Do we really need to sacrifice privacy for health in the fight against covid-19? The DP-3T protocol can save lives without furthering surveillance capitalism.

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• Sources: DP-3T, TCN Protocol, Ferretti & Wymant et al

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Michel Bauwens believes that because societies are complex adaptive systems, the only way to move towards a new, stable system is through a chaotic transition. The current pandemic shock will serve as a wake-up call, exposing the fallacies of our current systems. What we need forward are strong commons-based institutions that can provide a complimentary, counter-balance to powerful nation-states and existing multilateral organisations.

Podcast notes

In this with Michel Bauwens, we explore both the epistemological and political/regulatory layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new” ways of organising society. We dig into concepts like “trans-national institutions” and explore the changes we could expect in both regional and international governance of the economy and society.

Michel Bauwens is founder and director of the P2P Foundation, research director of CommonsTransition.org (a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons) and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group.

Michel is a real lighthouse when it comes to collaborative, commons-based production models and works tirelessly since more than a decade in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

> Michel Bauwens, Corona and the Commons http://liminal.news.greenhostpreview.nl/2020/03/23/corona-and-the-commons/

> Michel Bauwens and Jose Raomos, “The pulsation of the commons: The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition” (Draft), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sHhuecKxfB8HRH8o9aOfdlKNqaPQ8lc91502FXXv8e4/edit#heading=h.99i7fcsrn7tf

> Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Bologna_Regulation_for_the_Care_and_Regeneration_of_Urban_Commons

> P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival — Commons Transition, https://commonstransition.org/p2p-accounting-for-planetary-survival/

> REPORTING 3.0, https://reporting3.org/

> Robert I. Moore (2000), The First European Revolution: 970–1215, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/712195.The_First_European_Revolution

> Bernard A. Lietaer, The Mystery of Money, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8198838-the-mystery-of-money

> Material flow accounting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_flow_accounting

> Resources, events, agents (accounting model), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resources,_events,_agents_(accounting_model)

> David Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf

> Jamie Wheal in Rebel Wisdom: War on Sensemaking 3, the Infinite Game, https://youtu.be/mQstRd7opv4

> French land trust “Terre des Liens”, https://terredeliens.org/

> Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40203892-the-neganthropocene

Key insights

1. There are two main layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new”: Epistemological and Political/Regulatory:

– The epistemological layer needs a new educational approach, since the current one is largely reductionist and rooted in the “old” system.

– The political and regulatory space need stronger commons-based institutions and governance protocols, where the nation state becomes a “partner state” and you have a public commons protocol, like for example in the Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons in Italy.

– We will also see the emergence of trans-national institutions that connect local constituencies globally and virtually and which are able to protect planetary boundaries.

2. We’re moving towards a mutation of consciousness where Western countries are increasingly questioning modernity/progress paradigm, while many Asian countries still think they can get capitalism right (modernity-nature). Nonetheless, the fact that we’re currently consuming five times our planetary resources to maintain the capitalist economic model might indicate that we’re moving towards a next “pulsation”, or regenerative reaction, to a period of unsustainable extraction.

3. There’s a need of coherence driving decision-making mainly based on accounting using energy flows, which go beyond double-entry accounting — creating winners and losers — making transparent the three-dimensional, real impact of activities.

 Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.

This podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Stitcher, CastBox, RadioPublic, and other major podcasting platforms.

Transcript

This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Michel, is such a pleasure to have you on this podcast! We know each other I think from, you know, the early 2010s, probably something like that. So it’s almost 10 years, maybe more. And, you know, when we started this podcast, we really wanted to have the conversation on the on the commons and P2P commons based production into this conversation into this podcast. And, you know, as you know, I am also personally very much passionate about this idea of open source, for example, and open collaboration, based on the commons. So my question for you as a starting point, say to explore the world of P2P commons based production is is much more related to try to understand with you why this is not as big a deal as it should be, you know. And so, what are the structural issues that, as for your understanding, are harnessing the further development of these paradigms in the world?

Michel Bauwens:
Right. Well, I guess to start with, I’d like to basically maybe even challenge what you just said. Because, you know, you have to remember where it came from right, where basically we just had open source movements in the early 2000s. Now we have urban commons — and I did a study in Ghent which show the tenfold increase in urban commons from 50 to 500 in just one city — that’s one thing. Then we have the makerspaces, the fab labs and something that’s called a multi factory. There’s about 120 of them in Europe right now already and this is like real production, where craftspeople mutualise their you know, production in a common space using open source principles. And also, I would like to say that there’s already a lot more political expression of this, right, there is the regulation in Italy in 250 different cities, there is a whole plank of activity in France around the municipal elections, and you know, with a real commons political program at the local level. So, of course, we’re not where we want to be, but I just want to stress that we also have been growing at the same time. So I just want to make sure that that is said.

Simone Cicero:
For sure.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, yeah. But so I, you know, I think of course one of the issues and that’s one of the statements we wanted to discuss is, is about the value regime, right? So my analysis is that we live in a world that only recognizes extracted value. So in other words, in order to create value, you either work with people or with natural resources and you extract a surplus. And that surplus is translated in financial wealth. And then we are going to do philanthropy or we’re going to do taxation. And so we’re doing redistribution. And this, this has a number of paradoxical effects. And one of the profound effects is that if you do generative work, if you do care work, you don’t get funded unless you get this redistributive money. So a typical example would be, you have in France a community land trust called Terre des Liens. They have 775 million Euro in capital and you know, they buy land from the markets and put it in a trust and then they give cheap rent and ecological contracts with organic farmers. They have already in 2016 published a report showing that the fact that they don’t use toxic pesticides in their form of agriculture means that they’re saving the French state 300 million euros per year. So that’s, you know, amount of money in water pollution, depollution that is not spent, because they do this generative activity. And I hope you can see the problem there. Right. So if you’re a farmer, and you’re destroying your soil year after year, and some studies say there’s like 60 harvests left in Western Europe, you know, if we continue with this, de-substantiation of minerals in our soils. You’re going to be basically getting, you know, billions in European funding from the agriculture program, but if you’re an organic farmer you’re not going to get this. So I want to say this is important because the common in some ways and an alternative to capital, but you still need capital. So capital privatizes the commons, that’s how capitalism emerged. And so what people are doing right now, I would say is using the commons as an alternative to capital because they don’t have capital. Right? So if you don’t have capital, then you’re going to use mutualization as an alternative. This combined idle sourcing, combined many, many, many small contributions to try to, to get at a substantial amount of infrastructure. And so, why is this important because as long as the current system works, as long as the extractive system works even if it is destructive, it kind of creates a structural situation where generative activity is marginalized. And this is just, you know, a fact of life. Right? And now, if you agree with me — or maybe don’t agree with me — that we are reaching a point of no return in the current system. In other words, continued extraction at this scale, an overuse of the planetary resources at this scale, creates resource issues, creates future problems with food and water, creates climate change and — as we see nowadays — creates a huge issue around pandemic distribution. So, I would say that it might be that the time you know before these alternatives, you know, become more important is not so far away as we think. Now, so the first argument would be around structural weaknesses for me is the value regime, right? In which value regime are we operating? And what is it favoring? And what is it de-favoring?The second issue, though, I think, is that we live in a hybrid economy, in a hybrid society. So we have different ways of exchanging value. We have the pricing system, which you know, only is dominant for the last two centuries. It wasn’t before; it was a it was itself marginal until two centuries ago. You know, we have maybe 10% people in the cities and 90% people in the countryside were almost not affected by the pricing system. We have the gift economy, which is, I think, quite marginal. Then we have commoning, which is working on a shared resource, and then we have redistribution. So those are four different ways of exchanging value. And I think one of the critiques you know, like self-critique we could make of the commons movement is the idea that it’s a, it’s a totalistic alternative, right? So what I would argue differently is that the commons on its own is not sufficient, just as the market on its own is not efficient, sufficient. And the states on its own is not efficient. Even more so, I would argue that believing this is a form of totalitarianism, so you’d have fascism and communism as an absolutism of the state. We have a bit of right wing libertarianism and neoliberalism as a absolutism of the market. We also could have commonism as some kind of absolutism of you know, of horizontality. And so I think it’s much more fruitful to think of combinations. In other words, if you’re a market player, you could start thinking, you know, how can we use the commons. And actually, of course, we see that capitalists actually doing that, right. I mean, all the new — the things you do with your platforms and, you know, normally most of the platforms are capitalistic, what I call net article platforms — that’s exactly what they do. And they have become commons extracting economic systems. They directly,you know, get value from cooperating humans, right? So if you look at Uber, Airbnb, they no longer just hire people to produce, they actually let us exchange and then they get taxed from our exchanges, broadly speaking. So capitalism is certainly doing that. And so what I’ve been suggesting for the last 10 years is that commoners should do the same. One of the historical theories about capitalism is that it emerged in Europe because we had, you know, medieval cities, free medieval cities where the merchant guilds had autonomy, which didn’t happen in any other region in the world, because always the market forces were subsumed and dominated by the Empires and the Royal, the monarchic forces. But in Europe, we had a distributed system, fragmented system, of power in the Middle Ages and that allowed the merchant classes to slowly create a world that worked for them. And so basically, what I’ve been suggesting is that commoners should do the same; that we should be thinking not about, you know, doing on our own 100% pure way, but we should be thinking: what kind of markets work for commoners? What kind of state form works for the commons?

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, that’s, sorry I’m interrupting you, but I want to bring you some first reflection that reconnects with some older interviews that we’ve been recording the last few days. So, for example, when you say that the commons doesn’t need to be totalistic, you know, not approach that somehow like we need to do it alone outside of the society of markets, but more something that can appear on top of existing markets. It reminds me about David Ronfeld’s tribes, institutions, markets and networks. So this idea that essentially they evolve on top of each other and this is something that we also had the chance to discuss quickly with John Robb a few few days ago. And if I connect with your remarks at the start, that it’s a value issue and also you say, you know, as long as we have extracted value, it’s hard to imagine that, you know, something different comes up as long as society somehow praises this kind of extractive approach. And this is really interesting, I think. I mean, when you say for example, care work is not funded, it makes me think about Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene idea, that care needs to become central. And, and so somehow this brings us this reflection that if we don’t see more commons based production, you may also be an epistemological problem. We may also be dealing with to this idea of, you know, as Heidegger’s said we face the world as standing reserve that we just want to consume or basically we just can think about consuming. So it’s these big, these huge epistemological issues related to science and rationalism. And so this is one of the big issues. And on the other hand, that is a political issue. Because when you say, you know, basically, if this information needs to come on top of existing institutions and markets, it means that we need to take it politically, we need to have a political discussion on how we run our markets and what kind of production we, I would say we encourage with our policies. So there are these two topics. And you also mentioned the point of no return so at some point, we were going to figure it out that if it doesn’t change, we’re gonna have very hard times and we are already living through hard times. You mentioned the pandemic. It’s crazy, today we are all three of us at some level of lockdown, you know, you’re locked down in a room because you’re finishing your quarantine, and me and Stina we’re locked in our houses in Paris and Rome. So I feel like the point of no returning somehow is already here, for some reasons, but so the question is: how do you see that happening? Is the epistemological transformation really key? And is this aspect of cosmology and integrating the technology and the cosmological vision as we are seeing for example in China somehow, something needed? Is it something that you see happening? How do you see that unlocking? Is it a political procedure? Epistemological? That sort of thing.

