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

Podcast notes

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

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

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

Here are some important links from the conversation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

Simone Cicero:
For sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that was amazing, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simone Cicero:
Good point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief analysis of the situation in Italy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit Daniel Chavez (TNI)

The post Italy, democracy and COVID-19 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lead image: by Prachatai.

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

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

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

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

NO SPACE TO MANEUVER?

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM PROTESTS TO PODCASTS

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

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

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

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

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

SOLIDARITY AND THE COMMONS

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

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

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

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

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

STRUGGLES FOR REDISTRIBUTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREPARING FOR WHAT LIES AHEAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lead image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving away from a deficient system

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

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

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

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

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

Knowledge commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transformational change

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

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

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

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

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

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

A national conversation has begun which is alarming, yet also familiar. It talks about costs and trade-offs, losses and accounts. It is a conversation about human lives framed in the language of economics.

A recent study by Philip Thomas, professor of risk management at Bristol University, suggests that ‘If the coronavirus lockdown leads to a fall in GDP of more than 6.4 per cent more years of life will be lost due to recession than will be gained through beating the virus’.

Research like this presents us with a terrible dilemma, even leading some people to wonder whether the trade-off for trying to save elderly and vulnerable lives is really worth it, when it would cripple the economy for decades.

In times like these it helps to remember that we are presented with this misleading narrative every time we decide to act on our conscience. We are told we cannot halt the arms trade, because we will lose jobs. We are told we cannot reduce carbon emissions, because we will lose jobs. Now we are told we cannot save people’s lives, because we will lose jobs. For decades governments have used the threat of recession to badger us into maintaining an economic system that has made the poor poorer and the rich richer at the expense of the Earth’s support system. We are told this makes economic sense, but does it? 

Economics vs Chrematistics

In their book ‘For the Common Good’ economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb, Jr explain the difference between the practice of economics (from the Greek word oikonomia ‘the management of the household so as to increase its use value to all members over the long term’) and chrematistics (from khrema, meaning money and referring to ‘the branch of political economy relating to the manipulation of property and wealth so as to maximize short-term monetary exchange value to the owner’):

“Oikonomia differs from chrematistics in three ways. First, it takes the long-run rather than the short-run view. Second, it considers costs and benefits to the whole community, not just to the parties to the transaction. Third, it focuses on concrete use value and the limited accumulation thereof, rather than on an abstract exchange value and its impetus towards unlimited accumulation…. For oikonomia, there is such a thing as enough. For chrematistics, more is always better… “

In this definition of economics financial wealth does not trump the wellbeing of the community, as it is distinct from the actions a society must undertake to look after its members. The threat to our livelihoods that a fall in GDP represents is due to a conflation of economics with chrematistics.  

If for a moment we were to prise them apart we would see a different picture.

Whereas the lockdown has caused a drop in GDP growth (chrematistics) with the threat of recession and likely hardship for many people, apart from restricting our movements, it generally does not make us less able. It will mean many of us will not have access to society’s current means of exchange (money), but it does not represent a loss of ability, talent and willingness to contribute in the population at large. 

In fact, despite the fear and anxiety generated by the crisis, what we are witnessing is a phenomenal upsurge in generosity and creativity as people pull together to support each other with whatever they have. We are collectively defying the popular economic notion of humans as selfish utility maximising individuals and mostly showing solidarity and kindness. In the process we are realising who the real wealth creators are. They are the frontline workers in the caring economy: the nurses and doctors, the shop assistants and delivery drivers, the shelf stackers, the cleaners, the 750.000 (and counting) volunteers that have come forward to help the NHS. Online, they are the people offering free education, performances, exercise classes, financial advice, museum tours, mental health support, the list just goes on.  Behind closed doors it is those managing the domestic life: the family members doing their best to keep their children and themselves healthy and happy and sane, the friends joining together at a distance via a multitude of platforms. 

