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

• Originally published at n.case.me.
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• Sources: DP-3T, TCN Protocol, Ferretti & Wymant et al

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

Podcast notes

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

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

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

Here are some important links from the conversation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key insights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

Simone Cicero:
For sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michel Bauwens:
Yeah, that was amazing, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simone Cicero:
Good point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where will the government find the money?” is no longer a valid objection to providing an economic safety net for the people. The government can find the money in the same place it just found more than $5 trillion for Wall Street and Corporate America: the central bank can print it. In an April 9 post commenting on the $1.77 trillion handed to Wall Street under the CARES Act, Wolf Richter observed, “If the Fed had sent that $1.77 Trillion to the 130 million households in the US, each household would have received $13,600. But no, this was helicopter money exclusively for Wall Street and for asset holders.”

“Helicopter money” – money simply issued by the central bank and injected into the economy – could be used in many ways, including building infrastructure, capitalizing a national infrastructure and development bank, providing free state university tuition, or funding Medicare, social security, or a universal basic income. In the current crisis, in which a government-mandated shutdown has left households more vulnerable than at any time since the Great Depression, a UBI seems the most direct and efficient way to get money to everyone who needs it. But critics argue that it will just trigger inflation and collapse the dollar. As gold proponent Mike Maloney complained on an April 16 podcast:

Typing extra digits into computers does not make us wealthy. If this insane theory of printing money for almost everyone on a permanent basis takes hold, the value of the dollars in your purse or pocketbook will … just continue to erode …. I just want someone to explain to me how this is going to work.

Having done quite a bit of study on that, I thought I would take on the challenge. Here is how and why a central bank-financed UBI can work without eroding the dollar.

In a Debt-Based System, the Consumer Economy Is Chronically Short of Money

First, some basics of modern money. We do not have a fixed and stable money system. We have a credit system, in which money is created and destroyed by banks every day. Money is created as a deposit when the bank makes a loan and is extinguished when the loan is repaid, as explained in detail by the Bank of England here. When fewer loans are being created than are being repaid, the money supply shrinks, a phenomenon called “debt deflation.” Deflation then triggers recession and depression. The term “helicopter money” was coined to describe the cure for that much-feared syndrome. Economist Milton Friedman said it was easy to cure a deflation: just print money and rain it down from helicopters on the people.

Our money supply is in a chronic state of deflation, due to the way money comes into existence. Banks create the principal but not the interest needed to repay their loans, so more money is always owed back than was created in the original loans. Thus debt always grows faster than the money supply, as can be seen in this chart from WorkableEconomics.com:

When the debt burden grow so large that borrowers cannot take on more, they pay down old loans without taking out new ones and the money supply shrinks or deflates.

Critics of this “debt virus” theory say the gap between debt and the money available to repay can be filled through the “velocity of money.” Debts are repaid over time, and if the payments received collectively by the lenders are spent back into the economy, they are collectively available to the debtors to pay their next monthly balances. (See a fuller explanation here.) The flaw in this argument is that money created as a loan is extinguished on repayment and is not available to be spent back into the economy. Repayment zeros out the debit by which it was created, and the money just disappears.

Another problem with the “velocity of money” argument is that lenders don’t typically spend their profits back into the consumer economy. In fact, we have two economies – the consumer/producer economy where goods and services are produced and traded, and the financialized economy where money chases “yields” without producing new goods and services. The financialized economy is essentially a parasite on the real economy, and it now contains most of the money in the system. In an unwritten policy called the “Fed put”, the central bank routinely manipulates the money supply to prop up financial markets. That means corporate owners and investors can make more and faster money in the financialized economy than by investing in workers and equipment. Bankers, investors and other “savers” put their money in stocks and bonds, hide it in offshore tax havens, send it abroad, or just keep it in cash. At the end of 2018, US corporations were sitting on $1.7 trillion in cash, and 70% of $100 bills were held overseas.

Meanwhile the producer/consumer economy is left with insufficient investment and insufficient demand. According to a July 2017 paper from the Roosevelt Institute called “What Recovery? The Case for Continued Expansionary Policy at the Fed”:

GDP remains well below both the long-run trend and the level predicted by forecasters a decade ago. In 2016, real per capita GDP was 10% below the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) 2006 forecast, and shows no signs of returning to the predicted level.

The report showed that the most likely explanation for this lackluster growth was inadequate demand. Wages were stagnant; and before producers would produce, they needed customers knocking on their doors.

In ancient Mesopotamia, the gap between debt and the money available to repay it was corrected with periodic debt “jubilees” – forgiveness of loans that wiped the slate clean. But today the lenders are not kings and temples. They are private bankers who don’t engage in debt forgiveness because their mandate is to maximize shareholder profits, and because by doing so they would risk insolvency themselves. But there is another way to avoid the debt gap, and that is by filling it with regular injections of new debt-free money.

How Much Money Needs to Be Injected to Stabilize the Money Supply?

