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.

The crisis triggered by COVID-19 is challenging the very meaning of coexistence and cohabitation and redesigning the boundaries of public space in an absolutely unprecedented way, with unpredictable results.

Written by Francesco Martone and originally published by the Transnational Institute.

Measures to contain free movement and prohibitions on assembly have led to the temporary limitation, if not suspension, of some fundamental rights, such as the right to mobility, to meet, to demonstrate, to family life.

Over four billion people are now suffering under varying degrees of restriction of civil rights and freedoms. Nevertheless, this crisis is occurring in a global context where democracy and the civic space were already under attack, and this element needs to be duly factored in when analyzing the human rights implication of the crisis and possible remedial actions.

The CIVICUS monitor report “People power under attack” (December 2019) registered a backsliding of fundamental rights and freedom of association, peaceful assembly, and expression worldwide (40% of the world’s population now live in repressed countries, compared to 19% in 2018). The report concluded that civil society is now under attack in most countries, and just 3% of the world’s population are living in countries where fundamental rights are in general protected and respected.

In this context, COVID-19 is in fact representing a major challenge for human rights and the role of the state. Restrictions, such as social distancing, deemed crucial to preventing the spread of the virus pit the fundamental right to health against other fundamental rights and freedoms – albeit temporarily – and challenge the fundamental concept of indivisibility of rights. It is also bringing to light the extensive weakening of the state’s obligation to ensure key social and economic rights, such as the right to health, by means of a robust public health sector, or to a decent job. Millions of people, mostly the most vulnerable, migrant workers, precarious workers are losing their source of income and will be in dire conditions after the medical emergency is over.

As far as the impacts of COVID-19 on fundamental rights and on the quality of democracy are concerned, two situations can be identified. In states where restrictions and violations were rampant before the COVID-19 emergency is being used to strengthen the grip and increase repression and antidemocratic features. These are states where exception is the rule. In states where democracy still exists, albeit with the limitations described in the CIVICUS report, the COVID-19 emergency risks paving the way for dangerous restrictions that might persist also when the “emergency” is supposedly over. These are states, where the rule might become the exception. These two distinctions are key also to understand what the different challenges for international solidarity and social movements are. In both cases the space of initiative – current and future – would be jeopardized or at least affected. Social distancing is in fact hindering the possibility of organizing in traditional terms, (assembly, demonstrations, meetings, advocacy and solidarity delegations, international civil society monitors). To various degrees, countries in the so-called Global North also, where NGOs or social movements operate or are located, were already starting to suffer from a restriction of civic space (see for instance criminalization of solidarity, or restrictions and violation of privacy for antiterrorism purposes). The difference is that now the restrictions, of freedom of circulation and movement and the right to assembly in particular, are applied to entire populations.

It will therefore be essential that all measures undertaken to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and its consequences, respect fundamental rights and comply with a rights-based approach. News from various countries does not warrant optimism. From Colombia, for instance, where rural and indigenous communities already under attack before the pandemic are now even more under fire from paramilitary forces: in the last ten days at least six leaders have been murdered. Or in Hungary where Viktor Orban’s recent moves have allowed him to have full powers to manage the crisis. Or the Philippines, or Egypt or Turkey. It comes as no surprise then that in various recent statements the UN has called upon states to ensure the respect of fundamental rights, to protect the most vulnerable and to ensure that the COVID-19 emergency is not used to trample on peoples’ rights, and to justify further repression.

A brief analysis of the situation in Italy

Italy was one of the countries where COVID-19 spread with dramatic and tragic intensity. Some regions in the North, (Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia Romagna) are ranking first in terms of contagion, hospitalized patients and death toll. The spread of the pandemic in the country has been accompanied by unprecedented restrictive measures that have triggered an interesting debate on legality, democratic legitimacy, and states of exception and emergency and a growing number of initiatives by social movements, civil society, and ordinary citizens.

First and foremost, we must consider the extent to which the management of the COVID-19 emergency risks opening or deepening existing fault-lines in the democratic basis of the country and its governance structure. For instance, we are witnessing a risky overlap of competences and fragmentation of the polity. On the one hand the government, a coalition between the Democratic Party and the 5Star movement plus other minor parties, on the other the governors of the hardest-hit regions, Lombardy and Veneto (run by the right-wing League), on the other the pervasive presence of the “experts”, the Civil Protection Service (Protezione Civile) and the National Institute for Health (Istituto Superiore di Sanità). The latter are those that are instructing the political decisions: the “political” government is being substituted by some sort of medical governance and crisis/disaster management approach. Hence, any initiative that is being undertaken is hard to challenge politically, since it is motivated by scientific and technical assumptions and by the alleged goal of ensuring the containment of the virus and, by doing so, fulfilling the obligation to respect the constitutional right to public health.

The emergency is somehow “depoliticizing” the public debate. To add to this, the political turf battle between the government and those regions led by representatives of the main opposition party have led to the adoption of a multitude of decrees and ordnances that somehow form a patchwork of regulations and prohibitions, that make it harder to ensure proportionality and accountability and leave broad discretion to public officials. The use of the military in policing “social-distancing” measures is a case in point. It should be stressed that the deployment of the military for public security purposes is not a novelty in the country. Troops have been deployed to ensure protection of sensitive targets against hypothetical terror attacks, but their rules of engagement never included the enforcement of public order as the case could be now. Some “regional governors” in fact urged the deployment of troops in the streets to ensure compliance with “social-distancing” orders.

Secondly, the de-legitimation of Parliament and of the so-called “political caste” has reactivated speculation on the need for a “strong-man” or of the centralization of executive power. This de-legitimation was already severe before the outbreak and needs to be read in conjunction with the fact that, before the COVID-19, two key political deadlines were approaching, notably administrative elections and the referendum for the reduction of the number of members of Parliament. In fact for the first time ever the President of the Council of Ministers, currently Giuseppe Conte, has been issuing so-called Decrees of the President (DPCM), a brand new category of acts , since decrees are usually issued by the government as a whole. These were made executive without parliamentary debate and without their transformation into law, and hence without a sort of public scrutiny as the Constitution mandates.

