The two-day conference brought together a range of scholars and activists to map some of the different ways the search for just and rapid post-carbon transitions is animating a broad range of interventions—by labor and climate justice activists, designers, architects, academics and artists—and is opening up intersectional spaces across movements fighting for racial and gender justice.

During her presentation at Day Two of the conference (starting at 4:21:15), Bozuwa explained a proposal to take the nation’s energy system into public ownership—from nationalizing the fossil fuel industry to returning energy utilities into community hands. The goal is a rapid transition from a paradigm of fossil fuel extraction to an energy future based on democratic, equitable, community control of the energy system.

Conference organizers and moderators included Damian White, Dean of Liberal Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design; Thea Riofrancos, professor of political science at Providence College, and Timmons Roberts, professor of sociology at Brown University and an associate with the university’s Climate and Development Lab.

Day 1

Day 2

Visit our site: The Next System

The post “Public Ownership and Building the Next Energy System” At The Climate Futures Conference appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve spent most of the past 2 years travelling with my partner Nati, trying to discover what is the most strategic & wise action to take in a world that seems to be accelerating towards collapse. After an enormous amount of consideration, I have a strategy that feels good enough to engage my will and commitment. This document is a statement of intention. All going well, it’s where I want to invest my productive energy for the next 7 years or so.

I’m developing this plan in three phases:

• Phase 1 is a lot of conversation and contemplation.
• Phase 2 is this writing and re-writing process. Writing in public forces me to fill in the gaps in the argument, and to make my assumptions explicit.
• Phase 3 is where you come in as a reader and collaborator. If you feel struck by this proposal, I’d love for you to improve my thinking with your feedback. The best possible response will be for other people to run related experiments in parallel.

The proposal is very simple. But this is, I hope, the simplicity on the far side of complexity. The design elements come from 7 years of thinking & doing in the Loomio Cooperative and Enspiral Network.

I intend to start a new community as a sibling or cousin of Enspiral: about 30 to 200 people supporting each other to do more meaningful work. Our method will focus on getting people into “crews”, small groups of 3-8 people that start with emotional intimacy and get to economic intimacy. There’s a sequence from psychological safety to shared ownership of productive assets. The larger community functions mostly as a dating pool for people to find their crew-mates. The crews support the personal development of their members while doing useful things like providing housing, establishing circular-economy startups, growing food, making revolutionary art, or whatever activity seems meaningful to their members.

That’s the short version: form small groups, share feelings, then share money. In the following few thousand words I spell out the long version. I think modular and open source strategy is much more valuable than charismatic leadership, so I’m documenting my strategy as thoroughly and accessibly as I can. Because it is open source, you can copy it, modify it, and help me to spot bugs.

This article is long, so let’s start with a map:

Part 1. I start by briefly setting context, giving a name to the metacrisis I believe is threatening society as we know it.

Part 2. Then there’s a chunky piece of theory to explain how I think about groups, and groups of groups.

Part 3. With that background established, I can spell out my “microsolidarity” proposal in more detail.

Part 4. Then we get to the counter-intuitive part. I’m intentionally contradicting a lot of received wisdom from progressive and radical politics, so I want to do that explicitly, in the hopes that we can learn from each other.

Okay, let’s go!

Part 1. Collapse

I won’t spend a lot of time on this point because it is a downer, but it deserves a mention: we are well into a major collapse of our biological life support systems. Oops!

Just one data point: the population of wild animals on Earth has halved in my lifetime (source). This is not new information, but we are mostly in denial. Extinction Rebellion, a new climate action movement from the UK, remind us that we’ve known this at least since 2006 when the United Nations (UN) warned us that “humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago”. Yet our response is still piecemeal, uncoordinated and counter-productive.

While the biological substrate for life is disintegrating, so is our social fabric. Democratic populations are electing dictators and buffoons. Fascism is resurgent. Our ability to make meaning is dissolving. Across the political spectrum, people respond to this existential dread by retreating into anxious certainties. Political conversations feel brittle and explosive, one wrong word can trigger an artillery of shaming tactics to shut down the heresy.

This is how I set the design criteria: assuming we are in a major collapse, what is an appropriate action to take? How do we repair our damaged biological and social ecosystems? How do we plan for a future with much less peace, much less food, much less stable governance? What kind of action plan is fit for purpose in the last decade of the Anthropocene?