The mandated shutdown from the coronavirus has exacerbated the debt crisis, but the economy was suffering from an unprecedented buildup of debt well before that. A UBI would address the gap between consumer debt and the money available to repay it; but there are equivalent gaps for business debt, federal debt, and state and municipal debt, leaving room for quite a bit of helicopter money before debt deflation would turn into inflation.

Looking just at the consumer debt gap, in 2019 80% of US households had to borrow to meet expenses. See this chart provided by Lance Roberts in an April 2019 article on Seeking Alpha:

After the 2008 financial crisis, income and debt combined were not sufficient to fill the gap. By April 2019, about one-third of student loans and car loans were defaulting or had already defaulted. The predictable result was a growing wave of personal bankruptcies, bank bankruptcies, and debt deflation.

Roberts showed in a second chart that by 2019, the gap between annual real disposable income and the cost of living was over $15,000 per person, and the annual deficit that could not be filled even by borrowing was over $3,200:

Assume, then, a national dividend dropped directly into people’s bank accounts of $1,200 per month or $14,200 per year. This would come close to the average $15,000 needed to fill the gap between real disposable income and the cost of living. If the 80% of recipients needing to borrow to meet expenses used the money to repay their consumer debts (credit cards, student debt, medical bills, etc.), that money would void out debt and disappear. These loan repayments (or some of them) could be made mandatory and automatic. The other 20% of recipients, who don’t need to borrow to meet expenses, would not need their national dividends for that purpose either. Most would save it or invest it in non-consumer markets. And the money that was actually spent on consumer goods and services would help fill the 10% gap between real and potential GDP, allowing supply to rise with demand, keeping prices stable. The end result would be no net increase in the consumer price index.

The current economic shutdown will necessarily result in shortages, and the prices of those commodities can be expected to inflate; but it won’t be the result of “demand/pull” inflation triggered by helicopter money. It will be “cost/push” inflation from factory closures, supply disruptions, and increased business costs.

International Precedents

Critics of central bank money injections point to the notorious hyperinflations of history – in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, etc. These disasters, however, were not caused by government money-printing to stimulate the economy. According to Prof. Michael Hudson, who has studied the question extensively, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

For contemporary examples of governments injecting new money to fund domestic growth, we can look to China and Japan. In the last two decades, China’s M2 money supply grew from 11 trillion yuan to 194 trillion yuan, a nearly 1,800% increase. Yet the average inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index hovered between 2% and 3% during that period. The flood of money injected into the economy did not trigger an inflationary crisis because China’s GDP grew at the same fast clip, allowing supply and demand to rise together. Another factor was the Chinese propensity to save. As incomes went up, the percent of income spent on goods and services went down.

In Japan, the massive stimulus programs called “Abenomics” have been funded through bond purchases by the Japanese central bank. The Bank of Japan has now “monetized” nearly half the government’s debt, injecting new money into the economy by purchasing government bonds with yen created on the bank’s books. If the US Fed did that, it would own $12 trillion in US government bonds, over three times the $3.6 trillion in Treasury debt it holds now. Yet Japan’s inflation rate remains stubbornly below the BOJ’s 2% target. Deflation continues to be a greater concern in Japan than inflation, despite unprecedented debt monetization by its central bank.

UBI and Fears of the “Nanny State”

Wary critics warn that a UBI is the road to totalitarianism, the “cashless society,” dependence on the “nanny state,” and mandatory digital IDs. But none of those outcomes need accompany a UBI. It does not make people dependent on the government, so long as they can work. It is just supplementary income, similar to the dividends investors get from their stocks. A UBI does not make people lazy, as numerous studies have shown. To the contrary, they become more productive than without it. And a UBI does not mean cash would be eliminated. Over 90% of the money supply is already digital. UBI payments can be distributed digitally without changing the system we have.

A UBI can serve the goals both of fiscal policy, providing a vital safety net for citizens in desperate times, and of monetary policy, by stabilizing the money supply. The consumer/producer economy actually needs regular injections of helicopter money to remain sustainable, stimulate economic productivity, and avoid deflationary recessions.

Republished from EllenBrown.com

The post A Universal Basic Income Is Essential and Will Work 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.

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.

Before the Corona outbreak, and with the help of Jose Ramos, the lead editor of an upcoming book about cosmo-local production, I had been reviewing the literature on historical rhythms and cycles to set the stage for the current ‘chaotic transition’ and ‘what comes next’. 

In short, I have come to two important conclusions: 

1. society moves from relative stable stages, through chaotic transitions, which are real mutations both in human consciousness and in socio-economic structures 
2. this change is non-linear and moves through internal or external shocks. 

Clearly, Corona is such a shock, partly exo-genous, i.e. a unpredictable outside factor, but also partly endo-genous (internal factor), since our devastating ecological practices are an important part of pandemic generation. It’s a double whammy which both endangers human life and creates a double shock to the economic system (both demand and supply driven, this is quite unprecedented, as economic crisis usually alternate between one and the other). Corona is not going to be sufficient for a full transition, but it will be a Great Accelerator, which has already changed so much in such a short time. I am not predicting that the results will be uniformly positive (accelerating the green/p2p/commons transition), or negative (Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine). Think about what happened after the fall of Rome to see a mixture of radical changes.