Michel Bauwens:
Let me give you some examples. So I just finished writing an essay, which I really happy about is called “The pulsation of the commons”. And so I’ve been looking at different schools of thought like biophysical economics and cliodynamics, which is a historical school, and the cognitive cycles and the movement of Karl Polanyi. And they all come to a very similar conclusion, which is basically saying that history moves In waves, in pulsating pulsation, so you have extractive moments in history and then you have regenerative reactions, and typically for regenerative reaction is the revival of the components. So in, you know, 10th century 11th century Europe in 12th century Japan in 15th century China, what you see is that the extractive regime has done so much damage that there is a huge popular revolt that in that time takes on a religious and spiritual language. And so, basically, you know, we can take Japan also in the 16th century and happen again. So, you have like a completely deforested country, which will be subject to civil war and then, you know, so many people have died and then the Shogun takes power. And for three centuries, Japan has succeeded in creating it’s called the Tokugawa period, a nation that lives within its regional planetary boundaries. And it has a stable population. So it can be done right, it’s actually possible to have a civilizational form that lives within natural boundaries with a stable population. It’s been done in the past. And so that’s that’s like something that you see happening all the time. So for example, I was reading a book is called the first European revolution, it’s in 975, after the period of capitalization and you know, all these feudal lords are fighting and killing each other and raping their the women in their population and everything and stealing the gold from the churches. You have the monks and the people organizing demonstrations and within 70 years, the whole of European Society has changed. And so this kind of pulsation between extraction and regeneration is not unusual. It’s actually I would say the rule now with capitalism because of technology, because of oil, you know, we kind of thought we were out of it, right? We thought we escaped this, but this is no longer the case. We can’t escape it. We, you know, we use four or five planets, use five times more resources than the earth can regenerate. We have climate change. So basically, I believe we have now reached that point on a global scale. Now there is a difference between Asia and Europe, in Asia, in Europe, we already have at least one third of the population in Europe that questions all the ideals of modernity. So there’s already kind of a mutation in consciousness, I would say. In Asia, they are still much more believing in the system, and they think finally they can get there. So they, so that I would say that the the majority of the people in Asia believe in capitalism, and that a majority of the people in Europe are losing their faith in capitalism. And so you see all these people changing how they do health, how they do, you know, think about young people in work today. I mean, this is a real issue, where most young people cannot find meaning in a traditional job, or they they want something else, they want to live other values. So I would say in general, that we actually see mutation of consciousness. And let me end with one example because I think it’s important. So mutation in consciousness is not just a continuation of the old. So when we have the Christians coming after the Roman Empire, in the Roman Empire workers or slave work is something bad, is something that a free person doesn’t have to do. But in the Christian world, in a feudal world, Ora Labora, so you have to pray and work at the same time. So actually working is transforming the world, is making the world a better and more divine place. So that’s a complete complete shift in consciousness. And I think today, a lot of people want to care for the earth, want to be at the surface of the planet. And the system hasn’t yet changed to make that possible. But I think the desire is already there.

Simone Cicero:
So we can say maybe that, for your understanding, we are witnessing this epistemological change. So maybe it’s the time to see how it plays out to the political level?

Michel Bauwens:
Well, it plays out I think at the moment, first of all, with a total lack of trust in the institutions, right. 20 years ago, 70% of people were saying, I trust politicians, I trust doctors, I trust hospitals. Today’s more like 17%. So they, I think the majority of the people do not see it, have not a clear vision of the alternative. But they already have a clear vision of what they reject. And you probably remember this quote from Gramsci where it says the old system is dying but is not dead yet and a new system is being born but it’s not born yet, so it’s a time of monsters. You know, citation like that and he was living in the same moment we are living now because at the moment he was living is you had in the 19th century had Smithsonian capitalism, which was a total domination of capital over labor and why workers in the 1850s were dying at 30. And, you know, World War I and World War II were a transitional periods where two new regimes — fascism and communism — were competing to offer something new because the old system wasn’t working. And then we got a huge change which was the welfare system, right. So after 1945 we have a compact between capital and labor, and it creates — at least in the western states — it creates a welfare state. Well, then the way I formulate this is that the change now is, we need a compact with nature, because the compact between capital and labor was done at the expense of nature by not recognizing externalities. And then so politically — and this is one of the terms that we wanted to discuss — is we don’t have a nation state system that’s territorial. So people live in a territory they, they like their locality. So at least some people do, they feel attached to the region, a lot of people feel attached to their nation. And then we’ve built a multilateral system that is on top of that. And that is, so we have political and economic institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, that were mediating institutions, and they’re not working anymore. They’re not working well anymore. Then we have another world, which is the word that I think you and I work with, which is a transnational trans-local world, which is where people live in virtual territories. So let’s say you do permaculture so you at some level you’re local. You’re you know, you’re doing your garden. But then when you communicate about permaculture you’re communicating with the global permaculture community. And in that world, the nation state doesn’t even exist. It’s just invisible. It’s not part of your view. Right. And so that second world for me is the word that we’re building with the commons with Knowledge Commons. And so we talk about Cosmo local, global order, which is everything that’s global is everything that’s light is global and shared and everything that’s heavy is local, which is an alternative to both neoliberal globalization which is a globalization of matter and people moving around the world all the time. We spend three times as many on transportation, I’m making things now. And then we have a world of national protectionism of “okay, let’s keep the foreigners out. Let’s do everything locally”. And so what we try to present is a third view, right, is a view of “Yes, we need to re-localize a lot of our production”. Because if you look at corona, the reason we are such a mess is that we have neoliberal just-in-time systems that are totally dependent on the weakest link and then when China you know, got in crisis, we didn’t get our medications. And there’s no supply line to create the making of ventilators and masks and so we lost every resilience that we had in terms of combating disruption anyway. So, yes, so what I’m saying is that the open source germ form shows how we can do it. We have a global cooperation of experts globally about ventilators. And then we need to find local places where we can make it. What we don’t want is to isolate ourselves, you know, from the knowledge that’s available in all of humanity.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you. I will jump in with a question. I thought it was — you already answered to some of the questions that I had — but I was reading the other day your a piece that you wrote in Liminal on the corona and the commons. And there were some interesting remarks that you made about, you know, that for sure the systems that we have are sort of failing, like the nation state and, and the multilateral system. There’s a lack of trust that is growing but still, that things might have been even worse if we didn’t have these systems in place, because somehow they are doing their role. So I’m curious to hear about that coexistence and how you see that will pan out. What will be the frictions between the old and the new?

Michel Bauwens:
Right, so I think we have a two fold-problem: one is that we have, you know, weak, commons institutions. We don’t have strong commons institutions yet. And the other problem is that we have state forms which cannot cooperate with these commons, right? And I think Italy has given some examples of how this could be done, because after the Bologna regulation, the regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, you have 250 cities which took it over and according to the calculation between 800,000 and 1 million people who are involved in these projects. So you have there already what I call a “partner state protocol”, a public commons protocol. So you have in Italian cities, a way in which citizens can do a project that can be recognized by the state and can be supported in what they call the five, the quintuple governance multi-stakeholder model. So this is a typical thing that exists in Italy but doesn’t exist in other countries yet. And I think it’s a good example of, you know, how you can smooth the cooperation between those two worlds. Because what we have now is we have all these open source communities now with all the expertise that is needed to this ventilators and valves, but we also see that the government are not ready or able to work with them. So there are several issues. And of course, one of the issues is certification regulations, which should probably be relaxed in an emergency time because even if an alternative is not 100% effective, it can still save a lot of lives that you can’t if you don’t have anything. But you know, beyond just emergency measures, what it shows us is that what is lacking today is the interface between the state and the civil society, the state and the commons. There is no interface and I think that’s a huge weakness on both sides, because right now the state would — and also maybe say that in some more theoretical ways I think the state can see territory, it cannot see flows — and so we need a partner state with which is not just the issue of, you know, being a partner with civil society and allowing civil society to be autonomous, but it’s also related to the ability of the state to see things and accept the fact that flows enrich the nation. I am not sure that beyond the neoliberal market flows, commodity flows, that people in the states and traditional politicians are actually able to see how open source and international global maker spaces can enrich a territory can enrich, you know, the wealth of a nation state. I don’t think they see that work well.

Simone Cicero:
That’s a very important point, as for my understanding because so far I think what we have been seeing in the last — you know, basically from forever — is that, you know, gradual (something that you also mentioned), this gradual integration of institutions up until we reach this supranational let’s say multinational transnational state, you know, with the UN, for example, as a way to somehow take over this role of controlling and regulating and at the same time. What you mention is that this trend basically disconnected the citizen from the policymakers and from the regulation, regulatory process itself. On the other hand, maybe it’s a good idea to borrow Daniel Schmactenberger’s considerations on on the fact that when you have this huge power growing at the edge of the system, so where basically every nation state -but within time I would say every individual — has technological potential to create such a big harm and often coupled with Guerilla like, you know, basically biological warfare or like we said, you know, we’ve witnessed that with the drone attacks to the Saudi plants, you know.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that was amazing, yes.

Simone Cicero:
So the question is, when these two trends, let’s say generate friction between each other so that they need to to scale our need for a coherent regulation for example, at a multinational transnational level, and at the other hand, we have this need to probably go back into a more indigenous and local context of of creating wealth and managing the commons. Are we left with some kind of, you know, conundrum that we cannot solve?

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, okay. I you know, I won’t imply that it’s easy, but so let’s take the example with corona. So we can criticize the state and there were many failures and everything. But imagine that there is no state, then, you know, in the US, you would have every state out of the 50 states will be competing with each other. They wouldn’t take into account each other. One city would do social isolation and the other wouldn’t. I mean, that’s not acceptable either, right? There are some challenges that do require transnational frameworks. And in some way, you could say that the nation state system already works that way. And that’s not so bad. So the fact of the WHO, you know, was able to advise, and it’s an international organization. And it is followed by a lot of states. But it’s an international expression, right. And I want to say something else, which is that the regime that we are living with is, you know, it’s weak multilateralism, and it’s only economic and political. So the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations, and they are mediating institutions to keep the peace because before World War II, they didn’t have them. And so they thought “We want to keep the peace we need these mediating institutions”. Now, one mediating institution that I know we need right now is actually some institution that could protect planetary boundaries. And I’ve done a report last summer called p2p accounting for planetary, was again, “p2p accounting for planetary survival”. And the theme is that we need accounting tools — share the accounting tools — that enable us to see the world differently. And that allows us to see externalities. And of course, they are not externalities, but the economy — our current economy — sees these things as externalities. So the thing is the economy is the center and then these marginal things on the outside, but actually the planet is primary. And we know we are guests. So we are actually at the edges in a certain way. And so that kind of reversal of perspective, I think needs to be institutionally validated. And so one project that I really like and I think is totally on the mark is called Reporting 3.0. And one of their proposals is called the Global thresholds and allocations Council. This is a form of, they call it multi capital accounting. So you don’t financialized but we have to see the metron energy flows in our systems. And so what they propose is basically that this group of scientists and experts, the global thresholds and locations Council, would be in charge of setting the limits in which states and individuals and companies and coops can operate right, because your freedom stops where you endanger the life of another. I think international is not good enough because if let’s take the human rights issue, right, we you have the UN Human Rights Council, but then there’s China and Saudi Arabia are members. And now human rights are very important, but it only affects some people, but the planetary survival affects everyone. And so this is sort of a vision I have is to have this to have globally shared accounting platforms, and shared supply chains where we can actually do Stigmergy, right. And that’s that I would say it’s an institution of the open source movement that works very well in free software. And once we have accounting, we can also apply it to production. That’s a huge, huge shift in perspective.

Simone Cicero:
Can you add a little Michel, on how would you see Stigmergy playing out in progress?