In fact, the Italian Constitution does not contain any norm related to the state of emergency, while Parliament’s activity has been reduced to a minimum because of the spread of the virus among Members of Parliament and only after a few weeks from the declaration of the state of emergency was there a parliamentary debate on the COVID-19 and related government measures. More worryingly, Italy has no independent human rights institution that would monitor compliance of government’s activities and restrictions of fundamental rights and freedoms to international human rights standards and obligations as mandated by international covenants to which Italy is part, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights.

Third, beyond exposing these gaps and fault-lines, COVID-19 is also bringing to light the systemic imbalances, injustices and lack of full achievement and even denial of key social and economic rights in the country. As many as 2.7 million people are at risk of hunger because they have lost any source of revenue or income due to the lockdown, and at least 20 million people are now living on subsidies and other forms of emergency income introduced by the government. These figures account for a the broad informal economy and precarious or free-lance work. Also, the dramatic rush to step up intensive care units and to increase the number of health care personnel, point to the impact of budget cuts on the public health care system carried out in the past, with all the consequences it carries in terms of ensuring equitable access to public health care for all. The current inhumane conditions for detainees, due to overcrowding, also came to public attention after a series of prison riols triggered by fear of infection.

Lastly, other estimates point to the risk of a substantial shortage of fruit and produce in the markets, since at least one quarter of annual production is guaranteed by 260,000 seasonal migrant workers who now cannot travel due to the restrictions. Many of them have been working in the past in semi-illegal or extreme conditions. or have ended up involved in organized crime. Concerns have already been voiced about the potential of the Mafia to exploit this situation by offering support and access to credit to those who lost their jobs and hence cannot ensure their basic subsistence.

Parallel to the official narrative, that hinged on a mixture of cheap patriotism, restrictive measures, and scientific governance of social processes, other practices developed, that represent an important social and political capital for the future: online assemblies; a flourishing theoretical debate on COVID-19 and its implications at all levels; a growing number of initiatives by social movements; a proposal for an Ecofeminist Green New Deal; campaigns for better conditions in jails and for amnesty; for a so-called “Quarantine minimum income”; a recently published platform of civil society organizations and social movements working on trade, economic justice and against extractivism, and in parallel a growing number of solidarity initiatives are clear signs of another Italy that does not accept resignation or helplessness. An Italy that does not accept the idea that in order to tackle the virus and its implications people have to solely comply with orders aimed at limiting, repressing or imposing “do-nothing” behavior. Support services for the elderly, the most vulnerable, those that live alone in their homes, food banks, psychological support and assistance, purchasing and home delivery of drugs are among the most recurrent self-organized initiatives, that express an attempt to turn the feminist concept and practice of “care” into political practice. Civil society somehow transforms itself into a “commune”, and its members into commoners, that collectively organize to foster the respect and pursuit of common goods and rights, such as the right to food, care, solidarity. The challenge will be that of nurturing that mix of theoretical analysis, mobilizing and mutual aid and support from below after the most immediate “medical” emergency will slowly leaving the space to the economic and social one.

Further challenges will be that of linking up those processes with the global level, with similar and parallel processes elsewhere, adopting a “decolonized” approach that would always consider power imbalances locally and globally. COVID-19 will not bring the automatic transformation of our societies or the collapse of capitalism, or a revolution by proxy. Rather, the way and intensity of activation of social movements’ response “at present” will also be key to determine how these, and new and innovative modalities of conflict, proposal and self-organization can forge our future.

Photo credit Daniel Chavez (TNI)

The post Italy, democracy and COVID-19 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.

##

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.

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. 

##

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.

The Coronavirus pandemic raises many questions about public health, global diseases and the way we produce and distribute cures and treatments. Who pays for the corona vaccine and how? How is that innovation organised? Who profits?

Commons Network has been an advocate in this domain (‘access to medicines’) for years. In the next few months, we will publish a series of articles about the problems with the current system and the ideas and visions that exist to change this. Today, we discuss the proposal for a Covid-19 Knowledge Pool.

COVID-19 is a global health crisis that demands an immediate global response. But this crisis also lays bare many other crises in our societies. In many Western countries, the response to the virus has shown the vulnerabilities in our public health systems and other essential sectors of society. One major issue that the coronavirus exposes is the dire state of our biomedical system and the role that pharmaceutical companies play in that system.

• In The Netherlands, for instance, hospitals didn’t have enough test kits because Roche, the world’s largest biotech company, initially refused to hand over the recipe that is needed to perform these tests.
• In the United States, Trump’s ‘corona-minister’ Alex Azar released a statement saying that the government could not guarantee that a potential cure for Covid-19 would be affordable, because the innovation that is needed for that cure would only be spurred by high profits.
• The rush to create a vaccine was delayed for up to two or three years, because in most countries, pharmaceutical companies had sold their vaccine research facilities. And the companies that still had the capabilities to do the research had effectively scaled down their coronavirus research because there was no money to be made.
• Scientists were close to a coronavirus vaccine years ago, and then the money dried up.
• The vaccine market was even called ‘an oligopoly’ by Wall Street analysts at AB Bernstein. In fact, after countries abandoned infectious disease research, most companies also moved away from investing in this field, according to DNDi director Bernard Pecoul.
• In France, it was debated why a testing kit for coronavirus should cost 135 euro, eventhough the production costs are only 10 euros. The sub-optimal availability of tests was cited as a major reason for not testing in the fight against the pandemic in many European countries, leading many people to ask if this had economic reasons as well.

More and more people have now come to realise that the global race to find a cure for Covid-19 and a vaccine is slowed down considerably by the fact that the system we have now runs on market incentives and patent monopolies. Instead of shielding essential knowledge, companies could work together, share research results and new insights.

