If you’ve read any of my writing, you will have guessed I have some opinions about how we could do large scale governance differently. But the tool we’re building is designed only for small scale: If you’ve ever used Loomio, you’ll see that it’s designed for groups of up to a few hundred people, max. There’s a big gap between the decision-making context of a grocery co-op and an entire country.

So I was really pleased to be invited to make a presentation at The Direct Parliament conference in Florence last week, where I could connect the dots between the large scale and the small.

The conference was coordinated by Marco Deseriis, who studies networked society with a cultural/political examination of Internet-based activism. The Direct Parliament came at the conclusion of his 2-year research project Scalable Democracy. I was first introduced to Marco when he interviewed me back in 2016, looking especially at the mass adoption of Loomio in the early phase of Spain’s Podemos movement-slash-party. I have really appreciated following along with his research blog, which is full of excellent interviews like this one with Miguel Arana Catania from the Participation Team of Podemos, revealing the tensions between the social movement’s manifestations in the streets and in the institutions.

The day-long conference was all live-streamed, so you can watch videos of the presentations and discussions here. My talk starts 13 minutes in, there’s a direct link here. If you prefer reading to watching, I’ve included an approximate transcript below.

I usually avoid speculation about the large scale because I often see it distracting us from more immediate local concerns, where we can actually have tangible impact. But people keep asking me what I think we should do about governments, so I’m starting to develop some thoughts on the topic. I’d love to hear what you think. Feedback welcome

Transcript: Everyday Governance with Loomio

Thanks for the invitation to join this conference. I’m grateful to be here, and looking forward to learning with you all. I come from New Zealand, so sorry about my poor English. I co-founded a technology company called Loomio. I think technology is quite boring though so I won’t talk too much about it.

software is an artefact of values and beliefs

I think software is an artefact, a by-product of our values and beliefs. So I don’t want to spend much time telling you about the software we built; I think it will be more interesting to share some of my values and beliefs, rather than telling you all about our software platform. Bear in mind I’m one of many co-creators of Loomio, so my subjectivity is only a limited slice of the pie.

First I want to share some of my personal experience so you know where I’m coming from.

In 2011, I joined the Occupy Movement. I had no experience with activism or social movements before then. I had just been watching Occupy Wall Street online and I thought it was interesting. I saw all these people saying that society is in crisis, that we face enormous environmental and economic challenges, and that our institutions are not capable of coming up with good solutions. In retrospect, I think Occupy was an opportunity to get firsthand experience of the challenges of democracy, and to start prototyping alternative institutions.

When the Occupy Movement made it all the way to Aotearoa New Zealand, I went down to our Civic Square in Wellington to observe: who are these people, what are they going to do? Very quickly, I changed roles, from observer to participant. I found there was no way to stand outside, I had to be involved.

For the first time in my life, I met with citizens in the city square. We talked together about our hopes and fears, sharing, learning, debating, connecting. It was tremendously inspiring, and shocking, like, why have I never met other citizens like this before?

On the first day, somebody decided he was going to stay the night in the square. Two weeks later there were 100 tents, a whole village had appeared.

The amazing thing about this village was that nobody was in charge. We made decisions together: everyone needs to eat, so how are we going to organise food? We made a kind of free university, so what kind of education programs shall we run? All these people want to stay in the square: how can we make shelter for everyone? TV cameras keep visiting us, what should we tell them? Nobody was the boss, we had to negotiate and improvise.

Now nothing in my education had prepared me for this. I’m trained as an engineer. As an engineer I was taught an approach to problem-solving that was all about being right. I did research, I made simulations, I built electronic circuits and tested them with careful measurements. I was trained to be objective, detached, outside of the system, an expert observer with a brilliant intelligence.

In the assembly at Occupy, I discovered these skills are not very useful in deliberating with others. In the assembly I learned that my empathy is much more useful than my intelligence. 

Negotiating with other people, trying to find agreement about how we should organise our little village, I learned the most important thing I could do was to listen. Not just listening to rebut — listening to understand, where are you coming from? what do you believe? what do you value? why do you think like that?

When I truly understand somebody’s position, then I can make a proposal that they can agree with. It’s not about being very clever, having the best ideas, or the best ethics, it’s just about listening, being flexible, and looking for solutions that satisfy as many people as possible.

So, there we are in the city square sitting in circles and making consensus decisions, it’s very picturesque and inspirational.

It was also kind of a disaster, right? In my opinion, the Occupy camps all over the world ended for basically two reasons.

Some camps were destroyed by the state. Violent, brutal, armed thugs paid by the government to vandalise and dismantle these flourishing communities. The other camps collapsed under the weight of consensus. We learned how difficult it is to govern a public space, especially when you’re making decisions with random people, some of whom are drunk, or they are just passing through and sharing an opinion without any commitment to the community.

Actually maybe these two reasons demonstrate the same thing: governance is very difficult. The state does stupid things like pepper spraying students at a peaceful protest. And we activists do stupid things like spending 6 hours in a consensus meeting that brings us no closer to our aims.

So, as our camp disintegrated, my friends and I were left with an enormous question: what next!? It felt like we had come so close to a dramatic evolution of how we govern society, and then it collapsed. So what do you do after the revolution fails?

Being the kind of people we are, we decided to make some software about it. We thought we could help activists organise more efficiently with software to support inclusive decision-making.

So Loomio is a discussion forum like many others online, but the unique piece is the facilitation tools which are designed for productive and efficient deliberation. It’s not an endless conversation, the process is guided towards an outcome. E.g. you can poll people so see which options they like, then test for agreement with a proposal.

When we started we were just thinking of activists. But immediately we were swamped with interest from all parts of society, in many different countries. Now we have tens of thousands of groups using Loomio. In Wellington, the city government used Loomio to involve citizens, experts, and officials in policy making. Co-ops use Loomio for governance: approving new members, approving funding applications, debating about constitutional bylaws.

My favourite example right now is social.coop: it’s a social network very similar to Twitter. But instead of selling advertising, the platform is funded by users paying a small subscription fee. In return, users are invited to participate in governance, in a Loomio group: what kind of censorship should we have on the platform? where should we host the data? what code of conduct should users adhere to? It’s wonderful to see a digital platform being governed like a public utility.