Michel Bauwens:
Yes, so if we move to open collaborative systems — and I think the blockchain systems are already that right — so that means like open source, everybody can come in and can leave at any time. So there is no single company that integrates the whole system that dominates our system. It’s an ecosystem. And it’s an open ecosystem. So what we see in these ecosystems is sort of all contributive accounting, which is practiced by different open source systems, which is where you can recognize non market generated activity as having its own value. So if you look at human history, and Bernard Lietaer talks about this in his book, The mystery of money: it talks about Yin and Yang money, male and female, warm and cold currencies. So now we only have cold currencies, extractive currency, he says we need to go back to the double system, which we had until the Middle Ages in the 14th century, which is we need warm currencies, which recognize non market generative care activities. So for example, in Indonesia you have money systems which regulates the watershed: people are paid to care for the watershed, and they can use that currency. So in the system that Reporting 3.0 proposes — this is more like a thermodynamic accounting systems — but again, it’s an open system everybody can see. So the theory is the following: in order to be in a steady state economy, so an economy that keeps the level of resources for the next generations, we cannot grow more than 1% a year otherwise it’s exponential. So basically, you calculate, you know, like the all the chemical elements of the table of Mendeleev. And that already exists. You can find it online. The American Chemical Association follows the flows of matter in these different elements. And so you’d have a commission of experts that would follow this, you know, how much copper is there, how much copper do we expect to find every year? What is the bio-circularity of copper? 70%. Every time you use copper, you re-use it, you can only use 70% of the copper. And that gives you boundaries, right? And within these boundaries, you’re free, but you cannot cross those boundaries. And stigmergy is that if I, let’s say I make shoes and I need leather. I can see all the other leather producers as well. So I can adapt in real time my behavior to the behavior of the ecosystem. And so there is another kind of accounting it’s called flow accounting. REA (resources, events agents), which no longer has double entry, and this is an important point. So if you use double entry accounting, you only see what is coming in and out of your own entity. And it’s a narcissistic accounting because the ecosystem doesn’t exist for you. Once you have flow accounting or REA accounting, you see the whole 3D ecosystem. You see every transaction, how it fits in the 3D ecosystem. Now, I want to go one step further, if you don’t mind. Because what we want to avoid is eco-fascism, right, a kind of planned economy where everybody is rationed. So here’s a potential solution to this. Let’s say you want to decarbonize and what we do now in the neoliberal economy is to do everything with competitive bidding. Competitive Bidding is anti-holistic because you win the competition by externalizing as much as you can. So you solve one problem, but you create anothers. In order to win, you have to be really reductionist. If you do a circular finance, let me explain what that means. You create a public ledger, that public ledger allows every citizens every collective to have its decarbonisation efforts to be verified. So you have it verified, you have been tokenized. And it either through taxation, or through contributions, those who profit from that positive externality, you fund these tokens and you create a circle. It can be very easy. I’ll give you an example Belgium, a small city — 20% of the kids used a bicycle. So it creates pollution because, you know, 80% cars. You create traffic accidents, noise, everything. SO “okay let’s pay these kids mileage mileage based currency” — I forgot the name but, you know, it exists in Bonheiden — they let them then use that currency in the circular economy, the local circular economy, so recycle makerspaces, Fab Labs. So, now they went to 60%. So considering cycling generative as compared to the extractive effects of cars and you recognize it creates value, so you have a priority but you leave people free to choose how they’re going to do it. You know, to use their creativity in answering those societal challenges. I hope that makes sense.

Simone Cicero:
No, it makes a lot of sense. And I think maybe my last question for this conversation today, or my last reflection that I want to offer — and maybe Stina wants to add more — but, you know, every time that we talk about for example, this moving out of competitive bidding into circular finance, and we speak about, you know, the need for institutional enforcement, you know, multinational institutions to enforce these regulations, which is of course, very meaningful — I find it very meaningful — but, you know, for example you will have witnessed that in the last few weeks, there were lots of people talking about how corrupt is the World Health Organization. So, there is this issue — I’m not saying that — but I’m saying that a lot of people are saying, you know, these are corrupt institutions not telling us for example, that masks are useful, you know, because they don’t want to make us, you know, freak out or something like that. So, in general, I think the question on potentially dealing with the corruption of the institutions, and in general the scarce capability to work, because of the complexity of the matter that they regulate. It is something that should make us think about, you know, what is the other route? And when I was talking with John Robb — we were talking with John Robb a few days ago — he made a reflection with us, basically saying “I want to be able to connect with the global system on my own terms”. If I am, you know, creating a local system — for example, caring about my resilience — I can connect with me on my own terms. And this is quite different as an approach or an epistemological political approach, you know, either we end up with these multinational institutions that everybody trusts, which is I believe a very difficult, you know, a very improbable outcome, or we may end up with these local institutions that connect with, connect between each other on their local own terms. So, maybe these connections that we are going to create, these multinational inter-networks and connections are more like you know, gonna be produced as tools.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, yeah, I think this is the thing that, you know, fundamentally libertarian people like John Robbs don’t get. This is actually the core of what I’m trying to tell you, that you have the two: we are living through physical bodies, and we live in a territory. And that territory is not just a local, it’s no, it’s a historically evolved situation where the communities that were destroyed by capitalism became the imagined community of the nation states. And we shouldn’t underestimate the attachment of most people to this identity, right? And we see, actually today that forces that represent the revival of the nation state are winning. They’re not losing, they’re winning. And the people who, you know, usually on the left who don’t feel this identity with a nation state, they’re losing. And then on the other hand, you have the libertarian view, right? And it’s all about networks iner-connecting networks. And I think what is missing is that the nation state is a very contradictory institution, but it also represents a “common good” institution. It’s a social contract between different parts of the population. Because what you have in the virtual world is just the same. You know, it’s not an ideal place. It’s a place with hackers — you know, I mean bad hackers now — the kind of people who steal your credit cards and stuff. So, it’s the interaction between the two, right? So we need strong, commons institution. I’m trying to give you a few examples of what I see as potential new commons institutions. And then we need to work on the interrelationship between both. Because for example, you talk about WHO, you say they’re corrupt. Why are they corrupt? They are corrupt because they are international. So Western countries don’t have enough masks. So they want to preserve the masks for the doctors and the hospital systems. So they have an interest in not pushing masks. In Asia where everybody has masks, the information we get is that masks work. In Belgium, I’m getting information that masks don’t work. I checked it: masks actually work. But the corruption of the WHO is because the nation states are the only agents that have power there. So they’re gonna negotiate. And there’s a nice term, it’s called “super competent democracy”. And so I think we need more independence for the trans-national expertise as a way of counter balancing the, you know, the corrupt selfish power of nation states. But we can’t have a completely new system that ignores nation state when the nation state is still dominant and powerful. Does that make sense?

Simone Cicero:
Totally, totally. I think one insight that I’m driving from this conversation is that we probably need to care about the local and indigenous regional, you know, many, many terms we are using to describe these systems where we as citizens, we can be more actively engaged in producing on top of the commons. But we also need to care about these interrelationships, inter-relational institutions that need to connect these nodes. That’s the part that I’m more concerned about, you know.

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that’s what we’re missing and, you know, we had it in the Middle Ages and was called the Catholic Church. Right? This was an institution that existed in parallel with the regional powers that was organized on a European scale. And so it could identify with, let’s say the interests of Western civilization, not just, you know, not just a local perspective of the regional Lord

Simone Cicero:
Good point

Stina Heikkila:
This links well into the question that I had also because earlier you spoke about this mutation of consciousness that we can start to somehow see emerging, where people are tired of this endless capitalism that is destroying the planet. So I see the link between what you mentioned in terms of this kind of radical transparency, where you would be able to basically see the impact in real time of a decision, right? So what is the cultural shift in that mutation of consciousness? Like how could we nurture citizens who could, you know, look for the right kind of choices?

Michel Bauwens:
Well, I think it should start probably in school because right now, the modern school is an agent of alienation. You know, so we decided in the 16th century in Europe, that the body was separate from the mind that the human was separate from nature. And all our institutions reinforce this. So that’s what you learn in school. You know, you learn all the abstract knowledge. But you don’t know anything about cleaning your room and about growing stuff. And for example, if you live in a country like Thailand, you’d see that all the children of the farmers don’t want to be farmers anymore. Right? So there’s a complete break between tradition and the relationship to the land, local, and then when they go to the school, it’s all about the nation state and science and engineering and you know, all good stuff. But you know what I’m trying to say, right? So I saw this documentary — I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of the city, but it’s in Finland, I believe, in northern Finland — and it’s the first carbon positive city in the world. And what you see there is that the children are involved in this. So the children think about heating, they think about eco, they think about organizing the school in a way that, you know, it doesn’t use so much energy. So they started building like, how to say, a warming system that works on the floor. And so the kids are inventing all kinds of things. And so they are really growing up with a different kind of consciousness. So I think that, you know, that a large part of the answer is generational. At some point, we’re going to have to educate our children in entirely different ways than ways we were educated. You know, we’re largely lost already, in a way, because we’re so used to consumption and to all these separations. So even if we are ideologically sympathetic to these innovations, to be honest, in our daily lives, very few of us are actually living differently. And so, you know, changing our mind is the first step but to actually change the whole body-mind has to be mobilized. And I think this is something — you have to do some kind of programming of a worldview — and that has to be done very early.

Simone Cicero:
Well, Michel, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation. So I’m happy to offer a little bit of a reflection to wrap it up. I think we’re witnessing again and again, the fact that it’s a generational issue, it’s an educational one. And it looks — I don’t want to say that it looks like we understand what needs to be done — but somehow, more and more we understand that aspects of the current system need to change. We need to re-embed most of our economy to our region on a local scale. We need to, you know, develop these regulations and we need to change the educational system, but sometimes it looks like — or at least it was — you know, a trajectory where it was very hard to stop for a moment and to rethink, you know, the new systems. And, you know, sometimes — I was afraid to say that — but sometimes when I see that the systems are recovering, rebounding after the corona first hit, first wave, I’m thinking, you know, maybe in the future we’ll miss the corona times, where we had to stay at home.

Michel Bauwens:
So we can reset our thinking, right?

Simone Cicero:
Exactly and like, my question is, are we doing it or not?

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, I think we’re doing it. So here’s the way for me to see it: you have a stable system and the only way to go to a new stable system is through a chaotic transition because societies are complex adaptive systems. So we are ready since 2008 in the chaotic transition. And then what we need is you know, pedagogical catastrophes. We are going to learn because we are going to be shocked. And corona is the first shock, the first true shock — maybe the second if you count 2008 — but corona is a wake up call, and I think that it will have long term effects. I think it is, you know, we’ll try to go back to normal in some way. But I think in many ways people have woken up, for example, to the fact that our state systems no longer work. That you know, we don’t have ventilators, we don’t have masks. How is that possible? The most advanced Western countries are not coping with this pandemic as they should. And they lost tens of thousands of people because they were not organized in the proper way. And a lot of people will lose their income, you know, they will have to rethink their place in the world. So I think this will be a multi year shock and it will have effects but it’s not enough to have one shock. We’ll have more, but maybe this is the first one.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, I mean, just as a closure, I think, you know, I was listening to Jamie Wheal a few days ago on a podcast and I think he said something interesting: that sometimes, you know, that there’s this conversation now around this idea of “Game B” — also this idea that we need to make transition towards a new civilization. And it’s interesting to say that, you know, parts of this new civilization are already here. And sometimes we iconise, let’s say we imagine this transition as something very different, while the reality is it’s gonna start by steps, you know, through maybe this new disruption that we are living through these days is going to push us in this direction. A little step, and then another one, and then another one. And we end up maybe in a few years with a system that is completely different. So hopefully.

Michel Bauwens:
I think that’s how it works, yes, there is no, you know, there is, okay…. So you know, I was quite unhappy as a youth and I went to therapy. And you know, I did it for about seven years, and there is not a single therapy where I felt “this is it”. And yet after seven years, I was different. You know what I mean? So, I suddenly realized that I had changed. But there was no there was no like, revolutionary moment. And I think in the West, we’re too focused on this idea of, you know, the revolution that comes from the French and the Russian revolutions. But actually, even those industrial revolutions were different in every country. And it was a religious civil war in England. It was, you know, the military class which took power in Germany. The Tsar then liberated the serfs in Russia. So it took so many different forms, right? And I think this is going to be the same. We, you know, we shouldn’t wait for this magic moment. You have all these little changes and at some time, it will feel “Wow. Now the logic is already different”.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, maybe maybe Michel we just need to give up our tendency to try to model everything because this transition is not gonna be modelled very easily. So Michel, thanks very much. That was an amazing conversation. And really, we thank you for this and I’m sure that our listeners will have lots of food for thought. And for sure we had it, so thanks again.

Michel Bauwens:
Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Stina, as well.

The post Commons-based peer production at the edge of a chaotic transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“How about if the future of work does not get answered straight away with automation, but with cowork, with the creation of commons, with putting up productive energies, and the definition of work towards social and environmental ends.”

IN THIS EPISODE

Stacco Troncoso, Strategic direction steward of the P2P Foundation

Micky Metts, Worker/owner of Agaric

Ela Kagel, Cofounder and managing director of SUPERMARKT

TRANSCRIPT

Laura Flanders:

We’re relying more and more on free online platforms to mediate and inform our lives. But are they really free? As our digital selves are crunched, categorized, and traded, for-profit companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon make out exerting an alarming amount of control over our economy and us in the process. It could get much worse, but there are alternatives. This week on the show, I talk with coders, activists, and tech entrepreneurs who are at the forefront of the platform cooperativism movement. They’ll share their experience with cooperatively owned and operated digital platforms, which distribute rather than concentrate, power and wealth. If we take the cooperative route, they argue tomorrow’s digital economy could shrink inequality rather than exacerbate it and change our lives in the digital world and also on the dance floor. It’s all coming up on the Laura Flanders Show. The place where the people who say it can’t be done, take a back seat to the people who are doing it. Welcome.