Nevertheless, here are some preliminary conclusions: 

1) The market plays almost no role in finding solutions in such crisis moments, and 90% of big and small companies would go bankrupt without state support (right now, big banks are pressing big pharma to price-gouge even more the vital medicines in the US!). Of course, this is not to belittle the many SME’s which are rooted in their communities and doing their best to somehow contribute to them, but the proper ‘capitalist’ multinational and financial entities would have created a situation in which the poor would have been condemned to die for lack of affordable testing and medicines, thereby endangering the population as a whole.

2) The nation-states are weak and the leaders have made mistakes, but they have turned out to be to be an absolutely indispensable institution to avoid chaotic reactions from a fragmented social field, and to discipline the market so that everyone is not put in even graver danger.

3) The current multilateral regime has been useful, (WHO), but also rather weak and ineffectual, at least insufficient to the task. Many people have died because of the weakness of factors 2 and 3, but paradoxically, an enormously larger amount would have died without them; all in all, they are playing a vital role and after initial delays and mistakes, most of them adapted to relatively sensible policies. We should not entertain any illusions that the abolishing of state forms would be anything else than a grave disaster in this context.

4) We have seen an extraordinary civic spirit and collaborative mobilisation of civil society which has been vital in the adaptation to the crisis, and to mitigate market and state failures; countless local and trans-local groups have been set in motion to create technical and scientific commons capable to rapidly produce medical devices that the market had not in stock and the state failed to order in time. Without valves and ventilators, the sick die; without masks, medical personnel gets infected and citizens continue to infect each other at too rapid rates; without mass testing we cannot move from mitigation to suppression; in all these efforts, civil society groups have taken the lead.

5) What has been emerging through p2p/commons/open source efforts are the seeds of new institutions for trans-local, trans-national responses, which can at this stage, not replace, but greatly strengthen the nation-state/multilateral regime, insufficient to the task as they may be (we will need a much stronger trans-national, not inter-national, multilateral institutions in the future, which can guarantee that the human economy works within planetary boundaries and acceptable social equity parameters, as ecological and social justice are strongly dependent on each other).

This regime, which is now still dominant and necessary, can order around market players, as they are now doing through new legislation that both saves and coerces/mobilizes market players. But most of all, it needs to work with, and help mobilize, the collective intelligence of trans-local and trans-national expertise, the latter of which strongly needs to become effective. This process towards ‘partner state’ practices and public-commons protocols will not be automatic, and will be an alternative to a coercive and authoritarian state-centric model, which could be one of the negative outcomes of this crisis.

So what is the role of the commons movement ?

1) One is to show and demonstrate what we can do, as we have already done through the multitude of open source efforts to market and state failures as well as mutual aid self-organizing.

2) Use the opportunity of this pedagogical catastrophe to strive for structural adaptations and reforms. In other words, we can’t just be local and tribal, we must be trans-local, and work at every level of institutional life, in order to transform institutions and proposes commons-centric reforms and transformative policies.

Corona is a serious crisis, but the climate is a much more serious one. In a paradoxical way, the global mobilization against Corona, despite the weakness and mistakes, has shown what can be done, and how fast institutions can adapt and change their choices once our life, and thus their legitimacy, is at stake. This bodes well for climate change adaption and ecological transformation. But make no mistake, this is just one of the crises we will need. The deep transformation that we need for this bifurcation, requires a ‘mutation of consciousness’ on a par with the ones we had in the 11th and 16th century in Europe. Though this time it will need to be global and fairly ‘simultaneous’. We are not there yet, but we’re definitely seeing strong premises for it, and for which this crisis acted as a revealer. This is just the first of the pedagogical catastrophes that will force the necessary transformations to a new stable system that lives within the confines of nature and realizes its interdependence with all other life forms. It will need to escape the historical cycle of pulsation between extractive regimes leading to ecological crisis, and the regenerative responses that human societies have always brought. Instead, we will need to move to a steady-state economic and social regime that can last many centuries and millennia.

More Information

If you like our analysis, please read our draft:

• The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition can be found here

If you want to learn more about the role of the commons in transitions, and our commons-centric approach, see:

• What You Should Read To Understand the Commons

Originally published in Liminal News

Origami image by Dany_Sternfeld 

The post Corona and the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In that sense, it is good news that feminist economics is developing and posing a radical critique of capitalism, since the economy is our metabolism; that is, our relationship with energy and matter. We cannot aspire to change society without changing this material base. However, as Amaia Pérez Orozco recognizes[2], feminist economics still lacks a clear political commitment and finds it difficult to translate its criticism into concrete economic measures that go beyond common policies to other sectors of the left.

From my point of view –which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism– one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse. The collapse is one of the basic patterns of growth and can be compared fairly closely with the behavior of the capitalist economy, since it reflects its tendency to expand and overexploit. Understanding this pattern is essential when it comes to defusing the collapsing drift that our society is taking and I believe that a large part of the measures that can be taken to deactivate this collapse pattern are, basically, ecofeminist measures. But, before talking about the relationship between ecofeminism and collapse, I would like to describe the collapse pattern itself.