Moving away from a deficient system

The pharmaceutical industry is driven by profit and guided by shareholders. The research and innovation that is needed to come up with cures and treatments is monopolised. A system of patents and licenses is fine-tuned to produce the maximum wealth for a few multi-billion euro corporations. This is how we have organised the world of medicines today. Our system is not driven by public health needs but by profit and the only logic that counts is that of capitalism.

Our system is not driven by public health needs but by profit and the only logic that counts is that of capitalism

This model is based on the belief that the flow of biomedical knowledge should be privatized and protected through intellectual property rights in order to stimulate innovation. This monopoly model gives pharmaceutical companies the freedom to charge as much as they can get away with. It also stifles innovation where we most need it, like in the area of infectious diseases, because there is no money to be made. And finally, this system makes us, the people, pay three times: once to fund the universities and research facilities that create a lot of the knowledge needed for pharmaceutical innovation, once to pay these companies to produce and distribute, and once to our governments to fund our health care system.

It’s hard to estimate how many medicines are not invented, how much talent is wasted and how many people have to suffer because of what not is being researched and developed. This sytem limits the ability to collaborate, share knowledge and build on each other’s work. The public good of scientific medical knowledge and health related technologies has been transformed into a highly protected, privatized commodity.

The COVID-19 crisis marks a critical moment for generating the change we need. But how do we go from this neoliberal capitalist logic to something else, towards a system that is driven by the needs of the public and the health of the people?

Knowledge commons

The proposal to build  a global knowledge pool for rights on data, knowledge and technologies that was presented by Costa Rica is a great example of a step in the right direction, towards transformational change. On March 23^rd, the government of Costa Rica sent a letter to the World Health Organization, calling for a Global Covid-19 Knowledge Pool¹. In his letter to the WHO, the president of Costa Rica demands a global program to “pool rights to technologies that are useful for the detection, prevention, control and treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic.” It now also enjoys the support of the WHO as well as from the UK parliament and the Dutch government and civil society, which has announced their support the idea of a COVID-19 pool as well.

Why do we need a knowledge pool and why is it transformational?

As mentioned above, under our current system the privatization of knowledge limits the ability to collaborate, share knowledge and build on each other’s work. This really is artificial because knowledge is by nature abundant and shareable. Hence the current handling of medical technologies not only limits access to the ensuing treatments, it also limits innovation.

The Covid-19 Poll would pool relevant knowledge & data to combat Covid-19, creating a global knowledge commons². It is a proposal to create a pool of rights to tests, medicines and vaccines with free access or licensing on reasonable and affordable terms for all countries. This would allow for a collaborative endeavor, and could accelerate innovation. It would be global, open and offer non discriminatory licenses to all relevant technologies and rights. As such the pool would offer both innovation and access.

Inputs could come from governments, as well as from universities, private companies and charities. This could be done on a voluntary basis but not only. Public institutions around the world are investing massively in Covid-19 technologies and all results could be automatically shared with this pool, meaning this could be a condition attached to public financing.

So, placing knowledge in a commons does not just mean sharing data and knowledge without regard for their social use, access and preservation. It means introducing a set of democratic rules and limits to assure equitable and sustainable sharing for health-related resources. As such it allows for equitable access, collaborative innovation and democratic governance of knowledge. At the same time knowledge commons could facilitate open global research and local production adapted to local context.

Placing knowledge in a commons does not just mean sharing data and knowledge without regard for their social use, access and preservation. It means introducing a set of democratic rules and limits to assure equitable and sustainable sharing

If we consider the COVID-19 pool holistic initiative that treats the knowledge as a commons, not only to accelerate innovation but also recognizing this knowledge as a public good for humanity which should be managed in a way to ensure affordable access for all, it could be transformational. In contrast to the existing Medicines Patent Pool this pool would be global and not primarily focus on providing access to exitisting technologies, but more also on innovation: developing diagnostics, medicines and vaccines.

Transformational change

Instead of proposing tweaks it is now time to challenge the idea of handling medicines principally as a commodity or product, and to propose structural changes in order to approach health as a common good.  This means referring to our collective responsibility for – and the governance of health when reframing biomedical knowledge production. Instead of leaving it entirely to markets and monopoly based business models.

For this we should move to an approach based on knowledge sharing, cooperation, stewardship, participation and social equity – in practice, this means shifting to a public interest biomedical system based on knowledge commons and open source research, open access, alternative incentives and a greater role for the public sector. Knowledge pools are a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The current COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how it is possible to make transformational changes overnight when acting in times of an emergency. Let us use this crisis to acknowledge the failures of today’s biomedical research model and usher in the systemic change needed. The world after Corona will require the consideration of alternative paradigms –  it is indeed, as Costa Rica, Tedros and now the Netherlands as well rightfully confirmed – time for the knowledge commons to flourish now.

For some more background about commons thinking in the field of biomedical R&D and possible alternatives to ensure access to medicines for all, read our our policy paper ‘From Lab to Commons’. See also last year’s work on ‘The People’s Prescription’ by our allies in the UK, in cooperation with professor of Economics Mariana Mazzucato.

1. The idea of a knowledge pool is to organise the governance of knowledge by pooling intellectual property, data and other knowledge. This can accelerate the development of health technologies and thus stimulate affordable access to the public. In 2010 the Medicines Patent Pool was set up as a response to the unequal access to HIV/AIDS treatments in developing countries. It has proven to be a great success and now functions as a United Nations-backed public health organisation working to increase access to medicines for HIV, Hepatis c and Tuberculosis.
2. Knowledge commons refer to the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation, of information, science, knowledge, data, and other types of intellectual and cultural resources.

The post Pooling Knowledge: Private Medicine vs. Public Health? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Last Tuesday we launched a National Emergency Library—1.4M digitized books available to users without a waitlist—in response to the rolling wave of school and library closures that remain in place to date. We’ve received dozens of messages of thanks from teachers and school librarians, who can now help their students access books while their schools, school libraries, and public libraries are closed.

We’ve been asked why we suspended waitlists. On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable, locked away indefinitely behind closed doors.  