See, I told you this section would be a downer. But I promise from this point on it’s all optimistic and constructive.

Design criteria for action amid collapse

First criteria: we need enormous courage to persist without a guarantee of a positive outcome. Because I’m plugged into a renewable source of courage, I am a very hopeful optimistic confident person. So where does courage come from?

Second criteria: we need resilient methods for making meaning in the midst of chaos. The shortcomings of the old institutional media and the new networked media are collaborating to produce a freak wave of collective insanity. The popular votes for Brexit, Trump, Boaty McBoatface and Bolsonaro all illustrate the magnificent failures of our sense-making apparatus.

Third criteria: people with life-supporting values need to grow our power to influence the distribution of resources. Just 100 individual CEO’s are responsible for 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (source). The oligarchs are killing us. We need to get our hands on power of that magnitude, but it needs to be much more widely distributed and much more accountable.

So my humble proposal needs to produce limitless courage, make meaning from chaos, and grow enough power to counterbalance the suicidal oligarchs currently in charge. No big deal

Finally, I believe that the core of this bio/socio/psycho/spiritual collapse is a metacrisis of relationship, it’s about how I relate to the different parts of myself, to other people, and to all the other creatures, life, spirit, etc on this planet. If that’s true, then my response must be relational first. This article is written in the first person singular: it’s all I, I, I. That’s a stylistic choice for creative freedom. However, that language obscures the reality that all of this action is conducted in the first person plural: there is always a “we” acting together, me and others.

So that brings us to my theory of groups, which you can read in Microsolidarity Part 2: a Theory of Groups and Groups of Groups. //

Microsolidarity Part 2: a Theory of Groups and Groups of Groups

Definition of terms

For me to explain my theory, I need to invent some language. Unfortunately in English, we are missing words for different kinds of group. When I say “group of people” I could mean 3 people, or 300, or 3 million. These missing words are symptomatic of missing ideas.

So I’m going to propose some new words, to access new ideas. I’m not attached to the specific terms, and this is not a comprehensive map of all the different kinds of group, it’s just a subset of terms that will be useful for this argument.

1: the Self

The first group has only one person, it’s Me (or You). In this article, when I say “Self” I’m thinking of a tight network of overlapping identities who share custody of this body we call Me. Viewing my Self this way invites me to treat all my parts as worthy of respect and compassion. We’re all lifetime members of the consciousness called Richard D. Bartlett, even the ones I try to disown and shut down.

For more on this, Emmi’s article on consent and autonomy is a good introduction to the idea of a “networked self” and it’s implication for your relationships.

2: the Dyad

A Dyad is a relationship of two. If you can forgive the tremendous oversimplification: let’s imaegine society is an enormous Lego structure, but the only building blocks we have are Dyads. And now let’s say a Dyad can only be in one of two states: Domination or Partnership. Domination is imbalance, coercion, abuse, colonialism, the most controlling parent of the most acquiescent child. Partnership is like the balanced and consenting intimacy of two interdependent adults. Could also be a best friend, sibling, therapist, mentor, imaginary friend, spirit guide, etc. Because we learn so much through mimicry, an intentional Partnership Dyad is the best method I know for growth, healing, and development of the Self.

If you want to follow this logic that domination relationships are the root of all injustice, and partnership relationships are the root of all freedom, here are some juicy links: check out ‘NO! Against Adult Supremacy’, an anthology of zines available online & in print; Transactional Analysis is a therapeutic method for understanding interpersonal behaviour as parent-, child- or adult-like; and Aphro-ism is a Black vegan feminist argument that all oppression can be understood through the human-subhuman divide.

I reckon if the old domination society is finally disintegrating, let’s grow the next one around partnerships. I’m talking adult-to-adult, not parent-child relationships, from home to school to work to community to government. Are! You! With! Me!

3: the Crew

A Crew is a group that is small enough to fit around a single dinner table, around 3-8 people. This is about the same size as a nuclear family, but without the parent-child power dynamics. This is a long-term set of relationships with singular purpose, like a co-op, shared house, or affinity group. The size is important, because it is small enough to stay highly coordinated with minimal explicit rules & roles, and large enough that your enhanced impact is worth the cost of collaborating. If you observe many interactions in a Crew, you get many opportunities to learn about different ways of being a Self and being in a Partnership.