Loomio is very simple software: you have discussions, suggest proposals, and people can say what they think about the idea. There’s no magical automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or decision-making robots, it is a very human process. I think it contributes at least two very useful innovations to the problem of deliberation, which can be generalised to other tools and processes.

1. asynchronous deliberation

First, Loomio breaks the tyranny of time. Usually, when you want to include people in a decision-making process, you do it in a meeting. These days we have video-conferencing so our meetings can extend into multiple spaces, but still, we need everyone paying attention at the same time. This is a fundamental constraint of deliberation: you need to organise a meeting, get everyone to pay attention simultaneously, and there’s a pressure to make all your decisions before the meeting ends.

With Loomio you can involve people in decisions, without coordinating a meeting. People participate in their own time.

I’m travelling through Europe with my partner. Back home, we’re negotiating about a new investment round for Loomio, and potentially restructuring the cooperative. We’re on the road, in a different timezone from the rest of the team, but we can participate in these very important decisions in our own time. We call it asynchronous decision-making, I think it is a very profound breakthrough, even though it is quite mundane!

2. visualise positions

The second innovation: visualising people’s positions. It’s very common for deliberation to get stuck in a very frustrated state. Essentially, everyone is simply arguing for their preferred option. I think we should do this. Well I think we should do that. No we should do this. Often what is happening here is that people are advocating for their preferred option, simply because their preference hasn’t been acknowledged. I get louder and louder describing the benefits of my proposal, because nobody has demonstrated that they understand my idea. So it really accelerates the deliberation process when you can visualise everybody’s position. First, everybody needs to be heard. Then they are much more willing to negotiate and make concessions.

So with a Loomio decision, somebody makes a proposal, and then you can visually see where everyone stands. People agree or disagree, and they share a short summary explaining why they feel that way. so you can quickly focus in on the concerns, and evolve the proposal to respond to them.

Again, it is quite simple, but also a profound breakthrough. We use the same technique in face-to-face workshops and meetings to deal with difficult decisions. In this case, the graphic is used to visually distinguish preference (I love it) from tolerance (I can live with it):

I want to share a bit more about my beliefs, some of the thinking behind the software.

This shows you how I understand social change. The chart keeps going up to the right, with bigger and bigger scales: cities, states, the planet, all of life, etc. Many of us are motivated by large-scale change, I expect that’s why we’re at this conference: we want to rebuild the economy for equality, or reimagine politics, or repair the division between humans and the rest of nature. Big big change. But social change is very complex, and non-deterministic, it’s not a straightforward system. I don’t know how we re-wire society, but this picture shows my intuition. I believe we need to consider many different scales at once.

For example: I want to change the system called patriarchy. It seems to me a very urgent challenge. But if I just focus on the large scale, trying to dismantle the system, I may miss a lot of insights that are down at the lower end, much closer to me and my immediate experience. Down here there are some questions just for me: how do I support patriarchy, how do I benefit from it? or, how do I reproduce patriarchal dynamics in myself, how do I dominate myself? and then one step up, looking to my relationships: am I in equal partnership, or in domination relationships? Then I can examine my teams: are we treating each other with respect and equity, or does one person dominate the rest? To me it is very important to have integrity and alignment at all scales. So yes, I will join a social movement against patriarchy, demanding a change in how we distribute power in society and how we run institutions. And also I need to work at the very small scale.

This is what is in my mind when I am using Loomio. I believe it is very important to practice deliberation at the small scale. Learn how to share power, to negotiate, to listen, to make concessions, to empathise, to let go of demands, to find creative solutions. Simply, I believe the practice of small scale democracy makes me a much more capable citizen.

I’m not sure about the large scale. I think we will have much better ideas once people have more opportunity to practice at the small scale.

Right now, the best large scale example I know of the is in Taiwan. My example is 4 years old, but still most people don’t know about it, so I guess I will be the Asia-Pacific representative for this conference and share the story again.

In 2014, the Sunflower Movement occupied government buildings in Taiwan. They stayed there for 23 days, demonstrating how to run a transparent deliberative democracy process to renegotiate a trade deal with China. After the movement, many independent politicians won seats in government, including the premier of Taiwan and the mayor of Taipei. That is, they are there to represent citizens directly, without the mediation of a political party. Since then, there have been many experiments in citizen participation in law making.

The vTaiwan project uses a tool called pol.is to involve thousands of people in opinion gathering, which like Loomio, creates a visualisation of people’s position on an issue. Once the opinion groups are clear, then representatives of each group come together for an in-person deliberation. This is broadcast publicly for anyone to watch. Then, having understood the perspectives of the different stakeholder groups, citizens are invited to suggest statements that they believe everyone can agree with. In the end, the government agrees to implement every consensus point generated by the process, or to provide detailed rationale for why it is not feasible.

This is incredibly inspiring to me, and I hope more people in the Western world will pay attention to the developments in East Asia. And I will say, the technology is useful, but more important is the political strategy and the facilitation skill of the activists driving this change.

I’m not sure if the government of the future is going to use pol.is, or Loomio, or LiquidFeedback, or whatever technology. But I hope as more people have access to a kind of everyday democracy, we’ll be much more able to work together creatively, efficiently making great decisions that work for everyone.

So if the question of this conference is “how do we reclaim our vision of democracy?” I think the answer is very straightforward, and very difficult. How do you get better at anything? With practice. I propose we should practice democracy more-or-less everyday. In our schools, in our homes and workplaces. Learn what democracy is composed of, in our own intimate experience, and then we will be more equipped citizens, less naïve, less easy to manipulate by demagogues and propagandists. I imagine children and teachers collaborating to govern their schools. Workers coming together to self-manage their workplaces. Citizens working together with city officials and experts to develop good policy.

Most of all, I imagine what extraordinary breakthroughs we might discover if more of us learned to listen to the people on the opposite side of the political fence. What if we could hear the values and beliefs beneath their position, rather than just dismissing them as stupid or evil?

p.s. this story is licensed with no rights reserved, available for reproduction on my website

p.p.s. you can support me to keep writing with claps, shares, and dollars

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The crisis of the European Union begs for new, unifying and constructive narratives – alternatives to the right-wing populist and nationalist wave getting fiercer every day. A commons approach holds the potential for a unified vision towards an alternative economy, a Europe from the bottom up and an ecological economy and way of life. The idea of jointly stewarding shared resources, community and a generative economy, can find resonance with a diverse range of citizens.

