“Not hat long ago, I had a conversation with Ioannis Margaris, the CEO of the Greek state energy producer, a technician and economic theorist who is investing a lot of his own energy in transforming Greek electricity production into peer-to-peer production. Before he joined the energy firm’s senior executive team Margaris was a researcher at the Technical University where, with the Syriza economist Elena Papadoulou, he wrote an important briefing on the “transformation of production.” The idea behind it was: How can one slowly change the economy so that more and more decentralized, self-managed firms, co-operatives and initiatives play a gradually more important role – so that, in the end, a mixed economy emerges composed of private companies, state enterprises and co-operatives and alternative economic bodies”

I’ve learned via Robert Misik, at the end of his article discussing ‘end of capitalism’ accounts by both mainstream and heterodox economists, that Ioannis Margaris, who had joined the summit of our Commons Transion effort in Ecuador in 2014, has become the vice-chairman of the state energy utility in Greece. Ioannis has been a long-time researcher into distributed energy infrastructures, so this may be a significant move.

Here is the excerpt from Robert Misik:

“I’ve found signs of this in my many journeys across economies that remain strong but also a few in the so-called crisis countries. Not hat long ago, I had a conversation with Ioannis Margaris, the CEO of the Greek state energy producer, a technician and economic theorist who is investing a lot of his own energy in transforming Greek electricity production into peer-to-peer production. Before he joined the energy firm’s senior executive team Margaris was a researcher at the Technical University where, with the Syriza economist Elena Papadoulou, he wrote an important briefing on the “transformation of production.” The idea behind it was: How can one slowly change the economy so that more and more decentralized, self-managed firms, co-operatives and initiatives play a gradually more important role – so that, in the end, a mixed economy emerges composed of private companies, state enterprises and co-operatives and alternative economic bodies.

You’ve only go to look around the world with open eyes and, straight away, you can see at every turn that there are all kinds of initiatives, NGOs, companies and coops that are altogether building a kind of network, the nucleus of a new type of socialism. A socialism or a form of sharing economy, of communal economy, founded on the initiative of small groups and wholly decentralized – a socialism that has nothing in common with the bureaucratic beast of earlier state-run economies nor with those we know from communism and not with state capitalist societies as they existed close to home 30 years ago. And, of course, these are so far just small islands, around a new hundred initiatives, but their weight and value cannot be estimated highly enough – we could barely survive this crisis without them. “I believe,” writes the British economic author Paul Mason in his book Postcapitalism about projects like these, that they offer “an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do.”

Perhaps, all we need to do is learn to look at things properly. Do you know these famous picture puzzles which, when you look at them one way, seem totally chaotic and blurred and only when you look at them the right way does an image appear?

It could be that’s the same with our economy: We think we’re living in an economy which turns solely around trade, profit, money, material wealth and the resultant social status. And all other economic actors, be they self-help groups, file-sharing circles, coops, creative ideas for firms, altruistic aid projects, therefore seem to us to be somehow extra-economic, like the activity of a few mad people who have comical idées fixes, like work therapy for good men and women. But perhaps that’s utterly the wrong way to see the world. Perhaps we’re already right in the middle of the post-capitalist transformation – and simply don’t notice it.”