4: the Congregation

There’s another crucial size somewhere between 30 and 200 people: small enough that most of the members can know each other’s name, big enough to support many Crews to coalesce. Coordinated impact at this scale requires some formal rules & roles, but mostly you can hold coherence just by putting a bit of extra effort into the relationships. In my experience the best way to find your Crew is to spend some time in a Congregation. Coordination gets a lot more complicated beyond this point.

If you use my language for a second, you can think of Enspiral as a Congregation of Crews. We fluctuate around 200 people, all supporting each other to do more meaningful work. We have a big annual gathering, a coworking space, a participatory budget, and many experiments in developing systems for mutual aid. Loomio is one of about 10 or 20 stable Crews in the network, each one focussed on a specific purpose, like fixing the diversity problem in the tech sector, or providing accounting services to social enterprises, or building an intergalactic communications network.

The Crews and Congregation are in reciprocal co-development. I can absolutely say Loomio wouldn’t exist without Enspiral, and Loomio’s success has made major contributions to the development of other Crews. So my proposal is to work at both of these scales simultaneously.

5: the Crowd

There’s probably a couple more useful distinctions beyond 200 people, but for the purpose of this map, all human groups bigger than Dunbar’s Number get lumped into this one category: the Crowd. This includes corporations, neighbourhoods, regions, nations, multitudes, swarms, and many different kinds of networks, conferences, festivals, etc. All of these groups share some important characteristics. Only a minority of people can expect to be recognised in a Crowd. To develop and maintain trust, peace, coordination & coherence over time requires a lot of infrastructure: formal articulation of rules and roles, enforcement of norms, and checks and balances to ensure the just application of that enforcement.

There’s an empty space between Self and Crowd

From where I’m standing, it looks like contemporary neoliberal urban westernised society is mostly designed for Selves and Crowds. There’s a little space for Dyads, and almost no room for Crews and Congregations.

Anywhere you look: government policy, media narratives, conferences, employee performance management, UX design, the healthcare system… in all these different fields you will usually hear people being treated as either individuals or anonymous mass populations. Check any story in today’s newspaper and you’ll see what I mean. Climate change will be fixed by “you recycling” or “government policy” or “a social movement”.

That’s what individualism looks like: the vast majority of our conversations are about individual people (you, me, a public figure, your boss or lover), or about very large groups (Americans, progressives, women, programmers), which are so populous that the individuals have lost their distinct identity. Individualism is a metaphysical virus that allows us to only see trees, never the forest. This virus leaves us poorly equipped to work in groups.

Over the past 7 years of working with people who are trying to make the world a safer, fairer, healthier place, I’ve concluded that membership in a good Crew is a critical success factor. People enmeshed in really great Crews are most resilient to the psychological cost of doing social change work, and therefore the most able to think and act strategically. It’s at this small scale that we decontaminate each other, recover from the individualist virus, and start to learn a new way of being together.

So this brings is the core of my experiment: can we create the conditions for many excellent Crews to coalesce?

Read all about it in Microsolidarity Part 3: The Reciprocity Game…

Microsolidarity Part 3: The Reciprocity Game

Crews: when they’re good they’re really very good

Around ~5-8 people is a sweet spot of high impact and low coordination cost. Our little Loomio co-op is one example: we’ve raised more than $1M in ethical financing and supported 1000s of groups to be more inclusive and more effective in their governance. This is a scale of impact that I cannot possibly have on my own.

A good Crew is not only super efficient. It can also be a potent site for personal development. In a Crew you can experience human difference as a resource, which is our best antidote to bigoted tribalism. It’s a place to practice multiple Partnerships simultaneously, a rich source of belonging, acceptance, recognition, and accountability, a place to start coming out of my traumatised patterns of behaviour. My Crew is where my values gain nuance and complexity. One example: I only learned the crucial distinction between fairness and sameness by practicing a tonne of collective decision making around money.

In my original design criteria I said I want to work in a way that produces courage and meaning. You begin to see how Crews play such an important role when you view courage and meaning as social phenomena.

Simply, I believe courage is developed when we encourage each other, with our enthusiastic listening, praising, challenging, cuddling, gazing, regarding, acknowledging and reminding. It’s a fucking discouraging world out there! I need almost constant deposits of encouragement to maintain a positive balance in the courage account.

