1. Could you tell us a bit about your background?

I discovered libertarian socialism as a student at York University in 1976, where I was studying English with the idea of becoming a journalist. The mid-late 70s were a high point of working class confidence in the UK. There was also a government favourable to cooperatives and a rediscovery of ‘common ownership’ of enterprises. The decade between 1975 and 1985 witnessed fast growth in the number of worker cooperatives. By 1985 there were more than 2,000 in the UK. After university I joined one of the many collective publishing and print production projects that had sprung up and organized along cooperative lines.

2. You currently work as Client Services Director at Calverts Cooperative. What is this cooperative about?

Calverts  is a worker-owned creative design studio and print shop. It was founded by seven people in 1977. It was the product of a conflict between employees and manager-owners of a publishing and printing subsidiary of the Institute for Research in Art and Technology. It started as a ‘sweat equity’ common ownership worker cooperative, designing and printing community, union and political publications. I became a member of Calverts in 1985.

Over the years, Calverts grew meeting its members’ evolving needs and aspirations and investing all its surplus in skills and technology development. It is now a leading print house and design studio, working for universities, consumer brands, arts organizations and publishers. It is still, however, also a ‘movement’ resource, often working pro bono for grassroots community organizations with which our members are involved. It has also remained true to its founding principles of equality. Our members are all hourly paid, on the same hourly rate – from the Finance Director to the Cleaner. We have no line managers, working instead as interlinked team circles, with a General Meeting every month. We have a culture of ‘emergent strategy’, and most decisions are made by consensus, using a mixture of sociocratic and devolved process. We try to avoid conventional voting, except when it is required by statute. This efficient and empowering approach is quite common in UK worker cooperatives, which are in the forefront of cooperative democratic innovation.

3. What other activities are you involved in as a co-operator?

Worker cooperatives in the UK fell back after 1985, and by 1999 the sectoral organization – Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM) – was no longer viable. In 2000, ICOM merged with the consumer cooperatives’ apex to form a new apex body called Cooperatives UK. At that time I had not really been concerned with the cooperative movement outside worker cooperatives. I participated in a national cooperative congress with the idea of selling Calverts services to other cooperative businesses. The people I met, the friendships I made, and the things I learned at the event made me want to deepen my understanding of cooperatives.

In 2004 I was elected to a policy forum called the Worker Cooperative Council, then served as a board member of Cooperatives UK from 2006 to 2011. By that time, I found out that I was, in effect, already a ‘barefoot’ worker cooperative organizer – because groups would approach Calverts to learn from our experience, with the idea of setting up their own cooperatives, and I would help them. I was also giving presentations on worker cooperation to groups of students, particularly in the creative industries, in the context of the increased social and economic pressure on young workers after the 2008 crisis.

I formalized this in 2012, when I set up Principle Six that provides support and advice on cooperative enterprise development in areas of membership strategy, campaigning, policy, branding, copywriting and editorial and strategic communications. Through Principle Six I became involved with a range of cross-movement bodies, including the board of a specialist cooperative lender (Cooperative and Community Finance ); the London regional cooperative council (Cooperatives London ); a consortium of independent coop business advisers (London Coop Development); and now a crowdsourcing platform for cooperative development (Platform 6 ).

At the moment, I am focussing more energy on grass roots, local and international worker cooperative organizing. I still work part time at Calverts, managing key client accounts and maintaining Calverts links with the wider movement. I also serve as a board member of CECOP , European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives and support its communications team.

4. What do you think are the challenges and opportunities for the cooperative movement? How have you been addressing these challenges within your work?

Growing the cooperative movement is not so much a matter of finding the right formula, but of understanding how changes in the composition of communities, and in the world of work, are producing forms of collective resistance in new places. We need to see where people are already cooperating, using solidarity principles to articulate their demands for a better life, to see how we can connect with them – bringing in the technology of cooperatives, and putting our experiences to work.

This has implications for where we put our limited energy and resources. For me, defending cooperatives is important, but lobbying governments for special treatment is not a core task. Similarly, we might think there are self-evident opportunities for cooperation in (for instance) social care, platform-based businesses, or self-employment – but we will not succeed by offering top-down solutions. We need an agile strategy based on a close analysis of currents for social change, associating with them and investing tactically to see ‘what works’. This is the opposite of formulating grand narratives and strategies, where we propose cooperatives as ‘the answer to everything’. In this spirit, my recent work has been focussed in five main areas.

1) Supporting disaffected young people who are articulating a desire to take control of their situation: I helped with the formation of AltGen, the campaign for youth cooperation, and I also mentor young worker cooperatives in London.

2) Organizing around housing and public space: I work with the London Radical Housing Network  that brings together housing cooperatives, tenants of municipal housing and unions of private sector renters to promote access to decent housing.

3) Creating a better technology sector: Recent technological changes are transforming the world of work. I work with CoTech, a growing network of worker cooperatives providing technology, digital and creative services. The members of the network can use their collective experience, skills, and resources to promote the worker cooperative model that can create better workplaces, better products and better value for customers.

4) Connecting the cooperative movement with organized groups of super-exploited workers and new, small, and industrial unions, to see what scope there is to bring together these different strands of worker cooperation in a productive way.

5) Strengthening the existing network of worker cooperatives, creating accessible resources of knowledge, practical support and funds to spread and deepen cooperation. An example of this is the Worker Coop Solidarity Fund , which has collected more than £120,000 in four years in the form of micro-contributions from individual members and supporters. This means we can independently underwrite small worker cooperative education projects, fund co-learning and mentoring activity, and sometimes just give tiny amounts of money where it will make a difference. One example is that we have been able to sponsor CECOP’s 40th anniversary General Assembly and conference to be held in Manchester, which we hope in turn will result in meaningful conversations and learning between worker and social co-operators in the UK and across Europe.

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Spotlight interviews with cooperators is a series of interviews with cooperative leaders around the world, whom ILO officials have encountered in the course of their work with cooperatives. This article does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.

Republished from ILO.org

The post Siôn Whellens: Incubating worker cooperatives in the changing world of work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Darren Sharp: How do you create a viable business or organization without a hierarchy?

Enspiral, an entrepreneurial collective based in Wellington, New Zealand, has been working to answer this question since 2010. Started as a group of individuals doing contract work together, the community quickly shifted to launching companies focused on making its ongoing experiments in self-organization accessible to a wider audience. Successful projects include Loomio, a worker-owned co-operative that developed an open source app for consensus decision-making.

Distributed leadership has been key to the success of Enspiral and thousands of other sharing, open source and peer-to -peer communities around the world that rely on participation and networked governance to achieve outcomes for the common good.

Alanna Irving, who contributed to Enspiral’s new book Better Work Together: How the Power of Community Can Transform Your Business, has co-founded multiple startups, including Loomio, Cobudget, Enspiral, and Dark Crystal. She currently works as executive director of the Open Source Collective. We caught up with Irving to learn more about bossless leadership and her practical advice for how groups can both share power and tap members’ strengths to drive personal and social transformation.

Darren Sharp: What’s the book’s core message?

Alanna Irving: Better Work Together doesn’t give you a formula to instantly make your organisation collaborative, flat, or purposeful — because there isn’t one. In this book, we share what we’ve learned by pushing the boundaries of the future of work in a network of social entrepreneurs called Enspiral.

It’s not a book of theory, but a field guide by and for practitioners. As is fitting for a book about non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer, distributed practices, these stories are told through many voices, in many forms, like essays, toolkits, illustrations, exercises, and even a bread recipe. Sharing the failures is as valuable as sharing the successes. The truth is organic, emergent, and human. You can’t tie it all up neatly with a bow on top, or claim that everything fits into a clever 4-quadrant diagram.

We want to offer what we have learned to others, so they can make it their own and take it even further. We’ve gathered up the best insights and transformational experiences we’ve had while growing companies, networks, and ourselves in pursuit of truly meaningful work. The core message is: Join us on the journey.

Why was Better Work Together developed, how are people using it, and what’s its impact so far?

We’re doers, often too busy doing to reflect and communicate. Enspiral has never been great at marketing itself. We’ve never been good at productising or selling what we do, because that’s never what it was about. But whenever bits of our story got out, in talks or blog posts or podcasts, people clambered for more.

I think there’s a lot of abstract theory out there about new paradigms for human group dynamics, but a lack of real, unvarnished, on the ground lived experience. People are hungry for it. The book is a way for us to bring some structure to analyzing and communicating the ideas, tools, and practices we’ve developed, and offering them to the world in an accessible format. It’s our way of recognizing that we’re part of a much bigger worldwide movement, away from top-down, command and control structures, toward bottom-up, consent-based, shared power. The book is our contribution to the larger collective discourse.

It’s been truly amazing to see people respond to the book all over the world, excitedly realising that they are far from alone in this work, and how much further we can go by sharing our stories. A lot of people are telling us they want to go deeper, so now we’re developing workshops and courses based on the book.

Your contribution to the book is largely about distributed leadership in groups. Can you share what that looks like using examples from your personal experience?

Some people think that rid of bosses means there’s no need for leadership. I think just the opposite: It means you need to grow the leadership capacity of everyone. Personally, it took me a long time to reclaim the notion of leadership, because I felt uncomfortable with all the baggage it carried from coercive power hierarchies.

There is a name for this thing I do, and it’s called leadership, but it’s not about bossing people around. Once I was able to uncouple leadership from positional authority, I began to see it purely as a force that moves human groups toward coordination and velocity and away from entropy. It became clear that leadership is not contained in a specific role, but can and should be distributed among many people and processes.

This led me to questions like “How do I develop as a leader when there’s no ladder to climb?” and “How can I increase overall leadership capacity in my network?” I developed a framework for understanding these ideas, which is in a section of the book called “How to Grow Distributed Leadership”, which builds up from the base of shared power and self-leadership through leading others, leading leaders, and ecosystem leadership.

The framework has definitely helped me think more consciously about my own development, and how to mentor others who are intentionally developing leadership capacity in their own networks.

You use archetypes or personas to describe different types of leadership which have their corresponding shadow aspects. How can people become aware of their shadow aspects and make the most of them in group situations?

One of the chapters I wrote in the book describes a leadership development framework I created called Full Circle Leadership. In my work at Enspiral, I noticed an eight-step life cycle projects went through, and saw how projects fell over or fizzled if they missed some steps.

It partly came out of my annoyance that, as a network, we were great at coming up with new ideas but not as good at taking them all the way to completion. I needed to get the word “operationalisation” into our collective vocabulary. I also saw other organisations with the opposite dynamic: great at maintaining but struggling to innovate.

In parallel, as an operational leader, I went through a process of developing empathy for visionary leaders, and came to understand that we weren’t at two opposite ends of a spectrum, but part of a circle. Each of the eight steps represents its own unique kind of leadership, all of which are valuable and important.

This became a lens to better appreciate and nurture diverse leadership strengths. Equally, it’s a lens for awareness of the shadow sides. I got better at seeing my own shadows as a leader, and seeing both the light and dark sides of my collaborators. This is why working alongside diverse, respected peer leaders, who are different to you, is so important.

How can groups leverage people’s strengths and also take team members out of their comfort zone to learn new skills?

This work asks a lot of us. There is no way to keep engaging deeply, purposefully, and vulnerably in community without a lot of self-development. Sometimes we call that The Work. It never ends because humans are dynamic, complex, living beings, and groups of humans even more so.

On one level, it means always being out of your comfort zone. On another level, it means gaining a profound sense of purpose, confidence in you abilities, and unambiguous commitment to guiding values that stay steady in the face of enormous change. It’s great if you can be responsibly and safely held and guided by someone who “knows what they’re doing”, but really, no one knows what they’re doing when you’re charting new territory and constantly experimenting. It can be risky. You need a lot of self awareness and excellent boundaries.

My seven or so [years] at Enspiral felt like a never-ending stream of intensive challenges and growth opportunities. I learned so much about myself, at the same time I was learning about startups, facilitation, building technology, social impact, money, and everything else. It was incredibly rich — and, frankly, exhausting. I miscalculated and burned out multiple times.

