the trip to Israel, New Communities Inc. was registered as a farming co-operative and CLT. It was created as a direct response to the political disenfranchisement and vicious economic retaliation faced by Black communities, with the understanding that banding together and sharing ownership of the land would enable these communities to be more resilient and secure their land more effectively. In the following years, New Communities acquired 5,735 acres of land – 3,000 of which was cultivated farmland. At the time in the late 1960s this was the largest tract of land held by African Americans.

CLTs are legal models that separate the ownership of the land itself from the ownership of anything built (or growing) on the land. Importantly, CLTs effectively remove land from the market and, by democratising decision making and offering leases, ensure that the land is used for purposes that serve the surrounding community. New Communities did exactly this by offering leases that allowed farmers and homesteaders to use and manage the land communally.

New Communities operated for a decade and a half, but by the 1980s they were facing the impacts of drought, mounting debt, and racial discrimination. This prevented the acquisition of emergency loans from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and New Communities had to reluctantly sell its land and farms.

Although slavery officially ended in the US in the mid-1860s, it persisted for well over a century after. Once sharecropping was phased out, many white landowners often retaliated and did everything in their power to prevent African Americans from acquiring and retaining land, even pressuring federal agencies like the USDA to deny resources to Black farmers. In fact, the USDA had to pay $13M in 2010 to members of New Communities after losing a class action lawsuit, in which is was ascertained that there had been widespread racial discrimination with regard to loans for African American farmers.

Yet New Communities was not a failure, but rather a seminal experiment in community economics – one which has been learned from and replicated in various ways by hundreds of CLTs across the US and around the world. Mtamanika Youngblood, an early member of this movement, explained that New Communities took “civil rights one step further into economic independence and economic rights, using agriculture as an economic base.” What was significant was their understanding of the interplay between land, finance, and agriculture.

For a community to be resilient against external shocks and capable of directing its own development, it must be able to allocate sufficient resources to the efforts it sees as critical. This not only necessitates a stable system of land ownership and egalitarian land usage – such as the CLT model – but it also requires consistency and risk-management around agricultural production, in addition to a mechanism or set of mechanisms that allow a community to self-finance its own projects.

It’s no coincidence that experiments in community finance and local currency are often linked to agricultural production – think of the grain banks of Ancient Egypt. Agricultural activity directly produces commodities of value in the form of food and materials, but it requires the ability to pay in advance for seeds, equipment, land, and labour.

Since crops are subject to unpredictable external factors like weather, agriculture carries inherent risk. For a financial system that perceives each loan or investment as isolated, loans that increase food security and the overall health of a local economy are neglected or seen as high risk.

Jim Golden and his draft horses Spike and Rosie. His SHARE loan was to complete a barn for the team.

This is where community finance can play a role. Just as organisations like Kiva, a peer-to-peer microlending platform, enable businesses to take out low or no-interest loans guaranteed by their peers today, the SHARE (Self-Help Association for a Regional Economy) programme enabled community finance during a time of historically high interest rates. From 1981 to 1992, the SHARE programme enabled residents of the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts to collateralise loans to local business – businesses which would otherwise be rejected for bank loans. At the time, the US Federal Reserve had dramatically increased interest rates to fight rampant inflation. By the summer of 1981, interest rates on business loans was sometimes as high as 20%, yet the share programme enabled small businesses to take out loans at half that rate from their own community.

SHARE’s innovation in community finance continued to be successful and, among other programmes, advised two farms in the region to issue a scrip currency. One of the local farms needed funds to heat their greenhouses during the winter when cash was short; the other needed to repair and recover from fire damage. These farms sold what were called Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes for $9 during the winter. Once the harvest came, they accepted the notes back for $10, effectively giving a 10% discount to customers who pre-purchased farm produce.

Robin Van En (center) and other Indian Line members by Clemens Kalischer.

Yet viewed from the other side, this can be understood as a safe 10% return on investment – paid in farm produce – to those who invested in local agriculture. Analysing this further, this type of scrip currency can be seen as a grassroots financing scheme, one not dissimilar from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model.

Under the CSA model, all risks and rewards are shared with the community rather than absorbed by the farmers alone. Community members finance the operations of a CSA farm by pre-paying for CSA shares – a claim to a portion of the farm’s produce in the upcoming season. During a good year, community members with CSA shares receive high-quality produce below market prices; during a bad year, the financial impacts of the bad harvest are absorbed by the community. Importantly, the community reaps long-term benefits regardless of what happens. By smoothing out a farm’s income and insulating it from market shocks and external risk, the community ensures its own access to nutritional food.

In the same spirit, local currencies can and have given communities the tools to self-finance in times and places when the existing financial system cannot or will not do so. Local currencies serve multiple purposes and, depending on how individual currency programs are designed, each will serve some purposes better than others. It is important not to think of local currencies only as incentive systems that increase regional spending; local currencies can also be democratic systems of finance, tailored to the specific needs of the communities they exist in. These systems can (and already do) extend community credit to efforts which would otherwise not receive loans or funding.

The problem of accessing large-scale investment becomes less and less an issue as a regional currency achieves greater adoption. The Sardex currency system in Sardinia, Italy has been receiving a lot of press recently, and currently clears over €8 million in mutual credit payments between business each month. Another mutual credit system, the WIR in Switzerland, provides the means of over 1.5 billion Swiss francs per year and has been growing since 1934 when it was started to address a lack of access to credit. In Kenya, the Sarafu-Credit programmes operated by Grassroots Economics are also mutual credit systems, and they provide microfinance zero-interest loans in local currency to businesses and vendors who would otherwise have no access to credit.

Sharing a common thread with crowdfunding, lending circles, and even investment through credit unions and public banks, local currencies tap into the latent potential for communities to finance their own development. Just like these other community finance initiatives, any profits generated by endogenous financing from local currencies continue to enrich in the region.

Unassumingly nestled at the bottom of a sleepy hill in South Egremont (also in the Berkshires region), Indian Line Farm exists as an example of what the intersection of land, finance, and agriculture could look like in the new economy. Not only was it the first CSA farm in the United States, but Indian Line accepts the BerkShares regional currency as payment. BerkShares was started in 2006 by the same community that initiated the share programme and Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes, and still circulates today.

BerkShares local currency.

If that weren’t enough, Indian Line Farm also sits on CLT land and the lease requires that land to always be used for farming – it can never be used for any other purpose. In an innovation rare among existing CLTs, the farmers at Indian Line are not only entitled to equity derived from value they add to buildings on the land, but also from the value of perennial stock and organic soil improvements. By including this in the lease, the CLT ensures that the farmers’ economic incentives will always remain in alignment with the long-term environmental goals of the community.

Most often, when CLTs are mentioned in the media, it is in relation to low-income housing. This is because CLTs dealing with affordable housing or neighbourhood restoration have tax exempt status under US federal law. Yet there is nothing that actually requires a community land trust to be used for low-income housing.
In fact it is possible for all types of land to be held by CLTs, and it is also possible for equity to be given to individuals living and working on any type of CLT land.