Meaning, too. I make sense of a phenomenon by considering how my peers respond to it. If I know them very well, and I know myself well, I can interpolate the meaning of an event from the scattered data of my peers’ reactions. My stable membership in a few Crews gives me great confidence in my ability to make sense of this chaotic world.

Unfortunately, Crews are often dysfunctional

Because we’re infected with individualism, we lack the techniques, behaviours, language, beliefs, ideas, tools, and nuanced values required to thrive in multiplicity. As a result, many small groups suffer common ailments: mini dictatorship, hidden hierarchy, too much consensus, not enough consensus, toxic culture, unresolved conflict, repetitive trauma, equal power dogma… We can easily get stuck in the triangular domination patterns, or the circular design-by-committee patterns.

Nati and I have spent the past 2 years helping groups to recover from some of these dysfunctions. I’m writing a book of practical solutions for the common failure patterns of collaborative groups. Hopefully these ideas can help a little, but what’s needed most of all is practice.

I’m curious what happens when we start new groups, already inoculated against the most common strains of the individualism virus. So in 2019 I plan to start a bunch more Crews so I can learn how to start them well. Here’s the first draft of the experiment I intend to run. I’m already looking forward to coming back here in a year to discover which ideas were totally misguided. Yay, practice!

A Sequence to Crystallise new Crews

The first step is to start a Congregation localised to one geographic region (I’m starting in Western Europe). Nati and I will invite about 20 or 30 trusted people to a first gathering where we can co-design the minimum viable structure to govern our community.

As a starting point I suggest our purpose could be something like “people supporting each other to do more meaningful work”. That is, peers mobilising our diverse strengths to look after our peers, not institutional, paternalistic, or condescending support. “Meaningful work” is intentionally subjective, inviting a complicated amalgam of different purposes: planting trees, raising kids, writing software; if it is truly meaningful to you, it’s probably worth doing. And “more” is ambiguous in a good way: maybe you need more meaning in your work, or you’ve already found your meaningful work but you want to do more of it, or maybe you want to shift the whole global system of work to be more meaningful. All the options are good!

If the 20-30 people subsequently invite 1 or 2 more, we’ll have a first cohort of up to 90 people, which should be a big enough dating pool for complementary Crew-mates to find each other. Hopefully we can immediately launch a handful of new Crews and run many micro-experiments in parallel.

I suspect the first thing to do within a Crew is to establish psychological safety, a space where all the parts of your networked Self are welcome to show up. From there, the job is just to respond to the needs in the group.

Most of the people we plan to invite have already got a sense of what work is most meaningful to them, but almost all of us are financially precarious. So I’m interested in moving quite rapidly from emotional intimacy to economics. An easy place to start would be to disrupt the money taboo and expose our financial parts to each other: how much income do you earn? Where does it come from? What lifestyle would support you to be at your best? How much does that cost? If you need to earn more, are there some creative new tactics you can try? If you already earn enough, are there opportunities for you to get the same money with less compromise in your values, or more freedom in your time, or with more social impact? If you have a surplus, what needs to be true for you to want to share it with your crewmates?

Personally I’m interested in building economic solidarity, because I think we can do more good when we’re in a position to be generous. But maybe the rest of the Congregation will have different priorities. Mostly I’m interested in experiments that produce deep deep trust.

The Reciprocity Game

Building trust is not rocket science. It’s mostly about reciprocity i.e. building a track record of doing each other favours. Here are some versions of the reciprocity game I’ve tried. If you know some more, please share ‘em!

Level 1: Listening

Sit in a circle. One at a time, someone says something that is true for them right now, e.g. “I’m excited about x” or “I feel sad because Y”. All you have to do is pay attention, listen to each person in turn, then eventually you say something that is true for you. If everyone listens to everyone, congratulations, you all just earned 1 reciprocity point.

Level 2: Money

One person talks about (A) the work they do for money, and (B) the work that is most meaningful to them. Discuss together how they might bring A and B into closer alignment. Now, anyone can make a small gesture to help make this happen, e.g. share a new perspective, offer a design process or productivity improvement, make an introduction, encourage them to keep trying even though it is hard. If you offer something: hooray, 5 points for you. If you asked for something you need, hey! 5 points for you too! And BONUS! you both get an extra point for talking and listening with mutual respect and positive regard.