Sophie Bloemen and Nicole Leonard: A relentless focus on markets and growth has blinded us for the loss of social cohesion, rampant inequality and the destruction of the environment. In the perceived need to quantify everything, gross domestic product is used as a measure of social wealth. The commodification of our common resources and even our online behavior can seem limitless. Yet major fault lines are starting to appear in this dominant worldview based on individualism, private ownership and an extractive relationship with nature. A novel outlook based on networks, access and sustainability is emerging, where citizens are actively co creating their environment.

The Commons perspective captures the change in perception regarding needs and priorities. ‘Commons’ refer to shared resources and frameworks for social relationships that are managed by a community. ‘Commons’ also stand for a worldview and ethical perspective favouring stewardship, reciprocity and social and ecological sustainability. This outlook defines well-being and social wealth not just with narrow economic criteria like gross domestic product or companies’ success. Instead it looks to a richer, more qualitative set of criteria that are not easily measured – including moral legitimacy, social consensus and participation, equity, resilience and social cohesion.

Commons are not primarily a political theory but first and foremost a practice emerging from the bottom up. Everywhere people are engaged in alternative practices as part of the struggle for ecological, social and cultural transition within their communities. All over Europe local initiatives are taking care of their direct environment, sharing and stewarding knowledge online, and claiming natural resources as our commons. These include, for instance, community wifi structures providing internet access in remote areas, co-housing initiatives ensuring affordable housing, community land trusts that explore collective forms of property, or urban commons initiatives regenerating the city for its citizens. The digital knowledge commons are a key element of an alternative economy, and online commons projects have been able to attain an impressive scale. Creative commons licenses for cultural works, for example, are now over one billion. In all these areas, the commons approach offers a new vocabulary for collective action and social justice, as well as processes for communities to govern resources themselves.

The Commons to Overcome Political Struggles in Europe

So if commoning communities abound and cultural change is underway, what is stopping the commons from creating an alternative society? Perhaps commoners’ strengths – their localised, bottom-up stewardship of resources and strong community-oriented relationships – are also obstacles. How do we move from a loose network of atomised, emancipatory commoning initiatives to a strong network that can challenge the dominant, bankrupt worldview of individualism and economic growth at any cost?

Until now, European civil society, the NGOs and social justice networks, have not been able to unite around a broad shared agenda. Hundreds of organisations did unite in the fight against TTIP. However, in order to make progress towards another, fairer and ecological economy and society, a movement cannot be solely reactionary – it has to set the agenda and provide positive alternatives.

The emerging radical democratic initiatives that propose alternatives have mostly engaged at a national or local level. Examples are 15M in Spain, Nuit Debout in France or the University occupation in Amsterdam. The Occupy movement was trans-local, but did not succeed in genuinely opening up the conversation in Europe. Municipalism, such as in Barcelona is creating real change on the ground, providing an inspiration for cities not only in Europe but worldwide. Local struggles, forward-looking and emancipatory projects have to be connected in order to truly change the current order. The fact is that a great deal of the laws and developments that shape our societies come from the European level and global markets. There has to be trans-local and transnational solidarity around a shared vision of an alternative society.

The European Commons Assembly arrives to Madrid

The European Commons Assembly is an effort in providing a platform for these connections and trans-local solidarity. The European Commons Assembly that took place in Brussels in November 2016 has been a case in point for the unifying potential of the commons, and a symbol of maturity of the commons movement. A myriad of over 150 commoners, activists and social innovators from different corners of Europe came to Brussels for three days to develop new synergies, express solidarity and to discuss European politics as well as policy proposals. In the European Parliament, Members of Parliament exchanged views with this “Commons Assembly” and the political energy generated by bringing all these people together in this context was exceptional.

The ECA continues today as a political process and diverse platform, open to anyone who shares its values and wants to contribute. ECA explores what strategies to engage in order to nourish, protect, and extend the commons. How to develop the outward channels to affect political change, while taking care to maintain and strengthen its communities? How to build broader coalitions on the ground not bound to the left or the right, how to prevent erecting barriers with academic language and theory?

Since Brussels, the ECA has published a series of videos on commons topics, articles and generally aimed to visibilise the unifying potential of the commons narrative. Members also examined the intersections of the commons and Social Solidarity Economy and municipalist movements, with smaller assemblies held in Athens and Barcelona. Commoners from all over Europe and beyond are joining the online community all the time, and sharing their experiences, and even in the Netherlands and Finland commoners were inspired to create local commons assemblies.

ECA Madrid and the collaboration with Transeuropa 2017 provides the energy to move the process further along. It is becoming clear that the ECA needs to offer an added value beyond ideational affiliation. Assembly members will have to co-create the resources and practices that will strengthen the movement. That is why the idea of “production” figures so prominently in the discourse around this Assembly. The focus of the assembly this time will be on urban commons, taking advantage of ECAs presence in Madrid and Spain to examine strategies, failed and successful, to promote the commons politically and in public policy, including citizens in this process.

In Madrid working groups will focus on specific themes of the commons in the city, to create shareable outputs that bring these local experiences to a broader audience. This creation will nourish the toolbox of the ECA, in turn helping other efforts to support and scale commoning. This opportunity will allow initiatives to learn from and share with each other, attaining a level of technical depth and understanding that is necessary for change, deepening the European political agenda for the commons. At the same time, what is at stake goes beyond the specific themes and issues that color the commons movement.

The ECA aims to engage in conversations with other allies around Europe, and considers the political context and the commons movement as a political force that relates to conventional political power. Rather than letting citizen resentment of the current order and political backlash lead to Europe’s disintegration, the European Commons Assembly builds on these on-the ground experiences to draw hope and energy to power the commons vision and a renewed political force in Europe.

The European Commons Assembly will be in Madrid from the 25th until the 28th of October. The program includes participative workshops on urban commons topics, joint sessions with European Alternatives on the commons in policy, and opportunities to learn about and visit local commoning initiatives in Madrid. There will also be time dedicated to the future of the ECA.

Read and sign the Call: europeancommonsassembly.eu/sign-call/. Join the community: Introduce yourself by email at [email protected] Don’t miss any update! Join our telegram channel: http://t.me/transeuropa2017

Sophie Bloemen is a political activist based in Berlin and co-founder of the Commons Network

Nicole Leonard is the coordinator of the European Commons Assembly (ECA)

Originally published in the TransEuropa 2017 Journal.

