Excerpt from the review/obituary in Dissent magazine (republished below) – See how he beautifully solves the dilemma between equal opportunity and equal outcome:

“Wright also believed that socialism must encompass social justice. Unlike a capitalist society where everyone ostensibly has an “equal opportunity” to flourish, social justice requires “equal access” to the resources that allow people to flourish. Social justice also means freedom from social stigma. Children should not get to attend better schools because of how much money their parents have, and racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression need to be overcome so they do not constrain life outcomes.
Wright believed that socialism was compatible with markets, but not the kinds of markets that undermine political and social justice. To work in sync with socialism, markets must be smaller in scale and the power of their participants must be limited. In other words, they should look less like free markets and more like garage sales. ”

Republished from Dissent Magazine:

Erik Olin Wright, a University of Wisconsin–Madison sociologist and former president of the American Sociological Association, died from acute myeloid leukemia on January 23, 2019. He was 72.

Wright’s body of work is voluminous. He began in 1973 with a study of prisons in the United States. From there, he edited and wrote almost two dozen books on class and capitalism. From the “Utopia and Revolution” seminar he initiated and led as a graduate student at the University of California–Berkeley to the book he finished in the intensive care unit of Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee, Wright developed one of the most sustained understandings of class and capitalism since Karl Marx. Like his forebear, Wright believed in the moral impetus to struggle against capitalism and to envision alternatives.

Decades of research culminated in his 2010 magnum opus Envisioning Real Utopias. For Wright, “real utopias” were democratic and egalitarian “real-world alternatives that can be constructed in the world as it is that also prefigure the world as it could be, and which help move us in that direction.” Such institutions range from Wikipedia to the Mondragon federation of worker cooperatives in Spain. The short version of Wright’s thesis is that the left can erode capitalism with these institutions, while taming capitalism in the political sphere. The long-term result is socialism.

As he built his theory of transformation, Wright—in contrast to Dylan Riley and other thinkers he engaged in argument—was skeptical that capitalism could be smashed in a way that would engender full emancipation. He was critical of the Soviet Union and other states forged by revolution. For Wright, a socialist state is realized when social power—rather than economic power (capitalism) or state power (statism)—dominates. In socialism, individuals have a say to the extent that something affects them. A corporation, for example, cannot build its chemical plant in a neighborhood, unless the people living there agree. And the government cannot subordinate the interests of its constituencies to the interests of its politicians. The so-called socialist states of the twentieth century, like their capitalist counterparts, never achieved this form of political justice.

Wright also believed that socialism must encompass social justice. Unlike a capitalist society where everyone ostensibly has an “equal opportunity” to flourish, social justice requires “equal access” to the resources that allow people to flourish. Social justice also means freedom from social stigma. Children should not get to attend better schools because of how much money their parents have, and racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression need to be overcome so they do not constrain life outcomes.

Wright believed that socialism was compatible with markets, but not the kinds of markets that undermine political and social justice. To work in sync with socialism, markets must be smaller in scale and the power of their participants must be limited. In other words, they should look less like free markets and more like garage sales. Those ideas pushed against Robin Hahnel and other utopian thinkers, and opened Wright to criticism from more orthodox Marxists. Nonetheless, he never abandoned a position because it was unfashionable. But he also was willing to change his mind. Wright revised and discarded his own ideas when he felt that they no longer held water.

Before Real Utopias was published, Wright introduced his ideas in over fifty talks across eighteen countries. His ideas were debated and refined in the kind of open, deliberative forums that he championed. He continued that work after the book’s publication as president of the American Sociological Association. Under his leadership, the ASA’s international conference convened hundreds of sociologists from around the world to build on Wright’s work.

Wright also ran the A. E. Havens Center for Social Justice in Madison, which brought together scholars and activists devoted to creating a more egalitarian and democratic future. Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Nancy Fraser, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Tariq Ali, David Harvey, Theda Skocpol, Noam Chomsky, and grassroots organizers from a number of countries have participated. Under Wright’s guidance, many of the emancipatory projects debated in the Havens Center have been published in Verso’s Real Utopias Project series.

Over the course of his career, Wright advised hundreds of students. César Rodríguez-Garavito of Dejusticia, Amy Lang of Health Quality Ontario, University of Michigan associate chair of sociology Greta Krippner, Columbia University sociology chair Shamus Khan, the late Devah Pager of Harvard University, and so many others cut their teeth as Wright’s PhD students. More recently, Wright’s influence can be felt in the work of New York University’s Vivek Chibber, Peter Frase, and other writers who helped to build Jacobin and Catalyst. This new wave of socialist intellectuals produce work that is characteristic of the “Non-Bullshit Marxism” group that Wright was a part of. Alongside Samuel Bowles and Robert Brenner, Wright emphasized the need for clear, unpretentious writing that is accessible and relevant to the widest audience.

Like his comrade Michael Burawoy, Wright never abandoned his commitment to socialism even when the Cold War made his political stances unpopular in the academy and the general public. He succeeded in spite of it because of the rigor that undergirded his work. In 1981 a number of professors at Harvard tried to recruit Wright despite their “bitter opposition” to his politics. In other years, Wright received calls from Princeton and other universities. When I asked him why he never left the University of Wisconsin, he told me that he “wanted to build something that would last.” He declined higher salary offers and more prestigious appointments to create a Midwest refuge for radical thinkers. In the process, he helped to make Wisconsin-Madison one of the most recognized sociology departments in the world. As Harvard’s Harrison White observes, Wright never let his political commitments get in the way of serious scholarship or conclusions that he did not like. The result was decades of work that pushed forward mainstream sociology and the Marxist tradition, reshaping both in the process.

When I first reached out to Wright in 2017 while planning to apply to graduate school, he was one of the few professors who wrote back. He was the only one who asked me about my work and wanted to know more about me. That year, we exchanged a number of emails, in which he offered me feedback on a work in progress and encouraged me to come to Madison. Someone of Wright’s stature devoting time to exchange emails with a nobody is close to unheard of. Wright even thought to write me the day after he was diagnosed with leukemia to let me know that the future was “more uncertain,” and that he did not want me to accept my offer of admission to Wisconsin without knowing that he might not be around to advise me.