Level 3: Consistency

It’s pretty easy to do something nice one time and have a momentary surge of good feelings. If you really want to excel at the reciprocity game though, focus on consistency.

Either in a Partnership (2 people) or in a Crew (up to 8), practice meeting once a month (virtually or in person). Reflect on where you’ve been and envision where you might go next. (You can do this during or before the meeting.) Take turns to share your reflections.

Everyone gets 1 point for the first meeting, 3 for the second, and 5 points for every meeting after that. 5 points deducted for missing a meeting.

If you want a little more structure, here are some documented processes you can try:

• Feelz Circle (3 processes for sharing emotional care between friends/ comrades/ lovers)
• Care Pod (personal-and-professional development in small groups, a new practice in development at Enspiral, based on Intentional Change Theory)
• Stewardship (peer support system for Partnerships)
• The Elephants (long term personal development for Crews)

Level 4: Conflict

Now we’re getting into the harder levels. Conflict is a great way to strengthen ties. It goes like this: you do something thoughtless, or miscommunicate in a way that upsets somebody you care about. They get hurt. Then you apologise, take responsibility, and attempt to make amends. They listen and forgive. Woohoo! You transformed your conflict into greater connection: 10 reciprocity points each! Careful with this one though, because you lose 20 points each if you don’t find a mutually agreeable resolution.

Level 5: Co-owners

After you’ve played a few rounds of the earlier levels, you might be ready to play Co-owners. Start with an idea, maybe it’s a new tech platform or a community project or a commune. Maybe it’s a savings pool or lending circle or livelihood pod for sharing credit, income or savings with your trusted peers. Whatever the idea, find some people who want to work on it with you. Now, when you formally incorporate as a company or an association or co-op, whatever, share the legal ownership with a few people. Congratulations, 100 reciprocity points! Whatever happens, this relationship is going to form a part of your life story.

Okay that is all fun and cool and optimistic, but if you’re reading with a critical eye you’ll notice that there are some parts of this proposal that run against the grain of a lot of progressive and radical thinking about social change. In the next part of this article, I’ll name some of the ways this recipe is unorthodox. Then y’all can help me discover if I’m the good kind of heretic, or the very very bad kind.

On to Part 4. An Unorthodox Recipe For Social Change…

Microsolidarity Part 4. An Unorthodox Recipe For Social Change

There are many components of the microsolidarity proposal that are out of step with the prevailing currents of progressive and radical thought. I’ll name five of those attributes here. I intend to acknowledge the risk of travelling off piste, and start the process of building accountability. This is a very exposing piece of writing, so please assume positive intent and check in with me if something triggers you.

1. Exclusivity

One of the most striking counter-intuitive parts about the microsolidarity proposal is that, if you’re reading this and we don’t know each other personally, you’re not invited. I invite you to start your own Congregation, but you’re not invited to join mine. That’s a bit shocking, eh!

Most progressive social change actions start with inclusion as one of the top priorities. For this action though, we’re prioritising trust far ahead of inclusion. Actually there could be two barriers to inclusion: first to join the Congregation, then an even higher threshold to join a Crew.

I want to look around the circle at our first gathering and see 20 or 30 people with a specific set of traits. I’m thinking of people I can count on to contribute to the psychological safety of others, people with high emotional intelligence and good boundaries. We’re going into experimental and challenging territory, so folks need to be extra-tolerant, open to different ways of knowing, being and doing. My people know how to DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIWO (Do It With Others). We call each other to develop the highest parts of our Selves and to embrace our incomplete parts.

All of this exclusion is necessarily going to select for people with specific privileges, so it’s not a comprehensive plan to erase oppression and injustice in the world. Our collective has many responsibilities to the commons, beyond our own artificial borders. It’s critical that we use our increased resilience, resources, and opportunities to serve the needs of people outside of our tight circle. As a minimal gesture, I commit to continue doing the work of documentation, translating everything I learn into terms that make sense for people outside of my context.

But I’ve learned from long exhausting experience that there is no such thing as complete inclusion: the more permissive your entry criteria, the more you include people whose behaviour excludes others. So the question is not “should we exclude people?” but “which people should we exclude?”