Photo by cuellar

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A large chunk of the book is taken up with Iglesias’ exposition of Spanish history. A kind of ‘how did we get here’, here being neo-liberalism and a failing European dispensation for Spain. What becomes clear through this narrative is that the ‘mistakes’ of the left were, in his view, nothing to do with poor structuring that allowed organisations and parties to become detached from their bases, but a series of strategic mistakes made by their leaders.

Strategic errors are also made by many on the radical left, he claims, when they demand too much radicalism from left wing vehicles. He cites approvingly Lenin’s attack essay ‘Leftism is an infantile disorder’. What is meant here is that demanding too much purist radicalism is childish, because the people aren’t ready for it. There’s some truth in that: most people in Spain, as in the UK, are not political radicals, and any large-scale movements must bring them on board. Yet how does Iglesias think that movements get pulled leftward? Simply by clever positioning by people like him perhaps? Without a radical left wing one wonders what he would be positioning himself between – the centre left and the right?

I’ll admit to not knowing enough of Spanish political history to know what Iglesias gets right or wrong. He may well be mostly right, though his Marxist framework imposes a somewhat deterministic hindsight-view of struggling power blocs over the complex pathways of the past. Yet the broad overview he takes is disappointing from a man heading a party that denounces the current institutions as corrupt. He rarely critiques the institutions in themselves, with the exception of the monarchy and the EU: the easy targets, in other words. What he critiques again and again, whether in the Transition from fascism or in the present day, is those who do the wrong or corrupt things in those institutions. He looks at their decisions as a strategist looking down, yet rarely seems to suggest that it may be the nature of the state and party institutions that cause the problem. The wrong people are dominant and hold the reins of hegemonic power, in his view. He is the right person to wield  power, it is implied, having positioned himself perfectly as the critical yet mild social democratic voice Spain needs.

When the more recently written appendices do finally get onto Podemos, the position of Iglesias is further revealed. He has almost nothing to say about the democratic nature of Podemos. Remember that subtitle about a democratic Europe? It’s a particularly odd one when Iglesisas appears to have little interest at all in democratic organising. Podemos, in his version of history, was born less out of the horizontol urges of the 15M movement, which he more or less classifies as a failure, and more out off the media project of him and his friends: La Tuerka and Fort Apache. It was these, he insists, that won the loyalty of people. In the age of television, he argues, one can create a party through media alone. He has nothing to say about the autocratic nature of the medium. It is simply a prime ideological tool that the left should use to establish a popular leadership with (sufficiently mild) socialistic goals. I agree that media must play a role in establishing a new common sense, yet should it really be in charge? TV studios have become the real parliaments, Iglesias states as though it is an unchangeable fact. The upshot is that one must try to win on TV above all, with a few ‘good’ leaders facing up to the ‘bad’ leaders in the circus of the studio.

It seems curious that a man so obsessed with the ‘old elites’ of Spain should be so keen on setting up a new elite, yet it is difficult to reach any other conclusion about his goals. The democratic structure of Podemos is only mentioned in passing, and without strong approval. Its purpose as an organisation, one reads between the lines, is to launch the leaders of Podemos into power. Unlike every other person and party in history, we must assume, he and Podemos will be untouched by the degradation and capture that besets every new elite. He and the other leaders of the party will do the right thing, they will make the right strategic decisions, and thus, finally, the possibility of socialism will be opened by a party and leader that have sought to defend themselves constantly against the danger of being too radical.

In the same way movements need their left wing radicals, I’m sure they also need to their Pablo Iglesiases, their strategists and positioners. I’m aware that Iglesias has achieved much, and it’s easy to criticise from an armchair. But surely we must be careful of people who see themselves as ideal leaders. In an interview published as an appendix, Iglesias tells us he gave the king of Spain a gift of a DVD set of ‘Game of Thrones’, remarking that this is what is happening in Spain right now. The metaphor is massively disappointing to anyone who wanted Podemos not to create a new elite but to get rid of the elite altogether. There’s little doubt who Iglesias wants to occupy the Iron Throne.

Photo by marclozanobosch

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Francesca Bria: Until today digital social innovation (DSI) has been mainly driven by grassroots social movements, hackers, geeks and civil society groups. Huge sums of public money have supported digital innovation in business, as well as in fields ranging from the military to espionage. But there has been very little systematic support for innovations that use digital technology to address social challenges.

We need bold thinking about the type of digital society we want. I think . It will be a hybrid between physical and digital, between representative and direct democracy. Cities will be the place to experiment, grow and scale bold policies related to DSI, such as basic income, data commons, and digital participation.

That is what we are doing in Barcelona where we have a Mayor, Ada Colau, that is a former social movement activist. Barcelona en comù and Podemos, the two new political movements that emerged from the 15M anti austerity social mobilisation in Spain, only use crowdfunding and organise their members through a collaborative platform that gathers policy input from thousands of citizens. It is the quality of the balance between top down and bottom up that will determine the success of the digital social transition.

The following are some of the questions that I see for the future of DSI:

1. THE TECH FUTURE OF DSI WILL DEPEND ON DATA COMMONS

AI and machine learning is determining the future of our economy, from driverless cars, to precision agriculture, deep learning in the healthcare sector, to energy transition. Companies like Google and Amazon are spending over $10billion on infrastructure every year and are grabbing a huge amount of data. However, this kind of massive transformation cannot be left to big tech companies alone.

I think the future of DSI will depend on being able to strike a New Deal on Data to make the most out of data, while guaranteeing data sovereignty & privacy. We need distributed infrastructures to share data, encryption for the people, and new ownership regimes such as data commons to preserve citizens digital rights.

One of the main tech challenges for DSI will be striking a deal between full privatization and public control; between extreme centralisation and extreme decentralised; between data commons and data markets; between black boxes and algorithmic transparency.

2. THE ECONOMIC FUTURE OF DSI WILL BE ABOUT THE INTRODUCTION OF BASIC INCOME & THE GROWTH OF PLATFORM COOPERATIVES

The “sharing economy” is here to stay! Introducing fair regulation and algorithmic transparency to regulate incumbents is necessary but not enough. We need to empower sharing economy alternatives such as platform cooperatives, the maker movement that is reinventing manufacturing, and Maker Cities where circular economy models can be experimented and scaled. That’s what we are doing in Barcelona.