In this moment of crisis the fragilities of a globalised system have been exposed and it is ‘ordinary people’ and communities working together that are heading off socio-economic breakdown. They are demonstrating in the words of Naomi Klein in her book No is Not Enough, that ‘If the goal is to move from a society based on endless taking and depletion to one based on caretaking and renewal, then all of our relationships have to be grounded in those same principles of reciprocity and care —because our relationships with one another are our most valuable resource of all.’

The effects of Covid 19 will continue to place an unprecedented strain on societies that will require international cooperation, imagination and courage to overcome, but these efforts must not be geared towards returning to business as usual. Instead, we need to foreground the countless social and economic practices that have been developed over the last four decades by academics and practitioners dedicated to creating economic systems that serve all life on earth, and put in place mechanisms that reward people for generating real wealth and value. 

Time for bold solutions

After years of waiting in the wings Universal Basic Income (UBI) has now entered public discourse. Many pilots are underway, but the oldest ongoing experiment, The Alaska Dividend Fund, has shown no decrease in labour market participation and has ‘significantly mitigated poverty, especially among Alaska’s vulnerable rural Indigenous population.’ 

Currency experts such as Bernard Lietaer have shown that diversifying our exchange systems will make them more resilient to shocks in the global market and enable us to support social and ecological regeneration. The Human Scale Development framework developed in Latin America in the 1980s can help us evaluate whether what we are currently producing is actually meeting our real needs or pseudo satisfying manufactured wants. Together with Doughnut Economics and Steady State Economics such frameworks can help us steer a course that keeps our economic activity within the Earth’s limits. 

Vulnerable international food chains must now be replaced by regenerative local food systems. Building a vibrant food culture could simultaneously tackle obesity and youth unemployment, while ensuring future food security and restoring our soils. Land and property ownership must come under scrutiny and re-imagined to ensure food sovereignty, the regeneration of natural habitats and truly affordable and secure housing for all. The creation of worker cooperatives and support for local businesses have been shown to multiply local wealth and wellbeing, and will be needed to create more cohesive living and working communities.

In order to give people a say in shaping their lives and their communities, local authorities could introduce participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies and community charters.  Both nationally and internationally we must look at ways to abolish the crippling debt that is forcing people into unsafe work or destitution. We must also urgently start a discussion about the internet as a public utility. Work done by the P2P Foundation and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance can provide a guiding framework for sharing the wealth created by our communal efforts and make sure we all have access to its vital services.

The unintended social experiment precipitated by the virus presents a once-only window of opportunity to re-think our economic and social organisation in ways that can help us survive both the Corona epidemic and the greater threat of climate change that is now playing out. Instead of making people and planet fit around the numbers, it is time for numbers (financial mechanisms, exchange systems) to start fitting around people and planet. 

GDP does not measure what we value most. This crisis must be an opportunity to challenge what we have allowed corporations around the world to do with the natural environment (conveniently referred to as resources) and people (labour) in the name of economic growth. Thatcher was wrong: there are alternatives. Many of us have been working on them for decades. We are ready to take our rightful place at the table to help us turn the corner into a possible and hopeful future.  

Lead image by Tim Mossholder

The post No more business as usual – Rethinking economic value for a post-Covid world appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*                *               *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“I’ve lived in six places in five years,” one mother living in substandard private rented accommodation told me. “I am not happy because I can’t give my daughter the stability she needs while she does her GCSEs.” She showed me a box of anti-depressant pills. “And this is what they give me. I just want a place where I can raise my daughter.”

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a lack of social rented homes and falling home-ownership has forced more low-income families with children into the private rented sector. The proportion of children in the poorest fifth of the population living in the private rented sector has more than doubled to 36%. Many Londoners see no way out of their precarious and poor conditions except by leaving London. Of those who can’t or won’t leave, many shrug in despair and accept the situation. 

A collective response begins

But another pattern is also emerging across the city: someone is in distress with their housing, but rather than suffering alone, suddenly there are others around them, human blockades, collective lobbies working in their favour, campaigns emerging to address the systemic problems. London Renters Union has arrived.