This care and concern for the people around him was classic Erik Olin Wright. If you look at the hashtag #EOWtaughtMe trending on Twitter or the comments on his Caring Bridge journal, you’ll find an outpouring of affection. From his bicycle tours of Madison to the one-on-one attention he gave to graduate students whenever he visited a university; from the nature retreats that ended his seminars to the incredible love he expressed for his wife, Marcia, his children, and grandchildren; Wright will be remembered as an iconic thinker who embodied the socialist vision that he worked so hard to bring forth.

Adam Szetela is a PhD student in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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More specific, André Rocha and Lucas Barreiro Lemos participated in the “Distributed Design Summit: Creative Minds for Productive Cities” which was held during the Techfestival in Copenhagen, from September 5th to 9th. This festival examined the impact of technology within 10 tracks: Ego, Food, Play, Learn, Create, Work, Start, Cities, Energy and Democracy. The festival included day-long workshops, dynamic activities by local and international co-creators, stage talks, conversations, installations, social meetings, music, after-hour drinks etc. Summits were organised as one-day gatherings where a diverse group of people could discuss the bigger picture, share insights, and challenge best practices.

Special emphasis was placed on the maker movement as a loose global movement of individuals who make physical projects with digital tools through collaborative processes and the sharing of the digital files or documentation.

The two prototypes that were presented by Andre and Lucas were an automated irrigation system and a solar dryer, respectively. The presentations were prepared in accordance with the overall program of the session. Based on the fact that most of the participants were makers and designers, the presentations focused more on the manufacturing process of the solutions rather than their use in agriculture. Also, some details on more practical issues and the efficiency of the solutions were provided together with info on the local Habibi.Works community.

These were the speakers of the Distributed Design Summit in Copenhagen:

More details about the Distributed Design Market Platform project can be found here.

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First ever ERC Starting Grant at Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance

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You may remember Piketty’s analysts of the brahmin left vs the merchant right; but Bogdanov’s vision is also very pertinent in a Taubian context. So here is what I never say in public, as it draws catatonic blanks in western secular audiences: the next phase we are working on is a brahmin-worker synthesis, making real Bogdanov’s first failed attempts to merge work, self-governance and art through proletkult … now with the commons, the sociological conditions for this massive shift, have been realized. Thanks to Jan Krikke for this cogent and crystal clear presentation of Taub’s main message, he will be missed.

So if you want to know the ‘esoteric side’ of the P2P Foundation, it’s not just Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, it is also thoroughly Taubian.

Jan Krikke: In the 1970s, American futurist Larry (Lawrence) Taub gave a series of lectures in Tokyo and made what seemed at the time like outlandish forecasts. Mao Zedong had just died, the Shah of Iran was still ruling Iran, and Leonid Brezhnev was at the helm in the Soviet Union, but Taub predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, that an Islamic country would experience a religious revolution, and that China and its Confucian cousins would form the most powerful economic region in the world by 2020.

Taub based his daring forecast on three unique models that he synthesized in his book The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and the Last Caste Move the Future. He published the first English edition in the 1980s and an updated version appeared in the 1990s. A Japanese edition was published in the early 2000s and became a No. 1 bestseller in Japan. Shortly thereafter a Korean and Spanish edition appeared. Interest in the English edition remained limited, primarily because most Western readers are challenged by vantage points not based on a Western-centric worldview.

The Spiritual Imperative predicts not only what happens, but also where it will happen. Conventional futurists who came before him spoke in broad generalities applied to the world as a whole without offering specifics about particular regions and cultures. Fellow futurist Alvin Toffler described post-industrial society, but his model could not predict that China would become a dominant economic power. Samuel  Huntington predicted that the end of the Cold War would give way to a “clash of civilizations,” but he could not predict the Iranian revolution in the so-called religous belt.  Francis Fukuyama saw the collapse of Soviet communism as the “end of history” and the final victory of Western liberalism. His overtly ideological and Western-centric view of the world ignored that China developed a synthesis of socialism and free enterprise to become an industrial powerhouse to rival and even outflank the US and the EU.

Restoring the yin-yang balance

In the world of conventional futurists, women play no role in either the past or the future. In Taub’s macrohistory, women are a key driving force behind the changes in the world today. As he reminds us in his remarkable book, early human society, from its ancient animist past, was characterized by relative gender equality with a predominantly “yin-like” worldview. Patriarchies and a “yang-like” worldview developed from  600 BCE, during the age of Confucius, Plato, Jesus, and Buddha. Taub places the beginning of the end of the patriarchy in the 1970s, with the first wave of feminism.

Feminism changed not only the mindset of women but also of men. A remarkable diagram in his book illustrates the dialectic of sex, and how it plays a role today and in the future (see the diagrams in the page linked below). In about two decades, women will briefly become the dominant sex and restore the yin-yang balance that was lost in the patriarchal era. The female/male ratio of university students in many countries is one of many indications. By the middle of this century, the battle of the sexes will dissolve in what Taub describes as an androgynous synthesis.

The Spiritual Imperative is testimony to the enormous scope of Taub‘s knowledge of the world and his understanding of the human spirit. His models not only give pride of place to women, but also to the world’s three “source cultures” – China, Europe, and India. He shows that each has advanced the human condition and how they are shaping our future.

Links and Resources

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Diagrams from The Spiritual Imperative

The following three diagrams show The Spiritual Imperative in a nutshell. They show the enormous scope of Larry’s knowledge, his radical departure from a Euro-centric worldview, and the comprehensiveness of his macrohistorical model.

The post Remembering Lawrence Taub, the first feminist futurist (1936-2018) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Roelants’ appointment is good news as he has led work to help reform laws in Europe to expand workplace economic democracy and he has also promoted efforts to develop specific social and solidarity economy laws in European countries.

The work of CICOPA internationally has been important as low paid precarious work globally has expanded since 2000, while over this period inequality has escalated. In 2013 Roelants and Claudia Sanchez Bajo co-authored the book Capital and the Debt Trap – Learning from Co-operatives in the Global Crisis. Their analysis showed that co-operatives have been effective in creating new jobs since 2008. Moreover, their impact helps reduce inequality while providing more secure and stable employment. However, they show that supportive public policy is crucial to the scope for co-operatives to be given adequate development space. For example, thanks to support legislation passed some 30 years ago, Italy has over 20,000 worker and social co-operatives and in the non-public care sector, social co-operatives are the largest provider. This contrasts with the UK where 8 in 10 jobs in care services are provided by the private sector.