2. Not for profit but with profit

Here’s another zinger: we’re going to deal with money, so that means we’re going to have to deal with people’s money traumas. I’m hoping Tom Nixon can join us at least in the early days, to help us renegotiate our relationships with money.

Most of us are clenched when it comes to money, because of the stories and experiences attached to it. This seems to be especially true of people who are committed to making positive social impact with their work (me, for instance). We see the harm done by wealth inequality and corruption, so we conflate the wealth with the inequality. Anticapitalists conflate the marketplace with capitalism. We treat money as if it were dirty: I handle cash with my left hand while my right hand pinches my nose shut against the dreadful smell. It’s as if money is a pernicious acid that is just waiting to dissolve my values. Taboos prevent us talking about it, asking for what we need, and offering to help when we can.

I’ve tried being broke, and I’ve tried having enough to be generous, and I know which one is better for the planet.

When I was 21, after reading Small Is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher’s powerful short book on meaningful work, I immediately wrote a blog post publicly declaring my rejection of bullshit jobs (if you follow that link, pls don’t read anything else on that blog because it’s super embarrassing ). I didn’t grow up with easy access to capital, so it took another 7 or 8 years before I started to earn a minimal wage on my own terms. (Note: this is not a “bootstraps” story though, as I certainly did enjoy the privilege of New Zealand’s social welfare system to pay my rent when I couldn’t.) Now I’ve co-founded two small worker-owned businesses which pay me to do my most meaningful work (Loomio & The Hum), and pay to taxes so the state can do things like running the social welfare system.

These companies are not built for profit, but with profit. Generating our own income means we have the freedom to chart our own course. I think it takes money to do something ambitious, and it takes freedom to do something radical. So I want to be in community with people who are growing their financial resilience and co-investing in each others’ commons-building companies. I know the marketplace can be distasteful, but the situation is urgent, we need to be super effective.

3. Do Better Than Good

A lot of political strategy aims to change people’s behaviour because it is the right thing to do. If you want to be a “good” person, you’ll recycle, give to charity, and stop saying sexist things.

I’m more interested in strategies that can outcompete the “bad” option. I’m a feminist not because it’s the “good” thing to do, but because my quality of life improves as my relationships come out of patriarchal patterns. I absolutely believe we’ll all be better off without patriarchy, it’s not a tradeoff between winners and losers.

So I propose to outcompete individualistic consumerism with microsolidarity. I mean, how hard can it be to do a better job of meeting people’s psychological and material needs than this shitty 21st century gig economy? How many people have I met in the past few years who lack meaning and stability in their work, or who lack a sense of belonging? That’s our opportunity! Belonging is not a binary, like “yes” you’re connected or “no” you’re isolated. Belonging is a fractal: I have distinct needs for connection at each scale, from my Self, to my Partnerships, up to my Crew, Congregation and beyond. So do like the Emotional Anarchists do, and find freedom in the interpersonal.

4. Decentralised governance with not a blockchain in sight.

‘Nuff said.

5. Design for smallness.

In a world obsessed with big and fast, I’m designing for small and slow.

If our Congregation gets much bigger than 100 people, it’ll be time to start thinking about how to split in two. I’m starting “an independent sibling” of Enspiral rather than growing Enspiral to include more people, because I think the size is a critical success factor. I expect to be in this project for years before we see great returns.

In the past few years I’ve learned another important reason why “small is beautiful”, beyond what Schumacher wrote: our intimate peer-to-peer relationships have an extraordinary capacity for ambiguity and complexity. A high trust group can be very coherent and effective even with very low levels of explicit agreement about our state, direction and norms. It’s impossible to maintain this level of trust and connection beyond one or two hundred people. As organisations grow in size, they are governed less by interpersonal relationships and more by formal written policies, procedures, and explicit agreements. The written word is intolerant of ambiguity, and can only ever capture a tiny subset of reality, so groups that are governed by text are much less able to cope with complexity.

If you want to be agile and adaptive in a complex and rapidly changing environment, you must move as much decision-making power as possible into groups that are small enough to be governed by spoken dialogue, not written policy.

(For more on this theme, see my article The Vibes Theory of Organisational Design. If you want to go deep into the difference between written and spoken records see also Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. For case studies demonstrating the relationship between performance and small-scale autonomy across many different industries, see Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux and Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal.)