Collapse patterns

The collapse pattern is based on the combination of three feedback loops that can be seen in the graph of Figure 1, where each arrow speaks of a cause-effect relationship between the variables it links. We speak of feedback loop when a closed chain of cause-effect relationships appears. This is popularly described as a whiting that bites its tail: a behavior that feeds itself.

In the collapse pattern, on the one hand, we have the exponential growth loop, which, in Figure 1, is represented by the blue arrows and is applied to the economy. The blue arrows go from the variable economic growth to the variable economic activity, which means that when there is more economic  growth, the economic activity is higher (as is logical); but there is also a blue arrow in the opposite direction, indicating that the greater the economic activity, the greater its growth.

This is the usual behavior of systems whose growth is a percentage of itself, as capitalist economies, since it is assumed that GDP (economic activity) must grow a per cent per year for the economy to function properly. But growing at 2% or 3% means that growth is greater every year because it is a percentage of an amount that is also greater every year.

This type of exponential growth is very unstable, because it continually accelerates and becomes explosive when time advances. The capitalist economy is especially prone to grow in this way due to some of its characteristics (credit with interest, dynamics of competition, etc.) but it is not the only system that grows in this way. The exponential growth is very common in nature, since it is the habitual behavior of the populations of living beings when they find abundant food.

However, nothing can grow infinitely in the real world because all activity needs energy and materials, and both are limited. In ecosystems, we speak of the concept of carrying capacity (called in Figure 1, Capacity of the nourishing base), which we can define as the amount of food an ecosystem can provide in a sustainable manner. If, for example, we have a herd of herbivores in a pasture, the carrying capacity would be the kilograms of grass that grow each week. If the herbivores need a smaller amount, the population will get fed and tend to grow; but, if they require a larger amount, a deficit appears that slows down the growth of the population.

This limitation creates a feedback loop that, in Figure 1, is represented in green and is called stabilization loop, because it causes economic growth to slow down when the deficit begins to be important. The combination of these two feedback loops gives rise to a pattern of S-shaped stabilization. When the population (or economic activity) is small, resources are plentiful and the population can grow very rapidly, but, as it approaches the limits, the stabilizing link slows the growth down and the population tends to a sustainable value.

However, there are systems in which the green stabilization loop does not act fast enough to achieve this smooth evolution to balance. This is due to the fact that there are delays in the relation between shortage and economic growth limitation: the system is reluctant to decrease due to inertia, blockages or delays in information. In this case, a third loop may appear: the Degradation of the nourishing base loop that we have marked in red.

Growth might continue beyond the carrying capacity, but this can only be done by deteriorating the resources that are the nourishing base. Following the example of the herd of herbivores, they could eat more grass than it grows every week, but only at the expense of eating the whole plant. For a few weeks, the population could continue to grow above the carrying capacity, but on the basis of degrading the pasture and making it no longer productive. This is the behavior we describe colloquially with the expression kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Overexploitation might also create a third feedback loop (the red loop in Figure 1) because it decreases the capacity of the nourishing base and, when  this happens, the shortage gets even greater and this leads to an even greater overexploitation. This third feedback loop pushes the population (or economic activity) to collapse.

The result of the combination of these three dynamics is the collapse pattern that can be seen in black in Figure 1: a rapid initial growth that reaches a maximum and falls very quickly.

Conquest vs. care

The dynamics of growth, overexploitation and collapse have accompanied human beings since the beginning of their history, since, in general, they are the ones that govern the behavior of living beings. Some human societies have been able to reach equilibrium with their environment by limiting their growth; but western culture – especially since the fifteenth century– chose another option to escape from limits: conquest.

The colonial expansion allowed European societies to grow beyond the carrying capacity of their territory, and the use of fossil fuels made possible an even greater growth. This has allowed us to live five centuries of continuous exponential growth and has made us think that this is the normal behavior. But all growth has a limit and, although many people still believe that our expansion can continue with the help of new technologies, more and more scientific studies tell us the opposite [3][4][5][6]. But the more obvious evidence that shows we have reached the limits is in the signs of overexploitation that, for years, have been detected in the main natural [7]resources: collapsed fisheries, forests, water and degraded lands, pollution and climate change, decline of fossil fuels that is not compensated by investment in renewable technologies, etc.

Given the evidence of limits, society and politicians should enforce degrowth policies that would activate the green loop of stabilization. This idea of ​​voluntary degrowth, in one way or another, has been the main message of political ecologists in recent decades, but these measures are never implemented. The, so called, “sustainable development” became a slogan empty of meaning and our consumption and impact on the planets is growing out of control. Capitalism is reluctant to degrow, guided by its inertia and its enormously powerful interests that pursue continuous economic growth.

The absence of action of the stabilization loop might cause the activation of the pernicious red loop of the Degradation of the nourishing base. Nowadays, this is not the main loop observed in global society, but if the degradation of the environment continues, it will appear soon.  It is, therefore, vital that, at this moment, environmentalism adds a very important message with a strong emphasis: we have to deactivate the degradation loop. This message adds a different nuance to the degrowth message, and I think the word that best describes it is the ecofeminist notion of care, applied, in a broad sense, to the care of everything that reproduces life on the Planet.