Roelants has been a champion of the International Labour Organisation’s Recommendation 193, that the Co-operative College played a key role in researching and evidencing. Passed in 2002, this Recommendation promotes co-operatives as best practice and demonstrates that they are a highly effective way to move precarious workers from informal to formal employment, where they offer secure decent work, workers’ rights, legal protection and solutions to poverty.

In research and policy reports since 2002 for CECOP and for CICOPA internationally Roelants has championed the SSE which has become an integral part of the UN local development agenda since 2013. A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) report on inclusive growth has shown that the development of the social economy is crucial to tackling inequality, the housing crisis, climate change and the needs of marginalised groups. Employment in the social economy accounts for 6.5% of European jobs. In the UK employment level is below this average at 5.6%. Sweden, Italy, France, Belgium and the Netherlands have much higher ratios ranging from 9% to 11.2% and have benefited from supportive public policy.

The JRF findings shows that the SSE is a key provider of affordable childcare, housing and transport and enables local people to take part in economic decision-making. The social economy also builds social capital and generates community well-being. However the JRF research also show that in the UK the social economy is not being championed by influential actors, is poorly understood and inadequately supported by local government. The social economy is also wrongly perceived as primarily an answer for market failure and thus not supported well by procurement policies and other pillars for growth. Moreover as JRF shows, the expansion of the social economy is restricted in the UK by inadequate infrastructure. JRF highlights this by showing that where these weaknesses have been overcome in cities like Barcelona, Montreal, Lille and Gothenburg, the social and solidarity economy is much stronger, is growing and gaining in self-confidence and public awareness. The appointment of Roelants augurs well and should help advance co-operative development by deepening solidarity economy understanding.

Originally Published in SolidarityEconomy.coop

Photo by BockoPix

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Robin’s vision was always grounded in what exists. It starts from a radical move away from the conventional classification of the economy as the market, state and ‘third sector’. He argued instead that the key divide is between those parts of the economy that are driven by social goals (the social economy) and those that are subject to the imperatives of capital accumulation.

The social economy is a hybrid of several sub-economies, all distinct in how they are financed, who has access to output and on what terms, what kinds of social relations are involved, how surplus is distributed and what kind of economic discipline is exerted to achieve their social goals. They consist of the household, governed by relations of reciprocity; the state, funded by taxes and governed in theory by democratically-decided social goals; and that section of the market that involves the exchange of equivalents (between small social or co-operative businesses) and not yet dominated by capitalist enterprises.

They are all in different ways in conflict with the profit-driven economy and vulnerable to its imperatives. But there is nothing intrinsic to the state, grant or household economies that drives them towards capital accumulation. As economies they are oriented to their own social goals. Each can operate in the market (or, as Robin would say, ‘in and against the market’ – just as when we worked together at the Greater London Council we were, in Robin’s view, working ‘in and against’ the state) in pursuit of their goals without being drawn into the vortex of accumulation.

The cell is key

How different civil economic initiatives work to pursue their social goals was his interest, and how to strengthen them was his political passion. ‘It’s the cell that’s the most important and what we must study,’ he said when I last saw him, moving a discussion from systems of planning to the micro-detail of the highly successful Japanese consumer co-ops. For him the conditions of success of the cell was key: ‘If the cell is flourishing, that’s the thing.’

He was also concerned to explain the patterns of emergence of many cells. He pointed to the importance of the marginalised responding to globalisation, and of responses to the challenges of climate change to which neither market nor state had solutions. He highlighted the importance of ICT and the ways it enables complex distributed initiatives to connect, makes it possible for people to collaborate across production and consumption, and facilitates platforms for co-operation and the infrastructure for a massive increase in the civil economy.

One trend that particularly excited him was the rise of fair trade as a counterpoint to neoliberalism. He would have fought hard against the serious threat it now faces from major UK supermarkets, led by Sainsbury’s, who are planning to replace the Fairtrade mark, with their own ‘Fairly Traded’ label undermining decades of hard-won rights for hundreds of thousands of co-operative producers.

The term was first used in 1988 to refer to the surge of solidarity trading networks. Though they take different forms, reflecting different struggles, they are all part of an attempt to socialise the market and remake the relationships, rules and purposes of international trade. The idea works on several different levels, which can be in tension – but tension was never a problem for Robin.

On one level it involves the various kinds of fair trade shops, such as Altromercato in Italy, 300 ‘world’ shops with an annual turnover of $48 million. Shops that for Robin carried ‘within them the political economy of the world in one hundred objects’. On another level there are brands, such as Cafedirect, established between producer co-operatives. Twin Trading, which Robin helped to found, had become the sixth largest coffee brand in the UK by 2005. It used its brand profits to provide an extensive programme of technical support for producers. It extended the model to cocoa through Divine chocolate, fresh fruit (Agrofair UK) and nuts (Liberation) – all of them, including Twin Trading itself, co-owned by the producers. The next level involved the formation of an international body, the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation, to operate an international trademark and ensure consistency. Finally, via ALBA, an alliance of progressive Latin American countries, fair trade extended into government policy.

Transforming the state

It is this final challenge of how to integrate the state and civil economy that especially intrigued Robin. It was in just such an experiment in public-civil collaboration that I worked closely with him for five years at the GLC. He was the ‘chief economic advisor’ – titles meant little to him; I was his deputy and co‑ordinator of the Popular Planning Unit. We were, in his words, showing ‘how to heal that conceptual split introduced by 19th-century liberal theory: the forced separation of the economic and the political’.

Our work involved transforming the state, so that it was more supportive of the creative capacities and associational power of the civil economy and more intransigent in resisting the imperatives of private capital. Two principles of Robin’s were important. First, ‘productive democracy’: the idea that the state and civil economy, especially through the organised capacities of labour – household labour and precarious labour as well as waged labour – was productive, breaking the dependence of democratic politics on private capital. Second, the role of the state in supporting – not substituting – the realisation and development of the capacities of civil economic associations.

This support took many forms, with Robin and the GLC leadership always encouraging a bold, experimental approach. Sometimes it was a matter of using the GLC’s powers to block financial speculators – for example, supporting the community development plans of the people of Coin Street, Waterloo, against office developers from the City. Sometimes it involved using the GLC’s high public profile to support workers organising in multinationals such as Ford and Kodak with public inquires that questioned capital’s sacrifice of jobs and communities in the constant search for profit. At other times, it involved encouraging civil organisations to produce positive plans for socially-useful jobs, whether by negotiating research support for trade unions to develop alternative plans for rundown industries, or working with women’s groups across London on proposals for childcare that the GLC would then fund.