There’s a lot in the book about self care, well-being, group processes for looking after each other, and strategies for avoiding burnout when you’ve got a fiery passion in your heart. The risk and challenge are inherent, so I’d definitely encourage people to regularly reflect and check in about how it’s really going. But to me, there is no question that it’s worth it.

Power dynamics are an inevitable characteristic of human groups. What advice do you have for groups for making them more transparent? When does it make sense to share power and what steps can groups take to get there?

The first step is to practice talking about power dynamics openly, regardless of their shape. A healthy culture means being honest about power. If you are a hierarchy, admit it. Own it! Sometimes hierarchies are the right shape for what you’re trying to do. You can have consent-based, ethical hierarchies. A lot of people actually just want to be told what their job is.

Talking about power dynamics will allow you to collectively ask important questions, like “How is our structure working for us? Could it be improved?” Sometimes groups that aspire to less hierarchy will treat power like a taboo, and try to pretend it doesn’t exist. This will not result in shared power, only in implicit, unaccountable power.

Power dynamics are an inherent property of human groups. Your collective task is to take ownership of your group’s power dynamics and make them work for you. One frame I often use is “align power and responsibility.” If people have responsibility for things they don’t have power over, or are exerting power over things they aren’t taking responsibility for, you’ve got a problem.

Sometimes that’s about an internal emotional boundary around what you will feel responsible for. Sometimes it’s about restructuring roles to give power over their scope of responsibility. Sometimes it’s about calling out unacknowledged power. It’s a frame I find useful to examine in a lot of situations.

Finally, consider how our work on power in the context of human society overall [is] inextricably linked to social justice. We need to consider how power dynamics function at every level, from the macro to the micro, to truly understand them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darren Sharp | Twitter

Darren Sharp is a leading sharing economy strategist, consultant and researcher.  As founding Director of Social Surplus he develops strategy and facilitates capacity-building using strength-based approaches including asset-based community development,

The post What Enspiral can teach us about how to run a company with no boss appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This inverview, conducted by Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, was originally published in Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain

Pascal Gielen & Sonja Lavaert: Our book Commonism is about the triangle of ideology, aestheticsand the commons.1 Our tentative assumption is that commonism may be the next meta-ideology, after neoliberalism. We understand ideology not only negatively as a false awareness, but also positively as a logic of faith that connects fiction and reality and can make people long for and work towards a better form of living together. In Assembly you and Michael Hardt do something similar with notions such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘institution’, ‘leadership’. What does ‘ideology’ mean to you and do you think it may also figure in a positive narrative?

Antonio Negri: In my experience, ideology tends to have mostly negative connotations, or, rather, I have regarded ‘ideology’ mainly in negative terms. This means though that we are speaking of something that is real. Ideology is a real fact. In addition, it is something real that embodies, shapes and constitutes reality. What I see as positive in this embodiment of reality is critique – which can be critique of the ideology or of reality – and the dispositive, understood as the transition of the world of thinking to that of reality. In my view, ideologies make up reality, but I use the term preferably when discussing its negative aspect, whereas when I speak of its positive aspect, i.e., the critique or the dispositive, I prefer these latter words.

The ideological dimension is absolutely crucial when thinking about reality and in trying to analyse and understand it, but, again, it can be both positive and negative. Gramsci, for example, saw it this way. The ideological dimension is an essential part of any analysis of reality, but a discourse on ideology is therefore always both positive and negative. On the one hand there is the bourgeois ideology (that Gramsci opposed, as do we) and on the other hand there is the communist ideology (that we support). Today, I think it is better to call the communist ideology a ‘critique’ or ‘dispositive’; ‘critique’ as in taking place in the realm of knowledge and understanding, and ‘dispositive’ in the Foucaultian sense of the transition of knowledge into action.

And, well, there is the matter of meta-ideology… Again, I agree with your view that ideology, being something that belongs to the realm of knowledge and understanding, in a sense branches out into reality, feeding and shaping it, and that therefore ideology is always and everywhere present in concrete reality. However, I would be very reluctant to speak in terms of ‘meta’, ‘post’ or ‘after’, as if it were something transcendent or as if there is such a thing as a space of transcendence at all.

When we speak of meta-ideology, we refer to the tendency of transcending the traditional party political differences between left and right. It is a trend that can be seen clearly today, wherever the theme of the common is picked up or where common-initiatives are being developed. And elsewhere as well: liberal politicians write books about the importance of the basic income; neonationalism presents itself as a longing for social cohesion; religiously inspired political parties emphasize communion and the community, et cetera.

Common is not the exclusive property of the left, that much is clear. Looking at history from a Marxist perspective, we see how it was precisely the commons that were transformed by capitalism to be financially profitable. Capitalism’s attitude towards the commons is about expropriation, exploration, creating surplus value, and the dominion that is founded on these things. The common exists in two major forms: there are natural commons and social commons and, as Michael and I put forth in Assembly, these can be subdivided into five types: the earth and ecosystems; the immaterial common of ideas, codes, images and cultural products; material goods produced by cooperative labour; metropolises and rural areas that are the domain of communication, cultural interaction and cooperation; and social institutions and services that provide housing, welfare, healthcare and education. Now the essential characteristic of the present-day economy and society is that the social production of the commons is being exploited by capital. The struggle of the commons therefore is working people re-appropriating that of which they were robbed by capital. Re-appropriating what was taken from them and putting it to work for the benefit of the common: that is the meaning of liberation and emancipation. This also means that the fiction of ‘post’ or ‘meta’ is debunked and eliminated. There is no meta. The struggle of the commons is the possibility of eliminating an ‘outside’ (meta [above], post [after]). This struggle is exclusively fought in the domain of immanence, meaning: here and now, at the heart of the reality in which we find ourselves, because there is no ‘outside’. By the way, we can only speak in the abstract about common as a general unitary, singular and exactly definable concept, because in reality the common is always twofold, just like labour is.

There is much talk about ‘common’ nowadays; studies are undertaken, and various movements and schools of thought have emerged around the theme. Here in France, for example, there is the school of the economist Benjamin Coriat, editor of Le retour des communs (2015); we have Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, who posit the common as a demand and alternative in their Commun (2014), and Carlo Vercellone and other comrades – and Michael and myself are two of them – who regard the common as something that can be used ontologically, can be annexed, and for whom the struggle therefore consists of re-appropriating the common. This also ties in with David Harvey’s reading of Marx. In Assembly we concern ourselves in great detail with his analysis and for the most part we agree with him. However, whereas Harvey focuses on capitalism as a continuous primitive accumulation, we see it as a developmental phase and therefore prefer to speak of formal and real subsumption, but this perhaps is a different theme.

What I’m trying to say is: my distrust of the term ‘meta’ is that it suggests that there is no difference or antithesis anymore between left and right. Well, of course left and right are inaccurate concepts, but to put it more plainly: it means that capitalism is no longer recognised and that being liberated of capitalism is regarded as something that could easily happen or would even be a battle that is already won.

To give a concrete example of how we use the term ‘meta’: the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011 was predominantly organized by the left, but people from quite different ideological backgrounds are also joining the movement and are developing new initiatives, out of necessity, for their daily survival. For that reason, this movement, which is really more of a patchwork of initiatives, is sometimes ‘accused’ of being apolitical. In that sense we call commonism a practice-based ideology and we call it ‘meta’ because it brings together people from various, traditionally opposed political currents, and does so out of necessity.

I fully agree with that conclusion and analysis, but I would still be wary of using such an ambiguous term. The word ‘meta’ covers a political concern aimed at reconciliation with regard to the profound rift between, to put it bluntly, the bosses and those who are exploited.

What do you think of the fact that the Open VLD, the liberal party in Flanders, is organizing a conference about the commons as apparently they think it is important, without necessarily wanting to capitalize it but, as things look now anyway, because they are genuinely interested or find something lacking in their liberal system?

It is obvious that we are facing enormous problems nowadays. We see a general transformation of the system of production as it is being automated and robotized. These are things that we thematized and analysed in our operaismo movement, some forty years or longer ago. In the first issue of Potere Operaio, in 1969, we demanded the ‘civil income’ (reddito di cittadinanza) and this was because we already foresaw this process in which labour would be reduced to a completely secondary element. The question is how to respond to this revolution and reality and as far as that is concerned I see an urgent need to create spaces for developing initiatives outside of capitalism.

There are a number of interesting initiatives in Belgium: the start-ups, with already 50,000 participants, and Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P Foundation. And yes, the commons is a domain that very much interests ‘the right’. The same goes for social democrats, by the way. So, the entire problem consists of understanding what the alternative could be, how to respond, what to do, and this is in fact the very theme of autonomy.

In our research and book we speak of aesthetics not only in regard to art but also in relation to society. We understand aesthetics as the shaping or design of both material and social things, of people. In your book Assembly we detect a similar idea: assembly characterizes the aesthetic style and strategy of the commons. Likewise, in Commonism, we oppose the aesthetic figure with the abstraction that we associate with exchange value, finance capitalism and neoliberalism. What does the ideal assembly look like, in your view? What are the conditions for its realization? How can non-humans (things, nature) be involved in an assembly? What instruments or strategies are needed? In short, how should assembly be practically organized in order to function well, in your view?

We argue that the assembly is already there. It is already there in the structure of the present-day economy in which labour has transformed itself in language and in cooperation that is largely autonomous. The assembly is what we are confronted with. The problem therefore is how these labour forces or subjects / people who produce subjectivity can become political subjects. This is demonstrated by the recognition of the common, by the transition to the common and being together, by the transition of the mere finding of being together to being aware of it. The transition of collaboration and being-in-common to the production of common subjectivity is the central element of the assembly.

The comrades and activists who take part in the fight of the movement, from Occupy Wall Street to the Indignados in Madrid, have attempted to bring about such a transition, especially from the condition of people producing under capitalism and whose situation simply happens to them to a free condition in which the common is built and formed. This transition is fundamental and in addition it demonstrates that commonism is much more feasible today than in the previous situation, in which the workers were organized and brought together by capital. Before, the workers were brought together, they did not come together of their own initiative. This is no longer the case and precisely this means an enormous boost for the possibilities. The possibility for liberation is infinitely larger and wider today, because there is this being-together, an ontological fact that is also a point of departure.

The assembly is an ontological fact that must become political, that is the heart of the matter.

Marx has said of the working classes that they were made by capital and that therefore it was necessary for them to become aware of their situation through a political party, an external organization, an ideology, et cetera, in order to become political. Today we see a maturity and an original organization, so to speak, thanks to the transformation that occurred in labour and society. Labour today is no longer a labour under command. The aspect of the command is becoming increasingly alienated from the possibility to work together subjectively. What is important, is that the language that is formed by the worker comes before the command, precedes it. The importance of neoliberalism, by the way, is that it understood that this autonomous use of language can be reversed and can be made use of by capital. This is why the most important political work of today is to recognize this subjective and special use of language and to reverse again what capitalism and neoliberalism have reversed, and to bring about the liberation.

We are still not quite convinced, in the sense that we miss a concrete definition of what assembly exactly is. Looking at this as a sociologists, we look at examples of assemblies such as the Ex Asilo Filangieri in Naples, and we think: assembly is a tool, a meeting method, a more democratic way of organizing things, of taking autonomous decisions, of achieving self-governance. Can we say that assembly is a formula for organizing direct democracy?

What Michael and I have in mind is exactly the type of phenomenon like L’Asilo in Naples, where sovereignty has been reversed: to the common, to a space and a series of shared goods (beni communi) in the widest sense, both material and immaterial goods. In other words, where a series of remarkable initiatives is undertaken for the common good. The concept of common is always a production, something that is invented, made, shaped. The assembly is this: a body of people, a small multitude that manages well the shared (material and immaterial) goods and thereby constitutes a common. The fundamental concept of assembly is that the political and social are again joined and today we have a chance, an opportunity to do this. Unlike Lenin, we no longer find ourselves in exceptional conditions like it was with the Russian Revolution when there was only hunger, war and catastrophe and everything had to be torn down in order to create a new force. Now, today, we have the opportunity to transform the assembly into a force. Because that is politics: lending force. Or, that is aesthetics, if one wishes to use that term: lending form and force. There is no form without force. Politics is force, power – and that includes the aspect of violence. In politics it is about the force (the power, sometimes violence) to construct peace.