Though a tax-exempt CLT cannot offer equity to individuals, it can use a two-tier framework to do so, where a subsidiary holding company manages the land and offers equity to those who live and work on it. This framework -commonly used by churches and educational institutions – was developed and acted upon by the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires that holds Indian Line Farm’s land.

(in photo from left to right: Bob Swann, Ursula Cliff, Susan Witt, Frank Lowenstein, Clemens Kalisher, Elizabeth Keen and Al Thorp celebrate the 1999 partnership formed in order to transfer ownership of Indian Line Farm from the estate of Robyn Van En. Photo by Clemens Kalischer.)

This framework allows all types of land to be donated, including land used for commercial purposes, and business owners or other leaseholders are entitled to equity in improvements made to businesses or anything else built on CLT land. As far as land reform goes, this innovation is truly groundbreaking in the way it enables most types of land to be held securely in common.

These three elements – land, agriculture, and finance – fundamentally influence the wealth flows and power dynamics that permeate society and shape it. By using and improving existing models, communities can build a resilient foundation where decommodified land is held in trust, the risks of agriculture are socialised, and regions maximise their ability to self-finance. With a foundation this solid, a community would be primed and equipped to direct its own development in any way it sees fit.

Aaron Fernando is a community currency consultant who has worked with multiple community currencies across the United States, and is also a writer focusing on local movements, new economy initiatives, and behavioural economics.

Lead image Indian Line Farm, by Jason Houston.

The post Beyond Civil Rights: Economic Democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Stocksy United is a stock photography multistakeholder co-operative launched in 2013. This was a return to the sector after having been part of iStock, another stock photography provider. You initially considered setting up a trust, but opted for the co-operative model instead. Could you explain the decision to set up a co-operative?

Brianna Wettlaufer: After coming back into the sector, our goal was to put power back into the hands of artists. It was about giving people the control over their careers that had been lost at companies who were bullying them, where they had no rights over how their images were being sold, and were seeing their revenues clawed back. It was about the whole question of artistic integrity, which is an offshoot of the health of the community. Our goal was to bring that back into the fold, which existed in the early days of iStock but, as it scaled and was bought by Getty Images, was lost as priorities changed.

So knowing that we wanted to do that, we looked at nonprofits and a series of other business models. But at the end of the day, the co-operative model answered all of the questions. And with the legal background to ensure that we made these things happen, it wasn’t a long period of time for us to realise that it was the solution for our organisation. I think as Canadians we are more culturally aware of the model and Canadian laws are a bit easier to adapt for an online tech company.

JGF: Your co-operative has three membership classes: founders, staff and artists. What rights do these individual classes have within a multistakeholder co-op?

BW:  Class A is founders, and also our advisors. This class is a maximum of five people, and right now we have three people. Their purpose is high-level business operations. Class B is staff, capped at 20 presently, with all positions filled.

JGF: Why are they capped?

Nuno Silva: It was determined by the original by-laws. When we were deciding on how many shares to issue for each class, we had to put a number to it. So when we first started, 20 seemed like a reasonable number.

BW: Honestly, there is not much difference between the rights of each class, basically the class indicates the level at which they are giving guidance to the organisation. 90% of the dividends is awarded to Class C, and 5% goes to Class A and Class B. Currently, it is divided equally. It is pretty simple. Overall, it is pretty simple in terms of our governance.

Class A, currently, is Bruce Livingstone, a co-founder, Brent Nelson, another co-founder. Many of us have worked together as experts in our domain for a really long time. In terms of governance for the company, it is a very close collaboration. There are not many gaps or surprises, where people are having to do resolutions to correct the course that we’re on. We want to make sure everyone is being heard in the company, so everyone feels good about the decisions we’re making, having additional governance laws or different laws about participation, doesn’t make any sense as it just creates more bureaucracy, which we are working really hard to avoid as we scale.

JGF: Multistakeholder models are becoming more popular, but more stakeholders means more governance costs, potential delays, and difficulties. How do you manage stakeholder participation so that it is both meaningful and also allows you to remain competitive?

BW: It has definitely been a process, and we’re still trying to find the right balance. We take the ethos of being a co-operative very seriously—empowering everyone from the inside out and ensuring that we’re being transparent and collaborative. But when you take that to too much of an extreme, not only is not functional, it is not enjoyable for the people in the organisation. We’ve found that it is one thing to empower people in what they’re doing, and another thing to expect everyone to operate at an executive level and carry around the stress that comes with that position—to be expected to come up with ideas and solutions, when it is not what they are particularly interested in doing.

There is nothing wrong with people focusing on their jobs, or particular areas. So our goal is that those within the organisation can provide enough research and information to justify the decisions we make for the business, so we’re transparent as possible, identifying why and what we’re doing, and the reasons for the solutions we propose.

So moving forward that’s the platform we want, constantly asking the membership if there is anything we missed, then integrating their feedback. Our priority is maintaining an open conversation, but not so democratic that it is not functional across the different skillsets of how we lead the company, or being blocked by a vote-by-committee approach We keep everyone involved, and by doing that, if there is a difference of opinion, it builds this constant trust between those involved. As we scale, we’re trying to figure out how to make these conversations more meaningful again, trying to segment the groups we’re engaging, the process of how we bring out new features on our website, and how we bring people into the testing process to support its refinement and adaptation.

NS: One advantage of having artists as co-owners means we can be really transparent. We don’t have to hide information from our members, we can release financial data, we can talk about confidential contract negotiations, we can get them involved from very early stages, open the books to them so they can have educated and informed responses. Whereas, if were a private company we would be much more guarded about the information we share with the artists. Thankfully we don’t have to do this.

Illustration by Nick Taylor

JGF: A private company’s executives have the right to sell the company. Within your co-op, what control and rights does Class C have over a possible future sale?

BW: For us to move forward with a sale, it would have to go through a resolution process and be agreed on by the members. Full Stop.

You spoke about your background in the private sector. How much has it informed and enabled the business development of your co-op?

BW:  We are really lucky with the team that started Stocksy, bringing around 15 years experience in specialised areas. We had the developer who originally built iStock, we have marketing experience, and business development. All of us share the experience of knowing how to grow companies in the private sector into profitable companies, but all of us want to do that with about being horrible, or evil, and selling people out. I think that’s a big reason why we’ve been able to get traction so far, is that experience, but using it to support people.

JGF: You’ve said that being a co-op is a secondary, if not tertiary, reason why photographers apply to become members of Stocksy. This obviously means that Stocksy has developed a financially rewarding business model. But beyond better remuneration, what other advantages are there to being a member of the co-op for your photographers?