It was an experiment made possible by Robin’s ability to draw on a wealth of historical experience of associational/co-operative socialism and combine it with modern ideas of participatory democracy or ‘popular planning’. The memory of his generative and supportive leadership will continue to animate many people engaged in productive democracy of all kinds, whether in reversing power relations in the food chain, developing peer-to-peer production with the digital commons, or spreading models of decentralised and co-produced health care, personal care for the elderly and childcare. His arguments and ideas will live on and will animate our lives as we seek out our path away from neoliberalism.

This support took many forms, with Robin and the GLC leadership always encouraging a bold, experimental approach. Sometimes it was a matter of using the GLC’s powers to block financial speculators – for example, supporting the community development plans of the people of Coin Street, Waterloo, against office developers from the City. Sometimes it involved using the GLC’s high public profile to support workers organising in multinationals such as Ford and Kodak with public inquires that questioned capital’s sacrifice of jobs and communities in the constant search for profit. At other times, it involved encouraging civil organisations to produce positive plans for socially-useful jobs, whether by negotiating research support for trade unions to develop alternative plans for rundown industries, or working with women’s groups across London on proposals for childcare that the GLC would then fund. It was an experiment made possible by Robin’s ability to draw on a wealth of historical experience of associational/co-operative socialism and combine it with modern ideas of participatory democracy or ‘popular planning’. The memory of his generative and supportive leadership will continue to animate many people engaged in productive democracy of all kinds, whether in reversing power relations in the food chain, developing peer-to-peer production with the digital commons, or spreading models of decentralised and co-produced health care, personal care for the elderly and childcare. His arguments and ideas will live on and will animate our lives as we seek out our path away from neoliberalism.”

Cross-posted from Red Pepper.Photo by JD Hancock

The post Robin Murray: A very social economist appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following statement was originally posted on FocusWeb.org.

The Bolivian Government Must Stop Persecuting Those Defending Nature and Rights and Address the Real Problems

Pablo Solón, the Director of Fundación Solón, former Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, and former Bolivian Ambassador to the United Nations (UN), is being targeted by the Bolivian government for his vocal criticism of the government and the construction of two hydro-electric projects, El Bala and El Chapete in the Amazonian region. Based on the studies done by Geodata, an Italian company hired by the government to identify where the dams will be built, Solón says they will “inundate an area five times larger than the city of La Paz, displace more than five thousand indigenous peoples, deforest more than one hundred thousand hectares and will not be profitable for the country with the current prices of electricity in Brazil.”

Solón resigned as Bolivia’s UN Ambassador in June 2011, and was succeeded by the Deputy Permanent Representative, Rafael Archondo. Archondo a very well known journalist, served as the interim representative for 14 months, until Sacha Llorenti, who was Minister of Government in September 2011 during the repression of the indigenous peoples’ march in defense of the National Park and Indigenous Territory of TIPNIS, was appointed as the new UN Ambassador. The Vice Ministry of Transparency and Anti-Corruption has now decided to bring criminal charges with jail sentences of up to 4 years against Solón and Archondo, alleging that Solón “illegally appointed” Archondo and that Archondo committed the crime of “prolonging functions.” Both the accused have publicly responded showing that Archondo was appointed by the President of Bolivia as Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN and that he did not prolong in his functions.

Send your message of support and solidarity to Pablo here

Why such charges are being brought against Solón and Archondo now, six years after their tenure in government, is clear. The Bolivian government aims to harass, intimidate and criminalize those who dare to challenge the government’s policies and strategies. As Solón has stated: “The news [of the criminal charges] was not a surprise. Following our critical analysis of the mega hydroelectric plants at El Bala and Chepete, several friends had warned me that they would leave no stone unturned to accuse me of something, intimidate me, and silence me.”

Despite the threat of imprisonment, Solón has re-affirmed his commitment to voice his opinions. He says, “we will not lose hope for a different Bolivia, where the Rights of Mother Earth and Vivir Bien are a tangible reality.”

We strongly condemn the efforts of the Bolivian government to harass and intimidate Solón for standing up for the rights of indigenous peoples, nature and public interest. We urge the Bolivian government to withdraw the sham charges against both Solón and Archondo. We stand in solidarity with them as they challenge these trumped-up allegations, and continue to fight for justice and nature.

Signed

(Add your name to the comments and we will include your signature)

• P2P Foundation
• Commons Strategies Group
• Michel Bauwens
• Silke Helfrich
• David Bollier
• Stacco Troncoso
• Eric Doriean
• Ana Maria Peredo
• Nicolas Krausz
• Alain Ambrosi
• Miguel Novik
• Peter Lipman
• Marie Venner, CatholicNetwork.US

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Ed Mayo: Co-operation has always attracted visionary thinkers and Robin Murray, who passed away recently, was one.

Robin was an Associate of Co-operatives UK from 2010, alongside a host of distinguished affiliations, such as the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Young Foundation.

He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the LSE. He then joined the London Business School, where he lectured in Economics, moving to the Institute of Development Studies, at the University of Sussex, where he was a Fellow for 20 years.

In the 1980s, he was appointed by Ken Livingstone, London Mayor, as Director of Industry for the Greater London Council, helping to promote a new industrial strategy which at a time of rapid economic change, with a hollowing out of industry in the capital, had extraordinary success. Robin worked with a team of talented colleagues, including Michael Ward, who went on to found the Centre for Local Economics Strategies, and Hilary Wainwright, later founder of Red Pepper.

In 1985, he helped to found Twin and Twin Trading – fair trade pioneers with a focus on the practical development of co-operatives in supply chains overseas. Twin’s sister was Traidcraft, founded out of the Christian churches, whereas Twin’s roots were in the trade union and co-operative sectors.

In the 1990s, he served as Director of Development in the Government of Ontario, returning with a passion for green enterprise. He also co-wrote the first pamphlet for the think-tank Demos on reforming taxation, which made him front page news for a short while. That wasn’t what he craved.

A true collaborator …

Robin was someone who enjoyed collaboration, with a breadth of interests and a passion for learning. As Stephen Yeo comments, Robin’s own achievements were “always drowned by his enthusiasms for what his friends and comrades had done”.