We can perfectly call policies of care all those that deactivate the relationship between deficit and overexploitation (what in figure 1 has been indicated with the violet arrow). The attitude of care is what inspires the traditional policies of environmental protection and leads us to manage well the territory, the soils, the forests; it is the attitude that protects the reproduction of everything that feeds us. But, at this moment, we should not limit ourselves to environmental protection policies and we should start to devise more ambitious goals that change the sign of the arrow between deficit and overexploitation. We must start talking about regeneration policies, which not only prevent the nourishing base from degrading, but make it grow. In this sense, there are already very interesting experiments in the fields of regenerative agriculture and permaculture that show that these policies are possible and achieve remarkable successes[8].

On the other hand, the notion of care applied to people is especially important at this time. There are two things that activate the red loop of degradation: ignorance and desperation. Ignorance is very dangerous, although, at the moment, it is more virtual than real –because the problem is well known, but there are many people who choose not to see it. Desperation is more worrying, because it develops in people who, despite knowing the environmental damage their actions are doing, are not able to change because they are on the edge of their physical or mental capacities, unable to choose anything other than survival.

The attitude of care is vital at this time. Only a society that cares for people and diminishes poverty will be able to prevent desperation from leading us to degrade the resources that sustain our own lives. It is also vital, on the other hand, that we know how to take care of ourselves and satisfy our needs with technologies that have very low environmental impact and, also, take care of the Earth. Only by protecting nature will we be able to sustain human life; only by taking care of human life will we be able to stop the degradation of nature.

Ecological economics and feminist economics: the issue of reproduction

The concept of nourishing base has been applied in the previous paragraphs to the ecosystems that provide us with resources or services (forests, fisheries, soils) but it can also be extended to many other things that sustain human life, including technology. In this sense, the issue of the reproduction is the key that unites feminist economics and ecological economics and can create the necessary dialogue between these two disciplines (as Yayo Herrero points out[9]).

Just as feminist economics speaks of the importance of the reproduction of human life, ecological economics speaks of the reproduction of stocks and fund-service resources[10]. Stocks and fund-service resources are those that regenerate themselves (because they come from biological systems) and their reproduction allows human beings to obtain renewable resources and energy. Much of what I have called nourishing base are basically stocks and fund-service resources. The good health of these resources implies that their reproduction will be successful and they will be a sustainable source of inputs for the human economy.

Both feminist and ecological economics are based on the idea that we need to take care of life and its reproduction. On the contrary, the capitalist economy does not pay attention to the reproduction of life, assumes that natural and human resources are infinite and will always be available. While capitalist economy does not even see that the base that sustains itself is physical, biological and limited, the ecological and feminist economy recognize the value of all the activities of care that allow this fragile base to remain alive and healthy.

A similar concept can be extended to technology and its use, for example, of materials. The recycling of many of the minerals that are essential to current technologies is negligible nowadays. The minerals are extracted from mines and, once used, they are thrown into landfills, where they are dispersed and it is practically impossible to recover them. Our technology is based on a throw-away culture: extracting from mines and dispersing in landfills and, when a mine runs out, the companies looks for another new mine or try to replace one resource with another. But this replacement has a limit, since the new mines found are worse than previous ones and replacing some minerals by others implies losing performance and efficiency.

The minerals valuable to technology should be considered part of the nourishing base that must be taken care of. They should be recycled at rates close to 100%, so that they are available for human technology for centuries. Our nourishing base, therefore, can be considered made up of many things that make our life possible and whose reproduction must be protected: ecosystems, people, technologies, minerals, families, societies, etc.

Turning the economy yin

The concepts of nourishing base and exponential growth loop have an important similarity with the Chinese concepts of yin/yang, also the loops present in the collapse pattern can be interpreted in terms of the yin/yang equilibrium of the Chinese philosophy.

What I have called the nourishing base is very similar to what Taoist philosophy would call the yin part of the society: all that nourishes, all that sustains, the apparently passive part of society but the one that possesses the force on which any action is based . The activities of care have an eminently yin character: silent, humble, often ignored, often feminized, enormously important. On the other hand, the yang concept is associated in Taoism with the expansion and is similar to the exponential growth feedback loop of Figure 1 and to the conquering tendency of the capitalist economy.

In both Taoism and System Dynamics, the notion of dynamic equilibrium is fundamental. This is a very interesting contribution to Western culture, which tends to be tempted to think in the old terms of good/bad Manichaeism, too simplistic to understand systems. Neither the yin nor the yang aspect of a society are desirable or undesirable by themselves, it is equilibrium that is desirable. When the excess of yang leads a society to expand above what its yin can sustain, the political action should try to turn society more yin, that is, prioritize nutritive actions over expansive ones.