What we see in the practical functioning of assembly, for example, is that the practice of language becomes very important. After all, people have to speak to each other and try to convince others through dialogue. Now this mechanism has two problems: 1) those who speak more and better have an advantage in winning the debate; and 2) there is a class phenomenon. In the situation of an assembly the middle class becomes dominant: those who are white, educated and can speak well have the floor, so there is an element of selection. My question to you is: how can the assembly be organized in such a way that there is no such selection or that this shortcoming is compensated for by letting basis-democratic principles prevail? How does one give a voice to those who remain silent?

We are of course discussing examples and I think that especially in Naples, if one looks at the periphery, in the surrounding region, in all those places where the casa del popolo are strong and many initiatives are taken by the people, one definitely sees a direct proletarian use of language, and in quite dominant forms. There are also initiatives such as L’Asilo that already have quite a tradition, that have statutes and a legal structure. And yes, in those cases a certain political class is involved. However, I think that the assembly is both cause and product of a break with class distinction. The obvious objection one could have against these assembly initiatives is that not everything has been properly defined. We are after all speaking of a process that is not free of contradictions and downfall, but it is an extremely important process and it has begun.

The problem is that we have to develop a different model than that of parliamentary democracy, or, rather, we need a post-parliamentarian model of democracy.

What do you think of the fact that in Naples a commissioner for the commons (assessore dei beni communi) has been appointed? We ask this specifically with regard to your rejection of state institutions.

We cannot have this discussion with Naples as an example. The situation there is quite ambiguous. What is happening there now was achieved with great effort after an immense political crisis: the PD(Democratic Party) in Naples is divided into four or five factions, the 5 Stelle movement is weak, and there is this incredible Mayor Luigi de Magistris, a former magistrate – very straight and tough – who is open to what according to him might constitute the majority. So all this makes Naples a rather unique case, a confluence of events. There are so many contingent factors playing a part there. The first concern of the comrades who occupied buildings was therefore to obtain a guarantee, an anchoring in the institutions.

But to return to our point, the institutions are indeed a major problem, but we should not concern ourselves with the case of Naples as it is very much a separate case.

 In Assembly you regard the new leadership of the commons as a possible strategy of the multitude and as a tactic of the leader. The leader can only temporarily – and depending on her or his expertise – make certain tactical moves in the general strategy of the multitude. How can this be organized and in how much is your reversal of attribution of the strategy (to the multitude) and of tactics (to the leader) different from a representative democracy where leaders are also only appointed temporarily?

I think that we are faced with the problem of removing or eroding the political relationship between movement and leader. What is at stake is decision authority. What exactly was the formula of political parties? A party gathered a great number of people along a certain political line that was decided upon by the top, by the leader, and which was literally imposed on or taught to the people in a top-down fashion. In our work, Michael and I take the critique by movements as our starting point, because these movements reject the existing institutions. Today, we have to reject leadership but not necessarily institutions as such. So we are now faced with the problem of the institutions and we have to solve this, we have to face this, and study it together. Or, in other words: we have to bring back the leadership to the movement and it is within the movement that the hegemonial strategy of leadership must be developed. We have to take the decision authority away from the leader, or rather, take the abstraction and transcendence of the decision away from the leader.

But how does one choose the leader, and how do the commons differ from representative democracy?

The problem is not how to choose, as this can be done in any number of ways. The problem is that of the power that is given to the leader. Often though, the leader will spontaneously emerge from the multitude.

The power of the leader must be limited to the tactical level and this usually means the power to make proposals.

Anyone who has been active within the movement knows the phenomenon of the leader who spontaneously comes forward. It has to do with the actual needs and problems the movement faces and into which the leader has more insight than anyone else. One often sees how a leader’s power is acknowledged at some point and then begins, works out well, and thus becomes a reality.

Let me give an example. During the 1917 revolution, Lenin succeeded in becoming the tactical leader because he could instantly, in a very direct manner, provide answers to two problems that presented itself at the time: peace now, and land to the farm labourers. However, on the other hand, the powers representing the military and the farmers were convinced that neither the soldiers nor the farm labourers were ready for these changes and so they didn’t undertake any action. It was a paradox: the leader, Lenin, saying no to the ruling institutions because he understood what the soldiers and the farm labourers needed. This is a tactic that becomes power and force (forza).

The leader is always temporary, tactical. He steps forward in a struggle of the people / subjects who have demands and needs.

But then how does the leader know what those needs are? Simply because they stem from the people?

Quite so. He knows what is needed because he is part of it, because he is in the middle of it, but, again, this is a paradox. According to the official history books Lenin was a demagogue who played games with the people, but I know that the reverse is true: the revolution succeeded because Lenin understood that these were the real needs and because he immediately articulated an answer to them, without all the compromises, crippling detours and institutions as created by the parliamentary system. Those real needs to which he provided an answer were peace now, immediately, and giving the land to those who worked the land, without any compromise. 

The same is true for many leaders. Churchill, for example, took a direct decision to fight against the Germans in World War II. This is the point: the leader who immediately and directly coincides with the needs and wants of the many / the common.

In Assembly you defend the hypothesis that the institutions or the leader don’t need a centralized rule but that they can be realized by a multitude in a democratic manner. The examples you provide for the future of the movements are in line with this hypothesis: for example, Black Lives Matter. But isn’t this notion and aren’t these examples at odds with or even contrary to your criticism of the ‘horizontal leader-lessness’?

Well, many movements are leaderless, but that is not the issue. What is problematic, or what these movements need, is institutions. What we are trying to say is not so much that movements need leaders – as, again, they should take charge of leadership themselves – but that they do need institutions. It is a mistake for these movements not to have an institution, to not adopt an institutional framework. However, Michael and I are convinced that within the movements there is a tendency to do this, to form institutions – these are not anarchist groups – and thereby realize this horizontal hegemony. Our work is about searching for a type of institution that is not sovereign and is not connected to ownership. How this works out in practice, well, that is exactly what we need to discuss, think about, try out…

This leads nicely to our next question. You advocate complementarity of the three political strategies: pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony. Existing institutions are abolished and new, non-sovereign institutions are created. What exactly needs to be abandoned when it comes to existing institutions?

We are currently witnessing the death struggle of the concepts that have dominated political thinking and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The most important of these dying concepts are national sovereignty and property, both private and public. National sovereignty has been beaten by globalized capitalism, but at the same time actual capitalism is founded on those same barely surviving concepts that influence and mutually confirm each other. The concept or principle on which national sovereignty is based, in particular the ‘border’, has really become absurd. We transcend and cross borders constantly. Our brains are globalized and have no more use for the concept of border, so we need to get rid of it. That is the theoretical work that needs to be done: giving short shrift to moribund principles and concepts such as the border. As abundantly clear as this is for national sovereignty, so it is for ownership, both private and public: ownership is based on the same logic as the border, an obsolete concept that is at odds with reality. Even more so: property and border are one and the same thing.

The concept of the common, by contrast, is not one of ownership. In thinking about this issue it is extremely important to make a distinction between ‘common goods’ (beni comuni), which can be the object of ownership, and ‘the common’ (il comune) as in ‘commonwealth’, which is a production, something that is formed by the common from within and which consequently cannot be owned.

Is there anything positive you could mention about what these new ‘non-sovereign’ institutions might look like? How should the three political strategies – pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony over the institutions – work together exactly? Is there a sequence that these three strategies should follow, or should they be deployed in parallel?

That is a question of the political practice. I simply can’t answer that, as it is too hard to do this sitting at a writing desk. It is both impossible and undesirable. I don’t see it as part of my work, which is studying, philosophizing, providing general frameworks in a critical manner, studying the foundation of the discourse, questioning the principles and concepts. And then there is the practice of the struggle and it is within the struggle that debate and consultation should take place, among each other, about what should be done. We cannot be expected to predict the future, and it is not our ambition to do so. To me this is one of the core issues: we will have to wait until the future announces itself, breaks out. That takes place in practice, whereas in my work I wish to point out directions, and formulate a critique of the principles of ideas and structures.

In Assembly you quote Hegel: ‘Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as aSubstance, but equally as Subject’.2 What exactly is subjectivity to you? Does subjectivity take on a different form today and if so, what does it look like?

To Hegel, subjectivity meant synthesis and overcoming. Think of Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave dialectic: the slave overcomes the master in as far as he serves him and at the same time constructs him. Also think of the concept of the proletariat in relation to capitalism in the work of the young Marx: the proletariat forms itself and realizes its project in as far as it becomes a fully integrated part of the bourgeois society. In Capital we no longer find this interpretation, and it is also gone from or at least nuanced in our analysis of the reality of workers today. Today, the subjectivity of the worker is that of singularity, of a particularity that is being produced in the construction of the common. This particularity is invention, is immaterial and serves to construct the common, that is, a bringing together of all these things. The (worker’s) subjectivity of today is a production of ‘being’, as it is an innovation and a surplus. It is a practice of freedom and therefore the production of subjectivity is something that transcends any identity. The subject is non-identic, is not an identity (hence the impossibility of providing exact definitions for it). The subject is formed in the collaboration, in being social, and it is something historical.

How do you see the role of art and the art world in the organization of assembly? On the one hand we state that the art world today indeed has a role by creating a space for exchange and debate, which is lacking in mainstream media, at exhibitions and during biennales. On the other hand we conclude that it doesn’t go any further and that these initiatives remain limited to the domain of the discursive. Also, these initiatives are often used as PR tools, turning the debate into a commodity. In light of this, what role can the art world – and art itself – play according to you, and can it have a role at all in shaping and strengthening the commons?

As I have tried to clarify in my book Art and Multitude (1989), art can always be linked to its mode of production. Art is production. Its dignity is derived from the fact that it is production of ‘being’, of meaningful images. In other words, of images that shape ‘being’, that take ‘being’ out of a hidden condition and transform it into an open and public condition. This always happens during a process of production. This is why there is an analogy between how goods are produced in general in a certain historical context and how art is produced in that same context. In art there is always a ‘making’ in the sense of constructing something. Art is always a form of building, a bringing together, a productive gesture. When looking at things from this point of view, it becomes clear that it is all about making distinctions within this world. There is beautiful art and there is ugly art, useful art and useless art; likewise there is art that markets itself as a commodity and there is art that is a form of productive artistic making.

Like language, art produces communication, it makes connections. Especially nowadays, art is like the practice of language in constructing connections, becoming event. Art is getting rid of materiality and is increasingly linked to immaterial production. It follows the same trend as the immaterial production and makes connections in fluid, unstable, and new images, in unexpected forms and figures. In this way art affiliates itself with the present-day mode of production and, like this mode of production, it interprets behaviour that is related to special events and passions. We are in a phase of metamorphosis of art, just like we are in phase of the production mode in which labour is completely transforming itself.

With regard to art I would like to underline two things. First, I assume that art is a form of making and working that is therefore completely linked to the production mode of a specific historical situation. Second, I assume that art has the capacity to produce ‘being’. Of course not all art always produces real ‘being’. By this I absolutely do not mean that there is good and bad art; that is not for me to say. But I do think a distinction can be made between art that serves the market and that is produced and circulates within the market, and art that is absolute production, meaning that it produces ‘being’.

One year ago, at the Venice Biennale, Marx was read; at documenta 14 in Athens, so much engaged political art was shown that the 12 April 2017 issue of Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsbladlikened it to a ‘stage for the revolution’.  At the same time, however, these revolutionary platforms stay within the confines of biennales and documentas, which reminds one of what Walter Benjamin has called the ‘aestheticization’ of politics, which according to him was also a sign of fascism. Is there a way out of this for art? Can art escape from institutions that maybe do not affirm fascism as such, but certainly neoliberalism, and that turn art into a commodity?

There is always an escape route! Obviously these places must be regarded as battlefields, as places of confrontation and collision, of conflict and rifts. One can always escape that which biennales and documentas represent: that is, one can and should try to escape their control function – these big art institutions of the state or the market do function as control mechanisms – and artists therefore find themselves in exactly the same condition as the workers.