In 2011, true to that, he delivered on a commission that I had approached him to lead, which was to look at the future of the co-operative sector. The report Co-operation in the Age of Google was hugely influential here in the UK and overseas.

He made it clear that the sector had lost some of the cutting edge that it had arguably held before, identifying the extent to which co-operative methodologies had been adapted for use outside of the formal co-operative sector.

His recommendations embraced ambition – a passionate supporter of the case for co-operative education, he argued for the establishment of a Co-operative University (a concept which is moving closer) as well as an Innovation Programme, which started work at Co-operatives UK the following year, with the first Co-operative Innovation Prize, run in partnership with the Department for Business and with Robin on the judging panel.

At Co-operative Congress in 2011, Robin presented his findings and stayed talking with co-operative development practitioners in the bar with characteristic charm and politeness until 3am in the morning.

He also served on the Wales Commission on Co-operatives and Mutuals. As good as that report was, the flow of creative and substantive emails from Robin as a Commissioner encouraging a look at wider options, such as a co-operative investment bank for Wales modelled on Caja Laboral in Spain, pointed to what could have been.

… and social innovator

When the idea of ‘social innovation’ started to gain recognition, Robin travelled widely to spread the word. He emailed me after visiting Crumlin Gaol in Belfast. He was there to talk about social innovation in the context of peace and reconciliation. Later he was shown round the gaol – “so shocking” he reported “that I find it hard to write about”.

But write about he did: “I was with one of the people who had been interned there in the 70s and who had (bravely, I thought) decided to return. Talk about co-operation! The extraordinary and terrible world of the prisoners. The prisoner’s dilemma which is all about individualism is in some ways the opposite of what seems to characterise life there.

“The ex prisoner was the one who has been the driver of the Irish language movement in the Falls Road, which now has 41 schools that teach Irish across the communities. One of his favourite words is meitheal, that is pronounced mehal, which he translated as together, or what one days when there is a break in the weather and adjoining farms work together to save the hay. But we might translate as mutual or co-operative.”

In recent years, as an Associate of Co-operatives UK, Robin was active in working with Pat Conaty and Laurie Gregory among others on the challenges of social care and the kind of innovations that could develop a person-centred approach. He was drawing in part on his time at the Design Council, in part on his acute sense of how to make mutuality work in business terms, for commercial advantage. He was an active supporter of his local co-operatives, in Hackney, where he lived, and Cumbria, where he rested.

John Restakis this week called Robin “a beacon of hope, insight, and optimism for so many of us.” Hilary Wainwright said that “Robin exuded vigour and hope. And he infected those around him with his mood”. Michel Bauwens, of the P2P Foundation, has written that “my conversations with him had been electrifying, and we stayed in touch, meeting a few times in between. He was an amazing man and his life story left me speechless. He was a true hero!”

The LSE economist Carlota Perez is collecting Robin’s writings with the intention to publish these as an online collection.

My last time with Robin was spent by his bed, talking about values and how co-operatives work well when their values inspire them to be courageous, to do new things.

To the end, he was hopeful and I sign off this tribute with his own words of hope:

“The informal information economy is open and global. It is driven by interest and enthusiasm rather than money. The bulk of its traffic is free. It is taking time to digest the implications of these changes, and for those involved to work out what rules are necessary to govern behaviour. Some have seen it as a new form of the commons, and looked at codes of behaviour that have been developed by those using common land or fishing grounds. But this informal economy is more than sharing a common resource, for with the web the resource is unlimited. It is a site for relationships, and where joint projects are involved, it requires the kind of qualities found in those pioneer communities where everyone worked together to raise the roof of a home.

“It is growing with the speed and diversity of a tropical forest. It is informal and astonishingly inventive. It shares many of the same values and practices of formal co-operatives, and opens up numerous possibilities for a meshing between them. William Morris’s News from Nowhere depicted a world based on mutualism that for more than a century was seen as utopian. But in the last decade it has emerged as a reality not on the banks of the Thames but in the world of the web.”

• To mark Robin’s death, Co-operatives UK has published in an open form a chapter by Robin Murray from the recent multi-authored book, Co-operative Advantage: co-operation, innovation and how sharing business ownership is good for Britain. You can read it here.
• Read other tributes to Robin from Divine Chocolate,  openDemocracy, The Young Foundation and Co-operatives Wales.

The post Robin Murray: a tribute appeared first on P2P Foundation.

People and ideas, the lived and the meaning of life. Their connection was never lost in anything Robin did or said. Even as he lay breathless with the terminal lung disease which led to his death, and under firm medical advice not to talk too much, he could not contain his passion for both people and ideas. The energy of their relationship was his life force. He could not imagine living without talking about both, between sucking the means to do so from his oxygen machine. One evening’s topic were the ideas of Allende’s cybernetics advisor Stafford Beer and, more generally, the idea of the economy as a nervous system. At the same time, Robin’s starting point was always the health of the cell in its environment, the dynamics of the particular. He was forever fascinated by exemplary initiatives and how they worked, the conditions for their success. So, between breaths, the conversation would turn to the burgeoning Japanese consumer co-operative movement. Or to the co-operative shop in his original home county, Cumbria, to which even as his illness advanced, he devoted inordinate effort.

Above all, he was perennially fascinated by people’s personal stories, especially the stories of the young people in his family or helping with his care. The stories from his talented daughter, Beth and her Italian boyfriend Gianluca, of a visit to Gianluca’s olive growing family in northern Italy, and of exactly how his father harvested and sorted the olives. Or of how my niece Jessi proposed to her boyfriend in a tent during a hike across a Himalayan pass. “I asked her to describe the exact moment”, he said afterwards. He lived for the moment as his illness took hold. But his irrepressible curiosity about what moments were important for other people was, throughout his life, one of the qualities that made him so universally loved.

Our most thrilling moments together were when he was appointed to lead a small band of economic guerrillas who were brought into the GLC by Ken Livingstone in 1981; along with John McDonnell and the Chair of the Industry and Employment Committee, Michael Ward. Our brief was to draw up and help implement the London Industrial Strategy. Robin was a wonderful leader. He had the self-confidence to permit creative autonomy for diverse groups of us within the 70 or so strong Industry and Employment Department. At the same time he used the power of hierarchy to move against enemies of change – like the senior official who was determined to sabotage the Industrial Strategy in its early days. I led the Popular Planning Unit and although a few eyebrows were raised at our proposals – for example for the GLC to buy (unsuccessfully as it happened because of Tory government opposition) the Royal Docks in order to implement the People’s Plan for the Royal Docks (a community plan for an alternative to the City Airport) – Robin gave us constant encouragement. The politicians, Mike Ward along with Livingstone and McDonnell, won the space for new thinking. Robin was the ideal person to make full use of it and recruit a team to grasp every opportunity we could – and push them to the limit.