The capitalist economy tends to enhance the yang expansive aspect at any cost. In the Spanish economic crisis of 2008, for example, from both liberal and social democratic positions, the emphasis was on reviving growth, adding more yang to an already expansive economy. Few people stopped to think if the problem was in the yin base of the economy, that was exhausted and could no longer sustain more growth.

A very interesting yin policy would have been, for example, to save energy through plans such as those proposed for energy-saving housing reform or public transportation[11]. This would have helped to mitigate unemployment and balance the trade deficit without the need to increase the export effort. Instead, the government decided to promote large public works: a policy without the slightest yin ingredient, since it consumed even more energy and not even saved the base of the construction sector but its elite.

The policies implemented by the government to overcome the crisis have focused on protecting the banks and large companies instead protecting the families and the employees: this is a very yang policy that deteriorates the basis to save the elite. Ten years away, we can affirm that the Spanish social and ecological base is still more exhausted than before the crisis, which indicates that, what they call recovery, was only a continuation of economic growth based on social overexploitation.

Another interesting aspect of the yin / yang notions is their relative or adjective nature, since there is no clear boundary between them: something is yin or yang in relation to what it is compared with. This is interesting when applied to ecofeminism and what we consider the nutritive base to protect, since the most yin aspects of society are not necessarily occupied by women (especially of developed countries).

A European urban middle-class woman who takes care of her children, for example, is doing a yin work of care, but a peasant woman who performs the same tasks would be even more yin than the urban woman, because she lives in a more forgotten and more basic sector. And it would still be more yin the work of a man from an impoverished country who extracts the minerals necessary for the electronics used by both women; and it is even more yin the invisible contribution of the crops, the cattle and the fertile land on which the feeding of all of  them is based.

This adjective character can help us when deciding what are the priorities when it comes to protecting the nourishing base of our society. If what we need is to feed the yin aspect of society, the priority should be to protect the most yin, the most basic, the things that have a more nutritious character, which, normally, will be the most silent and the most forgotten. The first priority should be the stocks and fund-resources of energy, ecosystems, minerals and soils on which people and their activities are based and from there all human activities beginning with the most humble.

 The economy of care

Western society has lived for many centuries within an expansive culture that did not need to take care of the regeneration of its nourishing base, since it always found the possibility of conquering new territories and exploiting new resources. This attitude has been possible and very profitable (at least for some individuals) while resources were abundant. For that reason, the conquering and expansive attitude, associated with the political right parties, has been associated to images of prosperity, well-being, wealth and progress. It is the attitude that we have associated with the economically sensible, with what makes the companies to have a positive balance.

On the other hand, the discourse of the left parties has been based on rights: the rights to decent work, equality or a healthy environment. These rights were something to protect even though, economically, they were seen as a hindrance, a worsening of the accounting balance, a loss of economic efficiency that had to be assumed to protect our well-being, often more spiritual than material. With this mentality, it is not strange that, in the face of the crisis, the first thing to do is to end labor rights and further exploit ecosystems, to protect the economy, which is the most urgent.

But this discourse is based on a big mistake: to associate the expansive and exploitative attitude with good economic management, without taking into account that, when the limits of growth appear, exploitation becomes over-exploitation and this is a disastrous economic strategy, even from the purely economic, selfish and material point of view.

When limits are reached, expansion is the attitude that most quickly leads to collapse. And the collapse is the worst scenario of poverty, involution and degradation, that is to say: the opposite of those ideals of progress, well-being and wealth that the right brandishes as a standard. While it is true that, in the short term, an over-exploitative policy can increase the wealth of an increasingly smaller minority at the expense of the impoverishment of majorities, this process soon finds its limits. Inequality accelerates the degradation of the social base and intensifies the collapse pattern that ends in a resounding fall for all.

In a world with four more degrees of temperature, the only human society that can be imagined are groups of Tuaregs trying to survive hell, where little benefit could be found by investment funds. In a Spain swallowed by the Sahara, neither hunting nor macro farms would achieve a positive economic balance, no matter how much they try to maximize automation or destroy natural parks. A world of degraded ecosystems and shattered societies is a world of very low energy return, where the harvest is meager and unstable and work is painful. And a low energy return means, inevitably, a low economic return, that is: very bad business. Given the limits of growth the exploitative attitude is not only morally reprehensible, it is also a very stupid attitude.

Economy of care or collapse

Only economic policies based on care and regeneration can be sensible in a limited world, since they are the only ones capable of keeping society away from collapsing and achieving a positive energy and economic balance. The left parties must be able to understand this new position in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21^st century and make use of all the arguments that the collapse pattern gives us to launch a message much more powerful than the current one. The policies of the right are absolutely collapsing, they are based on ideas from the past and lead us to a world located at the antipodes of the ideal of progress that they sell us.

It is time to stop associating prosperity, good economic management and well-being to attitudes that destroy the ecological and human base that feeds us. Only the attitude of care and regeneration of life is able to lead us to the horizons, always desirable, of abundance, prosperity and progress.