This is a tremendous and historic outage.  According to IMLS FY17 Public Libraries survey (the last fiscal year for which data is publicly available), in FY17 there were more than 716 million physical books in US public libraries.  Using the same data, which shows a 2-3% decline in collection holdings per year, we can estimate that public libraries have approximately 650 million books on their shelves in 2020.  Right now, today, there are 650 million books that tax-paying citizens have paid to access that are sitting on shelves in closed libraries, inaccessible to them. And that’s just in public libraries.

And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection.  As we anticipated, critics including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have released statements (here and here) condemning the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive.  Both statements contain falsehoods that are being spread widely online. To counter the misinformation, we are addressing the most egregious points here and have also updated our FAQs.

One of the statements suggests you’ve acquired your books illegally. Is that true?
No. The books in the National Emergency Library have been acquired through purchase or donation, just like a traditional library.  The Internet Archive preserves and digitizes the books it owns and makes those scans available for users to borrow online, normally one at a time.  That borrowing threshold has been suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency.

Is the Internet Archive a library?
Yes.  The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity and is recognized as a library by the government.

What is the legal basis for Internet Archive’s digital lending during normal times?
The concept and practice of controlled digital lending (CDL) has been around for about a decade. It is a lend-like-print system where the library loans out a digital version of a book it owns to one reader at a time, using the same technical protections that publishers use to prevent further redistribution. The legal doctrine underlying this system is fair use, as explained in the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending.

Does CDL violate federal law? What about appellate rulings?
No, and many copyright experts agree. CDL relies on a set of careful controls that are designed to mimic the traditional lending model of libraries. To quote from the White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books:

“Our principal legal argument for controlled digital lending is that fair use— an “equitable rule of reason”—permits libraries to do online what they have always done with physical collections under the first sale doctrine: lend books. The first sale doctrine, codified in Section 109 of the Copyright Act, provides that anyone who legally acquires a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display, or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. This is how libraries loan books.  Additionally, fair use ultimately asks, “whether the copyright law’s goal of promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts would be better served by allowing the use than by preventing it.” In this case we believe it would be. Controlled digital lending as we conceive it is premised on the idea that libraries can embrace their traditional lending role to the digital environment. The system we propose maintains the market balance long-recognized by the courts and Congress as between rightsholders and libraries, and makes it possible for libraries to fulfill their “vital function in society” by enabling the lending of books to benefit the general learning, research, and intellectual enrichment of readers by allowing them limited and controlled digital access to materials online.”

Some have argued that the ReDigi case that held that commercially reselling iTunes music files is not a fair use “precludes” CDL. This is not true, and others have argued that this case actually makes the fair use case for CDL stronger.

How is the National Emergency Library different from the Internet Archive’s normal digital lending?
Because libraries around the country and globe are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Internet Archive has suspended our waitlists temporarily. This means that multiple readers can access a digital book simultaneously, yet still by borrowing the book, meaning that it is returned after 2 weeks and cannot be redistributed.  

Is the Internet Archive making these books available without restriction?
No. Readers who borrow a book from the National Emergency Library get it for only two weeks, and their access is disabled unless they check it out again. Internet Archive also uses the same technical protections that publishers use on their ebook offerings in order to prevent additional copies from being made or redistributed.

What about those who say we’re stealing from authors & publishers?
Libraries buy books or get them from donations and lend them out. This has been true and legal for centuries. The idea that this is stealing fundamentally misunderstands the role of libraries in the information ecosystem. As Professor Ariel Katz, in his paper Copyright, Exhaustion, and the Role of Libraries in the Ecosystem of Knowledgeexplains: 

“Historically, libraries predate copyright, and the institutional role of libraries and institutions of higher learning in the “promotion of science” and the “encouragement of learning” was acknowledged before legislators decided to grant authors exclusive rights in their writings. The historical precedence of libraries and the legal recognition of their public function cannot determine every contemporary copyright question, but this historical fact is not devoid of legal consequence… As long as the copyright ecosystem has a public purpose, then some of the functions that libraries perform are not only fundamental but also indispensable for attaining this purpose. Therefore, the legal rules … that allow libraries to perform these functions remain, and will continue to be, as integral to the copyright system as the copyright itself.” 

Do libraries have to ask authors or publishers to digitize their books?
No. Digitizing books to make accessible copies available to the visually impaired is explicitly allowed under 17 USC 121 in the US and around the world under the Marrakesh Treaty. Further, US courts have held that it is fair use for libraries to digitize books for various additional purposes. 

Have authors opted out?
Yes, we’ve had authors opt out.  We anticipated that would happen as well; in fact, we launched with clear instructions on how to opt out because we understand that authors and creators have been impacted by the same global pandemic that has shuttered libraries and left students without access to print books.  Our takedowns are completed quickly and the submitter is notified via email. 

Doesn’t my local library already provide access to all of these books?
No. The Internet Archive has focused our collecting on books published between the 1920s and early 2000s, the vast majority of which don’t have a commercially available ebook.  Our collection priorities have focused on the broad range of library books to support education and scholarship and have not focused on the latest best sellers that would be featured in a bookstore.

Further, there are approximately 650 million books in public libraries that are locked away and inaccessible during closures related to COVID-19.  Many of these are print books that don’t have an ebook equivalent except for the version we’ve scanned. For those books, the only way for a patron to access them while their library is closed is through our scanned copy.

I’ve looked at the books and they’re just images of the pages. I get better ebooks from my public library.
Yes, you do.  The Internet Archive takes a picture of each page of its books, and then makes those page images available in an online book reader and encrypted PDFs.  We also make encrypted EPUBs available, but they are based on uncorrected OCR, which has errors. The experience is inferior to what you’ve become accustomed to with Kindle devices.  We are making an accessible facsimile of the printed book available to users, not a high quality EPUB like you would find with a modern ebook.

What will happen after June 30 or the end of the US national emergency?
Waitlists will be suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.  After that, the waitlists will be reimplemented thus limiting the number of borrowable copies to those physical books owned and not being lent. 