Laura Flanders:

Welcome all to the show. Glad to have you. Let’s start with platform cooperativism because I still don’t think people quite understand what we’re talking about. So what is a digital platform and why does it need to be cooperativised?

Micky Metts:

Yes, a digital platform is the type of tool we use every day, as you said, a Facebook is a digital platform, amazon is a digital platform for buying things. We believe in platform cooperativism that people need to own the platforms that we use daily and engage in. We need to be the keepers of our own information and to put forward the goals we want with our platforms. We are now being owned by platforms that we are on and we are so far engaged in them that they own all of our contacts, all of our information. If you were to be shut off of a platform, you would not have any connection with all the people, the thousands of friends that have given you likes and that you know. So for platform cooperativism, people need to build and own the platforms that we use.

Laura Flanders:

So is it as simple, Stacco, as to say maybe once upon a time the marketplace was where we did our business, now it’s some platform online and there’s a problem.

Stacco Troncoso:

Well, they increasingly mediate our daily lives, they mediate our elections, how we relate to each other, and we have no ownership of this. And they’re actually headquartered in the US but they have worldwide reach. So how about we lower the transactional cost of that collaboration and take ownership of the decision making of how they affect us.

Laura Flanders:

Well what’s the cost we’re paying now?

Stacco Troncoso:

The cost we’re paying now is that our digital facsimile of you is creating information for advertisers to exacerbate consumerism, to give data to further set political ends, which may not be in accord to you, the data generator.

Laura Flanders:

So that reminds me of what we’ve heard about recently. We saw some of the leaked memos from Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook corporation, literally bargaining with clients based on the currency they had, which is us.

Ela Kagel:

I mean there’s the saying that goes if it’s free, you are the product. And I think that’s true for all the digital platforms where your data is being sold and your privacy rights are just being used.

Laura Flanders:

And just to put a little bit more of a fine pin on it. How is that different from advertising? Because I always say the for-money media is all about delivering people to advertisers, unlike the independent media, which is about delivering people to each other. So is it really different?

Ela Kagel:

I think it’s entirely different because advertising is a way of sending out a message to the world and you can still decide for yourself whether you want to receive it or not. But what we are talking about here is media corporations owning the infrastructure of our society, not only our data but also looking at Airbnb for instance, owning streets, owning neighborhoods, and transforming the way we live and relate to each other. And I think that’s really, that’s a different story.

Laura Flanders:

So what do we do about this? Stacco, you have this extraordinary DisCO manifesto that you’re releasing and you’re on book tour with it now. It is sort of about disco, but not quite.

Stacco Troncoso:

So what is DisCO? DisCO stands for distributed cooperative organizations. They’re a way for people to get together and work, and create, and distribute value in commons oriented, feminist economics, and peer to peer ways. You don’t get to do this at work very much, to exercise these kind of relationships. And there are also critique of this monster called the decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO. They’re basically corporations or organizations that exist on the block chain that can execute contracts, they can levy penalties, they can employ people. So the computer organizations that wield their own economic power, and because technology is far from neutral and it always follows the ideals of those who are investing in it, we’re quite concerned about the deployment of these decentralized autonomous organizations. So we came up with the DisCO as an alternative, which is comparative on solidarity base.

Stacco Troncoso:

This came out of the lived experience of our comparative called the Guerrilla Media Collective, which started with a project based around translation and combining pro bono work and paid work. So we will do social and environmentally aware translations for someone like Ela for example, but then we would also do client work and the income that would come from our agency work would come back to compensate for the pro bono work. And we did this because volunteering, doing pro bono stuff is cool if you have the privilege to do it. But if you’re a mother and you have five kids and you need to get to the end of the month, maybe you want to look into compensatory mechanisms so you can do valuable work. So this was the guerrilla translation, guerrilla media collective story. But as we became, through our work in the P2P Foundation, aware of this world of the blockchain, et cetera, we said, “Well, we need a feminist reaction to this,” and why we need that is it’s a movement that talks a lot about decentralization, but it doesn’t really talk about decentralizing power and this trifecta of hierarchy, which is capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

Stacco Troncoso:

So how can we operate in the marketplace while articulating those values?

Laura Flanders:

Micky, you’ve worked closely with the Ujima Project in Boston where you’re based, that is also trying to address this problem of investing and where it comes from and where it doesn’t go.

Micky Metts:

Yes. Well, one of the problems with investing is the vetting, of course, and finding out all the underlying ties, et cetera. If you’re not really speaking, today’s language of technology, it is very hard to vet what technology you’re going to invest in. And without consulting the community, you can’t really build the technology they need. So right now we’ve ended up with a bunch of corporations that are tightly tied with corrupt governments doing their bidding and feeding the information directly to the government. So without disengaging from that, there really is nowhere for us to go.

Laura Flanders:

So if you’re making software differently-

Micky Metts:

Yes.

Laura Flanders:

How do you do it?

Micky Metts:

We use free software that allows the people that use it to modify it, change it, sell it, do anything they want with it. When you’re using a corporation’s software, like a Facebook or whatever they build their platforms with, you cannot see into that and you cannot see what they’re doing, which is as Shoshana Zuboff is talking about now, surveillance capitalism, which in a nugget leads right down to predictive analysis.

Micky Metts:

And now there is a bill that William Barr has put up to use predictive analysis to take our social media or a doctor’s records, combine them, and search for signs of mental illness. And then to put us-

Laura Flanders:

As defined by somebody.

Micky Metts:

Yes, who we don’t know who yet, and then to place us in observation against our will. How is this possible? And hardly anyone knows it, but these are platforms that are corrupt, that are all filtering info to the governments.

Laura Flanders:

I highly recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, if you haven’t read it, people. Ela to you, you don’t only work with artists, but you have worked for a long time in the artistic community in Berlin. How does that fit into this discussion? How do artists engage with the same question?

Ela Kagel:

Well, I’ve seen quite a lot of my artistic friends moving away from contemporary art and rather diving into the world of activism, trying to apply artistic strategies to helping bring about social change. So I think that’s something that is happening because also, the artistic world is subject to a colonialization of people who have the money and the power to acquire arts. But that also brought about a really interesting movement of people applying all sorts of strategies.

Laura Flanders:

You work at the very prosaic level though of people’s daily needs as well, and I understand you’ve been working on a project having to do with food delivery systems.

Ela Kagel:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Flanders:

We’ve got lot of automated food delivery now coming from companies like Amazon, or explicitly Amazon in the US. Is that a similar problem in Berlin?

Ela Kagel:

Yeah, I think it’s starting to be a real problem everywhere. So a lot of these food delivery networks are owned by BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. So no matter are you trying to build locally? In a sense, you need to compete against this company. But what I think is super interesting when Deliveroo decided to pull out of some European markets, there have been a bunch of writers who decided, “Okay, so we are fed up anyways, we’re going to start our own thing. So we will apply a different ethics to what we do. We will create a platform co-op, something that is owned by us, something that allows us democratic control over what we do.” So there’s an interesting movement emerging now in Europe. It’s happening in Spain with Mensakas, it’s happening in Berlin as well.

Ela Kagel:

And it’s really interesting because this is not so much about taking a sole and entrepreneurial decision about, “Okay, I’m starting a co op or a company,” but this has more of a shared effort because clearly if a bunch of people is trying to build a sustainable food delivery network in a local sense, it’s super, it’s almost impossible to compete against the likes of, you know. So this really requires a shared effort of municipalities, of activists, people who know how to build co-ops, it’s super essential. The people who run the business, but also restaurants and potential partners, to really build something that is a real alternative to the food delivery as we know it. And I find it so interesting because these meetings, they feel different. This is not the startup situation, but this is really about creating multi-stakeholder models in cities and helping to bring about a real shared effort because all these organizations will only exist if you all want them to be, otherwise it won’t happen.

Laura Flanders:

They won’t be able to compete with the huge multinational. Well that gets to my next question for you, Stacco, the DisCO Manifesto is a lot about what happens online, but it’s also a lot about what happens offline in communities. And I want to just elaborate a little bit on what Ela just said, that co-ops are typically other privately owned organizations. They’re privately owned companies, they just happen to have a lot of private owners. Is there a possibility that you could have accumulation of wealth in cooperative hands that would still be concentrated, would still potentially be manipulated or abusive or surveilling, or are you trying to change the whole ethic of capitalism around accumulation?

Stacco Troncoso:

Despite the issue of private ownership, you can see that co-ops are like this fenced off area to experiment with other models, because co-ops actually overturn the three technologies of capitalism. So private ownership of the means of production becomes collective ownership. Wage labor? There’s no wage labor, you’re the worker and the owner, and an exclusive orientation to what’s profit is tempered by the cooperative principles. Now on the subject of comparative, as opposed to capital accumulation, as Ela has said, there’s multi-stakeholder models and you have precedents in Quebec and Emilia Romagna where for example, instead of privatizing healthcare, how about we give it to co-ops and we will have four kinds of votes. And one of them, it will be the state or the municipality that are putting up the funds, another vote will go to the doctors, another vote will go to the patients, and another vote will go to the family of the patients.

Stacco Troncoso:

So this is the more decision making side, but you can see that it’s emphasizing people who are part of the economic activity beyond the co-op. Co-ops have existed for 150 years, but they haven’t brought about the desired revolution that they could foreshadow, and part of it is because they do not talk to each other, they don’t know how to mutualize, and they don’t know how to mutualize economically for greater ends. You mentioned the big boys and they are boys, which is Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple, they have a market cap collectively of 3 trillion US dollars, but co-ops worldwide have also market cap of $3 trillion but they’re not talking to each other.

Laura Flanders:

You’re nodding and smiling, Micky.

Micky Metts:

Yeah. The most important thing that I see and hear from people we talk with is what the co-op movement needs most is a secure communications platform that is not owned by the Man or by governments. Because without that, our communications are kidnapped. We are not in real communicate, like the WhatsApp app that is just ubiquitous, that is a direct spy mechanism.

Laura Flanders:

You can say that it’s all the problem of capital orthodoxy and the tendencies of the economy. But isn’t it also our fault, Ela?

Ela Kagel:

I find this a super interesting question, to be honest, but anyway, I think we’ve had a really tiny time window where we actually had a choice. I wonder, if talking about today, if we still have that choice. Coming back to what you just said, you need to have the privilege to have the time to search for an alternative to opt out of these networks. But very often people are not in a position to opt out of Facebook and all these other platforms. WhatsApp, whatever. So that’s the real problem. And it’s not so much about us taking a choice. And I see this rather as a quite dangerous way of framing the situation. I think this is more about building an alternative to what’s there.

Laura Flanders:

Can we build one when Google has, I think, 96% of all the search business at this point? is it too late?

Stacco Troncoso:

I don’t think it’s too late. And if you look at the history of these monsters, they’ve only existed for some 20 odd years, and born out of public money. Here’s the thing, even though they may seem like behemoths, which are impossible to take down, take into account if the revolutionary drive of the 19th and 20th century was let’s take over the factories, let’s take over this massive economies of scale. What about if the means of production are actually in your laptop right now? And what about if we can network those laptops? It is much easier to create the alternatives. With that being said, what is really difficult is to have this network effect because what we need are alternatives, which are easy to use, which are inclusive, where your friends are, and this is where we’re lagging behind because of course we don’t have those massive investments, but the actual technology and to educate people into this technology is much simpler.

Micky Metts:

It’s there.

Stacco Troncoso:

Yeah. And it’s beautiful for people to actually know how to make the technology not just have it handed to you.

Laura Flanders:

How do we move forward to make the change that you’re talking about? It’s not going to be sporadic, you over here and you’re over here and maybe one TV show in a million once every 10 years. How do we do it? Do we embed these discussions in schooling and education? Do we fight for a better public media system? What?

Micky Metts:

Well, it’s difficult because the education system now, Microsoft and Apple got in there very early in the days of early computing and they armed all the schools with Apple’s and Macintosh systems, so now people have grown up with these systems and feel a loyalty to them that is beyond the convenience. So for new adopters, it’s the convenience, for the older generations that have grown up with these tools, it’s nearly impossible to get them out of their hands.

Laura Flanders:

Those are the screens that brought them up basically.

Micky Metts:

Yes. So even when you’re pointing out the inequities and how this tool you’re using is your jailer, people don’t really get it or they have to divide their mind and say, “I need this tool to do my work. I can’t work without it, therefore I must use it.” But I caution us all to while you’re using it, think of how inequitable it is. Think of the things that it’s doing to the system.