In my view, the problem with art institutions is this: they are arenas, more specifically arenas of a fight for the truth, of critique of ideology and production, places where the discourse of power is exposed, but they are always also marketplaces. The point is to break out of this cage of control by the state and the market and this has always been part of the development of art as it has manifested itself in many different forms, each time in a different manner. For example, at one time we had patrons of the arts who had the same role as the art institutions of today; it was no different then.

And so we have this whole history of constant artistic resistance against these conditions. I don’t think that art has ever been in line with power in any way. The great Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors were not, nor were the painters of the Golden Age in the Lowlands. On the contrary, there have always been breaking points in art that become evident in the artistic production, while these painters and sculptors were nevertheless an integral part of their specific social context. Because of these breaking points one can regard art as a way of unearthing the truth. They qualify art as a mode of truth.

I often talk to friends-comrades who make art and they are becoming increasingly critical of the market. There is a general resistance against the market these days in the actions of those comrades who believe strongest in or empathize with the class struggle – a rejection of the market that is becoming more and more radical. The protest is expressed in this negation, which is quite strong, and it leads to a radical criticism without compromise and without market possibilities.

There is of course also, and quite often, a strong temptation of ‘nothing’, of not doing / making, or of presenting art works that express a not-doing / not-making.

Anyway, I tend to be cautious with regard to these issues, and I think that in every action – and therefore also in art actions – a material composition is required and therefore a composition with reality as well. What I mean is: one should neither look for purity nor demonize the power / force.

In Assembly you emphasize the importance of language and communication. You mention the changing of meaning of words, speaking, and translation, and the appropriation of words as important political action. In this context you posit the idea of entrepreneurship of the multitude. Is this at all possible with a term like ‘entrepreneurship’, which has been associated with capitalism in all its guises for over 200 years? Is there not a risk that critique will wither and distinctions become blurred with such an act of appropriation?

I don’t think so, and frankly I don’t understand why such a polemic arose around specifically this issue as soon as our book was published. We, Michael and I, have always recuperated and reused words, and reversed their meaning in our work. For example, ‘empire’ may be the most academic and traditional term in the history of political science. Not that we were the first to do so: the word ‘capital’ as the title of Marx’s three-part book on the critique of political economy is about as capitalistic as can be. There is nothing wrong in appropriating words that are part of the tradition and ethics of the capitalistic bourgeoisie and assign them a new meaning. On the contrary, this is what we should do. The problem with regard to this form of language practice is to understand the force of reversal.

As to the semantic series of words such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘enterprise’, ‘entrepreneur’ in relation to the common – because we never just speak of ‘entrepreneurship’ but about the ‘entrepreneurship of the common’ – the word ‘enterprise’ admittedly is rather ambiguous. Enterprise is something like Christopher Columbus who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and demonstrated a huge capacity for invention. So on the one hand the word refers to a heroic, fantastic project. Columbus engaged in an improbable and completely new undertaking in the space of his time. On the other hand, the term ‘enterprise’ also refers to that with which it is commonly associated, namely a project aimed at financial profit and at generating income.

What we try to do in Assembly is to appropriate words that belong to tradition. We see it as our task to gain words for the common, to recuperate the words. Again, we do not speak of entrepreneurship tout court, but of entrepreneurship of the common. Speaking of the entrepreneurship of the common has the same potential and power as speaking of refusing to work: it leads to a re-appropriation of the common. So the power of this language use lies in this action of re-appropriation and in this the reversal is crucial.

In Assembly you imply that revolution is ontological and not a contingent event – that revolution is not aimed at seizing power, nor that it brings you to power, but that it changes power, or that it can bring you to power but that it changes the nature of power in doing so. You call upon the multitude to seize power in the sense of Machiavelli at the end of The Prince (1532): a call for a new leader who emerges from the multitude, and to not waste the opportunity. What is essential here is the phrase ‘to take power differently’, by which you mean, with Spinoza, that the ‘common’ or ‘freedom, equality, democracy, and wealth’ are guaranteed. ‘Differently’ here does not mean repeating the hypocrisy of freedom (without equality) as a concept of the right, nor that of equality (without freedom) as a proposal by the left. The formulation therefore is inspired by Spinoza to whom the ‘common’ was the basic idea that can also be summarized as: there is no freedom without equality and there is no equality without freedom. Common is an ontological and logical category that assumes and unites an internally contrasting multitude of singularities. Our question is twofold. Why speak of ‘commonism’ instead of simply calling it ‘communism’? And where is solidarity in all this?

Why we don’t call it ‘communism’? Perhaps because that word has been all too much abused in our recent history. In Italy, in the 1970s, there was a group of situationists who called it commontismo(rather a sympathetic lot, these situationists, but it all ended very badly: they turned out to be activist robbers, went to prison or became drug addicts; it all ended tragically).

I have no doubt that one day we will call the political project of the common ‘communism’ again. But it’s up to the people to call it that, not up to us.

Where is solidarity in our discourse? In everything we say there is solidarity because solidarity is in the principles of our discourse. To say it in Aristotelian terms, there is solidarity as in three of the four types of causes: as material cause in the rejection of loneliness, as efficient cause in the collaboration to produce and as final cause in love. In other words, everything that we propose, our entire theoretical building, has its material, efficient and final cause in solidarity. The ‘commontism’ is drenched in solidarity. One cannot live alone, in loneliness, one cannot produce alone, and one cannot love alone.

Our proposals cannot be read in any other way but as proposals of solidarity, or how to escape from loneliness. We have to escape from loneliness in order to define a solidary, close community, as we cannot survive alone in a barren desert. We must escape from loneliness in order to produce, because alone we would never have the means or the time. We must escape from loneliness in order to love, because on your own and without someone else there can be no love. This is the only way to understand this radical transition of / to the common, a transition that we are evolving towards, by the way. There is truly a developing tendency towards solidarity and towards an escape from loneliness.

We live in times of great crisis and terrible emptiness but at the same time these are also times of great expectations. We are facing a void between that which is finished and that which still has to begin. Especially in talking to young people one becomes aware of this terrible loneliness, but also of this great longing. The desert caused by neoliberal capitalism is insufferable in every regard.

Our next question is about that. As in your previous writings, in Assembly you start from the optimistic thought that the Occupy movements demonstrate a rebellion of the multitude, that the ‘possible is a given’, that the ‘common is a given’. But in Assembly you also pose the question, perhaps for the first time, regarding why the revolution of the Occupy movements failed. Does this indicate a turn in your work, a turn away from the earlier optimism? And what does this mean for the idea of revolution?

There is no turn from optimism to pessimism in our work. What we attempted to do is to understand the problem in a realistic manner and to think about possible solutions. The problem as we see it is that of the limits and limitations of movements, both of Occupy and other movements we have seen over the past decade. The most important limitation, in our analysis, is that these movements have not been willing or not been able to translate themselves into institutions and that where they did attempt to do so and in those cases where they actually formed institutions, it all ended in a betrayal of the movement. We see this for example in a part of the Indignados that founded Podemos, who eventually betrayed the situation from which they departed. Having followed all the debates from close up, my opinion of Podemos is negative. They have not succeeded in maintaining the reversal of the relation between strategy and decision or between tactic and strategy, leaving only the tactic.

So it is not about being more or less optimistic, but about grasping the problem in a realistic manner and about thinking of ways to solve the problem and this is what we try to do in our work. We try to see the limits and limitations of the political common-movement. Our conclusion is that power should be seized, but that in and with that operation power should be changed. Therefore, as you quote and as we expressed it in Assembly, it is all about ‘to take the power differently’ and then maintain this radical transition / reversal.

You also deal with populism in Assembly. Shouldn’t we discard the term ‘people’ anyway?

Yes, that’s what the common is all about. The term ‘people’ stays within the logic of Hobbes and the bourgeois line of sovereignty and representation. It is a fiction that violates the multitude and has only that purpose: the multitude should transform itself into one people that dissolves itself in forming the sovereign power. Think of the original frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, which perfectly illustrates this. But it was Spinoza who, against Hobbes, emphatically used the concept multitudoand underlined that the natural power of the multitude remains in place when a political ordering is formed. Actually, Spinoza, in elaborating these concepts of multitudo and comunis encapsulates the entire issue of politics and democracy, as I have attempted to demonstrate in my book L’anomalia selvaggia and to which we refer again in part in Assembly. Crucial in the transition of singularity to the common, Spinoza teaches us, are imagination, love and subjectivity. Singularity and subjectivity becoming common and translating themselves into newly invented institutions, is one way of summarizing commontism.

With regard to the current digital and communicative capitalism you also dwell on critique and what you call Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s techno-pessimism. You state that in order to arrive at an evaluation of modern technology it is necessary to historicize the arguments of critique. The position of Horkheimer and Adorno only relates to the phase of capitalist development that is controlled by large-scale industry. This constitutes a serious limitation of their critique. My question is: is this restriction of their critique related to the counter image of Enlightenment and modern thinking as forged in the Romantic period by opponents of revolutionary ideas and emancipation and in which their Dialektik der Aufklärung is also caught? Or, to put it differently, is it due to the fact that they do not make an explicit enough distinction between emancipatory modern thinking and capitalism? What is your view on this, also in the light of your thesis on the alternative modernity of Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx, in which the first two are regarded as the main suspects by Horkheimer and Adorno?

I grew up against the background of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and it is evident that operaismo is indebted to their critical work, but at the same time the entire development of operaismo can be seen as opposing the conclusions of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Horkheimer and Adorno’s work leads to extremes and extremism, it takes you to the border and then you can’t go any further. It is the conceptualization of a hermetic universe. In operaismo we asked ourselves, departing from this hermetic universe, how one could break it open. Instead of ending where they did, in operaismo we took the hermetic universe as a starting point, that is the universe of capitalism, of the excesses of instrumental rationality, and of the logic of control and repression, and we asked ourselves how we could break open this hermetic universe. We looked for ways to force open this hermetic universe, which had deteriorated into commodity and was heading for catastrophe. Introducing subjectivity is the central element in this, the crowbar.

So we are the children of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also rebel against it.

What we rediscovered in operaismo (and also in Assembly) against the positions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectics is ontology, the class struggle and the possibility of subjectivation. Our interest in the pre-1968 Herbert Marcuse can be seen from this perspective, and what has been especially important, according to us, is the work of Hans-Jürgen Krahl. He was a young student of Adorno who was killed in a traffic accident in early 1970, but he wrote a very important work about the formation of the class struggle, Konstitution und Klassenkampf (published posthumously in 1971). His discourse was similar to what we tried to do in Italy. It involves the discovery of the immaterial and intellectual labour that had the potential for political action, for liberation and for breaking with the total exploitation. Georg Lukàcs also played an important part in this discovery, as did Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France. In the intersection between phenomenology and Marxism we find the fabric in which our movement originates.

If you, as an intellectual, thinker, researcher, critical theorist, were to give an assignment to the future generation, what would it be?

What I see as most important, as fundamental in my life, and what I experience as unique in my life and something that connects everything and is positive, is the fact that I have always been a communist militant. Throughout my life I have never done anything, not as a philosopher nor in any of the many other professions or occupations I engaged in, not as a sociologist or sometimes even as professional politician, never have I undertaken anything that wasn’t completely driven by my communist commitment. I have always been a communist militant in everything. That is what I would like to leave to the future. I would like for communist commitment to become the central element again in people’s lives. Because the commonist militant is the salt of the earth.