And what a team! Robin was immensely proud of colleagues like Mike Cooley, the brilliant design engineer who was one of the inspirations behind the alternative plan for socially useful production drawn up by the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards in the 1970s. This in turn became one of the beacons guiding our work at the Popular Planning Unit. Sheila Rowbotham was another inspiring member of the team, who worked with women’s groups across London to draw up a London wide plan for child care – part of the innovative ‘Domestic Care’ section of the Industrial Strategy. John Palmer, ex-European Editor of the Guardian became the publicity director and a member of the board of the Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB). Many more received a transformative, practical education: Geoff Mulgan, Ken Worpole, Marj Mayo, John Hoyland, Bob Colenutt.

With poetic licence, one could say we worked like a combination of a jazz band, integrating structure and improvisation and a guerrilla band, agile but with an unrelenting focus on the enemy: big corporate capital and the Thatcher Government (and sometimes, bureaucratic sabotage within County Hall). The guiding purpose was set out in the London Labour Party’s manifesto, whose radical principles we were employed to implement, and more important still, Robin’s overarching understanding of the transition underway in the capitalist economy in London as elsewhere – as the principles of Fordism faced crisis and challenge. He argued that the features that made for the Fordist goal of ‘economies of scale’ – standardised products, mass, flowline production, fragmented tasks controlled by management with little if any autonomy for workers creativity or discretion – were being abandoned under the pressures of workers revolt, demands for deeper democracy in state organisation and more differentiated, sophisticated consumer demand in favour of what he called ‘the economies of scope’. This meant a shift towards economies coming from an integrated product range from which customers choose their own basket of products. In the process, innovation and design becomes more important, and a flexible workforce becomes desirable. The post-Fordist bargain offered security in return for flexibility – in contrast to the Fordist bargain of high wages in return for obedience to the discipline of the production line.

But post-Fordism did not mean one single inevitable outcome of a skilled, well-paid and willingly flexible workforce. This is where Robin’s creative Marxism and his understanding of struggle and of a political choice came in. He saw it as a choice between a Japan-style model, in which security in exchange for flexibility applies only in the small core of the economy and workforce flexibility on a widescale is achieved through mass insecurity. This was to lead on to the precariousness that is now all too prevalent within Thatcher’s post-Fordist world. Or, on the other hand, networks of social industrial institutions, decentralised, innovative and entrepreneurial, supported by a state organisations that plays the role of strategist, innovator, coordinator and supporter of producers, on the model of Northern Italy and parts of Southern Germany. Added to this, argued Robin, should be greater user/ community control and internal democracy in public administration to move away from a mass-produced administration towards a participative, responsive state.

Thus, whereas nationally the left response to deindustrialisation and the decline of Fordist manufacturing has been in terms of macro policy: devaluing the pound, controlling wage levels and expanding investment, with industrial strategy taking second place, Robin saw the opportunity of using the GLC’s considerable budget for investment and public purchasing and the land use powers and property ownership to develop exactly the detailed local industrial strategy which might expand the co-operative and social sector of the economy, creating skilled and fulfilling jobs and the local, targeted investment and integrated sectoral strategies which had worked well in regions of Northern Italy and Southern Germany.

It was in this detail that there was improvisation. Robin encouraged the various units of the Industry and Employment Branch to experiment with different kinds of intervention, collaborating as we worked. So, while in Popular Planning we worked with furniture workers developing their plans for the industry, others would be researching the trends in the furniture sector and yet others at GLEB, would be negotiating with furniture employers wanting investment funds; insisting with these employers that such funds were conditional on negotiating with the union over their worker developed alternatives. Had Robin been allowed to build on his strategy, London today would be a world centre not just of furniture design but of its manufacture.

In all this Robin’s understanding of the specific combined with his grasp of the theoretical meant that he could guide the implementation of strategy in a manner that was rooted in the actual relations of production in London in the early 1980s. His was a rare and a precious practical intelligence and far-sighted mind.

He also thrived on actually having power, albeit the limited power of a large local strategic authority, to carry out the strategies on which previously he had only advised – as an academic at Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies.

He also enjoyed a distinctive upper class confidence – without any hint of arrogance or presumption. He was the grandson of two members of what could be called ‘the dissenting posh’ Lady Carlisle a radical Quaker member of the Castle Howard aristocratic dynasty and the liberal classicist professor Gilbert Murray. He had been sent to Bedales – a co-educational boarding school for the progressive upper-middle class – with the egalitarian democratic ethos, and became head-boy. Frances was head girl and they formed a lifelong relationship.

At the same time influenced by the ‘spirit of ’68’ and active, again with Frances, in grassroots social movements he had the social capacity and desire to make good a far-reaching political and strategic challenge. It was a potent combination. Together with Mike Ward he had no hesitation in challenging capital and bureaucracy wherever it blocked radical change, at the same time as opening the space for popular participation. Crucially, there was not an iota of paternalism, or presuming they knew what the populace were presumed to need. He set out on a path of socialism without Labourism and its upper class Fabian elitism. As Norman Tebbit said threateningly on the eve of the GLC’s abolition: “this is modern socialism and we intend to kill it”.

But it lives on. For it is not surprising that Robin’s four years of intense work, halted by Margaret Thatcher’s act of political vandalism in 1986, should have produced a wealth of ideas from which John McDonnell has been able to draw for Labour’s persuasive manifesto that just could on June 8th, finally put an end to neoliberalism nationally as Robin’s London Industrial Strategy sought to defeat it in London.

This is just one way in which Robin’s legacy of hope will live on with us and through us. In the intervening years, to give just one example, his restless and inventive energy pioneered twin trading and created the Fair Trade network that supports tens of thousands of small farmers in developing countries. He lives on, he cannot but live on, and this is why, in spite of the sadness that this remarkable man with his indominatable spirit and generous enthusiasm is no longer physically part of our lives and no longer welcoming us with Sunday breakfast, tears will continue to well but not easily flow. Instead, his life and ideas continue to live.