Laura Flanders:

But that feels like me feeling guilty when I drink out of a plastic water bottle.

Micky Metts:

It starts like that. But then with these movements and platforms, there are actual places to join and make change.

Laura Flanders:

Ela-

Micky Metts:

And to not be alone.

Laura Flanders:

You have one of those places.

Ela Kagel:

I guess we find ourselves in a place where we are constantly competing with others about likes and about visibility, attention, and so forth. So what if we would really work on strengthening our local communities, our municipalities in order to create a sense of where we are, what our communities are, having more opportunities of actually getting together and helping each other with all these questions. Because one of the big problems of the neoliberal past 10, 50 years, 15 I mean, was the fact that people got isolated in a way. So that’s really, that’s proof to be a side effect. So for me a counter strategy is to radically create those opportunities in places where people can come together. That’s the first thing, because that is missing.

Laura Flanders:

So what do you do in Berlin?

Ela Kagel:

Well, there is Supermarkt but also other spaces because Berlin, this is in recent years turned into a hub of people that want to make the world a better place, which is great.

Ela Kagel:

And since space is still sort of available, there are enough people took advantage of that and got a space, rented it, and opening up that space for community events. So that’s what we also do at Supermarkt. So in doing so, just being there, that’s helped a community to emerge and that wasn’t curated by myself or anything, it was just about being there, opening the doors, running regular events, and then things happen automatically. They just emerge by people being in the same spot. And I really think that’s a healthy way to try to counter the current situation, but of course it’s not just the communities there. They also need backing from local politics and they need solid financing structures, and that finance cannot just come from the classic world of finance, but also that needs a collaborative effort to raise funds from sources that are acceptable and sustainable. I really think these are big tasks we need to tackle and there is no easy solution for that. But at the same time, what I really see, for instance at the Platform Co-op Conference here, I see a lot of people starting initiatives and I see them thriving. So there is hope, but we just need to bring these people together, as Stacco said, we need to build an ecosystem of platform co-ops.

Laura Flanders:

We caught up with one such group at the Platform Cooperative Conference titled Who Owns the World held at the New School in New York in November, 2019. For over 20 years, Smart Co-Op has provided work security for tens of thousands of freelances in over 40 cities in nine European countries. Here’s what they had to say.

Sandrino Graceffa:[in French, translation follows 00:22:00].

Our organization, Smart, has understood that there was an intermediate position, between the classical salaried worker and the individual forms of entrepreneurship, we call it the grey zone of the working world. This grey zone consists of creatives, freelancers, people that work with a lot of discontinuity. We call it the new form of employment. The atypical jobs. The institutions, whichever they are, don’t really take into account this category of workers who still need to be protected. Therefore, our organization intends to bring new solutions to these problems of work and employment.

Tyon Jadoul:

We are pursuing a social model for social transformation. We have a really political dimension to our project that strive to offer the best social protection for the most freelancer as possible.

Sandrino Graceffa:[in French, translation follows 00:23:01].

The core activity of Smart is to provide the administrative, accountability and financial frameworks that allow autonomous workers, freelancers, to charge for their performances. In exchange, Smart gives them a working contract, a salaried working contract. Smart converts the revenue into a salaried working contract and therefore brings the best level of protections for these workers.

Tyon Jadoul:

You can have a real living democracy participation of the members, even with a big structure like us because we are now about 25,000 cooperators or associates in Belgium. How we do that, we invented or created different possibility for a member to participate into the evolution, the decision making of our cooperative. You could do it by participating to small meetings at night, you can do it by giving your opinions online on a blog, by writing something that you might find interesting, by coming to the general assembly each year, you can watch it online, you can vote online, you can express your voice.

Laura Flanders:

Sharing successful models and innovative ideas is essential if we’re ever going to create a more democratic digital world, cooperatives owned and controlled by their workers look set to play an important part in that evolution.

Laura Flanders:

So we often end this program by asking people what they think the story will be that the future tells of this moment. So Stacco, I’m going to ask you, what do you think is the story the future will tell of us now?

Stacco Troncoso:

Just off hand, it may be the moment where people were doing things that were criticized as folly or useless, but really what we’re doing is to build capacity, and we’re building capacity because there’s people that talk of collapse and you always imagine like the Mad Max sexy collapse, but we’re in an ongoing process of collapse. But we’re doing these things that may not make sense, according to the predominant economic logic, but man, they will make sense in the next economic crisis where incidentally, co-ops over all economic crises have actually thrived, kept to their principles, and being more successful. But it’s not just that, there’s also overcoming the alienation that Ela talks about. How about if the future of work does not get answered straight away with automation, but with care work, with the creation of commons, with putting up productive energies, that being that the definition of work towards social and environmental ends.

Stacco Troncoso:

And I think that we’re in this hinge moment where everything may seem hopeless, but a lot of things are crumbling and those solutions which are being posited, your green growth, your neoliberal strategies now to tackle climate, they’re not going to work. And again, process of collapse we raise the ground with alternatives.

Laura Flanders:

All right, I’m going to leave it there. Thank you all. Micky, Stacco, Ela, great conversation. You can find out more about the Platform Cooperativist conference or the Conference on Platform Cooperativism at our website and we’ve been happy to be part of it these last few years.

Ela Kagel:

Thank you.

Micky Metts:

Thank you.

Laura Flanders:

Thanks.

The post Take back the App! A dialogue on Platform Cooperativism, Free Software and DisCOs appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Especially in these times, honoring our ancestors is investing in and trusting alternatives that are based in dignity, health and livelihoods for all of us. 

In the early 1960s, my grandma was a secretary at the Caymanas Sugar Estate in Portmore, Jamaica. She helped the cane cutters who worked on the estate’s land create a credit union. At that time, workers were acknowledging the problematics of who owned the capital and resources on their island. In 1962, Jamaica gained independence from the British, with the hopes of more national equity and securing workers rights. My grandmother understood that helping the cane cutters pool their money to create a credit union was one step closer to liberation from the confines of colonialism and capitalism. At the time she thought of it as a necessity—as the right thing to do—rather than an alternative economy.

Throughout the Caribbean and Africa, the sharing of resources and money is not new. Sou sous and other types of community banking are age-old practices. These traditions even emigrated overseas to places like the U.K. and Canada along with Jamaicans who realized they would not receive the queen’s royalties they learned of during their schooling.

Like Jamaican cane cutters and emigrants realizing they lacked access to the things they needed, we also now find ourselves similarly situated in the current pandemic. As we recognize that people need immediate access to resources, we are realizing that the most effective tools are local economies, regional manufacturing systems, and community banking. 

As people succumb to fear, individuals are hoarding the resources we need to protect ourselves against the COVID-19 virus, children are missing meals since schools are shut down, city governments are realizing housing should be a human right as we are called to Shelter in Place, and the federal government is finally acknowledging that freezing student loans will actually bolster the economy. It is clear the systems that currently shape our societies do not work towards human continuity or resilience. In fact, it is this way of life that has resulted in the crises that we are currently in: the health crisis, climate crisis and spiritual crisis. 

The pervasiveness of capitalism has overshadowed other types of economies so that we don’t think any other way is possible. Rather than many economies we are told there is one economy, and that one is capitalist. The dominant globalized economy has become so embedded into everyday life that investing in and finding accessible alternatives is a barrier for many of us. In the U.S., buying local clothing or food is a luxury. It is more expensive to buy locally made products than buying fashion or produce from thousands of miles away. 

If we are going to make it to the other side of this pandemic and this deteriorating world, then just as others before us have recognized, we have to rely on community interdependence, cultural equity, and alternative economies as a basis moving forward.

Luckily, we don’t have to wait for a SciFi future to participate in alternatives that support a better life for all of us. My grandmother knew this more than half a century ago. Around the world, communities are participating in and building other economies. I honor the work she did by investing in and participating in these communities. I am grateful to be part of an alternative circular economy with a council of womxn. I hope my experience can shed light on some of the current possibilities. 

I joined a gifting economy: a Mandala circle. Along with several other amazing womxn, we each gift whichever womxn is in the center of the circle at the time we decide to join. Eventually it’ll be our turn in the center of the circle to receive gifts. We have calls three times a week to discuss our dreams, intentions, challenges and proudest moments. We support one another and share resources. We share what we’d like to do and want to do if money was not an issue. We talk about our work and all that we are currently doing. We laugh and build sisterhood. 

The gifts the womxn in the center of the circle receives are monetary. However, giving the gift is not transactional, based in ownership or capital. It is based in love, trust, and the belief that we all deserve to live how we want without having to compete with each other. We gift this womxn knowing that she is free to do whatever she’d like with the money. The womxn in the center is not expected to pay it back and does not have to use it for professional purposes—although she can. We do not put barriers or burdens on the gifts, and trust she will make the right decision with her gifts. When it’s each womxn’s turn in the center, she receives the same agency and trust. We are investing in each other rather than stocks that are attached to extractive, exploitive enterprises. 

There are several of these Mandala circles. Some circles gift different amounts of money, and you can start out in a fractal Mandala circle in order to amass enough money to participate in the larger one. The Mandala circle splits so that it can multiply once the womxn in the center has received eight gifts. It is precisely this multiplication factor that allows this form of investment to be soundly sustainable, allowing more womxn to join the movement. At no point in the Mandala circle do you have to beg anyone for money, go to a bank, worry about interest, report on what you’re doing with the money, exploit anyone to get the money…you just have to be engaged in community with others. 

In my particular Mandala, each womxn will receive several thousand dollars without strings attached after gifting a little over a thousand dollars to whomever is in the center of the circle when she joins. We do not advertise on social media or do marketing. We do not hold space for those who only want to join for the money. Our circle is not about consumption, trends or not having enough. It is about rejuvenation, healing, and abundance. There is enough in the world, it’s just not distributed fairly. When we have money, we usually spend it on companies that are greedy and do not care about us. This is primarily because these companies are constantly in our face with advertising and usually widely accessible. In our Mandala, we put our money where our values are when we can—whether we have a little of it or a lot.   

We are linked in our shared values that thriving livelihoods and collective economics is a way forward. We are connected in our understanding that the ways of our ancestors can get us to the other side of this unsustainable violent system. We are bound by the belief that interdependence and supporting one another is the only way we will all survive. We believe in reciprocity and concentric circles, rather than greed and hierarchies. We believe that sometimes it is your turn to give and sometimes it is your turn to receive. Sometimes it is your turn to lead and sometimes it is your turn to follow. We know that everyone in the circle is deserving and worthy.  We know that giving a gift is both selfish and selfless: because you feel good when you do it and the person who gets it feels good when they receive it. 

The cane cutters’ credit union in 1960s Jamaica my grandma helped to start and the Mandala circle I’m a part of today are examples of alternatives to the current mainstream economic model. The current economic model really only benefits a wealthy few. The “economy” does not have to feel competitive, exclusive and exhausting. An economy can feel refreshing, collective and inclusive. These are the economies we need to support and build to combat this pandemic, to stop the climate crises, and to transform current ideological backwardness. These are the economies we need to trust. We need each other. The Mandala circle I am in—and other alternative economies—start from this premise. 

The time is now, we can’t go back to “normal”— and why would we want to anyways. As Arundhati Roy  aptly wrote last week in the Financial Times: 

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Here are a few alternatives to check out:

• For Streaming: enjoy videos & films on this worker-owned post-capitalist streaming service
• For Food in the Bay Area (co-ops): Mandela Grocery Store and Rainbow Grocery
• For Health in the Bay Area: Berkeley Free Clinic
• For Indigenous Solidarity: contribute to the Shuumi Land Tax, supporting an indigenous women-led land trust
• For Land & Food Justice for POC in California: donate to the Minnow Project
• For Solar Power & Renewable Energy in the Bay Area: worker-owned  Sun Light & Power can provide affordable, clean energy for your affordable housing unit or non-profit organization
• For Supplemental / Alternative Education for Black People: 400 + 1 collective centers Black liberation and prosperity (*specifically for Black communities)
• For Banking & Money: Black-owned Credit Union of Atlanta (*you don’t have to be Black to put your money in this credit union)
• For more information on the Mandala circle I’m in send me a direct message, although many circles are all womxn the Mandala Movement is open to all

Lead image: mandala by xavo_rob 

The post Pandemic Priorities: supporting alternatives now is promoting a sustainable economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

While politicians clearly hope that massive government bailouts will restore the economy, it’s important to recognize that this is not just a financial crisis; it’s a social and political crisis as well. Many legacy market systems – generously subsidized and propped up by state power – are not really trusted or loved by people. Do Americans really want to give $17 billion to scandal-ridden Boeing while letting the post office go bankrupt? It is too early to declare that the old forms will never return, and we do need to remember that the authoritarian option is dangerously close. But it is clear that the future will have a very different pattern.