The post The Internet Archive defends the release of the National Emergency Library appeared first on P2P Foundation.

However, pandemics are hard to ignore. Many ideas once ignored or dismissed by Serious People – commoning, green transition policies, climate action, relocalization, food sovereignty, degrowth, post-capitalist finance, universal basic income, and much else – now don’t seem so crazy. In fact, they are positively common-sensical and compelling.

The pandemic has been horrific, but let’s be candid: It has been one of the most effective political agents to disrupt politics-as-usual and validate new, imaginative possibilities.

Many things are now less contestable: Of course our drug-development system should be revamped so that parasitic corporate monopolies cannot prey upon us with high prices, marketable drugs rather than innovation, and disdain for public health needs. Of course our healthcare system should be accessible to everyone because, as the pandemic is showing, individual well-being is deeply entwined with collective health. Of course we must limit our destruction of ecosystems lest we unleash even greater planetary destabilization through viruses, biodiversity loss, ecosystem decline, and more.

In this sense, covid-19 is reacquainting us moderns with some basic human realities that we have denied for too long:

• We human beings actually depend on living, biological systems despite our pretentions to have triumphed over nature and its material limits.
• We human beings are profoundly interdependent on each other despite our presumptions – at the core of modern economics and liberal democracy — that we are self-sovereign individuals without collective needs. (Margaret Thatcher: “This IS no society, only individuals.”)

Notwithstanding these general assumptions of modern life, we humans are discovering that we are in fact programmed to help each other when confronted with disasters. As Rebecca Solnit chronicled in her memorable book A Paradise Built in Hell, earthquakes, hurricanes, and gas explosions spur human beings to self-organize themselves to help each other, often in utterly sublime, beautiful ways. It’s a deeply human instinct.

The early journalism about covid-19 confirms this human impulse. Just as the Occupy movement mobilized to provide essential relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, mutual aid networks are now popping up in neighborhoods around the world, as the New York Times has noted.

The Times cited the great work of Invisible Hands, a network of 1,300 NYC young people who spontaneously peer-organized in three days to deliver groceries to at-risk people who can’t venture out of their homes. The piece also cited this radio segment on mutual aid on Amy Goodman’s show, Democracy Now! 

Check out a number of useful links in the article to other mutual-aid efforts, including a massive Google Doc listing scores of efforts in cities around the US, and a pod mapping toolkit. And check out the Washington Post’s piece on how a website for neighborhood cooperation, Nextdoor, has become a powerful tool for people to help each other through the pandemic.

The mainstream world likes to refer to such peer-assistance as “volunteering” and “altruism.” It is more accurately called commoning because it is more deeply committed and collective in character than individual “do-gooding,” itself a patronizing term. And surprise: it sometimes comes with disagreements that must be resolved – but which can end up strengthening the commons.

A thoughtful piece on the role of anarchism in surviving the pandemic notes that mutual aid “is the decentralized practice of reciprocal care via which participants in a network make sure that everyone gets what they need, so that everyone has reason to be invested in everyone else’s well-being. This is not a matter of tit-for-tat exchange, but rather an interchange of care and resources that creates the sort of redundancy and resilience that can sustain a community through difficult times.”

The vexing question for the moment is whether state power will support mutual aid over the long term (it may be seen as a threat to state authority and markets) — or whether Trump-style politicians will use this moment of fear to consolidate state control, increase surveillance, and override distributed peer governance.

Another important question for the near-term is:  Can we develop sufficient institutional support for commoning so that it won’t fade away as the red-alert consciousness of the moment dissipates. To that end, I recommend Silke Helfrich’s and my book Free, Fair and Alive You may also want to browse the governance toolkit on CommunityRule.info or look into Sociocracy for All.

*                *               *

Throughout history commoning has always been an essential survival strategy, and so it is in this crisis. When the state, market, or monarchy fail to provide for basic needs, commoners themselves usually step up to devise their own mutual-aid systems.

In so doing, they are illuminating the structural deficiencies of conventional markets and state power. As we gave seen political agendas and profiteering have often been higher priorities than public health or equal treatment, as the $2.2 trillion bailout bill passed by the US Congress suggests. President Trump has been more obsessed with reviving the market and winning re-election than in saving people’s lives. Consider how many corporations are more intent on reaping private economic efficiencies (offshoring medical facemask manufacturing; closing down access to cheap generic drugs) than in allowing collective needs to be met effectively through government or commoning.

Numerous commentators are pointing out how the pandemic is but a preview of coming crises. It’s not been mentioned much that covid-19 is partly the result of humans encroaching excessively on natural ecosystems. The UN environment chief Inger Anderson has said that biodiversity and habitat loss are making it easier for pathogens to jump from “the wild” to humans.

And ecologist Stephan Harding has a wonderful piece on how Gaia seems to be trying to teach us to see the dangers of unlimited global commerce: “We are seeing right now how in an over-connected web a localised disturbance such as the appearance of a fatal virus can spread and amplify very quickly throughout the system, reducing its resilience and making it more likely to collapse.”

At this juncture, many massive, pivotal choices await us. We must decide to rebuild our provisioning systems on green, eco-resilient terms, not on neoliberal fantasies of unlimited growth and tightly integrated global markets. New/old types of place-based agriculture, commerce, and community must be developed.

This will entail a frank reckoning with how we re-imagine and enact state power, writes Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, in the Financial Times: “The first [choice] is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.” Harari warns:

Humanity needs to make a choice. Will we travel down the route of disunity, or will we adopt the path of global solidarity? If we choose disunity, this will not only prolong the crisis, but will probably result in even worse catastrophes in the future. If we choose global solidarity, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidemics and crises that might assail humankind in the 21st century.

Obviously, I think the commons has a lot to contribute to citizen empowerment and global solidarity. Hope lies in building new systems of bottom-up, place-based provisioning and care that are peer-governed, fair-minded, inclusive, and participatory. Hope lies in federating diverse commons so that they can coordinate and reach more people – accountably, flexibly, effectively, with resilience.