BW: I think as a whole, people want to work with companies that they can believe in, and feel good about working with. So that’s being able to trust the company we’re working with, its having access to ownership and opportunities for collaboration, knowing how the business runs. For artists it is knowing that they will also be treated as people, as individuals, that is really important. Second to that, the health of our community, and the inspiration and mentorship that follows from it. It is that we are always looking to create the best work we possibly can, which can sometimes be demotivating: ‘I can’t hit this bar, it is too high’, but when you hit it, you are really happy and you are doing it with a group of people who are likeminded and wanting to do great things. Basically, all the healthy things you look for in a career.

JGF: Do you think the quality of the community within the co-operative has enhanced the business?

BW: Definitely. I’ve been working with companies for the last 15 years where the underpinning of the product is the community. But 15 years ago, as Friendster and Facebook were just getting traction, there wasn’t value in communities, there was value in address books. But the approach or attitude towards communities was that they were just a lot to manage, an annoyance almost.

I came out of the community to work at iStock, so I’ve been on the other side. If you don’t have a healthy community working with you, you don’t have a product. And you have a PR nightmare!

JGF: Voting rights are an important part of workplace democracy, and you’ve developed your own platform for members to discuss and vote on proposals. With Loomio now being used by city governments and other institutions, tools that enable distributed group voting are obviously becoming more important. What is your experience of working with a distributed virtual membership and how might it inform others working on these scales?

BW: I don’t think we’ve nailed it yet, and there is still a long way to go. Our platform is still the same as the day we launched, it is very basic but following that, I wouldn’t worry too much about the quality of the tools you are using, as long as they do the things you need: a place for people to talk, a place for your co-op to distribute information, to participate and vote on the direction of the business. Overall, we’ve relied less on the resolution and voting features, despite taking the time to custom build one, because we spend a lot of time in the forums talking to people. Since we’re having a constant conversation with members and doing our best, any business move we suggest that affects them financially or the direction of the business, we ensure we educate members about why we’re proposing it. The resolution and voting tool doesn’t actually need to be there if you’re listening to members on a daily basis and integrating it into your decisions.

You can spend way too much time and money trying to make the perfect tool, when it is really about the quality of conversation on whatever platform you decide to use.

NS: We explored lots of third-party software, like Loomio, and while it is a great product, it had a lot of features that we just didn’t need. In our baked-in product, the product we developed, coupled with our forums, it was good enough for the immediate problems we were trying to solve. If we decide to make it more complicated, we might look elsewhere, but as Brianna said, having open conversations on a simple platform has been the most effective.

JGF: What have been the most challenging proposals?

BW: The membership cap. And we still don’t have a solution here. We proposed creating a non-membership class, but even though it had a majority vote, after going to many co-operative events, we were told it was a very frequent mistake being made by co-ops, as you’re introducing classes for how to treat people, and is the antithesis of being a co-operative. So we had to go back to the membership and say, we thought this might be the answer, but this is often what seems like an easy solution, it is not, and we don’t think we should move forward with this proposal. And it is not sure what we should do next.

NS It was hotly debated within the community, from both sides. And we did have a majority vote as Brianna says, but it wasn’t unanimous, and there were many people who were very vocal against the proposal, so it gave us pause to consider that there might be a better way to approach the issue and a new vote to be considered.

JGF: How many proposal come from each class? Is there a good mix?

BW: No! No resolutions have come out of Class A. With Class B there have been some exploratory things of crossover in multiple classes, that they’ve had to put to a proposal. But in terms of direction of the company, they’re coming from Class C. Last year, I think we had about 20 proposals.

We’ve tried to make the resolution process work for us, too. At one point we brought in some external advisors who were trained in Italy. They reviewed all of the resolutions and rejected them all—these aren’t resolutions. That was horrible for the community. So if all of our resolutions are not meeting a resolution expectation, then we need to adapt how we’re receiving this feedback, so we’ve created three classes of resolutions. One is site suggestions and improvements to what we’re doing—this doesn’t require a resolution, just consultation with our product owner.  Two is an idea for discussion. One thing we observed with many resolutions were that they mainly solutions without identifying what they were trying to solve. Great idea, but we need to know why we’re doing it. Three is an actual resolution, the biggest one coming from the membership is video and that being approved.

JGF: Stocksy is one of the success stories of the Platform Co-op movement—you’ve been able to raise significant finance, and are now profitable. What do you think is needed within the sector for co-operatives to increase their market presence in the digital economy?

NS: A great product! One thing I took away from Open 2017 is that most organisations were co-ops first, and products or businesses second. I think we are fortunate for having a very strong product vision from the very beginning, and that the co-op structure worked for our business model. So someone looking to start a co-op needs to have a really good product or business plan first, then make sure that the co-operative model fits that secondarily. If you have no product, then it just becomes ideological and you lack a viable product.

Speaking to Nathan Schneider or Trebor Scholz, you learn that there are companies doing some amazing things, like Green Taxis in Denver, Colorado, who found a need and a business model that fit.

JGF: There are many well-known artist co-operatives, such as Magnum Photos and Pentagram, though they are not actively part of the movement. Is supporting new creative digital agencies to set up as co-operatives part of Stocky’s strategy for the future? And supporting the broader platform co-op movement?

BW: I don’t think our goal is to support competitors! We definitely get a lot of reach outs from other organisations about how to do profit sharing with people they are working with. Anything we can do to share knowledge, tell people about the stumbles and mistakes we’ve made, exploring the assumptions of being a platform co-op, since there are not many examples out there, it’s an incredibly important part of what we’re doing, supporting the platform community. At the end of the day, coming back to the previous question, I think it is about making it more easily understandable and accessible, I think there are many false assumptions that make people think co-ops are more complex and challenging than they actually are, when really it is only a way to approach business. It is not like it is some crazy, different way of doing business, it is just a commitment to investing in your people upfront, instead of having lots of resources to respond to an angry community that is misaligned with your product—which is what private business end up doing.

Brianna Wettlaufer is the co-founder and CEO and Nuno Silva is Vice President of Product at Stocksy United, an artist-owned, multistakeholder co-operative in Victoria, BC (Canada). With its stable of hand-picked photographers, Stocksy produces high-end and beautiful imagery.

Reposted from STIR Magazine

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 To help transform our economy over the last few years, Stir to Action has organised national workshop programmes to support communities. Now, we are now planning to launch a year-long programme of practical workshops, 3-day residentials, mentoring, and live crowdfunding to build a new economy that works for everyone.

For this to be successful — and with your support — we are hoping to raise the £12,500 we need to cover programme costs. Pledges on our campaign over the next five weeks will support subsidised workshop places, local workshop venues, programme design, our mentoring network, and provide the resources to engage new communities with these ideas. This is our first programme at this scale, but we aim for it to be an annual programme!

We’re continuing to build our inspiring mentoring network during the campaign — would you like to join?!
Get in touch via [email protected]

Click here to support our crowdfund

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Whilst truly wild woodlands are ‘climax vegetation’ that has achieved a balance between death and renewal, these generally need to be at a scale much bigger than any of our remaining woodlands to thrive independently of humans.