The post On the life of Robin Murray, visionary economist appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Fortunately, one important historical episode illuminates the political challenges we face quite vividly:  the protracted struggle by the Greek left coalition party SYRIZA to renegotiate its debt with European creditors and allied governments. SYRIZA’s goal was to reconstruct a society decimated by years of austerity policies, investor looting of public assets, and social disintegration.  The Troika won that epic struggle, of course, and SYRIZA, the democratically elected Greek government, accepted the draconian non-solution imposed by creditors.  Creditors and European neoliberals sent a clear signal: financial capital will brutally override the democratic will of a nation.

Since the Greek experience with neoliberal coercion is arguably a taste of what is in store for the rest of the world, including the United States, it is worth looking more closely at the SYRIZA experience and what it may mean for transformational politics more generally.  What is the significance of SYRIZA’s failure?  What does that suggest about the deficiencies of progressive politics?  What new types of approaches may be needed?

Below, I excerpt a number of passages from an excellent but lengthy interview with Andreas Karitzis, a former SYRIZA spokesman and member of its Central Committee.  In his talk with freelance writer George Souvlis published in LeftEast, a political website, Karitzis offers some extremely astute insights into the Greek left’s struggles to throw off the yoke of neoliberal capitalism and debt peonage.  Karitzis makes a persuasive case for building new types of social practices, political identities and institutions for “doing politics.”

I recommend reading the full interview, but the busy reader may want to read my distilled summary below.  Here is the link to Part I and to Part II of the interview.

Karitzis nicely summarizes the basic problem:

We are now entering a transitional phase in which a new kind of despotism is emerging, combining the logic of financial competition and profit with pre-modern modes of brutal governance alongside pure, lethal violence and wars. On the other hand, for the first time in our evolutionary history we have huge reserves of embodied capacities, a vast array of rapidly developing technologies, and values from different cultures within our immediate reach. We are living in extreme times of unprecedented potentialities as well as dangers. We have a duty which is broader and bolder than we let ourselves realize.

But, we haven’t yet found the ways to reconfigure the “we” to really include everyone we need to fight this battle. The “we” we need cannot be squeezed into identities taken from the past – from the “end of history” era of naivety and laziness in which the only thing individuals were willing to give were singular moments of participation. Neither can the range of our duty be fully captured anymore by the traditional framing of various “anti-capitalisms”, since what we have to confront today touches existential depths regarding the construction of human societies. We must reframe who “we” are – and hence our individual political identities – in a way that coincides both with the today’s challenges and the potentialities to transcend the logic of capital. I prefer to explore a new “life-form” that will take on the responsibility of facing the deadlocks of our species, instead of reproducing political identities, mentalities and structural deadlocks that intensify them.

Karitzis takes issue with the premise that the Greek people could stop austerity and transform neoliberal politics simply by mobilizing people in the streets and winning elections.  The premise of SYRIZA’s political strategy was that “the only thing that seemed to matter was who and what group would have more influence and hold the key-positions in the government and the state….The implicit premise here was that the crucial point was to be in the government taking political decisions and then, somehow, these decisions would be implemented by some purely technical state mechanisms.”

But of course, securing state power is not enough.  Karitzis says he later “came to the conclusion that one major failure of the Left is that it lacks a form of governmentality which matches up with its own logic and values. We miss a form of administration that could run basic social functions in a democratic, participatory and cooperative way.”

One reason that SYRIZA failed, he believes, is that “the appointment of government officials was dictated by the outcome of the internal power games [within SYRIZA] during the previous period, and their mandate was to do whatever they could do in vague terms without having concrete action plans that would support a broader government plan. In the same vein, there weren’t any organisational “links” that would align government actions with the party functioning and the social agents willing to support and play a crucial role in a very difficult and complex conjecture.”

In short, SYRIZA assumed that a traditionally structured political party working in the conventional polity would be able to overcome elites. Ultimately, this failed, said Karitzis:  “Deprived of any real tool for reshaping the battlefield, the government and the party gradually moved from fighting against financial despotism towards merely a pool of political personnel with a good reputation that could reinvigorate the neoliberal project.”

The fundamental problem is that the left is clinging to old, conventional modes of “doing politics,” said Karitzis – and these modes are incapable of overcoming the political realities of financial capital: “The non-existent reality that government and party officials were clinging on to was built on the assumption that the elites were committed to accepting the democratic mandate of an elected government.”

But the power wielded by financial elites is only superficially democratic.  It consists

simply in tolerating – on behalf of the elites – a situation where people without considerable economic power have access to crucial decisions. SYRIZA knew how to do politics based on the premise that the institutionalised (in the past) popular power was not exhausted. By winning the elections, the remaining institutional power – mainly in the form of state power and international respect of national sovereignty – would be enough and it would be used to stop austerity (in all versions of how that would happen, within eurozone, leaving eurozone etc).

Based on the premise that the framework within which politics is being conducted hasn’t changed significantly, SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: supported social movements, built alliances, won a majority in the parliament, formed a government. We all know the results of doing politics only in this way today.

The sheer incapacities of existing “democratic structures” to deliver relief became “both hilarious and tragic,” said Karitzis.  During the summer of rising public protests and SYRIZA’s confrontations with the Troika, “It was obvious to me and others that we were engaged in an escalation that was not supported by anything that would make the lenders accept a compromise. The traditional, democratic means are simply outdated for doing politics in the new European despotism (although, if embedded in a different methodology of politics, they can still be very useful).”

In the end, SYRIZA leadership could not prevail and so it “shifted the central features of its assessment regarding how best to serve peoples’ needs: from ‘non-compliance with financial despotism’ to ‘stay in power.’ What happened after the agreement is just the natural outcome of this process of adjustment.”

One reason that SYRIZA could not achieve the change it wanted was because “the elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – have managed to gain control over the basic functions of society.  It is up to their anti-democratic institutions to decide whether a country will have a functional banking system and sufficient liquidity to run basic services or not.”

This leads Karitzis to some cold, grim advice for the Left:  “In Europe a new kind of despotism is fast emerging, combining the logic of competition and profit with pre-modern institutions and forms of power…..Twenty years after the fall of the ‘actually existing socialism’ we are experiencing the fall of the ‘actually existing liberalism,’ so to speak.”