Arthur had been trying to get repairs done on his flat for months when the renters union showed up at his door. “They said, if I have a problem come to a meeting,” he recalls. “That’s when I came to the union. I went to the meeting and told my story.” With the intervention of London Renters Union the necessary work got done within days. “I’d been through hell. I tried to get help from my doctors, councillor and MP – they couldn’t do anything. I didn’t have money for a solicitor,” Arthur says. “You need a union to be successful – they’ll fight for you.”

While the union takes on some individual cases, the point is to bring out the commonalities among renters so they can fight together. Many renters feel too isolated to go up against a landlord who holds all the power. Without support they bear the burden alone of the stress and insecurity that comes from a conflict with a person or agency who can make them homeless. The renters union aims to build support between members in order to create the confidence to take action. As one LRU member put it, “I thought it was just me struggling in this block. Then I got the renters union leaflet through my door and I realised it was everyone.”

London Renters Union’s membership is now over a thousand, and it could be one of the most significant new housing organisations for a generation. Several years in gestation, it is a product of other organisations already involved in housing struggles. “Organising locally as renters had taken us only so far.” says Heather Kennedy, one of those on the initial steering group for the project. “Our members got evicted and priced out to other bits of London all the time, and lots of the problems we face can’t be fixed by the local council. We needed something bigger and stronger, that could bring renters together across london to stand up to the power landlords wield over us.”

A new strategy

London-wide there are many organisations focused on defending social housing from attacks by governments national and local. It is a vital and necessary struggle, and a key front in the battle against housing as a commodity, but all the while the number of private renters has been growing, from the bottom of the market as social housing is lost, and in the middle of the market as buying became more unaffordable. The few organisations addressing private rental issues were struggling to make an impact.

London Renters Union saw the need for a London-wide organisation focused on renters, but don’t claim to solve the problems alone. lRU is part of the movement ecology of housing organisations from which they emerged, and solidarity between organisations as a key part of building a successful movement to confront the housing crisis.

Not only have private renters been growing in number but they have also borne the full brunt of decades of bad housing policy in the UK. When London Renters Union meets new members the same problems appear again and again: poor repair and no way to seek redress, rents too high, bad and even illegal behaviour by landlords, exploitation by letting agents, arbitrary evictions. Sometimes the union might simply help a member with advice, or help write a letter to a landlord. Sometimes members have participated in simple but impactful collective visits to the office of their letting agents: once an agent knows the member has back-up they are usually quick to realise they must do the repairs needed to make a home decent. 

Evictions are particularly difficult to resist in the UK, where, unlike some other countries, bailiffs can return again and again until they succeed. But London Renters Union turned out early one morning when bailiffs were due at a members’ house. Alongside other local people they formed human barricades at the front and rear of the property. When the bailiffs arrived they saw the people and renters union banners, and drove off without even getting out the car. The action bought the member precious time to find another place to live. Other landlords, say union activists, have called off illegal evictions at the mere mention of the union’s name. 

Talking about these victories is important to the union. Meetings aim to be inspiring and participatory, not just about dry administrative tasks or voting on position statements. Celebrating successes creates positive, sociable and accessible spaces in which members support each other. The everyday work of running local branches such as writing meeting agendas still has to be done, but it is shared between members as much as possible, ensuring nobody gets caught up in only doing the admin.

London Renters Union describes itself as a fighting union and a campaigning union. It wants not only to defend individual members, but also to change the landscape of housing. Demands that most housing charities consider radical are just the beginning for the union: rent controls, an end to arbitrary evictions, forcing landlords to take tenants on welfare. “We aim to mobilise our members to transform the housing system in the UK,” said Jacob Wills, a member of the coordinating group. But that doesn’t preclude joining more immediate campaigns, such as the campaign to End Section 21 with their partner organisation Generation Rent. Campaigning pressure from housing organisations recently forced the government to scrap Section 21, which had permitted ‘no fault’ evictions – a sign of the movement’s growing influence.