To me, one thing is obvious: searching for the rudiments of a New Order should be our top priority once emergency needs are taken care of. We need to identify and cultivate new patterns of peer provisioning and place-based governance, especially at the local and regional levels. We need new types of infrastructures and new narratives that understand the practical need for open-source civic and economic engagement.

This is not only necessary to help us deal with climate change and inequality; it is a preemptive necessity for fortifying democracy itself. Reactionary forces are already poised to try to restore a pre-pandemic “normal.” “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting,” writes filmmaker Julio Vincent Gambuto in a wonderful essay on Medium.

Gambuto astutely predicts that corporate America, the White House, and the rest of capitalist establishment will soon mount a massive marketing campaign to minimize the realities we’re now experiencing and rebrand the American Dream as back:

Get ready, my friends. What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government, it will even come from each other, and it will come from the left and from the right. We will do anything, spend anything, believe anything, just so we can take away how horribly uncomfortable all this feels.

And on top of that, just to turn the screw that much more, will be the one effort that’s even greater: the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war one; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America…. But you did. You are not crazy, my friends. And so we are about to be gaslit in a truly unprecedented way.

Put another way, economists Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin foresee what they call “the coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative.” In a paper by that title on Vox CEPR Policy Portal, Bowles and Carlin declare the coronavirus to be “a blow to self-interest as a value orientation and laissez-faire as a policy paradigm, both already reeling amid mounting public concerns about climate change.”

They predict that a struggle will soon be underway to lock in the political and economic lessons of the pandemic. There will be a big push for a state-friendly, capitalist-affirming narrative, of course. But that frame will narrow the debate to familiar binary choice of “liberal” vs. “conservative” policy, subtly foreclosing consideration of larger structural reforms or a paradigm shift. We will need only ask ourselves, Do we want a bigger, more active government or free markets (sic)?

Fortunately, the pandemic supplies plentiful evidence to support a more ambitious, breakthrough agenda. The Commons Sector and all sorts of alt-economy approaches, long hovering on the progressive fringe, are now bursting out into mainstream view. Makerspaces have stepped up to make personal protective equipment using 3D printers. The City of Amsterdam has embraced Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics” framework. All sorts of localized commons – for food, social support, emergency responses, etc. – are flourishing through people-powered ingenuity and goodwill. Thanks to the pandemic, once-fringe ideas (universal basic income, wealth taxes, relocalizing supply chains) are seen as practical if not essential options.

Bowles and Carlin argue that the pandemic calls into question the very language of economics and public policy. It is now clear that neither market contracts nor government edicts are capable of solving this and future pandemics. In addition, they argue, a “market vs. state” framing of future possibilities fails to acknowledge what the pandemic is showing — “the contribution of social norms and of institutions that are neither government nor markets – like families, relationships within firms, and community organisations.”

For example, 750,000 ordinary Brits volunteered to help the National Health Service in dealing with the pandemic (only 250,000 could be practically put to work). Among South Koreans, there was a huge outpouring of social cooperation to get tested for the virus. One might also add to these examples the remarkable mutual aid projects that have spontaneously arisen worldwide, as chronicled by George Monbiot in The Guardian.

The pandemic has demonstrated that old systems are broken (and were always broken). But many people, including progressives and political parties, are still not willing to recognize this reality. They can’t quite admit that new institutional forms and social behaviors are entirely possible on a systemic, ongoing basis.

Rather than backslide into the old, familiar ideological mindsets, it’s vital that we stride into the new spaces that have opened up! If you look carefully to the outskirts of mainstream politics and policy – to the many “new economy” experiments underway – you can see the lineaments of a new order. There is a huge constellation of promising experiments and proven archetypes. What they share in common beyond non-capitalist organizational forms is their invisibility on MSNBC, CNN, and among many progressive NGOs.

It’s hard to acknowledge that bottom-up social energies can and do work, that there are developed alternatives awaiting expansion and refinement. These models don’t resemble markets or bureaucracies, however, which is surely one reason they have been marginalized. They are emergent, situation-based social phenomena. They can’t be strictly controlled from the top-down, which may be why traditional power centers are so wary of them. They have a quasi-sovereignty of their own that stems from being grounded in a geography, with real grassroots players, who work together as a living, peer-organized, evolving force. This is precisely why they can accomplish so much serious work so quickly and flexibly, as pandemic mutual-aid initiatives have shown.

As renegade economists, Bowles and Carlin appreciate the limits of markets and the state:

Neither government officials nor private owners and managers of firms know enough to write incentive-based enforceable contracts or government fiats to implement optimal social distancing, surveillance, or deployment of resources to the health sector, including to vaccine development….

[N]on-governmental and nonmarket solutions may actually contribute to mitigating problems that are poorly addressed by contract or fiat. The behavioral economics revolution makes it clear that people – far from the individualistic and amoral representation in conventional economics – are capable of extraordinary levels of cooperation based on ethical values and other regarded preferences.

Bowles and Carlin don’t really explore HOW to foster new forms of collective social action, however, or what specific ones ought to be embraced. Perhaps they are not so familiar with the world of commoning and the impressive variety of “new economy” projects.

It is precisely this cohort of players who hold answers for the future. I’m talking about people who are pioneering the relocalization of food and place-based markets, new types of cooperatives, platform cooperatives in digital spaces, non-capitalist forms of finance, degrowth strategies, digital peer production, globally shared design (open source style) used to manufacture locally, agroecology and permaculture, urban commons, and countless other projects that point beyond capitalism and state bureaucracy.

A rare historical moment has opened up new possibilities. We can’t let it be wasted. We need to support an aggressive surge of institutional innovation, relationship-building and meme-spreading along with the development of new grand narratives and collaborative strategies. In a future post, I will look at some of the intriguing new institutional forms that are emerging in specific sectors.

Lead image: by Prachatai.

The post Let the Institutional Innovation Begin! (Part I) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

While health authorities focus on top-down measures to get COVID-19 supplies to hospitals in need, home-grown initiatives are enlisting regular people to create open-source equipment. Rather than wait for the impact of government efforts to persuade manufacturers to move into emergency production of ventilators and protective equipment, the sharing economy is already saving lives with home-made masks and 3D-printed ventilators.

A dearth of adequate medical supplies was implicated in an increase in coronavirus mortality in Italy, compared with Germany and South Korea, where supply was adequate.

Meeting a desperate need for ventilators through open-sourcing

Health authorities say the immediate short-term need is to get more ventilators, which compress and decompress air for patients who are too weak to breathe on their own.

In Ireland, a community called Open Source Ventilator sprang from a Facebook discussion to develop a simplified, low-cost, emergency ventilator that can be produced at scale from mostly 3D-printed components. Developed in collaboration with frontline healthcare workers, the emergency ventilator can be fabricated from locally sourced supplies and materials so its manufacture is not dependent on a global supply chain.

Before you rush out to hack together your personal ventilator, however, health experts warn that ventilators can do more harm than good if they are not properly constructed and operated. It is necessary to have the correct timing and air pressure, filtration, humidity, and temperature. Improper use can damage lung tissue and may even induce pneumonia. Faulty equipment can aerosolize the virus, causing it to infect others. Johns Hopkins has specifications for open-source ventilators. 

Home sewing corps fashion DIY masks

There are open-source projects in numerous cities focusing on producing masks for personal uses and to protect healthcare workers. COVID-19 is one micron wide and most medical masks filter particles down to three microns. So while wearing a mask doesn’t stop all virus particles, it significantly reduces the risk of infection. There is a multitude of how-to videos for how to sew your own mask with the fabric you have but health authorities caution that cotton, as shown in this video, is not good at stopping small particles so air filters should be added to protect down to three microns.  The Federal Drug Administration has guidance on producing and wearing DIY and 3D-printed masks during the pandemic.

Home computing power is put to work for drug research

The previous initiatives are aimed at short-term relief but in order to stop the spread of the disease and curb its deadly impact, we need to develop new drugs. The SARS-CoV-2 virus depends on proteins to reproduce, including an important one called the protease. Researchers want to find a molecule that can latch onto this protein and destroy it, paving the way to a therapeutic drug. That research requires a lot of computational power, which is why computer engineers have found a way for average people to donate their computer processors when they’re not using them. The Folding@home project uses software to unite home computers in a network that functions like a distributed supercomputer that can simulate possible drugs to cure the disease. The project is now over twice the size of the world’s largest supercomputer with more than an exaflop of processing power, meaning it can do a quintillion calculations per second. So far, 77 candidate drug compounds have been identified but users have raised concerns about abuse.

There are a number of ways for average people to get involved in fighting this pandemic and it’s clear that it will take all of us to beat the coronavirus. Whether you want to build a ventilator, sew a mask or contribute your excess computing power for research, the sharing economy means we can all play a part.

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This article is part of our reporting on the community response to the coronavirus crisis:

• The People’s COVID-19 Response needs you
• The coronavirus pandemic calls us to share more than ever
• 10 ways to share during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing
• 14 community-minded books to read during the 2020 quarantine
• Things got a whole lot more local than I expected due to coronavirus
• My new pandemic routine
• How these US immigrants are giving back to their new community during the COVID-19 crisis

The post Open-source medical supplies battle COVID-19 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Introduction

E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work Small Is Beautiful (1973) champions the idea of smallness and localism as the way for meaningful interactions amongst humans and the technology they use. Technology is very important after all. As Ursula Le Guin (2004) puts it, “[t]echnology is the active human interface with the material world”. With this essay we wish to briefly tell a story, inspired by this creed, of an emerging phenomenon that goes beyond the limitations of time and space and may produce a more socially viable and radically democratic life.

We want to cast a radical geographer’s eye over “cosmolocalism”. Antipode has previously published an article by Hannes Gerhardt (2019) and an interview with Michel Bauwens (Gerhardt 2020) that have touched upon “cosmolocalism”. Cosmolocalism emerges from technology initiatives that are small-scale and oriented towards addressing local problems, but simultaneously engage with globally asynchronous collaborative production through digital commoning. We thus connect such a discussion with two ongoing grassroots developments: first, a cosmolocal response to the coronavirus pandemic; and, second, an ongoing effort of French and Greek communities of small-scale farmers, activists and researchers to address their local needs.

Cosmolocalism in a Nutshell

Τhe most important means of information production – i.e. computation, communications, electronic storage and sensors – have been distributed in the population of most advanced economies as well as in parts of the emerging ones (Benkler 2006). People with access to networked computers self-organise, collaborate, and produce digital commons of knowledge, software, and design. Initiatives such as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and myriad free and open-source software projects have exemplified digital commoning (Benkler 2006; Gerhardt 2019, 2020; Kostakis 2018).

While the first wave of digital commoning included open knowledge projects, the second wave has been moving towards open design and manufacturing (Kostakis et al. 2018). Contrary to the conventional industrial paradigm and its economies of scale, the convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing machinery (from 3D printing and CNC milling machines to low-tech tools and crafts) has been developing commons-based economies of scope (Kostakis et al. 2018). Cosmolocalism describes the processes where the design is developed and improved as a global digital commons, while the manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check (Bauwens et al. 2019). The physical manufacturing arrangement for cosmolocalism includes makerspaces, which are small-scale community manufacturing facilities providing access to local manufacturing technologies.

Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, cosmolocalism emphasizes applications that are small-scale, decentralised, resilient and locally controlled. Cosmolocal production cases such as L’Atelier Paysan (agricultural tools), Open Bionics (robotic and bionic hands), WikiHouse (buildings) or RepRap (3D printers) demonstrate how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development.

Two Cases of Cosmolocalism

While this essay was being written in March 2020, a multitude of small distributed initiatives were being mobilised to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Individuals across the globe are coming together digitally to pool resources, design open source technological solutions for health problems, and fabricate them in local makerspaces and workshops. For example, people are experimenting with new ventilator designs and hacking existing ones, creating valves for ventilators which are out of stock, and designing and making face shields and respirators.