State institutions may be able to play positive roles, mostly in providing general rules, coordination, certain types of expertise, and infrastructure. Beyond that, they should focus on empowering people and smaller-scale governance and thereby engender trust in collective action.

It is still too early to know how the pandemic will unfold and resolve. There are too many complex variables play to predict the many ramifications. However, it is clear enough that this pandemic calls into question MANY elements of today’s neoliberal market/state order, whose institutions and political leadership are either dysfunctional or uncommitted to meeting public needs. It’s not just individual politicians; it’s a systemic problem. Yet the rudiments of a coherent new system with richer affordances have not yet crystallized.

So that may be our ambitious task going forward. Commoners and allied movements, disillusioned liberals and social democrats, people of goodwill must thwart the many retrograde dangers that threaten to surge forward under the cover of fear. But we must also, simultaneously, demonstrate the feasibility of new forms of commoning, infrastructure, finance, and commons/public partnerships. Rarely have needs and opportunities been so aligned!

• Republished from Bollier.org
• Featured art photographed by Antonio Marín Segovia

The post Commoning as a Pandemic Survival Strategy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Covid-19 quarantine has given us time to reflect on the work we’ve done toward “creating capacity”, that is, resilience and resources for when “normal” breaks down. We’d like to share some thoughts about that work, and our focus going forward.

Author/archdruid John Michael Greer talks about “catabolic collapse“. That’s not the guns & ammo, post-apocalyptic-yet-still-powered-by-capitalism scenario favored in the media, but an ongoing process of societal disintegration. Looking at our mainstream institutions, economics or beliefs, it’s clear that we’ve been collapsing for a while. Events like pandemics punctuate the catabolic curve with sudden, eye-popping jumps set against the processes bedrocked as background, never foreground. Welcome to the apocalypse, we’ve saved you a seat.

The origins of the word “apocalypse” point to an “unveiling”, dropping illusion and finding revelation. As our global production systems and social institutions (eg. healthcare, education) are suddenly overwhelmed, their basic unsuitability is exposed. Just weeks ago so mighty, economies now sputter when faced with this latest adversity. As many have noted, this sudden spike in the process of collapse portends a larger undertaking in ecological and social entropy. And as Covid-19 takes its human toll worldwide, we’ve begun to see the best and worst that humanity can offer in its choice of loyalties, whether to human life or to economic systems, and the power struggles in finding the right balance (if such a thing exists). It’s another opportunity to consider, what is inherent in us as people, and what is the product of our systems? Growing up in systems preaching that “greed is good”, that “the only social responsibility of businesses is to increase profits”, or that “there is not alternative”, is it any wonder that the worst reactions to the crisis are marked by individualism, paranoia and accumulation?

Natural systems are rebounding because pollution and emissions are down, but it’s impossible to fist-pump about this while people are suffering, dying, or working beyond capacity to save lives. In fact, it’s a good time to question the very validity of work: which services are essential, how to use our “free time”. What solutions can the market offer to the health crisis, to overcrowded hospitals, to breaks in supply lines of essential goods and services? To those unable to meet their rent, mortgage or future expenses? Some claim our global, industrialized model is to blame for the virus, others cry that “the cure is worse than the disease“, that the economic effects of quarantining will create more destruction than the virus itself. 

We think these predictions are not endemic to economic science, but to a history of accumulatory, command and control dynamics which, via longstanding institutions including patriarchy and colonialism, have found their apex in capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Short a few weeks of predatory feeding, the growth-based model shows its weakness against the apocalypse. Another veil is lifting.

What else can we see? What will the world look like whenever “this is over” (and how will we know when it is)?

Could this be the herald of another political economy based on abundance, not scarcity and greed? We can help nature to restore itself, cut down emissions, our consumption of mass manufactured and designed-to-break-down crap. We can radically curtail speculative ventures and fictitious commodities. Slash inequality from the bottom up, spend our time away from bullshit jobs to reimagine the world. Use this free time to reconnect, cherish our aliveness, break out of containment, care for each other, grieve what we’ve lost and celebrate what we still have.

We do have the frameworks, we have been creating this capacity for quite a while. From localized, yet globally connected systems of production that can rapidly respond to urgent needs without depending on massive global chains, to ways to organize the workforce into restorative and purpose-oriented clusters of people who take care of each other. This new economy will need a new politics and a more emancipated relation to the State: we have tried it and succeeded. What new worlds (many worlds are possible) can we glimpse from under this lifted veil?

Here’s a question: did you already know about these potentials? Are we still having this conversation among ourselves, or have these terrible circumstances gifted us with an opportunity for (apocalyptic) clarity? The normal is collapsing, while our weirdness looks saner than ever before. 

Timothy Leary famously called for us to “find the others“. I think that the others are all of us, and this may be the moment where more of us can recognise that. A few years ago, we created an accessible, easy to use platform to share the potential of the Commons with everyone. Today it’s more relevant than ever. The projects we work on (Commons Transition and DisCO) are based on two simple precepts:

1. Everyone can become a commoner
2. Commoners can make more commoners

This is why we strive to create accessible and relatable frameworks for people to find the commoner within themselves. But we need to grow out of our bubbles, algorithmically predetermined or not; we need to rewild our message beyond the people who already know. Movements like Degrowth, Open Source software and hardware, anti-austerity, Social Solidarity Economy, Ecofeminism, Buen Vivir…we are all learning from each other. We must continue to humbly and patiently pass the knowledge on, listen to more voices and experiences, and keep widening the circle to include everyone, until there are no others.

Please share this article with anyone who may benefit from these “crazy ideas” that suddenly don’t look so crazy anymore. Start a conversation with people who, aghast at the rapid collapse and lack of reliable systemic support, are eager for new ideas, solutions, hope. The greatest enclosure of the commons is that of the mind: our capacity to imagine better worlds, to be kinder to each other and to the Earth. This will not be an easy or straightforward process. We need to hold each other through the loss and pain. We need to keep finding the others among all of us, until there are no more.