Long term transformation

The aims of the LRU include organising their membership into a radical fighting body. “Education is a really key idea in the union,” says Heather Kennedy. “We are providing training to all of our members so that we can all learn together how to fight for change.” As the union sees it, skilling up all members – not just a few – to take on leadership roles is key to building a truly mass housing movement in London. Not everyone who joins the union will from the outset sees their housing problems as political, but the union is determined to expose the politics of housing for all to see, and to show that it is possible to fight for change. 

The union is also democratic, and that means training people to be in control. Branches are designed to be largely autonomous, and the coordinating group of the union is elected by members for only six months at a time. Policy and demands can be made by members at democratic general meetings. The union aims not just to build a housing movement but also to create a legacy for London: large numbers of people who know how to act together.

It is still at the beginning of its journey: it has three branches and is focused on building them slowly and surely before creating new ones. “LRU has to reflect the diversity of this city to be successful.” said Jacob Wills. “realistically it’s those most affected by housing injustices who are going to see the changes needed and win them.” This means the union sees recruiting on the street and in existing community organisations as essential to ensure that the organisation doesn’t get stuck at the level of recruiting the usual activists.

While driven mostly by volunteer work, the founders also decided that it would need paid staff to operate at scale. From two staff at present, the union plans to grow its paid staff in 2019. While taking money from funding organisations, it is also asking for membership fees so that it can begin to self-fund its expansion. At the recent Labour Party conference the party pledged  to fund independent renters unions if they get into office.

As the plight of renters becomes more stark, the union are happy to have some policy-makers onside, but they don’t want to be reliant on politicians. “Our union is all about building skills, agency and strong community between renters,” said Heather Kennedy. “Building durable supportive relationships with one another is how we can take on the landlords, developers and politicians we’re up against. We see this as a long term project to build community, as part of building our capacity to fight.”

The ultimate goal of the London Renters Union is to ensure that everyone can have a decent home, to turn anger and frustration at the housing system into systemic change. It is an aim both simple and ambitious, and the members know that to succeed they must help promote the demand that housing should exist to serve people, not be a mere commodity. Just as importantly, they know that for long-term success, the union must continue to build the ability of exploited communities to fight for themselves. 

Republished from Tribune Magazine

The post Organising for the right to housing in London appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This book is about the design of connections between places, communities, and nature. Drawing on a lifetime of travel in search of real-world alternatives that work, I describe the practical ways in which living economies thrive in myriad local contexts. When connected together, I argue, these projects tell a new ‘leave things better’ story of value, and therefore of growth. Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. 

The signals of transformation I write about are not concepts, and they are not the fruits of a vivid imagination. They are happening now. But in conversations about the book, I am often asked the same question: Are small local initiatives an adequate response to the global challenges we all face?

The sheer number and variety of initiatives now emerging is my first answer to that question. No single project is the magic acorn that will grow into a mighty new oak tree. But healthy forests are extremely diverse, and we’re seeing a healthy level of diversity in social innovation all over the world.

My second answer concerns scale. Many people – for example in government, or in large foundations – tell me that large-scale solutions are essential if we are to deal seriously with the large-scale challenges we face. But that’s not how healthy nature works, I answer. Every social and ecological context is unique, and the solutions we seek will be based on an infinity of local needs. There is no such thing as a correct approach for the whole planet.

My third answer concerns history. Big transformations in history have seldom been the result of a single cause or action; they were a consequence of multiple, interacting, processes and events that unfolded at different tempos. The German word eigenzeit – “proper time” – describes this phenomenon well: The timescales of change for a bacterium, a forest, or an economy, are very different – but they are all interconnected.

History also contains numerous examples of profound transformations that seemed impossible at the time – until they happened: the end of slavery in the United States; women gaining the right to vote England; or the end of apartheid in South Africa. Nelson Mandela’s famous words on the subject – “it always seems impossible until it’s done” – have inspired millions of people – and rightly so.

The assumption that the future is all about cities is another ‘inevitability’ now being reversed.

Designers have taken the lead in rediscovering the qualities and value of rural life Design Harvests, for example, led by Professor Lou Lou Yongqi at Tongji University, leads the way internationally in the creation of of new links – both cultural and economic – between city and rural.