Here in Britain, “the wildwood” has a central place in our culture and imaginations, but the reality is that active management has shaped our woodlands since the ice age, providing supplies of food, fuel and timber, and creating diverse habitats amongst the trees. Unmanaged woodland lacks diversity and can result in poor tree health and increase the spread of tree diseases.

Whilst most of that unmanaged woodland is in private ownership, the future management of our public forest estate also remains uncertain. Attempts in 2010 to sell off the national forest estate were abandoned in the face of a public outcry, but austerity has resulted in many local authority woodland teams being disbanded and the future for the management of the national public forest estate – at least in England – remains unclear.

It is in that gap between the market and the state that we find the commons and, increasingly, a diverse range of community businesses, co-operatives and other forms of social enterprise creating value and livelihoods from its management. So does social and community business have a role in reinvigorating our woods and forests and rebuilding our woodland culture?

In 2012, in the aftermath of the failed forestry sell off and in the wake of the Independent Panel on Forestry’s report, a number of organisations came together to discuss alternative approaches to the management of our woods and forests.

There was already a well established sector of community woodlands and voluntary groups involved in woodland management across the UK. There were also some examples of social enterprises managing significant-sized woodlands, particularly in Scotland where community buyouts meant communities in the Highlands and Islands already had ownership and control over their local woodlands and a focus on sustainable local economic regeneration.

Could these approaches provide new models for managing our woodlands in ways that created livelihoods, improved their quality, and produced useful resources such as woodfuel?

That 2012 meeting led to the establishment of the Woodland Social Enterprise Network and, over time, the development of a proposal for a project to support the development of social enterprise in woodlands. In 2015, funding was secured from Big Lottery to deliver Making Local Woods Work, a pilot programme to provide technical assistance, training and peer networking opportunities for woodland-based social enterprises across the UK.

The programme, which runs until Autumn 2018, is providing support to 50 woodland social enterprises right across the UK, each of which embed woodlands or woodland products into their core activity whether that is the production of woodfuel and timber, or delivering educational or health and well-being activities in a woodland setting. It provides technical advice on woodland management and finance, support in developing business plans, choosing legal structures and strengthening governance, and advice on leases, tenure, and a wide range of other issues. It also provides training, webinars and peer networking opportunities, many of which are available to the wider network of woodlands social enterprises as well as those who are part of the formal support programme.

Austerity has resulted in many local authority woodland teams being disbanded and the future for the management of the national public forest estate – at least in England – remains unclear.

Case studies:

Vert Woods Community Woodland in East Sussex is a 171 acre woodland that is owned and managed for community and wildlife benefit. Much of the woodland is recovering woodland, substantially affected by the Great Storm of 1987 and includes mature tall pines, oak and beech, as well as under-managed chestnut coppice, and unmanaged birch and willow. With support from Making Local Woods Work, Vert Community Woodland has registered as a Community Benefit Society (CBS) and is looking to widen its community membership and issue shares to enable the community to collectively own the woodland.

Elwy Working Woods in North Wales is a co-operative and social enterprise set up in 2010 to create sustainable employment by managing local woodland to produce good quality timber for construction and joinery. North Wales has seen the demise of several small sawmills in recent decades and Elwy Working Woods is looking to create new models for the business that can provide sustainable employment and add value to local natural and renewable resources. They aim to provide a one-stop shop capable of supplying everything from complete house frames to kitchen tables, using locally-grown timber and providing local training, employment and volunteering opportunities.

Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park manage London’s most urban woodlands in a densely populated and rapidly growing borough. The park is located in of one of London’s Magnificent Seven Cemeteries and owned by the local council. The Friends maintain the site under a Service Level Agreement and provide a wide range of public events, short courses and heritage activities as well as managing the woodland. In order to expand their activities, increase their commercial income, and ensure a sustainable long term future for the Cemetery Park, the Friends are being supported by Making Local Woods Work to review their business plan and explore opportunities for more secure tenure on the site with the council.

The forestry and timber processing sector already support around 43,000 jobs in the UK. It directly employs around 14,000 people in more than 3,000 separate enterprises, suggesting that the vast majority of forestry business is undertaken by small and medium-sized enterprises.

Community and social enterprises operate to a triple bottom line, ensuring that the way they manage woodlands is good for people and good for the environment as well as good for the economy. As well as providing social benefits such as health, education and wellbeing through the activities they deliver in woodlands, the very act of managing local land and resources is one that supports longer term community empowerment.

This aspect of community management is recognised and supported by programmes that enable community management, and even ownership, of the public forest estate in Wales and Scotland.

In 2011, Natural Resources Wales launched the Woodlands and You (WaY) scheme, which enables communities and social enterprises to operate long term projects through Management Agreements and Leases. Forest Enterprise Scotland’s Community Asset Transfer Scheme (CATS) provides asset transfer rights for communities who want to take on ownership or leases on Scotland’s National Forest Estate. This builds on the previous Scottish National Forest Land Scheme that gave community organisations the chance to buy or lease National Forest Land where they could provide increased public benefits.

To date, no such scheme exists in England, making it harder for community and social enterprises to secure leases or management agreements. Harder, but not impossible. Neroche Woodlanders are an example of a social enterprise that has secured a 10-year lease from Forestry Commission England to inhabit, manage and harvest wood from 100 acres of woodland near Taunton in Somerset.

Our woodland commons have always provided for basic human needs and securing access to them forms a rich part of our history. This November marks the 800th anniversary of the 1217 Charter of the Forest that restored the rights of free tenants to access and use the Royal Forests that were being enclosed. The Charter protected practices such as ‘pannage’ (knocking acorns from oak trees for pigs) and ‘estover’ (collecting wood). Whilst our expectations of what woodlands can provide for us may have changed over the centuries, the issues that the charter sought to address remain familiar.

Celebrations for the 800th Anniversary range from the call for a new Charter for Trees, Woods and People being led by the Woodland Trust, a public meeting under the Ankerwycke yew at Runnymeade to call for a new Doomsday book of the Commons, and a black tie dinner at Lincoln Cathedral. However you celebrate it, the anniversary provides an opportunity to raise awareness of the importance of our woodlands and the potential for communities to manage them in ways that work for everyone.

You can find out more at Making Local Woods Work and on Twitter @localwoodswork. The Woodland Social Enterprise Facebook page is also open to anyone with an interest in the sustainable  management of woodlands and provides a great place to connect online with what others are doing to make woods work for everyone.

The Making Local Woods Work / Community Woodland Association Conference will be held on 20-21 October 2017 in Westerwood Hotel, Cumbernauld, Scotland. More information.

Mark Walton is the founder and Director of Shared Assets, a think and do tank that supports the management of land for the common good. He currently acts an advisor to Defra, and Charity Bank on issues such as working with civil society, asset transfer, and social investment.

Republished from STIR magazine

Photo by FraserElliot

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The first response attempts to regain control and security through new forms of authoritarianism and protectionism. We’ve seen the return of the nation state as a reaction to global capitalism, the re-emergence of national and cultural identity, and a revival of racist and xenophobic discourses.