• Originally published in Stacco.works
• Cover art photograph by Antonio Marín Segovia
• “On Panic Buying” by the Sam Wallman and Miroslav Sandev
• “We Must Reimagine Everything” was originally published in Spanish by Miguel Brieva Clismón. It was translated to English by Guerrilla Translation

The post No New Normal appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There is much hype around circular and collaborative economies over the past few years. From Davos to the European Union, everyone is eager to grab a piece of the new mode of industrial development. But what lies beneath these grand narratives?

In this 3-part short series we attempt to critically review the current discussion on the circular and collaborative economy and provide insights from some alternative trajectories.

This short series based on a workshop on circular, collaborative and distributed production designed and facilitated by Chris Giotitsas and Alex Pazaitis on the occasion of the participation of OD&M project at the 83rd Florence International Handycraft Fair, on April 24, 2019 in Florence.

Part 1: On the circular economy.

The most widely known and basic definition for a circular economy (accepted even by the European Union) entails cycles of production, ranging from repair, to maintenance, to re-use, refurbishment, and last to recycling. For this conceptualization to work, products need to be designed to fit these cycles. Meaning that we need to rethink how we design and make things. For instance, a phone may be designed so that it can be more durable, easier to repair and easier to recycle. So far so good.

However, considering the production and distribution networks today, that would presumably take place on a global scale. A product would be produced in one place, then purchased on the other side of the planet, then repaired or refurbished and resold somewhere else entirely. Until ultimately it is recycled for material and entering the cycle all over again. The question here, then, is: who would do the repair/ refurbishment/ recycling on that scale? As it is currently conceptualized, it is the service provider or the manufacturer that does it. How? Would manufacturers have processing facilities all over the planet, or would the products be sent to their locations thus increasing energy consumption and pollution? Doesn’t this reverse the whole point of circularity related to sustainability?  

Furthermore, how would manufacturers and service providers keep track of all these products? Apparently, it is with the help of the “Internet of Things”, by making products smart and trackable. But if we’re talking about a circular system of this complexity then this means that the “manufacturer” would need to have massive operational capacities and resources as well as tracking (or surveilling really) data to an alarming degree.

From a different perspective, if one looks at the EU reports on the issue of circular economies they will find assessments based on collected data and while there is plenty available on a state and municipal level (regarding, for instance, recycling) there is next to none when it comes to industry. That is hardly surprising. It is costs money to track and collect information and when there is no clear profit foreseen, then why would a private manufacturer do it? The idea is to incentivize industry to change their practices. Allow them to make money in a different, more sustainable way. But even then, why would they share data? And how would the protocols and processes of one huge manufacturer work with those of another. They are competitors after all and the profit of one signals the loss of another. 

So, circularity without being open source, is not really circularity. By making it so, then it would ensure interoperability for start. Meaning the products of one manufacturer would work with those of another. Open licenses and standards for parts, tools, materials as well as the sharing of all relevant information would mean that the product of one manufacturer would be possible to be repaired or maintained by whomever locally. Their materials would also be easier to locate, distribute, and reuse. However, at least for now, this seems not to be the goal.

When it comes to the circular economy, we are attempting to apply a concept on a production system that is incompatible. And the attempts so far, seem either too small or they end up being co-opted to such a degree that they lose any transformative potential.  

Part 2: On the Sharing Economy

As a global society, we are facing what could be understood as an existential dilemma with the sharing economy. As a phenomenon, the sharing economy has been increasingly gaining attention since -roughly- 2004, as it gets more and more share in the global markets. But sharing, as a practice, is not a new phenomenon. It has been present in communities since the dawn of human history. And, frankly, in our current form of economic organisation we have not always been very fond of it…. 

Those of us who have been old enough to witness a primitive type of audiovisual technology called “Digital Video Disc” (aka DVD), have often found ourselves irritated with -and simultaneously amused by- aggressive anti-piracy ads like this one. In all their ridiculousness, comparing a downloaded movie with car theft, what they were basically tackling was early forms of peer-to-peer file-sharing.  

So what has happened in less than 10 years that made sharing (esp. over the internet) from a criminal activity to the whole “sharing is caring” story? 

Apparently, the answer lies in some people making enormous amounts of money through sharing. A glimpse on the net worth of Mark Zuckerberg or the market value of tech start-ups like Uber or AirBnB nicely illustrate this. On the other hand, a closer look in their underlying infrastructures (and also their tax returns) shows that, despite profiting on sharing capacities, they are not equally interested in sharing themselves. So, to put it bluntly, what is interesting about sharing, is the sharing economy. What is less obvious is what it is about the economy that is of the interest of sharing. 

In a broader view, the economy can be described as a system that caters for the production and distribution of the means necessary for our subsistence and well-being. In the specific kind of economic system we broadly refer to as capitalism, economic affairs usually involve two main institutions: (a) private property; and (b) market exchange. The latter is fundamentally dependent on the former, and, respectively, the former rationalises the latter. This line of economic understanding also by and large underpins the definition of the sharing (or collaborative) economy from the European Union (European Commission (2016). A European Agenda for the Collaborative Economy. Available): 

“[…] the term “collaborative economy” refers to business models where activities are facilitated by collaborative platforms that create an open marketplace for the temporary usage of goods or services often provided by private individuals” 

And further it is pointed out: 

“Collaborative economy transactions generally do not involve a change of ownership and can be carried out for profit or not-for-profit” 

More or less, the understanding of sharing on behalf of the EU is reduced to the extent it can relate to these fundamental institutions of property and exchange. The focus is then placed on regulating issues evolving around these relations, concerning both things and people, including labour, liability and taxation. 