Designing for change, in this context, is less about single, problem-solving actions, and more about the continuous search for value in neglected contexts, and the creation of enabling conditions for system change.

The first and most important enabling condition is a capacity for ecological thinking – the ability to see the patterns of life as a connected whole. Experiencing the world as a web of connection – between humanity, place and nature – is deeply rooted in Chinese culture, but has been forgotten in most of the West.

These connections – or their absence – are best explored at the scale of the bioregions that surround our cities. A bioregional focus re-connects us with living systems, and each other, through the places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, food sheds, energy sheds, fiber sheds – not just downtown or in ‘the countryside’.

Thinking ecologically gives new meaning and purpose to the concept of growth. Rather than measure progress against such abstract measures as money, or GDP, growth in a bioregion means observable improvements to the health and carrying capacity of the land, and the resilience of communities. Value is created by the stewardship of living systems rather than the extraction of ‘natural resources’. The language used is one of system stewardship rather than ‘productivity’.

A second enabling condition for system change is a focus on the social. In the North, the sharing or Peer-to-Peer economy has been presented as a novelty in recent times – but throughout history, people have collaborated, and shared resources, to raise and educate their families, take care of the land, and support each other in times of difficulty; social systems based on kinship, and ways to share resources, have deep roots in China, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Although these practices have been neglected during the modern age, they have enormous potential today. We need to ask: who has answered a similar question in the past? How might we learn from what worked before?

A third enabling condition for system change design is a shift of focus in design from place making to place connecting. In place of an architecture concerned with discrete buildings, – or the design of stand-alone products – the new priority is relationships. As the biologist Andreas Weber points out, this is how nature works, too: The practice of ecology is the forging of relationships.

A fourth enabling condition for system change is that a new kind of infrastructure – social infrastructure – takes precedence over the concrete kind.

As we change the way we govern our communities and our ecosystems, a variety of different actors and stakeholders need to work together. The exploration of social and cultural assets, for example, can involve a range of skills and capabilities: the geographer’s knowledge of territory; the biologist’s expertise in habitats; the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources. This convergence of expertise requires institutional support.

The scale and complexity of learning we have to do now is demanding, but it is not not unprecedented. During the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, numerous regional institutions were invented to ease our transition. Many of these can be repurposed to do so again.

New sorts of enterprise are also needed: food co-ops, community kitchens, neighbourhood dining, edible gardens, and food distribution platforms. In these new kinds of enterprise, paying attention to the process by which groups work together is just as important as deciding what needs to be done, if not more so.

The social infrastructure we need is beginning to appear in the form of new social and business models: Sharing and Peer-to-Peer; Mobility as a Service; Civic Ecology; Food and Fibersheds; Transition Towns; Bioregions; Housing as a Service; The Care Economy. Platform Co-operatives, in particular, promise to be to effective ways to share the provision of services in which value is shared fairly among the people who make them valuable.

Technology has an important support role to play as the supporting infrastructure needed for these new social relationships to flourish. The re-emergence of gift exchange can be made possible by electronic networks. Mobile devices, and the internet of things, make it easier for local groups to share equipment and space, or manage trust in decentralised ways; technology can help us transition from an economy of transactions, to an economy of relationships. Technology can help reinvent cooperative practices in rural contexts: sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging, & swapping – in which money is but one means among many of holding or exchanging value.

A focus on the local and the social does not mean abandonment of collaboration at a national or international scale. We can use technology to link projects, initiatives, and individuals in a global ecosystem. Learning in a bioregion – and between them – can also be enhanced by the ways people in the software world find what they need on a day-to-day basis. They ask each other, in real time. The Tech For Good community, for example, keeps up to date on GitHub.

This book is not about pre-cooked solutions. It’s about building on what has already been done, in our various social and cultural histories, and on what’s being done, right now, in diverse contexts around the world. It’s about positive change that is top-down and bottom up; long-term and short-term. It challenges us all to search for connections that are working, and those that need to be made, or repaired. The health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, are one story – but it has many different versions.

The post How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Preface to the Chinese edition appeared first on P2P Foundation.