But going beyond this, one of the main economic challenges for DSI in the next 10 years will be reinventing the notion of work in relation to the rapid automation of labour. Economists predict that 100million workers will be replaced by the robot economy. Rethinking our social security system through for instance the introduction of basic income schemes will be crucial and DSI can stimulate our imagination to experiment on the future of health, education, work, care, and even money.

3. DSI WILL ENABLE A GENUINELY DIRECT DEMOCRACY VS RIGHT WING POPULISM

Finally, the future of our digital society has to be built with the people! In particular with the young generations that are disenfranchised in this moment of crisis of trust in the political and financial system. We need to engage the young generation in politics through an open democratic process or right wing populisms will prevail, together with the spreading of Fake News. This may seem difficult when oversees we see institutional closure, intolerance, racism, but I think a genuinely participatory democracy is the only way to build a stronger and more just Digital society leveraging social innovation movements.

THE NEXT 10 YEARS OF DSI

To end, I would like to provide a pretty positive picture of where DSI will go in the next 10 years:

1. More and more cities and public institutions will introduce social, environmental, ethical, open and innovation clauses in public procurement enabling the integration of DSI in public service delivery

2. Digital participatory democracy with thousands of citizens involved in policy making will be the norm

3. Basic income schemes will be tested and successfully introduced

4. Data commons will make platform cooperatives a solid alternative to Uber & Airbnb

5. Every City will have Maker districts for the circular economy & produce energy and food locally, moving towards productive and sovereign Cities

Photo by ario_

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About the authors and their positions

The whole text is written from the personal standpoint of the author. I will try to distinguish between the interpretation of the 15-M movement and the ideas we, that is the autonomous current, have today. 

I write with a perspective amid the 15-M movement in the city of Barcelona. This particular branch, or current, can be summarized by one of the 15-Ms motto “ningú ens representa” (nobody represents us).

Eduard Nus is a member of the Autonomy Reflexion Group and of La Base: ateneu cooperatiu in Poble Sec, Barcelona. He is currently starting to build autonomous bases in semi-rural places around Can Tonal de Vallbona.

Assembly on the so called “mushrooms square” in Sevilla on the 21st of May 2011.

What is the key idea of the 15-M movement

A heterogeneous movement with a common denominator

The 15-M movement was very heterogeneous. Nevertheless, the participants of the 15-M movement shared the following ideas as a common denominator:

• A critical stand on existing institutions (We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers, nobody represents us, etc.).
• Opposition to the antisocial measures of the economic policies implemented by the government and, in a deeper sense, criticism of the commodification of life, the need to express outrage and the need to find responses to the crisis.
• Opposition to the competitive principle and the need put an end to the alienation and individualization of life, to which this system condemns us. With the words of our friend Pablo Molano, who has recently left us: A lot of people say that 15-M was an act of protest. It is true, but it was not just that. It was, and is, an encounter, a recognition and the abolition of personal and ideological barriers. We were one, because we were all and each with their own quirks, accepting each other.

To sum up, we can say that the central idea is that society and the people must be placed on top, and that political and economic institutions must be subordinate to them.

One of the posters calling to the first 15th of May demonstration in 2011 (Image: democraciarealya.es)

The context

The 15-M movement in Spain developed out of a long series of protests following annunciations by the central government with regard to major wage and labour cuts, more privatization of public services and a drastic erosion of the welfare system. In response to this, and seeing that the major trade unions failed to call for a general strike and were instead negotiating with the established powers, people started to demonstrate and organize themselves. In Barcelona, the Assemblea de Barcelona (Barcelona Assembly) was created, a gathering of activists who wanted to unite everyone who was affected and oppressed by the neoliberal measures implemented by the government. At the same time, other collective platforms such as Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) emerged online as well as a way to express the people’s outrage and their discontent with the governing elites. The following motto, which hung on the walls of an important squat building in Barcelona just a few days before the general strike, which then in September 2010 was called upon by the trade unions, nicely summarizes the collective mood of the time:

“Banks suffocate us. Employers exploit us. Politicians lie to us. CCOO and UGT¹ trade unions sell us. Fuck off!”

In the same vein, “Democracia Real Ya”, whose main motto was “We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers”, called for large demonstrations in all major Spanish cities on May 15th. These demonstrations, apparently without prior planning, turned into permanent camps which occupied major squares in the main Spanish cities and thus starting a long series of protests. This plural and diffuse movement of citizen’s assemblies, which formed during the camps, was the beginning and the most important moment of what we know as the 15-M movement. In Barcelona, the camps remained there for several weeks until they were forcefully evicted by the Catalan police. Following this controversial act, they re-grouped in the neighbourhoods as part of a decentralization strategy. This consolidated existing projects and gave rise to new ones, but meant losing participation in town square occupations.

Some of the most important elements were the collective learning, the organic functioning, the general fraternal attitude and the almost forgotten feeling of having something in common. Again, something happened that had the force to unite us beyond the discourses of mass media and its alienating show. It was something that we, the people, shared, outside of the boundaries and regulations defined by the elites to avoid sectarian divisions and the prevailing individualism.

From the squares to the neighbourhoods

After the squares were evicted, the movement rooted in the neighbourhoods. At this time, two different projects started to emerge more clearly: one that wanted to plant the seeds for a new self-ruled society and the other that talked about a new constitution and the creation of new alternative political parties. The supporters of the first ones were few and without enough clear ideas or bases to create an anti-systemic movement or to change everyday life; so they continued to work in local projects as usual but with renewed energies and more people. To them, 15-M was a climax, but not a shifting point. The others, the majority, fell easily into a dynamic of demands, denouncement, compromise and cultural events. Requests to politicians were watered down to preserve the rights and welfare system of the previous years, as if this were possible.

On 27th of November 2011 the police evicts Plaça de Catalunya (Catalonia Square) in Barcelona and the demonstrators reoccupy it and rebuild the camp.