Pascal Gielen is full Professor of Sociology of Art and Politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor-in-chief of the international book series Arts in Society. In 2016, he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. His research focuses on creative labour, the institutional context of the arts and cultural politics. Gielen has published many books  translated in English, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Sonja Lavaert is professor of philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She has published on early modern philosophy (Machiavelli, Spinoza), radical contemporary philosophy (Agamben, Negri, Virno), critical theory, Italian studies and philosophy of art. She is the author of Het perspectief van de multitude (2011) and she co-edited The Dutch Legacy. Radical Thinkers of the 17th Century and the Enlightenment (2017) and Aufklärungs-Kritik und Aufklärungs-Mythen. Horkheimer und Adorno in philosophiehistorischer Perspektive (2018). Her research focuses on the philosophical representations of history, and on the genealogy of political and ethical concepts in the interdisciplinary area of philosophy, language, literature, and translation.Credit: This essay is reproduced from the forthcoming book with the kind permission of the authors Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert and publisher Valiz, titled Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real, edited by Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen, for the Antennae-Arts in Society series (Amsterdam: Valiz, September 2018), www.valiz.nl. Text licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 License.

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In recent years, many researchers and social activists from very different countries, like myself, have rediscovered the notion of the commons as a key idea to deepen social and environmental justice and democratise both politics and the economy. This reappropriation has meant questioning the vanguardist and hierarchical visions, structures and practices that for too long have characterised much of the left. This concept has resurfaced in parallel with the growing distrust in the market and the state as the main suppliers or guarantors of access to essential goods and services. The combined pressures of climate change and the crisis of capitalism that exploded in 2008 (a permanent and global crisis, which is no longer a series of conjunctural or cyclical recessions) force us to reconsider old paradigms, tactics and strategies. This means discarding both the obsolete models of planning and centralised production at the core of the so-called ‘real socialism’ of the last century and the state capitalism that we see today in China and a few other supposedly socialist countries, as well as the equally old and failed structures of present-day deregulated capitalist economies.

At first, the concept of the commons was disseminated by progressive intellectuals inspired by the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009. Ostrom, an American political scientist, was a progressive academic, but could hardly be classified as a radical thinker or as a leftist activist. In the last decade, academics and activists from very diverse ideological families of the left have reviewed her contributions and have engaged in intense theoretical debates about the potential of the commons, based on the analysis of many inspiring prefigurative experiences currently underway.

Ostrom’s main contribution was to demonstrate that many self-organised local communities around the world successfully managed a variety of natural resources without relying on market mechanisms or state institutions. Currently, it is possible to identify various perspectives in the theoretical debates around the commons, but in general they all converge on the importance of a third space between the state and the market (which should not be confused with the Third Way outlined by Anthony Giddens and adopted by politicians as dissimilar as Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton in the United States, or Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil as a hypothetical social democratic alternative to socialism and neoliberalism).

Nowadays, a quick search in Google about the commons results in millions of references. Most definitions tend to characterise commons as spaces for collective management of resources that are co-produced and managed by a community according to their own rules and norms. We (TNI) have recently published a report on the commons in partnership with the P2P Foundation, in which we refer to this concept as the combination of four basic elements: (1) material or immaterial resources managed collectively and democratically; (2) social processes that foster and deepen cooperative relationships; (3) a new logic of production and a new set of productive processes; and (4) a paradigm shift, which conceives the commons as an advance beyond the classical market/state or public/private binary oppositions.

In Latin America and Spain, those of us interested in this field of activism and research must overcome a linguistic obstacle, since the translation of the concept of the commons from English into Spanish is not always easy or appropriate. This problem also appears in other parts of the world, so we often use the original English word to avoid confusion. Some of our friends and comrades use the concept of bienes comunes, but this term refers to ideas linked to the old economy or the social imaginary propagated by the church and other conservative institutions, without capturing all the richness, complexity and potential of recent theoretical developments and empirical processes around the commons. Obviously, the production of meaning in this field has already spread beyond the Anglo-Saxon world and there are already many people in countries of the South involved in this type of processes. That’s why the P2P Foundation and other friendly organisations have added a new word to the Spanish dictionary, procomún, while others (like myself) prefer to use the word comunes, which derives from a literal translation of the original term. From a similar perspective, many European or African activists prefer to use the English term instead of bens comuns (Portuguese), beni comuni (Italian), biens communs (in French), or gemeingüter (German).

Are the concepts of ‘the commons’ and ‘the public’ synonymous?

This question is the axis of heated theoretical debates, since it alludes to the old discussion about the nature and role of the state. The defenders of the commons who are most disillusioned with the left in government in several Latin American countries, particularly those linked to the fundamentalist autonomist current (like many of my friends in the Andean region, mainly those who are involved in struggles around the rights to water or energy) are convinced that the state should not assume any role and that the social order should be restructured by transferring political and economic power to self-organised local communities. Other researchers and activists (including myself, something that’s not surprising having been born in a country as state-centric as Uruguay) retort that such a contradiction is artificial and that we should at the same time expand the reach and influence of the commons – for example, by creating and interconnecting new types of authentically self-managed cooperative enterprises– and democratising or ‘commonising’ the state – for instance, incorporating workers and users into the management of existing state-owned enterprises or creating new public-public partnerships for the provision of essential public services.

My friend Michel Bauwens, a Belgian social activist internationally recognised as one of the most creative and influential thinkers in this field, often highlights the importance of what he has characterised as the partner state. From his (and mine) perspective, the state is perceived not as the enemy, but as an entity that could provide local communities and self-organised workers with the institutional, political or economic power that would be required for these processes to reach their maximum potential in the framework of the political and economic transition that we need. It also means, among several other possibilities to be considered, the provision of financial or in-kind support for cooperatives or other initiatives inspired by the notion of the commons.

The idea of the ​​partner state is in line with some relatively recent theoretical debates among Marxist thinkers. Today, and especially after a series of counter-hegemonic governments that we have had in Latin America, we’re already very aware that the contemporary state is not simply that “committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie” that Marx and Engels referred to in the Communist Manifesto. Neither Marx nor Engels were interested in developing a unified or integral theory about the state, so we should not interpret their statement (from the year 1848!) literally,. In the 1970s, Nikos Poulantzas and other non-dogmatic thinkers began to rethink the institutional framework of capitalist societies and argued that the state should be understood as a social relationship and not as an abstract entity floating above conflicting social classes, and added that the transformation of state institutions could be possible in the context of a “democratic way to socialism” (opened by the government experience of Popular Unity in Chile and brutally repressed by a military coup in 1973). More recently, Bob Jessop has shown how, although the state has a strong structural bias towards the reproduction of social relations, it’s also influenced by the totality of social forces, including counter-hegemonic struggles. My perspective of analysis on the state and the commons is very influenced by Jessop, and also by David Harvey, when he argues that a big problem on the left is that many – pointing to John Holloway and other proponents of the thesis of “changing the world without taking power” – think that the capture of state power wouldn’t be of much importance in emancipatory processes. We must recognise the incredible power accumulated in the institutions of the state and, therefore, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of state institutions; in particular when there’re opportunities to enable the expansion of the commons.

To those who are interested in deepening the knowledge of contemporary theoretical debates on the state and the commons, I would recommend reading our comrade Hilary Wainwright, the British political economist with whom I co-coordinate the TNI New Politics Project. A few years ago Hilary wrote a beautiful book, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy, where she argued the need to ‘occupy’ state institutions while, in parallel, we organise ourselves to create and connect new political and economic institutions rooted in local communities and workers’ collectives. Her books, the one mentioned here and more recent ones, are based on the detailed investigation of positive examples of commons-related initiatives across the Globe.

In recent years, within the framework of our New Politics project, Hilary, myself, and many other activist-scholars from different regions of the world have tried to make sense of a substantial shift in emancipatory thinking. Until not long ago, the economic policy of much of the left included the proposal of nationalisation of key industries. Nowadays, and maybe influenced by the recognition of the failures or shortcomings of nationalisation in places like Venezuela (where in recent years there’s been a recentralisation of political and economic power in the hands of the bureaucrats and military that control the reins of the state, with very negative in terms of lesser autonomy and influence for popular organisations and with very bad indicators in the management of nationalised companies) many of us are more interested in the design of a new economy based on cooperative relations, in which state institutions would play a facilitating and protective role. We emphasise the importance of public ownership of public services and productive infrastructure, but only as long we ensure a significant level of decentralised ownership and management; for example, in the provision of water and energy services and in the production of a vast range of goods through networks of self-managed ventures.

This perspective also means a deeper and more serene examination of the ambivalent consequences of the scientific and technological changes currently underway. We already know that the emerging forms of organisation and control of information and communication technologies and distributed production constitute a very contested space, in which a few transnational corporations (I’m thinking of Uber, Airbnb and other examples of the wrongly called ‘sharing economy’) financialise and benefit from precarious workers, the users of social networks and independent software programmers – with negative impacts on unions’ power and on the quality of work – but we should also be able to recognise that the same technological developments could be beneficial for the (re)creation of truly solidarity, democratic and self-managed forms of ownership and management. Around the world, we can see the emergence of a new generation of workers who use their technological knowledge to launch new enterprises and networks based on the principles of the commons and coordinate and collaborate among themselves, transcending economic sectors and geographical borders, and being ethically (and increasingly also politically) aware of the new social and economic order they’re creating.

How would you appraise the so-called ‘pink tide’ in Latin America vis-à-vis the commons?

My personal perspective on these issues has evolved, as I tried to understand the arguments of comrades from other Latin American countries who posed a very strong critique of the statist political culture prevalent in some political and academic circles of the region. Like many Uruguayans, it was hard for me to assimilate the positions of compañeros like Pablo Solón in Bolivia, Edgardo Lander in Venezuela, Arturo Escobar in Colombia, Maristella Stampa in Argentina, or Eduardo Gudynas himself in Uruguay. They (and many others) are strong critics of ‘development’, and in particular of its ‘(neo)extractivist’ component. In short, my critique to them focused on two aspects: their staunch criticism of the state, and their inability to formulate alternatives or proposals to transcend the reality that they criticised. With the passage of time, and after many and agitated discussions with Pablo and Edgardo in workshops at the World Social Forum, seminars of our New Politics project and other similar spaces, I could understand that their criticisms of the state (not always so homogeneous nor so acidic as I perceived them) were not that far from my own criticism of the Latin American left, and I also ended up realising that indeed there were proposals embedded in their criticisms.

My position on these issues has also been influenced by my increasingly pessimistic interpretation of the outcomes of our progressive of left governments. After having followed very closely the processes of Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and to a lesser extent also those of Bolivia and Nicaragua, I think we should ask ourselves up to what point is it possible for the left to get involved in government without losing autonomy and our utopian perspective. In other word: is it possible to operate within the state apparatus without being caught in the demobilising logic of institutional power? Unlike some of the friends I mentioned before, I don’t have a single or categorical answer to such question. I still believe that the state has a very important role to play, but I’m also convinced that it is now imperative for the left to get rid of its obsolete state-centric vision and open up to fresh perspectives like those of the commons.

For the Uruguayan left, such transition could be difficult, if we consider the heavy weight of the state in our society, politics, economics and culture. A significant difference between Uruguay and most other countries in the region is its long tradition of strong and efficient state-owned companies, which are highly appreciated by the population. In Uruguay, people perceive the state as a catalyst for development and guarantor of equity and social integration. On the other hand, the transition could be made easier if we consider the already high significance of workers’ and housing cooperatives. I grew up in a mutual-aid housing cooperative, so I might not be entirely objective. And we know that not all cooperatives are well managed or are internally democratic or participatory, but when we compare the reality of the Uruguayan cooperative sector with other countries of the region and the world, it’s clear that we already have a very fertile terrain for the development of the commons.

From a purely theoretical or ideological point of view, many components of the current global debate around the commons wouldn’t be a novelty for the Uruguayan left. If we look at several parties that compose the ruling coalition Frente Amplio(Broad Front), we realise that parties as different as the Progressive Christian Democrats (PDC, the advocates of the thesis of socialismo autogestionario, self-managed socialism), the People’s Victory Party (PVP, in line with their libertarian roots), or the Socialist Party (PS, with their proposal of transition from co-management to self-management, which the party has been advocating since 1930, when it demanded workers’ control of the economy) have been for a long time formulating programmatic ideas that transcend the limits of statism.