There are so many initiatives, in fact, that there are now attempts to aggregate and systematise the knowledge produced to avoid wasting resources on problems that have already been tackled and brainstorm new solutions collectively.[1] This unobstructed access to collaboration and co-creation allows thousands of engineers, makers, scientists and medical experts to offer their diverse insights and deliver a heretofore unseen volume of creative output. The necessary information and communication technologies were already available, but capitalism as a system did not facilitate the organisational structure required for such mass mobilisation. In response to the current crisis, an increasing number of people are working against and beyond the system.

Such initiatives can be considered as grassroots cosmolocal attempts to tackle the inability of the globalised capitalist arrangements for production and logistics to address any glitch in the system. We have been researching similar activity in various productive fields for a decade, from other medical applications, like 3D-printed prosthetic hands, to wind turbines and agricultural machines and tools (Giotitsas 2019; Kostakis et al. 2018).

The technology produced is unlike the equivalent market options or is entirely non-existent in the market. It is typically modular in design, versatile in materials, and as low-cost as possible to make reproduction easier (Kostakis 2019). Through our work we have identified a set of values present in the “technical codes” of such technology which can be distilled into the following themes: openness, sustainability and autonomy (Giotitsas 2019). It is these values that we believe lead to an alternative trajectory of technological development that assists the rise of a commons-based mode of production opposite the capitalist one. This “antipode” is made possible through the great capacity for collaboration and networking that its configuration offers.

Allow us to elaborate via an example. In the context of our research we have helped mobilise a pilot initiative in Greece that has been creating a community of farmers, designers and fabricators that helps address issues faced by the local farmers. This pilot, named Tzoumakers, has been greatly inspired by similar initiatives elsewhere, primarily by L’Atelier Paysan in France. The local community benefits from the technological prowess that the French community has achieved, which offers not only certain technological tools but also through them the commitment for regenerative agricultural practices, the communal utilisation of the tools, and an enhanced capacity to maintain and repair. At the same time, these tools are adapted to local needs and potential modifications along with local insights may be sent back to those that initially conceived them. This creates flows of knowledge and know-how but also ideas and values, whilst cultivating a sense of solidarity and conviviality.

Instead of Conclusions, a Call to Arms

We are not geographers. However, the implications of cosmolocalism for geography studies are evident. The spatial and cultural specificities of cosmolocalism need to be studied in depth. This type of study would go beyond critique and suggest a potentially unifying element for the various kindred visions that lack a structural element. The contributors (and readership) are ideally suited to the task of critically examining the cosmolocalism phenomenon and contributing to the idea of scaling-wide, in the context of an open and diverse network, instead of scaling-up.

Cosmolocal initiatives may form a global counter-power through commoning. Considering the current situation we find ourselves in as a species, where we have to haphazardly re-organise entire social structures to accommodate the appearance of a “mere” virus, not to mention climate change, it is blatantly obvious that radical change is required to tackle the massive hurdles to come. Cosmolocalism may point a way forward towards that change.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 802512). The photos were captured by Nicolas Garnier in the Tzoumakers makerspace.

Endnote

[1] Volunteers created the following editable webpage where, at the time of writing, more than 1,500 commons-based initiatives against the ongoing pandemic have been documented: https://airtable.com/shrPm5L5I76Djdu9B/tbl6pY6HtSZvSE6rJ/viwbIjyehBIoKYYt1?blocks=bipjdZOhKwkQnH1tV (last accessed 27 March 2020)

References

Bauwens M, Kostakis V and Pazaitis A (2019) Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. London: University of Westminster Press

Benkler Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press

Gerhardt H (2019) Engaging the non-flat world: Anarchism and the promise of a post-capitalist collaborative commons. Antipode DOI:10.1111/anti.12554

Gerhardt H (2020) A commons-based peer to peer path to post-capitalism: An interview with Michel Bauwens. AntipodeOnline.org 19 February https://antipodeonline.org/2020/02/19/interview-with-michel-bauwens/ (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Giotitsas C (2019) Open Source Agriculture: Grassroots Technology in the Digital Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Kostakis V (2018) In defense of digital commoning. Organization 25(6):812-818

Kostakis V (2019) How to reap the benefits of the “digital revolution”? Modularity and the commons. Halduskultuur: The Estonian Journal of Administrative Culture and Digital Governance 20(1):4-19

Kostakis V, Latoufis K, Liarokapis M and Bauwens M (2018) The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: Two illustrative cases. Journal of Cleaner Production 197(2):1684-1693

Le Guin U K (2004) A rant about “technology”. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Schumacher E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row

The post Small and local are not only beautiful; they can be powerful appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As the pandemic forces us into lockdown, activists across Europe demonstrate that there are still ways to organize and practice solidarity at a safe social distance.

The coronavirus pandemic is confronting us with unprecedented contradictions. The foundations of neoliberal capitalism are crumbling before our eyes, as governments in the EU are taking control over their economies in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago. Restrictions on public spending have been lifted, private hospitals are being nationalized, wages are being temporarily covered by the state and universal basic income schemes are being drafted. At the same time, states are also implementing draconian emergency measures to restrict and monitor our mobility, which we cannot rightly oppose out of fear of spreading the virus.

This leaves the left in the predicament of having a unique opportunity to force a rapid transformation of our capitalist system yet lacking any way to do so through collective mobilization. Many of us have been left disoriented by this situation, not least because we have to reorganize our everyday lives on top of figuring out how to stay politically engaged. Across Europe, activists are already hard at work to find ways of organizing collective action even under conditions of lockdown.

NO SPACE TO MANEUVER?

Countries across Europe have implemented measures banning gatherings of more than a handful of people and many have mandated outright curfews that restrict any movement besides commuting to work and buying groceries. Most countries have also closed their borders — including the EU itself — halting international travel and migration completely. Certainly, many of these restrictions are necessary to prevent the further spread of COVID-19. However, they also carry the severe danger of permanently restraining our rights and curtailing our ability to mobilize political opposition.

When the immediate danger of the pandemic has passed, we now face a dual threat of either returning to the same neoliberal order that led us into this crisis, or seeing these “states of emergency” turn into permanent forms of authoritarian state capitalism.

This transformation is already underway. Hungary has effectively become a dictatorship, as Viktor Orbán received carte blanche to rule by executive decree for as long as he wishes to. In Austria, the government has adopted cellphone tracking as a new surveillance practice to monitor the population. Many countries have introduced harsh punishments for curfew violations. The Danish government was only narrowly prevented by the far-left and liberal parliamentary factions from giving police the right to force entry into the homes of people suspected of infection.

There will also almost certainly be concerted efforts across the EU to keep heightened border security measures in place in order to further restrict the movement of migrants and diminish the ability of asylum seekers to enter Europe.

These developments are highly alarming. Without minimizing the need for social distancing, we should be very worried about the descent into authoritarianism unfolding around us. The fact that governments are acting out of a genuine need to cope with the threat of a global pandemic does not make their measures any less undemocratic. In fact, authoritarianism is quite often the reaction of a government fearing a loss of control during a phase of heightened uncertainty, such as an economic or political crisis.

However, such a loss of control is usually the result of growing social resistance against the government’s rule, which is not the situation we are in today. Most governments are not threatened by any major social mobilizations in addition to the pandemic, so their implementation of authoritarian measures does not run into immediate opposition. Indeed, the need for social distancing prevents most forms of political mobilization, forcing activists around Europe to innovate.

FROM PROTESTS TO PODCASTS

Physical meetings and actions are largely out of the question at the moment. Some countries still permit demonstrations but these are quickly shut down if people do not keep a minimum distance from each other. Activists have therefore switched to digital communication and begun organizing political events online.

Housing movements originally planned to coordinate public actions across Europe for an international Housing Action Day on March 28. Instead of just canceling the event, they proceeded to protest from their individual balconies and windows, making noise and putting up banners. A day later German activists protested against the EU’s treatment of refugees by simulating an entire demonstration online, advising people to flood the social media feeds of various public institutions that they “passed” along their “route.”

The climate movement Fridays for Future has shifted its weekly climate strikes online as well, sending millions of pictures and political demands across social media platforms. Activist from the movement have also started hosting the online show Talks for Future, where they engage in discussions with academic experts. Indeed, a whole congregation of activist groups and critical think tanks have taken this opportunity to start hosting their own podcasts and livestreaming political debates. On a more day-to-day basis, community organizers across Europe have shifted their consultation services to phone conversations and email.

This transition to online activism is certainly borne out of necessity rather than proactive political choice, but it can provide us with some important long-term benefits. For large sections of the left, particularly political parties and critical academics, the decision to invest more time and energy into their online presentation has been long overdue. Social distancing has effectively forced their hand to catch up with how most — especially young — people are already consuming media.

This is even more true under the current lockdown conditions, as almost everyone is forced to spend much more time at home — and therefore online. There is a good chance that this may lead to a heightened politicization across civil society, which makes it essential that the left is able to reach this captive audience. By making full use of the accessibility and flexibility of online activism, the left may expand the reach of progressive messages and quickly build up larger networks. At the same time, it needs to be aware and critical of the heightened surveillance risks posed by online platforms like Zoom and work towards building its own alternative online infrastructures.

SOLIDARITY AND THE COMMONS

Not all forms of activism can be done online, however. The current crisis highlights the urgent need for local mutual solidarity, not only to protect the most vulnerable communities but also to lay the foundation for the commons-based socioeconomic alternative that we so desperately need.

Local solidarity networks have provided mutual aid during humanitarian crises in the past and many continue to do so now. In Greece, activists have built a huge network of solidarity initiatives due to years of austerity and many of them are now organizing the distribution of food and other supplies to precarious communities under curfew conditions by sending individual volunteers to shop for whole neighborhoods. This practice can be easily adopted anywhere else in Europe and could alleviate the strain on those who are less financially secure or mobile to sustain themselves. Solidarity with asylum seekers is particularly urgent, especially in the context of refugee camps whose conditions are quickly deteriorating. On the Greek island of Lesbos, medical volunteers are working around the clock to provide aid and stem the spread of COVID-19 among the refugees trapped in the camp.

But vulnerable groups require urgent help also in the urban centers of northern Europe. In Berlin, activists have been occupying empty apartments and turning them into improvised squats for the homeless population, while carefully abiding by medical safety conditions. Across the continent, there is also increasing domestic violence against women who are now forced to stay at home with abusive partners. Because of this, women’s shelters continue to operate, albeit under strict sanitary conditions, and volunteers of anti-violence networks offer to hold consultations in person in case of emergencies.

These forms of solidarity work have to continue not despite, but because of the pandemic. Mutual solidarity, so long as it is provided under careful sanitary conditions, is a crucial way to support vulnerable and marginalized social groups for whom the virus and lack of mobility create existential threats. By creating local support networks, we can also continue engaging in political activism at a grassroots level, in a way that raises both the security and political consciousness of our communities.

The mutual ties we are now forging through neighborhood solidarity can be a basis for future collective mobilization, as well as convince people of the possibility of enacting more transformative political and economic changes. Since the sheer lethality of the globalized market economy and austerity politics is more obvious than at any other time in recent memory — at least in Europe — the left needs to double down on its struggle for a commons-based alternative. By making it obvious to everyone that local community-based solidarity is capable of helping us through this crisis, we can build a solid foundation for our struggle for the commons.

STRUGGLES FOR REDISTRIBUTION

Since the pandemic is deeply intertwined with a crisis of capitalist reproduction, we are already seeing new waves of redistributive struggles, which will only become more forceful as the economic crisis unfolds.

Many companies and public institutions still expect their employees to show up for work, especially in sectors that are deemed systemically essential like transportation, retail or public security. The increasingly unsafe working conditions in these areas have sparked a number of new labor struggles, even without the opportunity for collective mobilization.

Italian unions have called a general strike because multiple sectors are forced to continue operating even after the government initiated an economic shutdown. Amazon has been hit with labor protests due to the retailer’s reckless endangerment of workers by forcing them to work with minimum safety protection. French unions have announced a month-long strike notice for the public sector in order to protest the government’s “anti-social” relaxation of labor conditions under the guise of fighting the pandemic.

Tenants unions have called for an international rent strike to suspend living costs for people whose income has been compromised by the lockdown. These struggles are still few and far between, as many workers and employees have been sent into home office, temporary leave, or were laid off entirely. The conditions for labor mobilization will continue to be difficult, as the imminent threat of economic collapse and rapidly increasing unemployment will put workers under great financial pressure.