Nevertheless, the same document still cannot move away from pointing out -even if in a footnote- a certain element that is significantly different: 

“Collaborative economy services may involve some transfer of ownership of intellectual property […]” 

And I would add a hint: often without conventional market-based transactions. Earlier examinations of the phenomenon focus exactly on this dynamic, explaining those conditions that allow them to have massive economic impact. Harvard Law Professor, Yochai Benkler, more than a decade before the EU became interested in the sharing economy (Benkler, Y. 2004. Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Form of Economic Production. The Yale Law Journal, 114(2): 273-358), eloquently argues on sharing as a form of economic production and nicely summarises his position as follows (again in a footnote, yet for different reasons here): 

“I am concerned with the production of things and actions/services valued materially, throughnon-market mechanisms of social sharing […]” 

And then continues: 

“Sharing’, then, offers a less freighted name for evaluating mechanisms of social-relations-based economic production” 

The phrase “valued materially” concerns the real value of sharing, not the one expressed in financial markets or the balance sheets of Facebook’s partner advertising companies. It relates to the very human interaction of sharing stuff and our own time and capacities in things we consider meaningful, from food, shelter and rides, to knowledge, information and technology. The meaning, or value, of this interaction, contrary to the so-called sharing economy, is not guided by price signals between the people, commodities and services. It is a form of an economy, i.e. a system catering for human subsistence and well-being, based solely on social relations. And this is partly why a Harvard professor has to come up with a “less freighted name” for it, as we can all imagine the all-too-freighted name of it that any Fox News anchor would instinctively shout out based on the above definition alone. 

And here lies the real transformative dynamic of sharing as a form of economic production. It is this element that allows a group of uncoordinated software developers create better a web-server than Microsoft; or thousands of people, contributing their knowledge with no predefined structure, roles or economic incentives, create a digital encyclopedia that outgrows Britannica. But such sharing-enabled success stories typically don’t mobilise huge cash flows and don’t create “added value”, which basically entails an understanding of value stemming exclusively from selling stuff to people.  

Going back to our existential issues with sharing, our general position as societies is that we basically think of sharing as a nice thing to do, but lack the institutions to really appreciate its value for our economic system. This massively restrains the actual dynamics of sharing, which are gradually subsumed by the dominant private-property-and-market-driven system. 

There are of course great alternatives in the digital economy alone that build on this sharing capacity in a more humane and socially-minded way, from early neighbourhood tools and rides sharing platforms, to Free and Open Source Software, open design projects and Wikipedia. There is frankly as much sharing taking place on Facebook as in Wikipedia, at least on the front end. But the underlying value models and, subsequently, potential outcomes for the majority of the people involved are vastly different. 

For this we need to finally mature with regards to our issues with sharing and, eventually, make a choice for the kind of sharing for which we would design our institutions and societies. And hopefully that would be the one that would help us escape the current dead ends on the social and ecological front. 

Part 3: Needs-based design as an alternative paradigm 

Despite the serious conceptual and systemic problems described in the previous parts of this short series, it does not necessarily mean that there are no examples of true implementation for collaborative and circular practices right now. In fact, there are several technological development communities that make it happen to some significant degree. More specifically,  needs-based design and grassroots innovation as community-driven endeavours offer a serious alternative paradigm. 

In other words, communities can harness these ICT-enabled capabilities to collaboratively create technology for themselves, and promote sustainable practices based on shared values, knowledge and infrastructure. For instance, small-scale farmers in the agricultural communities of L’atelier paysan and Farm Hack, collaborate to produce tools and machines, often from recycled scrap material, suitable for their type of agriculture, which conventional market channels often fail to adequately cover. 

Yet, this type of self-construction activity is limited in simpler, frugal solutions, whereas  to address today’s challenges we need a broader engagement of design and engineering. But for a community to create complex technologies and systems, advanced skills still need to be employed, including designers, engineers and software developers. The main difference is the type of relationship they have with the community of users. This means the experts would act according to their own motives for engagement but with an explicit purpose to provide a solution which best serves the users of the technology. 

As far as the users are concerned, designers take up a specific purpose. They serve the role of guides or “Sherpas” (with reference to the ethnic group of the Himalayas that are expert mountaineers helping other groups). In that sense, the design process begins after a need within a community is made explicit. Then the designer meets with the community several times to discuss the parameters of the problem that needs solving and uses her expertise to design the solution, which is then reviewed by the community. This is an iterative process until a final artefact is produced, often through a collective process.

Nevertheless, engaging in such a creative activity  and simultaneously making a living out of its is no easy task, yet it is better than the alternative. Having a community as a base of support beats deciding to engage in “social innovation” on your own. At least if we are defining social innovation as something that you make for the common good rather than a thing to make money out of. For instance, designers in the agricultural communities mentioned above, could receive funds to help farmers refurbish or redesign an existing tool, or they could crowdfund within the community for the creation of a new tool. 

Such hybrid and radical models may lead to some sustainability for the designer willing to engage in social production. In our view however, for these terms to be genuinely meaningful in terms of sustainability, openness and equity, structural changes need to take place starting from a policy level. These communities provide a certain blueprint to inform the direction which needs to be taken. 

For instance, instead of incentives for manufacturers, perhaps more focus could be placed in empowering communities to tackle parts of the extremely complex problems of circular production. Likewise, user-communities can harness favourable licences and legal tools to build on shared capacities for collaborative forms of production and distribution. Individuals like designers could also be given incentives and support to engage with these communities in a relationship that is not profit-driven but informed by mutually shared values. 

What this would look like may take many forms, especially depending on local cultures and social contexts. For instance, such a community in the US, which generally lacks serious welfare structures, means that farmers need to rely largely on themselves and each other. Designers that work with them, manage to secure limited funding through the national agriculture organisations and donors while doing also something else to secure their personal sustainability. A similar community in Europe, on the other hand, which still manages to maintain basic social welfare amidst austerity obsessions, means that designers and engineers working with the farmers can secure state funding. So the volume of the work, as well as the quality of tools and documentation can be significantly increased. 

In conclusion, collaborative and circular economies are possible. But we need, as a society, to engage with these ideas in more radical ways than it is happening at the moment.

The post OD&M: Designing for Sustainable Economic Transformations appeared first on P2P Foundation.