In other countries of the region, it would seem that the proposal of the commons would be more compatible with the governmental discourse. In fact, the proponents of the commons in Europe often refer to the concepts of vivir bien (living well) or buen vivir (good living), which came from Latin America. These concepts became popular on a world scale as a supposed alternative paradigm to capitalism. The concepts of suma qamaña and sumaq kawsay have their roots in the economic and societal models developed over centuries by the indigenous peoples of the Andean and Amazonian regions, prioritising forms of production more horizontal and in harmony with nature. The translation (or ‘export’) into other languages and cultures is problematic, but in the countries of origin the significance of these concepts can be debated as well. Bolivia and Ecuador, during the governments led by Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, incorporated the notions of living well and good living in their respective constitutions and policy guidelines, but the policies implemented have not always been coherent with the spirit or with the letter of the new legal and institutional framework. In Ecuador, in the framework of the very radical turn to the right performed by president Lenin Moreno in recent months, the discourse of buen vivir (which sounds beautiful and guarantees a left patina) is being used to provide justification for an impending wave of privatisation and corporatization of public services. In Venezuela, there was also much talk around self-management and people’s power, and considerable resources were allocated to the creation of cooperatives and associative ventures of a new type, but in practice very little progress was achieved; the rentier model based on the exploitation of a single resource – oil – deepened during the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, and its current exhaustion is the most important factor to explain the political, economic and social crisis that the country suffers today.

What are the organisational and programmatic challenges of the left for the integration of the idea of the commons into its political platform?

To answer this question, I should start by clarifying that I do not believe that the promotion of the commons should be the only strategy of the left. I believe that we must embrace the emancipatory vision of the commons, but without forgetting the role of the state and the need to respond to the very urgent problems of large sectors of the population. I agree with the criticisms of the hegemonic model of development and support the struggles against extractivism. I also tend to agree with many elements (not the whole package) of the emerging theorisation around the concept of degrowth – which is already very influential among European left circles, but not very significant within the Latin American left. But I disagree with visions such as Escobar’s when he speaks of “underdevelopment” as a mere “narration”, presenting it as an abstract concept that the colonialists would have elaborated and spread for the colonized to repeat. We can’t ignore the terrible rates of poverty, exclusion, and poor access to basic goods and services that still affect millions of Latin Americans. Our region should be incorporated into the global fight against climate change, and we must promote new forms of organisation and production that preserve the ecological balance, but we must also respond to social demands in the context of a quite likely deterioration of the economic situation in the short or medium terms. In that sense, I believe that the impulse to the commons must be framed within a broader strategy of growth, different from that offered by predatory and savage capitalism.

Thinking about the specific conditions of Uruguay, and based on data and projections published by local researchers, it should already be evident that the promotion of mega-projects like the huge paper mills run by Finnish corporations, or the already privatisation of the wind segment of the energy sector, don’t constitute the most appropriate developmental strategy. I would have preferred that the effort made by the government to convince us that the attraction of direct foreign investment and the liberalisation of trade are the right path would have been accompanied by serious studies sustained by reliable information to appraise the pros and cons of two different strategies: supporting large private investment on the one hand, and the promotion of the local and popular solidarity economy on the other. What would be the impacts of redirecting the tax exemptions and the large explicit or covert subsidies received by large transnational corporations if all that money were used to support cooperatives and other associative enterprises rooted in the national economy? I don’t have concrete answers to these queries, but I know that other Uruguayan economists and social researchers also raise similar questions and could provide objective and relevant information to deepen this exchange.

How to incorporate the commons within a political project that aims at the de-commodification of public services?

In Latin America we have many valuable examples of de-commodification of public services, past and present, that we should reconsider in the framework of current exchanges around the commons. A few years ago, during the heyday of what we then praised as the Bolivarian ‘revolution’, I worked in Venezuela and I was able to appreciate very closely the emergence of multiple processes of popular self-organisation in which millions of people participated. I’m referring to the mesas técnicas (people’s technical committees), the consejos comunitarios de agua(community water councils), the consejos comunales (communal councils) and the comunas (communes). Unfortunately, most of these processes are no longer in existence or in terminal crisis. Individualism and competition has been stronger than solidarity and cooperation in the responses to the crisis that Venezuela is experiencing today. This is a sad realisation, which forces us to question ourselves about the reasons and the conditions that made possible the erosion of processes that many of us considered very strong and even irreversible. A large part of the communal and participatory initiatives that had emerged in the most fecund years of the Venezuelan transition have gone into rapid regression when faced with the loss of the resources provided by the state (of which they had become dependent), in the context of the terrible deterioration of the social and economic situation. I think that many lessons can emerge from Venezuela, both on the potential of the commons and on the fragility of processes of this type. It also forces us to rethink the limits of ‘revolutionary’ political projects that are excessively focused on the state.

At the international level, and taking as a basis for analysis the European reality – which is the one that today I know better, since it’s my place of residence, activism and research – I believe that Latin Americans could ‘import’ some interesting ideas from current European exchanges on alternatives to commodification and corporatization. The side of the European left most active side in the promotion of the commons is that linked to struggles around the right to the city and the citizen platforms that won local office in several Spanish cities. Today, an important part of the European left perceives the city as the privileged space for political, social and economic experimentation, without seeing cities as isolated entities or at the margin of processes aimed at changing the state on a national scale, but recognising their growing significance in the new regional and world order. It’s not by chance that the fight against climate change or for the recovery of public services are led by networks of progressive local governments. Barcelona En Comú, the citizen coalition that now governs the Catalan capital, in particular, is a very powerful source of inspiration of regional and world importance. The political influence of Barcelona today is comparable to the hope that Porto Alegre, Montevideo and other Latin American capitals had been generated in the 1980s and 1990s, when the left began to experiment with participatory budgeting and other innovative policies for the radicalisation of democracy at the municipal level. Barcelona is today a laboratory for the design and testing of multiple initiatives inspired by the principle of the commons.

Another possible source of inspiration could be the current program of the British Labour Party. Since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader, Labour has become much more radical than our Frente Amplio and most other left parties in Latin America and Europe. The Labour Party has a proposal for renationalisation that’s much more advanced than similar initiatives applied or proposed anywhere else in the world. In the specific case of the energy sector, Corbyn and his party propose to bring back the sector into public hands, so that the country’ energy becomes environmentally sustainable, affordable for users, and managed with democratic control, as stated in the programmatic manifesto launched last year. But renationalisation, from this perspective, does not simply implies that the state retakes control by going back to the obsolete state-owned companies of the past, but rather the combination of different forms of public ownership and management. In short, Labour proposes not merely to re-nationalise companies that had been privatised during Thatcherism and Blairism, but to reconvert the big banks and other financial institutions that during the crisis had been saved from bankruptcy with public monies into a network of local banks based on mixed ownership (state and social), or the creation of new municipal utilities. The party is committed to create new municipal utilities, inspired by some socially-owned companies already in operation – such as Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham – or by popular campaigns – such as Switched On London – that propose the de-privatisation of power through the launch of new public enterprises, rooted in a more democratic type of management based on the active participation of users and workers, being environmentally sustainable, and securing services with affordable rates for the entire population.

Originally posted at the Transnational Institute Website

Lead image by Roger Cunyan. Additional image by Isabella Jusková.

The post The commons, the state and the public: A Latin American perspective appeared first on P2P Foundation.

What is the definition of capitalism? What is the history of the word “capitalism”? Who were the Boston Anarchists? What is “vulgar libertarianism”? Are there alternative social structures that we do not acknowledge because we are stubborn and stuck in our ways? Is post-capitalism occurring?

Further Reading:

Center for a Stateless Society website

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, by Kevin Carson

Reposted from Libertarianism.org. Click here to see the original post (includes a transcript)

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Pat attended Glastonbury University and obtained a degree in English and Media Studies

An array of different topics with Pat Kane and how they intertwine with music

We also discuss different topics about reading books and how they’ve played a key role for Pat to use alternative thinking with a more open mind. He discusses Future Fest conferences and enables people an affordable place compared to Wired or TED conferences.

Also, discussed in the interview is some political talk and activism within music and how it has certain messages to purvey to it’s audience. Pat discusses with us how people can network in the music industry and the best methods to selling tickets to your community to drive sales up.

Pat is the ultimate activist for musicians and making sure they have a platform in Future Fest to make sure they have knowledge within their industry. Future Fest is a space where people can be themselves and grow in inspiration as musicians.

Links from the show:

• Future Fest
• Follow Pat Kane on Twitter
• Please subscribe to Ouishare Radio

The post Pat Kane on Future Fest, Play, Music and Activism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this interview, Claire Milne, Inner Transition Coordinator for the Transition Network, discusses the addictive qualities of digital technologies, how we can make peace with them in our own lives, and how to repurpose these technologies for the transition to a more just, caring and ecological future.

On 20th November, Claire will join Gaia Trustee Philippe Sibaud at 42 Acres Shoreditch in London to launch Gaia’s new report Wh@t on Earth: How digital technologies are severing our relationship from ourselves, each other and our living planet. Book now!

Tell us about  your role at the Transition Network?

The Transition movement is about celebrating the wealth of our communities; it is a community-led global initiative to achieve spiritual growth and ecological, social and political change. I am both the Inner Transition Coordinator and I hold a role called Nurturing Collaboration. My roles are basically around the inner dimension of Transition and designing for collaborative culture.

Your work is in large part collaborative and reaching out to external organisations. Is there a place for digital technology in your work in Inner Transition?

I feel like although it [digital technology] plays a role in eroding deeper relationships I also feel like it’s playing, in some respects, very positive roles in connecting people at levels of scale that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible. So being able to collaborate beyond the local level – at the regional, national and international levels – is very helpful.

Like with anything, if we are able to be in full choice we can have a healthy relationship with digital technology and it can play a healthy role in our life. Then it starts to get more complicated because, you could equally say that hard-core Class A drugs are not wrong, because at the end of the day it’s about our relationship with them. But what we know about Class A drugs or even technology is that the way they interact with our neurobiology [has] the potential to be hurtful at the physiological and psychological level. Then it becomes more complicated because what we’re being asked to do is recover from addiction.

What part does technology play in the Transition Network’s ideal envisioned future?

I find it really helpful to ask the question: ‘is the world that I’m longing for and that my life is dedicated to in part creating screen based?’ The answer is really clearly no.

But another a part of me recognises that at the stage that we’re at, there is a need for some degree of that relationship with digital technology to enable that scale of change that is required in order to bring about transformation. And at the same time to have the depth of psychological and spiritual transformation that’s needed for us as a species, to survive, there is equal need for us to have times in our lives that are free from digital technology.

That comes back to the reality that technology has this addictive quality and therefore the creative tension that we’re all being asked to navigate at this point in history is how can we relate something that is so crucial to the transformation of our world in a way that doesn’t fall into encouraging that addiction.

And the degree to which we’re addicted to technology is seriously high, and plays out to the identity politics that were already there. The degree to which we are addicted and to what we are addicted to is correlated to the ideas we hold about what will make us lovable and feel like we belong and feel like we’re good enough. Technology just completely feeds into that, and that’s why at a psychological level it’s addictive.

In identity politics at the moment, there are certain aspects like the ‘work ethic’ that plays a big role in burn out. This core belief within us, seen as the capitalist protestant belief, that for us to be good enough – for us to be accepted by the tribe, for us to be loved – we need to be productive and we need to be good at stuff. It’s very clear that technology feeds that. It feeds this idea that we can be superhuman, we can get even more done, we can work 24/7. Social media feeds into identity politics, around what we look like and celebrity status and all the phenomena around getting likes. This is all about that addiction to looking good that feeds into these identity politics.

And I say this with compassion because it’s very easy to slip into a sort of persecutory tone, but the reality is that these are deep wounds and they’re painful and we develop behavioural strategies to protect us from feeling the wounding of believing we’re not lovable and don’t belong. These behavioural strategies have been really amplified and codified by technology.

We are at a tipping point in terms of the ecological damage that humans are causing to our living planet. We have so much knowledge about our impacts, but are arguably more disconnected from Earth than ever. Do you think digital tech is playing a role in that? Can we revive that important connection with the Earth in time before our crises totally overwhelm us?

On a good day I’ll feel like that’s possible and on a bad day I think that that’s just an absolute joke. And I don’t think anyone has the answer.