The second response, fuelled by techno-optimism, sees no limit to our capacity to invent our way out of global crisis through what has been described as a ‘fourth industrial revolution’. This approach is advocated by organisations such as the World Economic Forum, along with  a multitude of transnational corporations, financial powers and governments. Following a competitive logic, it suggests that individuals and societies that are better technologically adapted will prosper, whilst others will be left behind.

The third response sees neighborhoods, towns and cities around the world emerge as the place to defend human rights, democracy and the common good. Neighbours and citizens are uniting in solidarity networks to address pressing global challenges, from access to housing and basic services to climate change and the refugee crisis. This new municipalist movement seeks to build counter power from the bottom up, challenging the dominance of the nation state and capitalist markets, putting power back into the hands of people.

Fearless Cities: the municipal hope

In June we participated in the first ever international municipal summit, which was organised by Barcelona en Comú, a citizen platform whose radical politics and rapid takeover of the City Hall has inspired activists and councillors around the world.

The summit brought together over 700 mayors, councillors, activists and citizens from more than 180 cities in more than 40 countries across five continents, including representatives from roughly 100 citizen platforms, all aiming to build global networks of solidarity and hope between municipalities.

The agenda—public space and the commons, housing, gentrification and tourism, the feminisation of politics, mobility and pollution, radical democracy in town and city councils, creating non-state institutions, socio-ecological transition, re-municipalisation of basic services, sanctuary and refuge cities—was a demonstration of the common challenges we face, and far removed from the dominant logic of economic growth to which national institutions, increasingly separated from the day-to-day reality of citizens’ lives, direct their attention.

With accessible ticket prices, child care provision, a bar run by an association of the unemployed, the main talks free to the public and the opening plenary held in one of the central squares, Barcelona en Comú remained true to their values of inclusion and participation. The conference involved an incredible diversity of people, not only as participants, but also filling the panels and leading the workshops. ‘This is the first panel I have ever seen that doesn’t include a single white male,’ commented one of the participants.

The emergence of citizen platforms

Since the financial crisis in 2007-8, citizen platforms have rapidly emerged across the globe. Their rise has been particularly strong in certain countries, such as Spain, where they now govern most major cities, as well as many towns and rural areas. These citizen groups are generally composed of independent candidates or of an alliance between independents and members of progressive political parties, with members frequently having roots in social movements. Ada Colau, for example, was at the forefront of the anti-eviction group, Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca), before becoming mayor of Barcelona.

Some citizen platforms are elected on a particular agenda, such as Barcelona en  Comú, who came to power in 2015 promising to defend citizen rights, rethink tourism in the city, fight corruption, and radically democratise local politics. Others have crowd-sourced their agenda or don’t have an agenda at all. Indy Monmouth in Wales, for example, ran for election with the promise that they would take their lead from the community once they were elected. This desire to transform politics and put power back into the hands of people is one of the primary aims of citizen platforms and the municipalist movement.

Radical democracy and the feminisation of politics

Municipalism is concerned as much with how outcomes are achieved as with the outcomes themselves. The need to radically democratise and feminise the political space was a persistent theme throughout the Fearless Cities conference.

Barcelona en Comú described how the democratisation and feminisation of politics is key to transformation, by bringing marginalised voices into the debate; reducing hierarchy; decentralising decision making; enabling dialogue, listening and collective intelligence; re-evaluating what we understand by the term experts and seeing everyone as experts in their own day-to-day life, their neighbourhoods and their communities; placing care, co-operation, relationship and people’s lived experience at the heart of politics; and facilitating co-responsibility for where we live, for the environment and for each other.

This kind of politics has the potential to include rather than alienate, to create interdependence rather than dependence, to liberate the knowledge, experience and visions of a huge diversity of people, and empower us to act together to bring about change. It’s not glamorous but it’s potentially transformative — it’s about learning by doing, and is concerned with addressing day-to-day needs and issues, such as housing and access to basic services.

This approach dispels the idea that our political participation happens once every four years when we vote and makes everyday life a matter of politics. Starting from the grassroots we have the opportunity to build democracy at the level that government directly interacts with people’s daily lives, and where the negative effects of neoliberalism are experienced on a daily basis. It has the potential to bring us together rather than tear us apart as we build an alternative identity that is based on where we live and on our participation, relationships and collective concerns, as neighbours, friends and community, rather than being attached to our nationality, race or ethnicity.

Libertarian municipalism and social ecology

The term municipalism stems from ‘libertarian municipalism’, a type of political organisation proposed by American social theorist and philosopher Murray Bookchin. It involves neighbourhood assemblies that practice direct democracy and seek to form a confederation of municipalities, as an alternative to the power of the centralised state.

This approach sees democratic communities as the driver of change, as the means by which we can redefine how we live together and our relationship with the natural world. Offering a holistic vision, the approach recognises the interdependent and eco-dependent nature of life and sees the ecological and social crises as inseparable.

Municipalism in practice

Municipalism offers us the opportunity to redefine the political arena and return power to the grassroots, to neighbourhoods, to local assemblies, to living rooms, to citizens. We shape a new world, starting where we live. And it’s not just in theory — it’s happening in practice in towns and cities all over the world.

One of the leading lights has been Barcelona en Comú, and it’s no wonder they have captured the world’s attention—the progressive nature of their politics and the ambitious goals they are working towards are both humbling and awe-inspiring.

Some of their objectives include rehabilitating housing and sanctions against empty buildings; introducing energy efficiency criteria for new buildings; promoting urban agriculture; supporting care and care services; introducing a tourist tax; incorporating social and environmental criteria in public procurement; re-municipalisation of water supply alongside re-localisation of energy production; strengthening local trade; promoting social entrepreneurship and co-operatives; introducing independent citizen audits of municipal budgets and debt; establishing salary limits, including publication of income and assets; and supporting local initiatives such as social centres, consumer co-operatives, community gardens, time banks and social currencies.

Taking their lead from local people, decisions are made within neighbourhood groups and district assemblies. Autonomous and self-managed, these groups and assemblies deal with the issues affecting their geographical area. If you’re not able to attend, you can still get involved by using one of their many online participatory tools, and  Decidim.Barcelona was the first open source platform made with and for citizens. This digital tool has been used to develop the Municipal Action Plan, which sets out the priorities and objectives for the local government.

In this same spirit, Citizen Platform — Ciudad Futura — in Rosario, Argentina, use processes that enable citizens to imagine and build the future society they want to see. Originating from the convergence of two social movements known for their commitment to popular struggle, they gained the support of nearly 100,000 local people and managed to elect three councillors to the City Hall in 2015. They maintain one foot inside the institution and the other rooted in the social movements from which they sprung. They are transforming existing local institutions whilst also building new non-state institutions, and their motto is ‘hacer’, meaning ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ in Spanish.