We need to feminize the economy because, as Alicia Puleo says[12] “The characteristics of the warrior and the hunter (hardness, emotional withdrawal …) are today a dangerous heritage.” In the 21^st  century, with a planet exploited on all four sides, we no longer have wide plateaus or vast empires to conquer and it is time to tell the new conquerors that are emerging from the far right to do the favor of staying at home and do not destroy with the hooves of their horses the few resources that we have left.

Feminism has come to stay because its message is reaching both the head and the heart of a society tired of patriarchy, wars, exploitation and destruction. That is why it is important that the feminist message evolves, as it is already doing, and does not restrict itself to the equality of rights between men and women; because that equality, in many areas, is already being achieved. It does not make a big difference for both parents share the tasks of caring for their children if the topsoil that feed them is degrading, if chemical contamination fills the body of newborns and the life of the whole family moves in a precarious pattern that makes reproduction difficult.

Let’s hope that feminist economics continues to extend its analysis far beyond the domestic sphere and is able to develop theoretical tools that allow building an economy that really puts life at the center. If something characterizes this century that begins is the deterioration of life on the planet, both human and non-human. Restoring the base that sustains and nourishes our life is essential and this can only be achieved if the idea of care becomes the central theme of that discipline that is at the base of political power and so importantly determines our lives: the economy.

[1] This lemma is becoming common in the discourse of some Spanish ecofeminsts, but does not seem to have a translation in English speaking countries https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/?p=16371

[2] Amaia Pérez Orozco. Espacios económicos de subversión feminista. Economía Feminista, desafíos, propuestas, alianzas. Ed. Cristina Carrasco Bengoa y Carmen Díaz Corral. Entrepueblos 2017.

[3] I. Capellán-Pérez, M. Mediavilla, C. de Castro, Ó. Carpintero, L.J. Miguel, Fossil fuel depletion and socio-economic scenarios: An integrated approach, Energy. 77 (2014) 641–666. doi:10.1016/j.energy.2014.09.063.

[4] C.J. Campbell, J. Laherrère, The end of cheap oil, Sci. Am. 278 (1998) pp. 60–65.

[5] C. de Castro, M. Mediavilla, L.J. Miguel, F. Frechoso, Global solar electric potential: A review of their technical and sustainable limits, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 28 (2013) 824–835. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2013.08.040.

[6] Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios IñigoCapellán-Pérez, Carlos de  Castro, Iñaki Arto. Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 77 (2017) 760–782.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117304720

[7] In 2017 year there was a second Scientist Warning to Humankind  signed by more than 15000 scientists.   William J. Ripple Christopher Wolf Thomas M. Newsome Mauro Galetti Mohammed Alamgir Eileen Crist Mahmoud I. Mahmoud William F. Laurance 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 12, 1 December 2017, Pages 1026–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229

[8] https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/

[9] Yayo Herrero. Economía ecológica y economía feminista: un diálogo necesario. Economía Feminista, desafíos, propuestas, alianzas.. Ed. Cristina Carrasco Bengoa y Carmen Díaz Corral. Entrepueblos 2017.

[10] La economía en evolución: Invento y configuración de la economía en los siglos XVIII y XIX y sus consecuencias actuales. José Manuel Naredo. Manuscrits : revista d’història moderna, N. 22 (2004) p. 83-117. https://ddd.uab.cat/record/4786

[11] http://www.ilo.org/integration/greenjobs/lang–en/index.htm, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—webdev/documents/publication/wcms_098489.pdf

[12] Alicia H. Puleo. La Utopía Ecofeminista. La utopía, motor de la Historia.. Juan José Tamayo, dir., ed. Fundación Ramón Areces, 2017.

Margarita Mediavilla is a PhD in Physical Sciences from the University  of Valladolid (Spain) and associate professor of Systems Engineering and Automation in the School of Industrial Engineering. Her lines of research focus on energy and sustainability using system dynamics as the methodological tool. She belongs to the Research Group in Energy, Economy and Systems Dynamics of the University of Valladolid,  which is a multidisciplinary team of engineers, physicists, economists  and social scientists that works on the study of global energy  perspectives resulting from peak oil and other natural limits and  combines academic research with social divulgation. She is a member of Ecologistas en Acción, the main confederation of  environmental associations of Spain, and is a very active discloser of  the problems of the limits to growth, participating in all kinds of  publications and conferences in the Spanish area. Her personal blog (in  Spanish) is Habas Contadas.

Header image: Pedro Ribeiro Simões, Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Republished from Resilience.org

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Walking down the high street of a place described as one of the UK’s most ethical towns, the first thing you notice is the absence of national chain stores and fast food outlets. Instead, you find a diverse mix of independent shops selling organic food, clothes, art, antiques and furniture, as well as cafes and restaurants and an abundance of charity shops.

This is Totnes – a small, historic market town in the south-west of England that has garnered a reputation as a thriving hub for art, music, theatre and alternative lifestyles. Noticeboards around the town advertise everything from yoga lessons to Zen meditation, together with posters for various events – including the next Extinction Rebellion non-violent direct action training session.