It comes back to that question: is the life I’m longing for screen-based? And I realise that’s not answering your question. I think that maybe what is important is being able to sit with the not knowing. Too much is unknown to know whether that depth of inner change is possible.

Because we cannot control what is happening, we can make a difference and make interventions. So whatever happens, we need to learn how to navigate challenging, precarious situations in the physical world. So the greatest privilege, and I think human right, is access to support around inner resilience: education around emotional intelligence, and inner resilience.

If we can be in choice around how we respond to things and in choice around how we respond to addictive substances like technology, then we have freedom. For me, the inner dimension of change and the inner dimension of transition are all about liberation from the ego and the superego, and the destruction of patriarchy and capitalism.

So ultimately, the future of the Earth and our interdependence with the other-than-human world is dependent on us liberating our egos from patriarchy and the conditions that then leads to the destruction of the Earth and other beings, because it is leading us to this state of disconnection, disillusionment and separation.

Do you see a correlation between technology and patriarchy?

I think it’s really important to look at the role that our relationship with technology is playing in coping with trauma. Because I think for a lot of people, connecting via technology enables us not to have to feel that trauma.

Connecting through technology really colludes with that dissociated state that comes with trauma. If we’re not in our bodies and in our hearts, then we can’t meet other beings from that heart-felt, emotional place, we’re just two heads meeting.

That dissociated state is what is very characteristic of a lot of society because there’s this sort of low-level trauma that’s just across the board, and I think that technology really speaks to that. A lot of the population are sort of drawn to connecting via technology because it protects us from feeling the pain and limitations around relationships.

Is there any practice that you employ to feel that reconnection with the Earth?

Well, an interesting one for me is the sit spot. And I work with the sit spot in two ways. There’s the kind of well-known sit spot where you go out and you find your spot in nature and take your attention 50% with yourself and 50% with your peripheral vision, which as a regular practice just allows this deepening of connection to the other-than-human world.

But the tune-up on that would be the inner sit spot. So bound out into the world to find your sit spot, and then practice the inner sit spot, whereby you go in to your inner world. It could take the form of a body scan or all sorts of mindfulness practices, but there’s something really beautiful about the combination of that classic sit spot out in the world and then combining that with an inner sit spot to make sure you are in connection with yourself as well.

Join Claire Milne, Philippe Sibaud and Gaia to launch the Wh@t on Earth Report and delve deeper into these reflections on 20th November, at 42 Acres Shoreditch, London.

Photo by docoverachiever

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10 years since the financial crash we’ve learned that there exists in the US not just one economy, but many, as well as many kinds of economic actors. From platform cooperatives to cryptocurrency, people are continuously building economic alternatives. So says Nathan Schneider, crusader for collective ownership and author of “Everything for Everyone: the Radical Tradition That Is Shaping The Next Economy.” Plus, professor and author Virginia Eubanks on how government and corporations are erasing social services through unequal digital practices.

Photo by Lukyclover

The post The Next Economy: worker led for public interest appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Michel Bauwens: Dear Nathan, this is not your first book. Could you give our readers a short overview of your “life in books”, i.e. how each subsequent book is linked to the other, eventually leading to the insights and motivations that resulted in your new book on the future of the cooperative tradition ?

Nathan Schneider: It does seem like a rather baffling path. First, a book on arguments about God, then a close-up on Occupy Wall Street, and now co-ops. But it all makes sense in my head somehow. The overriding challenge for me has always been that of capturing how people bring their highest ambitions into the realities of the world. I’m drawn to people with both adventuresome imaginations and the audacity to put them into practice.

This book followed especially naturally from the Occupy one, Thank You, Anarchy. After the protests died down in 2012 and 2013, I started noticing that some of the activists I’d been following got involved in cooperative businesses. The first business I know of that started at Occupy Wall Street was a worker co-op print shop. Other people were helping create co-ops in areas of New York hit by Hurricane Sandy. There was this euphoria about the idea of co-ops among many of these people—a way of earning a livelihood while retaining the democratic values of the protests. I experienced a bit of that euphoria myself, which turned to a more serious fascination as I realized how long and deep this cooperative tradition has been.

MB: Can you tell us about the evolution of your engagement with Platform Cooperativism?

NS: Pretty early on in this work, I started seeing opportunities for cooperatives in tech. I’ve long been a tinkerer with free software and open source, so I’d been used to thinking of technology as a kind of commons. But this came to a head around 2014, when more and more people were wising up to the fact that Silicon Valley’s so-called “sharing economy”—which was then becoming mainstream—really didn’t have much to do with sharing. Especially under the guidance of the OuiShare network based in Paris, Neal Gorenflo of Shareable, and of course the P2P Foundation, I started noticing that a few entrepreneur-activists were trying to figure out a real sharing economy, with sharing built into the companies themselves. This was a hack open-source software was missing; those people had hacked intellectual property law but they’d left the extractive, investor-controlled corporation unscathed. Now it was time to rethink the logic of companies, and the old cooperative tradition seemed like a sensible place to start.

In late 2014 I teamed up with Trebor Scholz, who had been thinking along similar lines, and the following year we organized the first platform co-op conference at the New School in New York. The response was way beyond what we had expected, and we had the germ of a movement in our midst. The more I was getting approached by new startups trying to create platform co-ops, the more I found myself turning to history in order to be able to offer advice based on some kind of evidence. The more I did that, the more I discovered how much there is to learn and to draw from.

MB: How do you see the relations between cooperativism and the commons? Could they possibly merge?

NS: I regard cooperatives as a kind of commons, a mode of commoning that has made itself legible to the industrial-era state and market. Compared to the visions of many commons activists today, however, the co-op tradition is quite conservative. I like its conservatism; it makes for fewer wheels in need of simultaneous reinvention. As a storyteller, I find it can be hard to tell stories about the more cutting-edge commoners because the challenges they are taking on are so hard, and so new, that people who lack an ideological commitment aren’t going to stick around for long. Cooperatives are a way of introducing people to a radical vision of the commons that also includes familiar stuff like Visa, Associated Press, and the credit union down the street. But I wouldn’t claim cooperatives are sufficient. They’re a starting point, a gateway to more diverse and widespread commoning.

Another concern: Cooperatives are all about old-fashioned property and ownership. I’m sympathetic to the “property is theft” vein of anarchism, but I also think it’s a mistake for commoners to relinquish ownership before the lords do—as the sharing economy proposed. That’s feudalism. Open-source software developers relinquished ownership over the code for Linux, and now it powers history’s most effective corporate surveillance tool, the Android operating system. As Piketty demonstrates, capital ownership (more than wage income) is the driving force behind economic inequality. The cooperative tradition is a way of distributing ownership more equitably. That will put us in a better position to shift toward a world in which property is less important and we can meet more of our needs through the commons. Commoners need to claim their rights from a position of strength.

MB: One of your chapters reviews the experience of one of your interviewers and the FLOK Society project in Ecuador. What is your evaluation of that experience?

NS: The experience of FLOK, which was an effort to craft a country-sized commons transition, was very instructive for me. It was a chance to see commoning presented as a comprehensive social vision, not just as a series of isolated interventions. Cooperatives were a critical ingredient in all that, of course. And of course, too, the Ecuadorian government’s follow-through was very limited. But that process led to the Commons Transition resources, which have been invaluable for articulating in a comprehensive way what all this is about. For me it was a magnificent education. Everyone should have that experience once in a while—to participate in crafting a plan for the future of the world.

MB: Your engagement is strongly linked to your faith. How can one be a progressive Christian in this day and age?  Do you link to particular elements in that tradition?

NS: The more I got to know the cooperative tradition, the more I found it to be bound together with religious traditions. I saw this especially in my own Catholic tradition, which produced such examples as the North American cooperative banks and the great Mondragon worker cooperatives, but similar examples can be found in so many other faiths as well. I wouldn’t say that cooperation is in any way reducible to religion or dependent on it, but as with so many other major forces in our world, religion plays a vital and mysterious role.

I was personally grateful to discover, through this work, some new patron saints. For instance, Clare of Assisi, co-founder of the Franciscan order, insisted in the Middle Ages that her nuns should have the right to self-govern, and that all voices should be heard. John A. Ryan, a prominent Catholic economist in the early 20th century United States, wrote beautifully about the moral education that comes through cooperative business. Albert J. McKnight, also a priest, brought a Pan-Africanist vision to the development of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. And those of us trapped in English are in dire need of more translations from the work of José María Arizmendiarrieta, the half-blind priest who founded the Mondragon co-ops. Each of these people turned to cooperative economics out of a deep-rooted faith that God has endowed each of us with the dignity to be capable and deserving of co-governing our communities.

MB: How do you see the coming ‘phase transition’ unfold? How optimistic are you that humanity can pull this through?

NS: I’m not big on predictions, despite the subtitle of the book. But what I do know is that, if we decide we want to practice democracy in richer ways than most of us do now, we’re capable of it. The past makes that clear enough. It’s perfectly possible that someday we’ll look back and laugh at the current condition of vast inequalities and autocratic corporations and the occasional ballot box. But at present it seems just as likely that we’ll give up on democracy entirely as that we’ll opt for ever more excellent forms of it.

The following excerpt is republished from Everything for Everyone, by Nathan Schneider:

Phase Transition

Commonwealth

The first time I saw it, I took the metaphor literally. “We will all meet in Quito for a ‘crater-​like summit,’“ the website said. “We will ascend the sides of the volcano together in order to go down to the crater and work.” Alongside those words was a picture of Quilotoa, a caldera in the Ecuadorian Andes where a blue-​green lake has accumulated in the hole left by a cataclysmic eruption seven hundred years ago, enclosed by the volcano’s two-​mile-​wide rim.

What the website beckoned visitors to was something less geologically spectacular than Quilotoa, but possibly earth-​shaking in its own right. The government of Ecuador had sponsored a project to develop policies for a new kind of economy, one based on concepts more familiar in hackerspaces and startups than in legislatures. The project was called FLOK Society—free, libre, open knowledge. Its climactic event, which took place in May 2014, was called a summit, but the nod to Quilotoa’s crater was a way of saying this wasn’t the usual top-​down policy meeting. Nor were the people behind it the usual policymakers.

Michel Bauwens, the fifty-​six-​year-​old leader of the FLOK Society research team, held no PhD, nor experience in government, nor steady job, nor health insurance. A native of Belgium, he lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with his wife and their two children, except when he left on long speaking tours. He dressed simply—a T‑shirt to the first day of the summit, then a striped tie the day of his big address. His graying hair was cropped close around his bald crown like a monk’s. He spoke softly; people around him tended to listen closely. The Spanish hacktivists and Ecuadorian bureaucrats who dreamed up FLOK chose for their policy adviser an unemployed commoner.

If Ecuador was to leapfrog ahead of the global hegemons, it would need a subversive strategy. “It’s precisely because the rest of the world is tending toward greater restrictions around knowledge that we have to figure out ways of producing that don’t fall within the confines of these predominant models,” Ecuador’s minister of education, science, technology, and innovation, Rene Ramirez, told me. He and other government officials were talking about dispensing with such strictures as copyright, patents, and corporate hierarchies. “We are essentially pioneers in this endeavor. We’re breaking new ground.”

At first this was a subversion mutually beneficial to guests and hosts alike. Several months before the summit, Bauwens said that FLOK was a “sideways hack” — of the country, maybe even of the global economy. “It’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity to do something innovative and transformative in Ecuador.” He saw a chance to set the conditions for a commonwealth.

FLOK bore the style and contradictions of Ecuador’s brand at the time. The president, Rafael Correa, sometimes spoke in favor of open-​source software; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been living in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012. Even while exploiting rain-​forest oil resources and silencing dissenters, Correa’s administration called for changing the country’s “productive matrix” from reliance on finite resources in the ground to the infinite possibilities of unfettered information. Yet most of the North Americans I met in Quito were out of a job because Correa had recently outlawed foreign organizations, likely for circulating inconvenient information about human rights.