Changing the way we do politics

So what is the way forward?  Karitzis argues that we must overcome the “squeeze effect” – the ways in which “the political system is amplifying the confusion and the feeling of despair within Greek society.” This has rendered the political realm incapable of addressing “the real life conditions of the population and [is] entirely impenetrable to the peoples’ anxieties and demands.”  He adds:

The negative social consequences and psychic implications caused by austerity and social decline cannot be reflected at the political level, they cannot be represented, democratically expressed, and positively transformed in such a way that contributes to social stability and cohesion. Without a minimally proper function of political representation in place, these social and psychic wounds – in the form of negative and (self-)destructive dispositions – are spread across all social networks of interpersonal relations shaking social cohesion in a deeper way.

SYRIZA was the last gatekeeper of the political functioning through its non-compliance with the financial despotism that the Troika represents. That was SYRIZA’s most precious role over the years that contained the Greek society from a deep decline. The implosion of the political system – via SYRIZA’S choice to remain in power  – is the key factor in shaking social cohesion in a deeper way today.

SYRIZA’s capitulation in effect “normalized the financial coup,” said Karitzis, ratifying the premises of neoliberal politics and governmentality throughout Europe. “SYRIZA’s choice deprived the popular classes of a crucial tool after a painful defeat: the political representation of non-compliance with financial despotism. SYRIZA eliminated the chance of a tactical withdrawal, a collective process of reassembling our forces properly that could take into account the escalation of the fight provoked by elites– and forming a more effective and resilient ‘popular front’ that would build its resources to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy in the future.”

I think this may be one of the hardest challenges for the left to accept – that existing “democratic” structures, however venerated and enduring, cannot yield transformational results. “Modern societies are just waking up from the ‘end of history’ illusion [that “democratic capitalism” is the inevitable end-point of political evolution],” said Karitzis.

“The new political movements (square movements, Occupy movements, etc.) are the first glimpses of such an awakening. They are also making use of whatever exists around them, like SYRIZA, Corbyn, Sanders etc. But, we must upgrade our forms of organization and action significantly and modify radically the mentality and methodology of mobilisation. So, we are in the beginning and we must proceed decisively and effectively towards new and better adapted ways of organizing and fighting.

Karitzis bluntly concludes:  “The amount of power we can reach through the traditional political practice is not enough to pave the way for the restoration of democracy and popular sovereignty in Europe. If this is our current predicament, then the urgent question is not find a ‘right answer’ but to set up a new conceptual framework of doing politics both within the state and outside of it which is relevant to the current situation.

But, we should be aware that this path requires a different mentality and qualities from the ones we used to deploying through traditional political action. If we look at the horizon of the political practice of the Left we will see that it contains movement-oriented and state-oriented approaches: organizing movements, demonstrating and fighting in the streets pushing demands to the state and voting, trying to change the balance of forces at the parliamentary level and hopefully form a government of the state. If we look closely we will notice that both of these approaches – and, thus, the entire horizon of our political practice – are mostly shaped around the traditional institutional framework of representative democracy that situates the state at the center of political power.

But we know that the elites have already shifted the center of gravity of political power towards anti-democratic institutions and repositioned the state within the institutional neoliberal European order. The elites have managed to gain total and unchecked control over the basic functions of society. In order to be in a position to pursue or implement any kind of policy one may consider as being the right one, we need to create a degree of autonomy in terms of performing basic social functions. Without it we will not be able to confront the hostile actions of the elites and their willingness to inflict pain on a society that dares to defy their privilege over crucial decisions. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground…..

Karitzis advises “shifting priorities: from political representation to building popular power…. Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a European framework designed to be intolerant to people’s needs, we must set up an autonomous Network of Production of Economic and Social Power (NESP). A network of resilient, dynamic and interrelated circuits of co-operative productive units, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, community control over infrastructure facilities, digital data, energy systems, distribution networks etc. These are ways of gaining a degree of autonomy necessary to defy the despotic control of the elites over society.

“Is this feasible? My hypothesis is that literally every day the human activity – both intellectual and practical – is producing experiences, know-how, criteria and methods, innovations etc. that inherently contradict the parasitic logic of profit and financial competition. Moreover, for the first time in our evolutionary history we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach.

“Of course we are talking about elements that may not be developed sufficiently yet. Elements that may have been nurtured in mainstream contexts and that are often functionally connected to the standard economic circuit. However, the support of their further development, their gradual absorption in an alternative, coherent paradigm governed by a different logic and values, and finally their functional articulation in alternative patterns of performing the basic functions of our societies is just a short description of the duty of a Left that has a clear, systematic and strategically wide orientation. In the worst case, we will achieve some degree of resilience; people will be more empowered to defend themselves and hold their ground. In the best case, we will be able to regain the hegemony needed: people could mobilize positively, creatively and massively, decidedly reclaiming their autonomy.”

Kartizis argues that the Left reflexively “reproduces priorities, mental images, methods and organizational habits that they already know are not sufficient or adequate anymore. This means that there are implicit, deep-rooted norms that shape crucially the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. It’s not important what we think, it’s what we know how to do that matters. And the latter is a product of our collective imagination, methodology and organizational principles.”

In short, we are stuck in an old framework.  How can the Left (and others) expand and change the notion of “political representation”?  Karitzis says we should “explore novel ways of performing the function of political representation in order to restructure existing ones and upgrade significantly the political leverage of the popular classes. For example, putting forward a project of shaping political representation as ‘commons’ could give us valuable insights towards new ways of performing political representation…..The question is what it means to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing the traditional democratic functioning and in order to restore it by newly transforming it.”

The stakes are very high, says Karitzis, because “the domination of extreme right-wing forces in Europe will be the end-product of neoliberalism and austerity. It will be their nastiest consequence, the endgame of the decline of Europe. European countries will fight each other, not over who is going to rule the rest of the world, as in the past, but over who is going to be less miserable in a declining region. The signs of collapse of the standard economic circuit are obvious in Greece but not only there. There is a growing exclusion of people from the economic circuit — having a job or a bank account, having a ‘normal life.’ Modern society in general is in decline, and from history we know that societies in decline tend to react in order to survive.”

“It is up to us to grasp this and start building networks that can perform basic social functions in a different way — one that is democratic, decentralized and based on the liberation of people’s capacities.”

Photo by benf1982

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