In many shop windows today, there are stickers which read “Totnes pound accepted here”. Sadly, after 12 years of operation, the Totnes pound will come to an end on June 30, 2019. This highly symbolic initiative inspired other local currencies including the Bristol pound and the Brixton pound, which encourage people to spend locally and keep money in the community.

But the gradual shift to a cashless society and a lack of uptake by local government agencies have ultimately led to the Totnes pound’s demise. Rob Hopkins – co-founder of community-led charity Transition Town Totnes and initiator of the local currency – thinks the Totnes pound has helped to build a sense of community and strengthened the town’s identity, with the £21 note reflecting the local sense of humour.

The impact of austerity

The Totnes pound is just one example of the kind of outside the box thinking that has kept this local community resilient in the face of austerity. Since 2010, the pressure on local authority budgets across England has been intense, with a 50% decline in central funding support. The result has been cuts to public services and less money circulating in local economies.

In Totnes – as elsewhere – there are visible signs of these trends, with the closure of local bank branches and “to let” signs on vacant shops. According to Francis Northrop, former manager of Transition Town Totnes, smaller rural communities like Totnes face difficulties because they lack the economies of scale which make cheap goods and services more accessible in big cities.

Leer más: Retail decline, in maps: England and Wales lose 43m square metres of shop space

Totnes has responded by developing a new ethical economy that puts community values at the core. The closure of the Dairy Crest factory in 2000 convinced many locals that the answer was not to wait for inward investment from big businesses outside of the town. Instead, the focus is on internal investment: harnessing community wealth to address community needs.

But unlike anti-austerity efforts seen in larger cities – such as Preston – a small town like Totnes cannot rely on anchor institutions including local government, universities or hospitals, to redirect their spending into the local economy.

Indeed, one such institution – Dartington College of Art – relocated to Falmouth in 2010 with the loss of an estimated £6m a year in local spending from 900 students and staff. Instead, Totnes has had to show it’s possible for small towns to withstand such losses, by drawing from a toolbox of different methods to build community wealth.

A new ethical economy

The response has grown from more than a decade of community trust building, since the launch of Transition Town Totnes in 2006. Initially set up to promote local resilience in the face of climate change and peak oil, Transition Town Totnes now coordinates an extensive range of local projects, and forms part of a global Transition network, with initiatives from around the world sharing knowledge and ideas.

Some of these projects focus directly on combating the effects of austerity. For example, Caring Town Totnes is a collaboration of around 80 organisations seeking to counter the impact of budget cuts on local health and social services.

Current Transition Town Totnes manager Jenny Gellatly is also working with the Common Cause Foundation to explore how it may be possible to place compassionate values at the heart of the future transformation of the town. During a recent visit for my research, she explained to me how initiatives like these promote caring for neighbours, friends and family, to help ensure that the most vulnerable people in the community get the support they need.

Other projects focus on building up the local economy and making it more self-sufficient. An important breakthrough came with the launch of the Reconomy Center, to support new enterprises and promote local investment. The centre hosts an annual Local Entrepreneur Forum to crowdfund low carbon, ethical and sustainable business projects.

A number of organisations also came together to produce a Local Economic Blueprint, which highlights the economic benefits for small independent businesses in Totnes of sourcing goods and services from other local businesses and suppliers, to ensure more money circulates in the economy.

The next critical step was the launch of the Totnes Community Development Society – a not-for-profit that raises funds and implements local development projects. It’s currently implementing the Atmos Totnes project, to transform the disused Dairy Crest site into a school for food entrepreneurs and a business incubator, with affordable housing.

In the face of severe challenges, Totnes has shown how a community can mobilise to achieve a more ethical and resilient local economy. It will be fascinating to observe how the town changes in the years ahead, and to see what the next initiative will be, to replace the Totnes pound.

Author Brendan Barrett is Specially Appointed Professor, Center for the Study of Co*Design, Osaka University

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Minneapolis had ambitious climate action goals, but was making no moves to upgrade its energy strategy to do so. Moreover, people of colour, renters, and low-income energy users were at a disadvantage both in terms of financing clean energy solutions for their heating (e.g. solar panels), and in getting jobs in the local clean energy sector. Community Power saw the need for a different model centered on equity and local benefits, ownership and decision-making power.

The initial aim of the campaign was to give the city the option to municipalize its energy utilities. The campaign stirred discussion within city leadership, which led to the crafting of the country’s first city-utility partnership, known as the Minneapolis Clean Energy Partnership (CEP). Community Power pushed to shorten the franchise agreement to 5-10 years for increased accountability, and established a 15-member advisory committee including representatives from diverse constituencies. In coalition with a black-led grassroots group it also defended the partnership’s and racial equity funding at City budget hearings.

After the establishment of the partnership, Community Power began to broaden these processes to support energy democracy and community wealth-building in a variety of ways, including continuing to influence the Partnership’s work plan and hold it accountable through the Partnership’s citizen advisory committee and grassroots members; building a movement around inclusive financing (a tariff-based financing model designed to require no credit score, no upfront capital, and savings starting day one); local access to community solar, and renter engagement, working for renters’ rights broadly, including energy access and affordability issues.

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us. Or visit  communitypowermn.org

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

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