As the summit approached, local politicians seemed to evade Bauwens and the team of researchers he’d brought there. Team members weren’t paid on time. Two dozen workshops about open knowledge took place across the country, with mixed response. By the time I met Bauwens in the gaudy apartment he was renting in Quito, a few days before the summit began, he looked exhausted from infighting with the Spaniards and wresting his staff‘s salaries from the government. “It’s going to be a much harder fight than I anticipated,” he said.

Bauwens had a knack for seeking out potent knowledge. He grew up in Belgium as the only child of two orphan parents. His curiosities drifted from Marxism as a teenager to, as an adult, various Californian spiritualities, which led him to Asian ones, then esoteric sects like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Meanwhile, Bauwens put his cravings to work in business. He worked as an analyst for British Petroleum and then, in the early 1990s, started a magazine that helped introduce Flemish readers to the promise of the internet. As an executive at Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications company, he guided its entry into the online world by acquiring startups. And then, in 2002, he’d had enough. He quit, then moved with his second wife to her family’s home in Chiang Mai.

“Capitalism is a paradoxical system, where even the ruling class has a crappy life,” he says. He started to believe his unhappiness had cataclysmic causes.

For two years in Thailand, Bauwens read history. He studied the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism—a ”phase transition,” as he puts it. It was an age when the previous civilization was in crisis, and he concluded that what led the way forward was a shift in the primary modes of production. The Roman slave system collapsed, and then networks of monasteries spread innovations across Europe, helping to sow the seeds of the new order. What emerged was an interplay of craft guilds organizing free cities, warlords ruling from behind castle walls, and peasants living off common land. As the feudal system grew top-​heavy, networks of merchants prepared the way for the commercial, industrial reordering that followed.

With the internet’s networks, he came to believe that industrial civilization faced a crisis of comparable import, as well as the germ of what could come next. He zeroed in on the notion of commons-​based peer production— the modes by which online networks enable people to create and share horizontally, not as bosses and employees but as equals. It was a new rendition of the old medieval commons, but poised to become the dominant paradigm, not just a means of survival at the peripheries. He set out to find examples of where this world-​transformation was already taking place. By seeking, he found.

The bulk of Bauwens’ oeuvre lives on the collaborative wiki that long served as the website of his Foundation for Peer‑to‑Peer Alternatives—the P2P Foundation, for short. Its more than thirty thousand pages, which he has compiled with more than two thousand online coauthors, include material on topics from crowdsourcing to distributed energy to virtual currencies. His life’s work takes the form of a commons.

Bauwens tends to talk about his vision in the communal “we,” speaking not just for himself but for a movement in formation. He borrows a lot of the terms he relies on from others, then slyly fits them into a grander scheme than the originators envisioned. Put another way: “I steal from everyone.” Nevertheless, one is hard-​pressed to locate any enemies; rather than denouncing others, he tends to figure out a place for them somewhere in his system.

It was in and for Ecuador, together with his team, that Bauwens mapped out the next world-​historical phase transition for the first time. He believes that cooperatives are the event horizon. They’re bubbles of peer‑to‑peer potential that can persist within capitalism, and they can help the coming transition proceed.

They can decentralize production through local makerspaces while continually improving a common stock of open-​source designs. They can practice open-​book accounting to harmonize their supply chains and reduce carbon emissions. Open intellectual-​property licenses can help them share their resources for mutual benefit. As these networks grow, so will the commons they build, which will take over roles now played by government and private markets. Soon all the free-​flowing information, combined with co‑op businesses, will turn the economy into a great big Wikipedia or Linux—by anyone, for anyone. The industrial firm, whether capitalist or cooperative, will dissolve into collaborations among peers. Bauwens calls this process “cooperative accumulation.”

Co‑ops are not an end in themselves. They’re not the destination. But they’re the passageway to a peer‑to‑peer commons. “We see it as the strategic sector,” he told me. New cooperative experiments were spreading from Mississippi to Syria, and here was a chance to show how they could grow to the scale of an entire country.

The Quito convention center is a two-​story complex with stately white columns and hallways enclosed in walls of glass. Visible just a few blocks away is the National Congress building, the supposed destination of FLOK Society’s proposals. Volcanoes stand in the distance behind it, the city rising up as high on their slopes as it can manage. During the four days of the “Good Knowledge Summit,” as the event was called, bureaucrats in business casual worked alongside hackers in T‑shirts to develop and distill the discussions into policy.

The opening night included bold pronouncements. “This is not just an abstract dream,” said Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s minister of knowledge and human talent. “Many of the things we talk about these days will become a reality.” Rather than tax havens, added the subsecretary of science, technology, and innovation, Rina Pazos, “we need to establish havens of open and common knowledge.”

Bauwens spent most of his time in the sessions on policies for cooperatives. In Ecuador, as in many places, it is harder to start a co‑op than a private company. The Canadian co‑op expert John Restakis, a member of Bauwens’s research team, called on Ecuadorian officials to loosen the regulations and reporting requirements on co‑ops, and to enable more flexible, multi-stakeholder structures. The officials pushed back; the regulations were there for a reason, after waves of co‑op failures and abuses. Restakis and Bauwens pressed on. They wanted Ecuador’s government to serve as what they called a “partner state,” nurturing commons-​oriented activities without seeking to direct or control them.

By the summit’s end, the working groups had amassed a set of proposals, some more developed than others: wiki textbooks and free software in schools, open government data, new licenses for indigenous knowledge, community seed banks, a decentralized university. Mario Andino, the newly elected governor of Sigchos, one of Ecuador’s poorer regions, wanted to develop open-​source farm tools for difficult hillside terrain. Before the summit, Bauwens visited Sigchos and received a standing ovation for his presentation. “We could be a model community,” Andino said. But there were no promises.

Over the course of his life, Plato made several journeys from Athens to Syracuse, in Sicily, with the hope of making it a model of the kind of society he described in his Republic. The rulers there, however, fell far short of being the philosopher-​kings he needed; he returned home to retire and compose a more cynical kind of political theory. If not quite so discouraged, Bauwens seemed adrift after the summit ended. The work of FLOK Society was now in the hands of the Ecuadorians, and by that time, there was little indication the government would take more from the whole effort than a publicity stunt. Bauwens was already starting to look toward the next iteration; thanks in part to the process in Ecuador, there were signs of interest from people in Spain, Greece, Brazil, Italy, and Seattle. The same month as the summit, Cooperation Jackson held its Jackson Rising conference.

“Recognition by a nation-​state brings the whole idea of the commons to a new level,” Bauwens said. “We have to abandon the idea, though, that we can hack a country. A country and its people are not an executable program.”

Excerpted from Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider. Copyright © 2018. Available from Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Photo by thisisbossi

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Nithin Coca: The Platform Cooperative Japan Consortium (PCJ) is the first organization in Asia focused on promoting the idea of platform cooperatives — businesses that bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance — to the digital world. PCJ was founded by Mathias Sager and is directly connected to the New York City-based Platform Cooperativism network (Shareable is a member of this cohort). Originally from Switzerland, Sager has spent several years living in Japan. Besides his work with PCJ, he is an independent researcher, social entrepreneur, and leadership and strategy adviser for Japanese and global organizations. He is also pursuing a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Liverpool in the U.K.

The consortium has members from Japanese academia, the country’s existing cooperative sector and civil society. In a short period, they have already organized several events with the goal of introducing the platform cooperative idea to Japan, and localizing it as a solution for the country’s economic and social challenges. We spoke with Sager to learn more about PCJ and the potential for platform cooperatives in Japan.

Mathias Sager (fourth from left) at Platform Cooperative Japan Consortium event. Photo courtesy of PCJ.

Nithin Coca, Shareable: What is Platform Cooperative Consortium doing to spread the platform co-op idea in Japan?

Mathias Sager, Platform Cooperative Japan Consortium: Our mission is to support the cooperative digital economy through research, experimentation, education, advocacy, documentation of best practices, technical assistance, the coordination of funding, and events.

Our web presence is helping us to reach potential PCJ stakeholders. Currently, we want to extend our online visibility in the social co-op Fediverse and on Mastodon in particular as a Twitter alternative, where there is already a lively user base in Japan as well. Part of our work is to actively contact organizations and individuals who could potentially be interested in the Platform Cooperativism concept and in becoming a member of the PCJ Consortium. As we did in the past regularly, we continue to organize PCJ public events at which we present the concept and discuss with the audience. Besides own events, we welcome guest speaking opportunities as, for example, at the J-Global Institute of Collaboration or at Nerd Nite. Also, other events such as Social Innovation Japan provide a good possibility to spread the word further.

Can you explain more about the challenges facing Japan that platform co-ops could address?

Japan’s economic growth rate in the past 10 years has been averaging in between 0-2 percent range, with negative 4 percent being the lowest in 2009, after the Lehman shock. Japan is hyper-aging and its population is declining due to low fertility. With this aging population and declining working-age population, economic researchers estimate Japan’s potential growth rate no more than 1 percent.

It is deeply worrying today that youth in Japan are often unable to find regular jobs after graduation. Platform co-ops should be able to help this lost generation and provide the many free part-timers fairer job opportunities. It is not the younger talents who are in decision power — due to seniority-based promotion systems, only 9 percent of Japanese managers are below the age of 40, compared to 62 percent in India and 76 percent in China. Hidden under the low unemployment rates are often precarious labor conditions. Working poor comprise an increasingly larger segment of the working population. For example, it could be a promising way to form freelancer-cooperatives who create or work for platform co-ops. Platform co-ops could also emerge from rural revitalization initiatives.

The private and public sector are struggling to address the challenges in personal care, especially for the increasing number of elderly. In Japanese culture, women are still widely encouraged to stay at home. Although women are also used to drive corporate profits, they are not sufficiently supported in their burden of child-rearing mothers at the same time though. Japan’s corporations, long heralded for their lifetime employment strategy, demand long office hours, which keeps fathers away from their families. However, Platform Cooperativism can be an answer to these issues by responding to the desire for more work-life harmony for all. … Cooperatives, and platform cooperatives, can help revitalize the Japanese economy.

Doesn’t Japan already have a large cooperative sector? Can platform co-ops build on that?

Japan is known for its mostly consumer cooperative tradition. Indeed, roughly one-third of Japanese households belong to co-ops. Cooperatives have long been an organizational solution to labor exploitation. Platform cooperatives strive to bring the concept of ownership to the digital economy, exploring not just employee ownership but also user data ownership. We can revitalize cooperative idea with platform cooperatives that will speak to a younger generation because they understand that something is wrong. … Millennials, in particular, may appreciate the opportunities for a better work-life balance. Cooperatives might be able to provide such a balance in addition to purpose and identification. Furthermore, cooperative governance can be designed to reward performance, therefore supporting personal growth in many ways.

What are your future plans and how do you hope to engage your target audiences?

When presenting Platform Cooperativism as a fairer user-worker-owned model of running online platforms, I often hear answers like “that’s a great idea, but it’s too difficult to realize.”

While grassroots efforts are essential, the cooperative way should also be supported top-down as a political priority. A cooperative economy can not only be profitable but by not passing excess profits to just a few it is also able to provide for welfare benefits and community development where often tax paid government efforts failed in demonstrating sufficiently sustainable effects.

The movement is relevant for any individual and organization that is valuing sustainable online platform solutions. Cooperative values ensure that the prosperity and decision-making can be shared between value creators working together for mutual benefit and the transition to a more equitable platform economy.

Platform co-ops could be of local scope but are inherently able to function cross-border in the world wide web to build global membership bases. A parallel development and step-by-step convergence of national and international segments may provide a Japan specific avenue to keep the politics local and open up to international users for global cooperation at the same time. I had the idea to coin the term of “sato-digital” as derived from satoyama or satoumi. Sato (里) means village and yama (山) means mountain. One definition is “the management of forests through local agricultural communities.” More recently, satoyama has been defined not only as mixed community forests, but also as entire landscapes that are used for agriculture. In that sense, Sato-digital could be translated into, suitable to the platform co-op concept — the management of a digital business through (respectively “by, of, and for”) the local digital community and the broader platform co-op ecosystem in Japan.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image by Pawel Janiak via Unsplash

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