But if there’s anywhere that demonstrates the potential that we have to reclaim our territories and build something new, based on principles of democracy, participation and equity, it has to be Rojava in Northern Syria.  Under conditions of unimaginable terror and oppression, they have created an independent state with decentralised self-rule. The region is made up of 130 municipalities, with populations that include many different religions and ethnicities — Kurds, Arabs, Turks, Syrians, Christians, Muslims and many more. Together, they have built their own administration based on principles of democratic confederalism and characterised by grassroots participation, ecological sustainability, protection of ethnic and religious minorities and gender equality, including the co-presidency of one male and one female president.

These are just three of the many stories of municipalist-led change that inspired us at the conference. There were numerous others from towns and cities around the world, such as Attica (Greece), Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Jackson (USA), Cape Town (South Africa), Grenoble (France), Hong Kong (China), Buckfastleigh (UK), Madrid (Spain), Naples (Italy), Valparaíso (Chile), New York City (USA) and many more.

Local limitations and the rise of a global municipalist movement

The desire to access local government powers came, in part, from the limitations of protest and a wish to transform local institutions so that they could support social movements.

Along with the many success stories, councillors and mayors also spoke of the numerous challenges that they have faced on entering local government: age-old hierarchies, systems and traditions that are deeply embedded in their institutions; cuts to their budgets and resources; and the austerity, anti-immigration and other measures imposed from above.

Bit by bit, citizen platforms and progressive local politics are making headway, opening up spaces and redistributing power, but it’s often slower than originally hoped. Alongside citizen platforms, there is strong recognition of the fundamental role that social movements and non-state institutions have to play within the municipalist movement, in order to achieve the profound social and ecological change needed. These citizen platforms need strong movements on the ground that push for change from outside of the institution.

An important next step for this movement, and one of the main aims of the conference, is to form an international municipalist network. Putting technology at its service, the movement is spanning borders and becoming an interconnected web of place-based change that includes local government, social movements and non-state institutions.This comes from the recognition that we cannot work in isolation nor within the restrictions of national borders. Many of the most pressing challenges we face, such as climate change and the refugee crisis are global in nature and we need to work together to address them.

Info & Credits

All workshops and talks from the Fearless Cities conference are available for free online.

Jenny is co-founder of School Farm Community Supported Agriculture. She has a background in local community development and environmental education. Her focus is on connecting the social and the ecological to bring about grassroots systems change.  For the past year she has been living and working in Spain.

Marcos heads up research and training at Solidarity International Andalusia, in Spain. His work focuses on strategies for building local resilience. He has a background in social and political activism.

Published in STIR magazine no.19, Autumn 2017.

Online version at stirtoaction.com

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We talk to Brett Scott the alternative financial activist about the opportunities and challenges of transforming the economy.

Your work can be described as economic anthropology, an attempt to explore the historical origins and current approaches to economics. How cultural is our economic system?

I come from an anthropology background and one of the main ways anthropologists try to understand systems is by immersing themselves in them to understand the perspective of those involved. Sometimes that is called participant observation – participating in something while observing it. You can blend those elements in different ways: Hardcore anthropology can be weighted towards extreme participation with less structured observation, really immersing yourself. Some old-school anthropology is more weighted towards observation than participation, making it more prone to a ‘judging’ outlook.

The discipline of Economics has traditionally tried to fit economic activity into universal theories. The attempt to fit all societies over time into a single theory requires a level of abstraction that is often quite disconnected from actual practice, or how people experience themselves in economies. Anthropology, on the other hand, is more attuned to describing the differences between people – the specificities and variations – and more interested in showing the ways people have provisioned themselves over time, rather than just asserting that people have always traded as ‘self-interested agents’ on markets. In essence, Economics takes one form of economic activity, forged in a particular historical and political context, and implies that this is the only form of economic activity.

Also, economics as a discipline tends to make a strange distinction between economics and politics, as if the political sphere and economic sphere can be meaningfully separated from each other. Holistic forms of anthropology, though, would explore how different economic systems are formed in or imply different political or cultural systems – how they are all interlinked.

One of the insights that came out of anthropology and historical studies is that states cannot be meaningfully separated from our modern concept of markets. That is to say, market-based thinking was enabled by, or expanded by, modern states. Within traditional Economics, self-interest is presented as natural, timeless, and inevitable. If you look at the economist Adam Smith, he makes this assumption that people have always traded with each other since the beginning of time. Whereas, history and anthropology point out many instances of societies that do not rely on trade, or do not even have private property regimes, and that have completely alternative ways to provision themselves.

It is only in the context of modern state formations that you see the emergence of the modern conception of ‘markets’. In the time of Adam Smith, modern states had already formed and he was blind to the fact that many features of economies he was observing couldn’t really exist outside of that context. So economic anthropology and history will try to situate the economy within specific political and cultural epochs.

Modern academia has attempted to create discrete disciplines to describe and understand reality, such as politics, economics, psychology, and so on. But in your everyday life no-one experiences these things as separate from each other. You don’t experience your psychology as distinct from a decision to participate in a particular form of economic activity. They are all fused into one experience. So all economic activity is intensely cultural and political. It is concerned with the distribution of resources, your ability to act in a society. The idea that there is some realm of economic activity that is separate from culture is, frankly, bullshit.

If we change our culture, can we then transform the economy?

If you come from a strict Marxist background, you’d probably tend to say the material world conditions culture, or that the underlying relations of production support a ‘superstructure’ of beliefs and institutions. So the tendency – more or less – is to see cultural systems as being a reflection of the underlying economic situation. The question then is, “Can you change your underlying economic situation by altering your culture?” And yes, it probably is possible. But it is a complex process and I’m not sure I have a coherent answer. Within economic reform movements you have some people who say things like ‘all we need to do is make people think differently to effect change’, but that jars against the reality that every single day people need to enter an economy that has a particular structure, regardless of what they think. It’s not obvious what the link between changing people’s worldviews and changing economic structure is.

Take a look at small credit unions or local currencies. People are trying to think and behave differently – act out a different culture – but in reality they remain stuck within the vortex of a much more powerful economy. Sure, if everyone, at once, changed the way they behaved, you could probably change an economic system, but there is a huge coordination problem there. It seems more likely that change is a messy and contradictory process, driven by some things we consciously choose – like small changes in behaviour – and others that we do not, such as technological changes. It’s unpredictable. The Internet, for instance, has opened up new possibilities, but also created opportunities for new monopolies of power.

To shift the question slightly, we could ask, “How do you shift culture within a large financial institution, such as Goldman Sachs?” These institutions are huge, with like 35,000 employees. They have to go into work every day and keep doing the same thing. Even if individuals within the institution want to change their own personal behaviour, the day to day pressures and requirements won’t allow it. So if you wanted to change the culture you would have to press pause on the organisation for, say, three weeks, and then go around and convince everyone in it to behave differently. But there’s no way in hell that they can press pause, so any attempt to change culture has to happen on the fly, incrementally. But these cultures get locked into these institutions, and when it gets toxic they find it very hard to change it. Here’s an analogy: imagine you have a computer that has a load of viruses, but to get rid of them  will require a complete time-consuming reformatting. Now imagine you need to use it every day, and it’s not an option to be without it for a week, so you just keep using it. Likewise, we need to reformat financial institutions, but often we’re just superficially patching them up.