If we are very optimistic, we can consider 15-M as a turning in the context of a series of demonstrations and as part of a wider project that could become an alternative to the current system. The collective consciousness of the collapse in which we are immersed was not yet very distinct. The crisis was still very “new”, and the claims of the time were therefore very strongly focused on not losing what had been achieved until then. This meant ignoring that we were in the middle of a changing era, a civilization shift. After many affluent years, when all came down, people felt lost and upset, even betrayed. There weren’t any clearly discernible alternatives, let alone an organization to support them. Therefore, it was easiest to try to return to what people already knew.

The autonomous perspective within 15-M

As already mentioned, 15-M was a heterogeneous movement. The autonomous perspective within 15-M is an autonomous and local approach that existed before the 15-M mobilizations, and like many others, participated and was reinforced by it. From my point of view, 15-M was a climax in this current, not a shifting point. Also like other currents it is not an explicitly self-recognized movement.

This current shares the common points we’ve listed before, but we don’t think that the problem we have to face are bad rulers or evil bankers, but that it is something inherent in the capitalism-state system. To solve it we have to go to the roots of the system and deactivate it.

Autonomy and Heteronomy in history

We can analyse history as a struggle between autonomy and heteronomy. In a political sense, autonomy is the self-determination of the communities and heteronomy is the opposite. We understand autonomy in a broader sense, not only as a political regime, but also as a way of life, with regard to how we use time or resources, how we relate to each other and so on.

The history of the movement for autonomy goes back to Antiquity. It is the history of self-organization, of the commons, of neighbourhood assemblies, of countless revolutions. During history, different movements have continued the heritage of their predecessors, as we try to do nowadays. In Catalonia we are heirs of the libertarian movement of the first decades of the 20th century, and the workers struggle during the 1970s. We are also heirs of feminist, ecologist and anti-globalization movements, who influenced and nourished our practices, analyses and discourses.

In our country, the movement almost disappeared due to draconian repressions during the Franco dictatorship. After the end of the dictatorship, the resistance and any revolutionary approaches were minimized, especially during the period 1980-2000 and due to the growth of the welfare state. In the first years of the new millennium, it started awakening, little by little, especially within the anti-globalization movement. In the years before and during the 15-M movement, this autonomist movement became more visible, and neighbourhood assemblies started to form. Thanks to 15-M and the work that was done during the following years, as well as the relentless strengthening of the dynamics of the capitalist system, this current is more present now and starting to gain strength.

Today it is obvious that heteronomy is winning the struggle, and that we are facing a multidimensional crisis (social, economic, ecological, . . .). We are not only damaging the planet and other forms of life, we are even risking the survival of humanity.

In addition, it is clear that we must overcome capitalism not only as an economic system but also as a world view, a set of values and its associated lifestyles (or, should we rather say lifeless-styles?). Personal interest, selfishness, and commodification are central elements that permeate our relationships and attitudes. So if we want to change this system, we need to thoroughly rethink our strategy, proposals, discourses and practices: We need a new cosmovision of ourselves and the world.

The alternative

The consensus of the 15-M movement was to regain sovereignty over our lives. However, there are different proposals and visions on what sovereignty means and what could be the strategy to achieve it. In some cases, the proposals are revolutionary and in most cases, they are reformist.

From the perspective which I feel part of, the alternative is a society that is self-determined, self-managed and based on communal life and sovereign public assemblies, without the state or any dominating power. The alternative also implies another world view, our relationships with each other, with time, with nature. We think of communities rooted in a territory, self-reliant, mainly living of their own resources, and confederated with other communities. In this context, we find the ideas and practices of Democratic Confederalism² interesting, which are currently applied by a majority of the population in Kurdistan.

The idea of societal change, to achieve this alternative, is to build and defend a common life, another lifestyle with another world view, and a political and social movement that can spread, coordinate and defend this communal life. The idea is that this movement can also challenge the current system of domination with enough power to replace it, to end it.

There are different points of view on how to accomplish this shift from the existing system to this new stateless form without capitalism and other forms of domination. The most feasible for us is a transitory process allowing the new forms to be tried and tested within the current system; the construction of a “parallel society”, not only to create this “new world” here and now in a small scale but also to have enough power to resist and disable the existing one.
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Who is part of the 15-M movement, what do they do?

Concrete local and political action

We can identify 3 levels of participation within the 15-M movement:

• The core, consisting of the most committed and persistent activists. There are a few thousand of them all over the country and they are in charge of planning and coordinating actions.
• The active citizenship (hundreds of thousands), who participate in the multiple forms of collective expression.
• Outraged or unhappy citizens (2/3 of the population) who somehow sympathize with the aims and actions of the movement.

The movement is organized around specific actions, working areas and groups that are organized in committees and a general assembly (no matter how large³ ).

After the 15-M demonstrations and square occupations different projects and initiatives arose. At the beginning all the initiatives were based more on local and horizontal projects. With the new electoral processes after the 15-M mobilization came new parliamentary political projects in addition, which are considered to be the heirs of the 15-M movement. So we can differentiate two groups in the evolution of the movement practices:

1. Those who decided to participate in state institutions. Most of them think that the problem is bad rulers (such as the political party Podemos), and some of them think that the problem is the system but it is important to be in state institutions to slow the system dynamics (such as the political party Candidatura de Unidad (CUP) or some parts of Barcelona en Comú). It comprises few thousands of activist who are active on these platforms and the millions of people who vote for them in elections.
2. Those who refuse to participate in state institutions and continue with direct local work (many local projects, cultural centres, cooperatives, etc.). There are few thousands of activists who participate in these projects, and it is difficult to determine how many people sympathize with them. The 15-M was a nourishing moment for existing projects and for the creation of new ones. It was a moment that energized existing activists but also brought a lot of new people to the existing groups. Most of them became inactive a few weeks/months after the square occupations, but the few who remained considerably strengthened the projects.

Can Batlló is a neighbourhood project which has many years of history, but gained strength due to 15M mobilization and can now use a town hall building for neighbourhood activities. It is an example of neighbourhood projects in Barcelona.

The organization of this second option is very ephemeral, not formally organized and operates on two interrelated levels:

• Projects with a local perspective (what unites them is a territory) which aim to defend the neighbourhoods, to strengthen communities and breathe life into the commons.
• Thematic projects with a broader territorial perspective. What unites them is a common perspective, a struggle, an area of activity etc. Regarding such projects, it’s worth noting that in recent years there have been several organizational proposals (Process Embat, Apoyo Mutuo, …) to come together and give voice to the second kind of groups, the more autonomist ones. Also during the last two or three years there have been a number of gatherings to generate thought and reflection or to get organized. Awareness is growing about the need to build a more organized and coherent movement.