Nevertheless, there are reasons to be hopeful. The current crisis is radically changing our perception of which forms of labor are relevant for societal reproduction and which are not. Formerly undervalued professions like retail employees, delivery drivers and transport workers have transitioned from being labeled as “unskilled labor” to being “essential” to the survival of society. Healthcare staff in particular are increasingly regarded as playing an outright heroic role and their working conditions have become a central political talking point.

This experience of being indispensable for the survival of society will undoubtedly boost the collective class consciousness of people working in these sectors, which can greatly strengthen their ability to organize. So far, the public’s appreciation for these professions has been mostly limited to symbolic gestures like collective applause, but the underlying shift in collective consciousness can be the foundation for long-term solidarity.

Similarly, the fact that many families now have to home-school their children may increase people’s respect for educational staff and childcare employees. Although there is little reason to believe that the lockdowns are contributing to a more equal redistribution of gendered house and care work, the experience alone can provide additional fuel for future feminist struggles for collectivized social reproduction.

PREPARING FOR WHAT LIES AHEAD

In a few months, when hopefully the imminent threat of the pandemic subsides and we are hit by the full force of the economic crisis, the struggle for how to reorganize our political, social and economic systems will take center stage. As grim as the situation is, this provides us with a unique opportunity to fight for a fundamental emancipatory alternative. With the existential threat of neoliberal capitalism being more evident than ever before, the European public is growing aware of the need for a massive expansion of social protection, collective control over the economy and the reorganization of labor.

As hundreds of billions of Euros are pumped into the failing economy, there is an opportunity to force companies to abide by new social and ecological standards and hand more democratic control to their employees. Governments can also take this a step further and transfer the companies’ ownership into public hands entirely, which would finally allow us to initiate a transition towards the more socially equitable and ecologically sustainable economy that we desperately need. We now have proof that such a radical transformation is entirely feasible and only depends on the political will to make it happen.

For such a progressive change to become a reality, the left needs to hit the ground running. As soon as lockdown conditions are lifted, we need to organize broad social mobilizations, engage in struggles for redistribution and eventually achieve decisive political shifts in government.

We need to use the current phase to prepare for these struggles. Online activism can enable us to expand our networks and reach new audiences. Local solidarity can alleviate the worst impact of the pandemic and get new people engaged in a movement for collective social and economic reproduction. And by relying on the newfound structural power and public solidarity of “essential workers” we can put pressure on companies and governments to implement changes they would have never agreed to before.

As people across Europe are already demonstrating, we can do all of these things at a safe social distance. Even under quarantine, we can continue to fight capitalism.

The post Organizing under lockdown: online activism, local solidarity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We’re forming a global, advocacy innovation lab to Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 and you can take part.

Around the globe we are taking rapid, drastic action to slow the spread of COVID-19. As we come to terms with the daunting path forward, it’s hard to imagine the day we read the headline “COVID-19 Immunizations Begin.” But our experience with our amazing global scientific community teaches us that it’s only a matter of time until we have a vaccine for COVID-19. This day will arrive. And in that there is hope.

But when we do have a vaccine, will everyone have access to it? Herd immunity only works if the vast majority of the herd is immune. Without affordable access for everyone, across the globe, the vaccine can’t really do it’s job. Already governments around the world are investing billions in tax-payer funds into the research and development of diagnostic tools, treatments, and a vaccine for Covid-19. Since SARS outbreak, the National Institutes of Health alone has spent nearly $700 million on coronavirus research and development. This virus is now a global pandemic, yet experience tells us once the vaccine is discovered, pharmaceutical corporations will want us to pay again to acquire it. How do we make sure pharmaceutical companies profits don’t interfere with doctors, public health officials, and our access to tests, treatments, and the vaccine? How do we make this life saving medicine accessible to our family and friends around the globe and reduce infection?

The good news is that we know what needs to be done, and we – you! – have done it before. We have to fight for free access for all with creative, collaborative and convincing campaigns.

TOGETHER WE WILL FREE THE VACCINE FOR COVID-19

Join us as we do the work, together, to make sure this vaccine does all the good it can do. We won’t win through old methods – holding up signs at a traditional crowded protest march is not an option. So together we’ll find new, better ways that work in our current context. We’ll achieve this by creating an advocacy innovation lab with teams around the world crowdsourcing new methods to achieve our objectives. These “Salk Teams” will design and test creative methods to pressure governments and pharmaceutical corporations to ensure publicly-funded diagnostic tools, treatment, and the COVID-19 vaccine will be sustainably priced, available to all and free at the point of delivery.

WHAT WE’RE ASKING FOR AND WHAT WILL HAPPEN:

Once part of a Salk Team, you’ll connect with dozens of interested, talented and committed people from around the world! You’ll get advanced training through weekly online courses with:

• the Center for Artistic Activism, which has worked around the world helping advocates and activists be more effective by using play, creativity, art, and humor.
• Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, a global student-driven organization focused on ensuring that publicly-funded medicines are affordable to the public
• Special guest collaborators – veterans in access to medicines, the arts, design, and campaigns for public health and human rights.

Together with other SALK Team members, you will create experimental actions to move the needle on affordable vaccines.

WHAT THAT MEANS:

• A weekly total time commitment of roughly 2-4 hours over for 3-4 months.
• Weekly inspiration to help you to prepare: video, reading or an individual action you can take from your home etc.
• Collaboration with other participants in your area (from your home)

WHY SALK TEAMS?

WHAT YOU GET:

• A sense of agency in an uncertain time. A sense of community and belonging as well as connection to new friends collaborating with purpose. Your contributions will matter and be part of the solution to help save lives.
• The opportunity to take action on a crisis impacting us all now.
• Ability to take action from home.
• Respect for your time, schedule, and changing demands in the months to come.
• An understanding that if you need a break for illness, to support a relative, or need some for mental healthcare, then that’s OK. You’re part of a big team and together we got this.

WHAT WE HOPE TO LEARN

We hope to learn how to make the COVID-19 vaccine accessible for all. No one knows how to do that, yet, because we can’t do that without going through an innovation process. Within a few months we’ll have created and evaluated the effectiveness of dozens, maybe hundreds, of ideas. Those successes will move forward, developing and evolving into practical methods. We’ll then implement those methods to take huge steps forward in advocacy for access to medicines. Through sharing our work, it will have already reached other regions and inspired new action. There’s no way to innovate on advocacy without a massive amount of experimentation. We hope to learn from those experiments while developing and building a grassroots movement ready to implement them.

WATCH OUR INFO SESSION

We offered two, live online information sessions on Friday, MARCH 27. You can view one here:

CAN YOU SUPPORT OUR COVID-19 WORK?

Help make this happen.
We understand not everyone is able to participate in the same ways. Your donations will help get this program up an running; building infrastructure, materials for producing actions around the world, and creating, translating, and distributing teaching materials. 

UPDATE

Our initial round has begun with roughly 300 participants from 27 countries! If you are interested in the campaign, sign up here to get on the Free the Vaccine newsletter. We’ll send you updates and opportunities to participate.

Find out more at C4aa.org

The post Free the Vaccine for Covid-19 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Early last week, when Republican Lt. Gov. of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested that the elderly should be willing to die from COVID-19 to get the economy back in action, something major shifted. If just briefly, the mask came off. Here was an elected official explicitly offering human sacrifices to appease the market. 

Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick went on national tv & argued elderly people should die for the health of the market. Capitalism is a system that priorities profits over people. This fight is literally a matter of life or death. Battle lines are being drawn. Which side are you on?

“Capitalism has always been willing to sacrifice life,” author and activist Naomi Klein told an audience of 14,000 people last week on an online teach-in hosted by Haymarket Books. “[It’s an] economic model soaked in blood. This is not a more radical version of capitalism; what is more radical is the scale.”

It’s unfortunate that it’s taking a global pandemic to reveal it, but the unprecedented crisis catalyzed by the coronavirus has exposed our capitalist economic system for what it has always been. From the early history of colonialism, slavery, the enclosure of the commons to the ravages of industrial capitalism, and into modern austerity regimes, capitalism has always put profit over people.

This is exactly why any calls for “returning to normal” are so misguided. “Normal is deadly, normal was a massive crisis,” Klein emphasized last week. “We don’t need to stimulate the death economy, we need to catalyze a massive transformation into an economy that is based on protecting life.”

In 2007, Klein presented her thesis of disaster capitalism to the world in her groundbreaking book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Her ideas seemed to perfectly explain much of what was — and still is — taking place globally. The thesis is fairly simple: When a crisis unfolds, disaster capitalists will try to create an opportunity to advance their nefarious agendas. One obvious example of this is the stimulus bill signed into law late last week which showers trillions of dollars onto Wall Street and giant corporations with minimal oversight or regulation. Nothing suggests a “return to normal” more than another corporate bailout that will never “trickle-down” to the rest of us. 

Instead, what Klein and others demand is a bottom-up bailout that goes well beyond simply surviving this acute crisis. Throughout the teach-in, Klein and her co-panelists Astra Taylor and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, offered a variety of solutions that could be applied to both the short- and long-term crises of the coronavirus and capitalism — both relief and recovery. An example of immediate relief would be a moratorium on rent until the crisis is over, while an example of recovery would be passing policies that would guarantee affordable housing to everybody living in the United States. The former is a stopgap measure to mitigate immediate harm; the latter is systemic transformation.

Part of the economic recovery package which just passed congress includes a one-time payment of $1,200 to individuals making less than $75,000 annually. There has been quite a bit of criticism coming from many different communities suggesting the figure of $1,200 is too low. The number was likely derived from the federal minimum wage wherein a full-time worker making $7.25/hr grosses $1,160 per month. Rounded up, this explains the $1,200 figure that the Republicans and Democrats agreed upon. 

If we utilize the framing encouraged by Klein and others we can begin to see how the coronavirus pandemic simply reveals the more chronic disaster that is the Federal minimum wage. If $1,200 is not enough in an acute crisis, then it’s certainly not enough during “normal” times. 

Of course, affordable housing and an increase in the minimum wage are not new ideas. In fact, many of the structural policy proposals put forth by Klein and her co-panelists are ideas that have been on the agenda of the left for quite some time. “We need to reimagine in this moment,” Klein argued. “And the good news is that we aren’t starting from scratch.”

Policy proposals like the Green New Deal, universal health care, universal basic income, and labor protections such as raising the minimum wage to $15/hr and democratizing the economy, for example, have all — as Klein puts it — been “lying around” for quite some time. She borrows this phrase from the economist Milton Friedman, who argued that radical transformation can only take place during periods of acute crisis. It’s during these periods that the ideas “already lying around” will step in to fill the gaps. 

Friedman was an American right-wing economist whose ideas are largely responsible for the rise of neoliberalism and austerity politics that have shaped the last 40 years. He utilized a crisis in capitalism during the late 1970s to help usher in a sweeping transformation that ended the Keynesian, New Deal-era in the United States. 

“The scale of the coronavirus crisis is so profound that there is now an opportunity to remake our society for the greater good, while rejecting the pernicious individualism that has left us utterly ill-equipped for the moment,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained during the teach-in. “The class-driven hierarchy of our society will encourage the spread of this vicious virus, unless dramatic and previously unthinkable solutions are immediately put on the table.”

The coronavirus is an unprecedented event, but it’s the sharpening of class divides, the gutting of our social safety net and the mentality of selfish individualism encouraged by capitalism which have turned this pandemic into an unimaginable crisis. 

Things like eviction moratoriums, stimulus checks, or extended unemployment benefits will not fundamentally address the conditions which allowed the coronavirus to unfold so disastrously. They also won’t address the many chronic disasters that plague capitalist society on a daily basis. As Klein and others argue, these things can only be addressed through radical, systemic transformation. 

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This article is part of our reporting on the community response to the coronavirus crisis:

• The People’s COVID-19 Response needs you
• The coronavirus pandemic calls us to share more than ever
• 10 ways to share during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing
• 14 community-minded books to read during the 2020 quarantine
• Things got a whole lot more local than I expected due to coronavirus
• My new pandemic routine
• How these US immigrants are giving back to their new community during the COVID-19 crisis
• Open-source medical supplies battle COVID-19

Lead image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The post Coronavirus demands radical transformation, not a ‘return to normal’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.