Access to capital is probably the most powerful dimension of our financial system. How can communities have more control over the circulation of capital at this stage?

The financial system as it stands, in most countries, operates at a large scale. It has centralising tendencies that give financial institutions lots of market power, and these large banks are also closely connected to government. In general, these banks find it easier and more profitable to deal with other large-scale players, directing capital to large corporations or large infrastructure projects, for example. Or else they invest in large numbers of standardised financial products that can be sold at scale, such as mortgages. They don’t have much ability, or desire, to sensitively respond to the niche needs of small-scale communities.

So how do you change that? Short of restructuring the entire system so such power does not exist, there are interim approaches such as banking regulation and reform. For example, you might lobby for quotas on banks to get them to support the real economy and smaller businesses.

Then there are attempts to bypass or augment the mainstream banks. This includes, for example, building community banking systems or municipal banks. Local banking advocates will insist that if you have a small financial institution rooted in an area, it is far more likely to serve local interests. In this debate, countries like Germany are often mentioned, as they have an older and more established system of local and regional banking. Co-operative banks are another approach. The idea is to change the ownership structure of banks to produce better outcomes, bearing in mind that co-operative banks often work at large scales and need not be local in orientation.

Then there are the local currency movements. This approach is not necessarily about accessing or raising capital, but creating economic exchange between people. This is different to raising money for a business. That said, mutual credit systems are currency systems, but they also provide access to short-term small-scale credit. They don’t solve the problem of accessing large-scale investment, but they can be very effective at allowing small businesses to trade on credit. Sardex in Sardinia is a good example.

A mutual credit system is when a network of people create an economic network and then set up a system to record when members give energy, labour or goods to another member of the network. The member who receives the labour goes negative, and the person who gave it goes positive. It’s essentially a ledger system for recording obligations between people. Members go in and out of credit and debt with each other. Over time, this is basically what a monetary system is: I contribute things, but I also needs things. When I contribute to the system I get positive credit, when I need things I am using up my credits or going into debt. This creates a cycle between members.You can create these networks with, say, 150 people, and I think they are one of the most undervalued approaches within local currency movements.

So there is local banking, local currencies, mutual credit, but there are also systems like community shares, which allow you to raise equity finance by offering shares to your local community. These have been relatively successful on a small scale.

You also have to bear in mind that is has been quite a while since there have been coherent communities in the UK. We often talk about ‘community’, but in London people often don’t know each other in their own neighbourhoods. There is a whole raft of work around community cohesion that is required before we even start to develop ways for communities to finance themselves.

I think with all of these things you have to have serious commitment. There are a lot of people trying to design local economic strategies that are volunteer-led or part-time. I’m not against small timebanks or other volunteer-led schemes, but they are not a serious challenges to the economic system. In the case of Sardex, it is a serious attempt to build a parallel currency system, and one that also integrates into the normal system. Recently I’ve become interested in the Greater London Mutual, and the network of new regional banks supported by the Community Savings Bank Association, which look like serious attempts to build local and co-operative banking.

If you can combine these alternatives with banking reform and policy changes, putting pressure on the existing banking system, you can then start to make a difference.

More recently you’ve been exploring what you call the ‘dash to a cashless society’. Could you explain how this offers new surveillance opportunities to private companies and governments, and how you understand the social consequences?

The term cashless society is a euphemistic way of saying the ‘bank payment society’. Within this system you need a bank account and you have to ask banks to facilitate payments. In a cashless society you always have to go through a financial institution.

Think about the traditional story given in any Economics course. A market is made up by two basic players – a buyer and a seller. The buyer gives money tokens to the seller who hands over tangible goods or services. In a cashless society, however, there is the introduction of a third player between every transaction – the money-passer, who moves money between the buyer and the seller in exchange for a fee. These payments intermediaries include the card companies and banks, who run the underlying infrastructure to allow this. So the ‘cashless society’ is an economic system that is predicated on every transaction passing through the banking system and groups like Visa and Mastercard.

There are a lot of institutions lobbying for this system – the banks themselves and digital payment companies who facilitate the movement of money between bank accounts. Then there is the state that can see many advantages to this. In particular it allows them to monitor all transactions. If you’re forced to use digital payment systems, all of your transactions are recorded and leave a data trail. This data can then be analysed. They are interested in this for anti-terrorism and crime detection, but also to monitor tax. There are also monetary policy interests, in particular the ability to introduce negative interest rates.

So the implications are far more than data about transactions, and it’s not just states that find this useful, but corporations, too. Large technology companies, like Google and Amazon, are trying to build payment infrastructure to expand their data monopolies and gain ever deeper insights into people’s economic behaviour. For example, big web platforms often are in the advertising business, but struggle to prove whether adverts convert into sales. So one endgame for some of these large technology companies is to discover the correlation between the adverts you see and how much you spend. So they have an obvious interest in receiving and analysing that data, and if they can track what you spend, they can also develop more efficient advertising.

Another endgame is machine learning and predictive analytics that try to predict, and ultimately steer, people’s behaviours. Banks themselves are interested in this approach, using data to influence behaviour.

There is no cashless society at present, but there is a big political push for it. In this context, it is interesting to explore crypto-currencies that create some form of counter power.

Blockchain technology has been offered up as one of the most recent transformative technologies, with use in supply chains, payment exchange, and its ability to decentralise the control of data. How do you see the political implications of this technology?

Blockchain is multi-layered. At its base, the original version, blockchain technology is essentially a means for a network of strangers to keep track of their positions relative to each other, without a central intermediary. In the case of Bitcoin, it is about keeping track of money tokens. The concept can be applied more broadly though.

Why is blockchain seen as a profound shift in technology? If you walk out in the street, right now, wherever you are, you are going to see a group of people you do not know – strangers. You don’t necessarily distrust them, but there is no easy way to extend your trust. Traditionally, the way we would deal with this is through state law – such as consumer protection laws – and big third-party institutions and corporations who mediate between these interactions. I can walk into a shop and buy something without needing to know the seller personally.

Then blockchain emerged as a technology that could facilitate transactions between people without requiring intermediary institutions. People have historically been able to do that in small-scale situations, but blockchain tech enables this at large scale. The first version of this was Bitcoin, which is a system that enables people to move tokens between each other without relying upon banks. Unlike the banking system, where transactions are recorded on private ledgers controlled by an oligopoly of banks, whose permission you require to move money around, Bitcoin is based on a public ledger that is updated by special players in a peer to peer network.