The strategy consists also in acting on these two levels, by looking at the long-term aspect (building a new world and ending with the existing order), but making everyday actions. We think that strategic awareness is of key importance in determining fate, evolution or stagnation, of different projects, and to give purpose and strength to each action.
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How do you see the relationship between 15-M and degrowth?

Inspiration from as well as advancing and implementation of degrowth ideas

We can talk about the 15-M as a movement of movements. Most importantly, all the social movements in Spain participated in it. The degree of involvement varied, some of them participated more actively, more enthusiastically or more sceptically, but we can say everybody was there. Most of the social movements sympathize with the 15-M movement.

The 15-M movement was influenced directly by the degrowth movement. However, due to the heterogeneity of the movement, and the fact that the degrowth perspective was shared only by a minority, it didn’t have an important presence. It is very difficult to describe the relationship between the two, as it was non-coherent and not continuous. For what I know it had a clear presence in some committees and working groups and no relationship with others.

The most distinct influence of the degrowth movement consisted in some practices and in bringing in the awareness of peak oil and environmental problems. However, this turned into something like an ecological label, rather than being established as a movement within 15-M.

In Catalonia the degrowth movement started around 2007, with an activist approach. After two years a crucial part of activists moved on to other frameworks or created broader movements, which considered the strongest degrowth ideas, but took them further. We want to highlight the Cooperativa Integral Catalan (Catalan Integral Cooperative) which started and is still supporting a lot of self-managed projects – it was created by degrowth activists – and the Democràcia Inclusiva (Inclusive democracy Action Group), a reflection and action group for inclusive democracy, which was also initiated by degrowth activists. From my point of view, in Barcelona, the academic section grew stronger than the activist section of the degrowth movement over the last years.

We believe that many of the basic ideas of the degrowth movement are related to the autonomous approach I feel part of. Practices related to the degrowth movement have been gaining strength as well. We can say that we were inspired by ideas and practices from degrowth in significant nuances, and we are therefore interested in the debate that might arise around those ideas. We very much welcome this publication because it allows us to delve into that debate.

Which suggestions do they have for each other?

Growth is not the only problem and lifestyle change is not a solution

From my point of view, the role of the degrowth movement has to be to participate in and contribute to other movements or struggles, but I don’t think of it as “The movement” of social transformation. We don’t want an ecological movement with a holistic perspective but a holistic movement with a strong ecological view. In order to achieve this, we think that it is also important that the degrowth movement doesn’t turn into a mainly academic movement.

The 15-M movement has implicit proposals in its practices that can be interpreted and applied to any social movement, including the degrowth perspective. Above all, we think that the degrowth perspective could learn from the 15-M movement concerning the multiple faces of the system and its ways of oppression, and how this translates to specific problems for the people. This knowledge can help to carry out an analysis and to broaden the perspective, allowing us to consider the fact that the strategy to overcome such oppressions can’t just consist of reforms.

I have identified a number of contributions from the degrowth perspective that the 15-M movement would benefit from adopting. You can probably find more with deeper and more extensive knowledge of the degrowth movement than I have. The most important ones I can identify, are the following:

• To understand and accept the planet’s physical limits, and the relationship between economy, ecology, energy, resources, etc.
• To understand the consequences of economic growth.
• Voluntary simplicity and changing our own lives.
• To offer people who are concerned about the specific environmental or economic crisis a certain anti-systemic perspective, a broader view and analysis, including different struggles or problems within a common analysis, identifying a common root.

Demonstrations in front of “La Caixa” a major bank, during the 1st “birthday” of 15M, during May 2012.

From our point of view, I would like to propose the following issues to the degrowth perspective:

1. Growth is a problem, but not the main issue: The degrowth perspective sees growth as the main problem of the system. We hence ask: Why do we have a growth economy? This is the key question. Growth is a big problem, but it is just an inherent feature of the current economic system. Growth is a consequence of a competitive scheme, whose purpose is the concentration of power and to serve private interests. In the words of Ted Trainer (Trainer 2010: 1): …we are dealing with extremely important initiatives, which are heading in directions that are admirable…but which are unfortunately mistaken regarding the nature of the global problem and the way out of it.
2. A market system implies growth: Growth is not only a consequence of a growth ideology, it is also caused by the dynamics of a market economy. This is obvious for projects such as some cooperatives. They don’t follow the growth ideology but have to grow to survive in a market economy.
3. Degrowth and capitalism: Degrowth within capitalism, particularly in a globalized economy, is an oxymoron. Capitalism requires growth to reproduce itself. When growth is not possible there is an economic crisis or a war, and a restructuring takes places, which usually implies more concentration of power, more inequality, and also more oppression towards the environment and/or the population.
   Proponents of the degrowth perspective have to ask themselves which social organizing system could cause a reduction in material consumption? Which social organizing system could reintegrate human life with nature? We think that this is impossible in a market economy. Which system could also end most structural oppression? We don’t think that this can be done if we maintain the nation-state system in which elites and hierarchies are a precondition to survive, as they control most of the things we need to survive: food production, health centres, energy production. All this implies that the growth economy cannot be overcome with reforms, nor with isolated projects.
   We need both a new collective imaginary and new values, as well as new institutions and public spaces, which can reinforce and maintain these values. These institutions must have structural elements such as self-reliance and local assemblies, and be empowered through direct relationships within the neighbourhood, as well as direct relationships with the things that sustain life.
4. It is not only a lifestyle manner: In order to end the problems of growth and the current system, it is ineffective that we think of it only as a matter of lifestyle, or as if we could solve those problems only by having a “better” lifestyle. We have to change our lifestyle, but if we want to achieve a societal change, we have to make this change of lifestyle as part of a political strategy. We need a broader social change strategy capable of connecting all actions we develop of establishing new social institutions and replacing the existing ones.

Outlook: space for visions, suggestions or wishes

Open-minded discussions and local projects to deconstruct the current system

Our wish is to integrate practices and some analytical viewpoints from degrowth could into a broader common movement, with the aim of changing society from its roots, to end domination in all its forms (political, economic, ecological, social…).