The second wave of blockchain – such as the Ethereum system – took the same concept, but moved towards developing more complex interactions between people beyond the exchange of money tokens. In particular they added the ability to deploy automated agents onto the network, which they – somewhat misleadingly – refer to as ‘smart contracts’. In Bitcoin you assume all players on the network are humans who make their own decisions about whether to send tokens. The automated ‘smart contract’ agents of Ethereum though, are like robots, forced to do certain things when members of the network interact with them. For example, if you want to raise money for a company, you can programme a smart contract to automatically send a share to someone who sends it money. To understand this, imagine a vending machine. It is an automated agent. You give it money and it gives you a drink. It has no choice. Now imagine this kind of thing in digital form. If you start to link these ‘smart contract’ entities together you can automate all sorts of interactions.

The third wave of blockchain tech – which is being hyped right now – is the corporate use of the technology. The first two waves were open systems in which anyone could join and, theoretically, everyone had the same rights. In wave three, which is known as private, closed or ‘permissioned’ blockchains, institutions or groups of institutions control who is able to join the system, and can give users different rights and powers within the system. This fundamentally changes the entire ethos. They’re just trying to make more efficient versions of business as usual. Banks, for example, already collectively run certain shared systems for things like payments, and they currently see private blockchain systems – or ‘distributed ledger technology’ – as just a more efficient way to do the same thing. So if American Express says it’s ‘using blockchain’, they’re going to be building a closed system, and this makes it confusing for the public, who often don’t know there is a difference between the open systems and closed systems.

So, to give an example, when I was working within the derivatives market, two traders would agree a deal – let’s say a trader at Goldman Sachs would do a deal with a trader at Barclays – but once they’d done that they report it to their separate back office staff, who would do all the dirty work of having to make the transfers and make sure both traders had recorded the same details about the deal. This takes time, and each bank has different systems that don’t necessarily jive with each other. So the interest for large banks is in finding ways to automate the coordination between themselves, so that they can fire all their back office staff who do the reconciliation work.

What is important here is the distinction between open public and closed private blockchain systems. That said, you could also use closed systems to launch co-operatives. If you were trying to create a co-operative version of Uber, a closed blockchain system could be very useful. So drivers could get together to coordinate themselves. So there is interesting potential.

With the Paradise Papers we are reminded again how tax policy and legislation is often written by the legal teams of large companies who are offshoring their assets and profits. This is a clear example of big finance’s political power. What are the opportunities for us to transform the policy and legal environment?

We are used to this tacky distinction between ‘states vs markets’, but I start from the assumption that there has always been a symbiosis between states and markets. The state creates the underlying structures that enable large-scale markets to operate. If you accept that, you can then think about which market players the state prioritises. Do they favour the large corporate players or the small players and ordinary citizens? This is kind of the historical battle between conservatives and labour: is the state there to facilitate the owners of capital, the CEOs, the elite entrepreneurs, or is it there to protect those with less market power, the employees and marginalised? The state is always going to be captured – the question really is who has captured it? Is it a corporate state, or a citizen’s state? This is a dynamic that goes back and forth.

I do think there are opportunities to transform the policy and legal landscape, and it has happened over the years. It is a fickle system, though. A positive policy change can be reversed by a new government, like a law to separate safe banking to risky banking that then gets repealed. In the long-term the ideal is to try build systems that do not rely on external regulation, but that have positive principles built into their DNA. I’d not give up on financial reform, but it’s difficult. I’ve just come back from spending time with Finance Watch in Brussels: they lobby for the public interest in finance, but they are outnumbered by highly paid private lobbyists that the financial industry deploys. They have to fight day to day against the odds.

In terms of the Paradise Papers, I feel there has been a political turn in the tax avoidance debate. I think there have been gains for tax justice groups. At the same time, there has also been a fatigue among the general public. We hear about new scandals frequently, but there is only so much outrage people can express. This is a long-term fight, not something you can win in quickly. So stick in there and enjoy the ride.

Alternative financial activists, such as the Robin Hood Co-operative and Debt Jubilee, use ‘traditional’ financial tools to challenge the system. How do you understand the strategic relationship between financial protest, financial reform, and the creation of new financial institutions, tools, and services?

Finance activism, financial reform, and alternative financial should, like you say, align with each other. I think they do, but those within these groups do not often attempt to overtly work together. Partially because of funding structures. If you are a critical artist exploring finance, like Paolo Cirio, his funding stream will come from arts funding bodies. And then if you’re FinanceWatch, your funding comes from NGOs and EU sources. This means they’re often having to play into different institutional spheres that don’t allow much overlap.

Also the energy required to work towards different campaigns means focusing obsessively on certain priorities. If your whole world is lobbying in Brussels or Westminster, you may become dismissive or intolerant of the direct action strategies of activists scaling the Houses of Parliament. There are cultural differences within financial reform and they don’t always recognise each other’s value. Sometimes because they are competing for media attention, funding and legitimacy.

But when I zoom out and think about how we will create financial change, I see all of these approaches playing a role. Financial activism and protest is very effective at getting media attention – Occupy Movement, Move your Money campaign, UK Uncut were very good at getting headlines and asking for extreme changes. This then creates space for more centrist organisations to draw up more technical proposals for financial reform. They come through with more palatable demands, which can create change.

The same with climate change movements. Earth First or Greenpeace open space for less overtly activist sustainable finance groups – like CarbonTracker – to come and make technical proposals. You have to zoom out to see the politics – take alternative finance platforms like peer-to-peer lending. Mainstream policymakers struggle to directly attack big banks, and may find it easier to support the alternative finance sector as a way to indirectly weaken banks. The alternative finance sector in the UK has actually been quite good at ‘playing the state’, presenting themselves as a useful alternative to address the shortcomings of the traditional finance giants.

On the extreme end of financial activism, there is little crossover with more ‘respectable’ alternative finance entrepreneurs. If you take Enric Duran, or the Robin Hood Co-op, they have no interest in reforming finance. They are trying to create parallel systems that do not rely on the current system. It’s not like the divestment campaigns, or ethical banking system, which are trying to reform the current system, and that’s an important distinction.

The divestment campaigns are an interesting case study. These campaigners are often criticised by those within more mainstream sustainable finance circles as lacking nuance or being counterproductive. But the divestment organisations have been great at driving the debate on unsustainable investment in a more public way. They actually indirectly support the work done by the technical sustainable finance community. The student activists are creating a space for more technical changes to be introduced.

Since I specialise in not specialising, it makes it easier for me to to see the points of intersection. There needs to be more people who hop between different approaches, overtly spending more time in different communities. The technology community, the localist community, the policy community, the artistic community, and so on. Hybrid approaches are often the most interesting.

Brett Scott is a journalist, campaigner and the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto, 2013). He writes for publications such as the Guardian, New Scientist, Wired Magazine and CNN. He is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab, and helps facilitate a course on power and design at the University of the Arts London.

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Published in STIR magazine no.20, Winter 2018

Illustration by Nick Taylor

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