We learned many things during the 15-M demonstrations, however it wasn’t enough for the changes we want and need. Our opinion is that the 15-M movements didn’t go further because there weren’t enough clear ideas, practices, resources, examples, etc. There wasn’t enough focused strength that would allow to change people’s everyday life, what in turn would enable to build a broader movement that could change the world as we know it.

Therefore, our proposal is to continue working in two main areas:

1. share spaces of open-minded discussion, to build common narratives of how we analyse the world and also how we want to live.
2. create local projects where we can test the world we envision, from where we can showcase and rethink our ideas, from where we can defend what we are doing and where we can establish a common life that has the power to disable, to deconstruct the current system.

Links and literature

Links

Decocracia Real Ya platform website
15-M article on the 15-M Wikipedia
Can Batlló project website
La Base project website
CanTonal project website

Applied as well as further literature

Barcelona Assembly 2010. Statement about the Bank squat in Catalunya square (Barcelona).

Dalmau, Blai 2012. 15M balance towards emancipation (March 2016).

Fotopoulos, Takis 2005. Multidimensional Crisis and the Inclusive Democracy project. The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy.

Fotopoulos, Takis 2007. Is degrowth compatible with a market economy? (March 2016). 

GADI (Editorial Team of the Catalan ID Group) 2010. “Spain: Beyond the general strike”. The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy 6 (4).

Trainer, Ted 2010. De-growth is not enough.

Photo by Tom Raftery

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Here are two strategic questions I’d like to leave hanging.

Faircoin 2 Annex 

This post is also available in: Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Greek

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Continuing our ongoing coverage of the imminent Spanish elections, here’s an interesting video debate juxtaposing the slow vs fast track to social change evidenced in the Spanish political arena.

From the indignados and 15M to housing struggles and municipalismo, Spain has been at the forefront of some of the most creative and effective social movements of recent years. With citizen-led coalitions now governing in Madrid and Barcelona, many see the Spanish context as offering a beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak political climate.

As the country heads to the polls on #20D in one of the most unpredictable elections for many years, the capacity for upstart parties and movements to grow further will be affected by the result. But how exactly is the capacity of Spain’s grassroots politics related to what happens in parliament? And in particular how important is Podemos’s performance in the elections to the future of progressive politics in the country?

In our latest English language episode, filmed in the studios of La Tuerka, the talkshow founded by Pablo Iglesias, we discuss these questions and more with Juan Luis Sánchez (eldiario.es), Carlos Delclos (ROAR), Ana Méndez and Mario Munero (City of Madrid).

Hosts Lorenzo Marsili, director Berardo Carboni.

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Image: Buttons made for last year’s Campo de Cebada’s Summer University 

DIWO Co-op is a worker-owned co-op located in Madrid, Spain. Recently, they were featured on the Spanish TV program “La Aventura del Saber“. This program forms part of a larger project, “La Aventura de Aprender“, which analyses the ways in which communities learn from each other and give back to the Commons.

The following video will be both familiar and inspirational to anyone who has ever been involved in a cooperative enterprise. In the interview, two of DIWO’s worker-owners, Mamen Martín and Rosana Fernández, talk about cooperativism and different forms of collaboration contrasted with individualism, and the differences between traditional enterprises and co-ops. Don’t miss Martín’s tale about the financial advisor that urged them *not* to become a co-op because “they’d lose control of their company”, and their reaction.

The DIWO contingent misspoke twice during the interview, resulting in two small errors. The original 15 M march was in 2011, not 2012; they also flubbed a point at the end while talking about the role of the co-op’s general assembly. Those errors have been corrected in the subtitle track for the video, in the interest of clarity and accuracy. After the vid, we’ve included some of the info from their website.

Hit the “close captions” button at the bottom right to active our English subtitles for this video.

There are some very interesting plans coming up with DIWO for this fall, namely the launch of DIWOShop, in collaboration with Guerrilla Translation and Freepress Coop, to provide free translation and promotion services to a selection of ethical and environmentally-oriented enterprises.  (Disclaimer: I’m Guerrilla Translation’s founder).

The following is extracted from DIWO’s website:

DIWO/We are:

diwo coop is a worker owned co-op specializing in custom button/badge production and other kinds of merchandise for distribution. The co-op is made up of people with various professional backgrounds. We formed our project to help promote communications by and for groups, organizations and companies working for the common good and aimed at building more ethical and sustainable societies. We created diwo coop in 2012, building on and including our previous project, platypusLab, because we’re convinced that collaboration is the best way forward from the current situation of widespread precariousness.

DIWO/We do: 

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The outraged movement in Spain has already prevented almost 47 evictions, according to the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH in Spanish http://afectadosporlahipoteca.wordpress.com/), which aims to defend the “right to housing”. From their website they are constantly making to ensure that families with financial problems avoid becoming homeless, denouncing that real estate speculation has led many families to inhumane situations. They also denounce the fact that, in Spain, around 180 evictions are executed each day, too many to be stopped.

The platform prevented the first eviction in November 2010, way before new groups from the 15M movement, such as Real Democracy Now! and Acampada Sol, joined them. Thanks to them Lluís Martí, an unemployed father and his nine year old son could continue to live in their home in Catalonia, despite being unable to pay their debt. On the 7th of July, the group successfully disrupted the eviction of a 55 year old woman from Madrid, who is unemployed and has to take care of a severely disabled son of 25. Problems for this family started 18 years ago when the mother mortgaged their house to help her ex-partner pay some debts. In 2002, after the relationship had ended and she found herself unable to pay, she went to a financial agency, that in turn went to the bank Caja de Ahorros Mediterraneo (CAM), that in turn gave her a new loan of 157 thousand euros. Today, in 2011, the financial entity, adding expenditures and interest rates, demands that she return 200 thousand euros, a sum way out of her reach. Among the protesters there were at least two other people that have managed to delay their evictions thanks to the platform’s actions. One was Anwar Khalil from the neighborhood of Tetuan, the first sucessful action in Madrid, and the other one Luis, an 70 year old man from Parla, also in Madrid. To achieve their goal the group summons the public and media to stand in front of the house, blocking the Government inspector from entering and therefore delaying the process, as it has to pass through court again.

For more information, see the full European Revolution report and this other one from Associated Press. In terms of local Spanish sites see Stop Deshaucios mapping reports of evictions and Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca or PAH, the original movement behind the protests against evictions.

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