Ok, there are a bunch of other reasons why the microsolidarity proposal could cause alarm, but I’m feeling sufficiently exposed now so I’m ready to see what I learn from pressing “publish”. One last thought before I do:

The Assembly of Congregations: A Decentralised Autonomous U.N.?

For now I’m going to stay focussed on starting this 2nd Congregation, but it’s fun to imagine what might happen at the next order of magnitude. Here’s a fun metaphor, which I gratefully borrow from my Enspiral-mate Ants Cabraal, after he shared it on Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast:

The United Nations (U.N.) is currently our best effort at global governance. There’s 190-something nation states chipping in to fund a staff of about 40,000 people trying to make the world safer and fairer. Imagine if we mobilised another 40,000 people to work on global challenges, but instead of the traditional centralised organisational structure of the U.N., with its hierarchies, department and managers, imagine if we were organised in small, decentralised, self-managing, commons-oriented, future-proof, complexity-capable networks. After all, 40,000 people is just 200 Congregations of 200…

Are! You! With! Me!

Postscript

It’s been a couple days since I finished this major writing effort. For a moment I felt ecstatic: one part of my Self enthusiastically congratulating the other parts of my Self for being so confident, articulate and clever. But before I got a chance to publish, some of my other parts started speaking up. My confidence disintegrated as I listened to the voices of my uncertain, disoriented and timid Selves. They’re quick to point out that this essay is far too X or it’s not nearly Y enough. I think I’ve reached the limit of how long I can hold a monologue before I reconnect with my crewmates, check in, and add their sensemaking to mine. So I’m looking forward to improving this proposal with the thoughtful consideration and spirited dissent of my peers. Time to leap and trust the net will appear.

I’ll keep documenting what I learn along the way. Follow the #microsolidarity hashtag if you want to stay up to date, and support my Patreon if you want to free up more of my time for writing like this.

The post Courage Before Hope: A Proposal to Weave Emotional and Economic Microsolidarity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Something amazing is happening in American politics. Wow it felt good, and weird, to type that sentence. Not sure if you noticed, but it’s been kind of a hellish shitshow recently.

Anyway… On Tuesday 13th November 2018, a group of young climate activists descended on the office of Nancy Pelosi, expected to lead the Democrats in the US Congress. They were demanding that she set up a special committee to create a proper climate action plan for the country – a Green New Deal.

They were joined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a new rising star in the Democrats – more on her later – who hasn’t even officially taken her seat yet, but who dropped in to show her support of this demand on her new boss.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and we’re going to dive in to the details. But first I just want to give a shout out to David Roberts, one of my favourite climate journos, who wrote this fantastic piece about this. I am going to be drawing on his article quite a bit for the first few sections of this post. You should totally read it too.

A Green New Deal – what now?

These young climate activists and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for something called a Green New Deal – a vast policy package with the aim to address climate change by decarbonising the US economy while addressing economic injustice, creating good jobs, investing in much-needed infrastructure and public services. Read this to see for yourself how eye-poppingly ambitious it is. We’re talking 100% renewable power and a slew of other goals.

The idea of a Green New Deal has been kicking around in environmental circles for years, and has long been championed by the US Green Party. But in just the last week, this is by far the most mainstream attention I have ever seen this idea get. It’s been discussed or at least mentioned on TV channels from Fox News to Russia Today, it’s been in many of the major national newspapers. As far as I know, this level of attention is unprecedented.

As the name suggests, the idea draws on the New Deal that President Roosevelt used to deal with the Great Depression. It’s basic Keynesian economics – essentially when the economy isn’t doing well, the government can fix it by spending a hell of a lot of money on useful stuff like infrastructure and research, which creates economic demand in the short term and higher productivity in the long term.

The ‘Green’ bit re-purposes this idea to be about retooling the economy to get off fossil fuels.

This most recent iteration of the concept is a little different because the US economy is not doing badly in terms of GDP – it’s actually growing. However most of that extra growth is only benefiting the rich, while ordinary Americans struggle. So the Green New Deal is more about economic justice than growth – good jobs paying living wages, public healthcare and education, affordable housing.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, part of a movement

You may well have heard of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez already, as she’s quickly become very popular in a short space of time. I have been reading up on her lately and I’m a huge fan.

She is the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress, at 29 years old she is now going to represent the 14th district of New York – covering the Bronx and part of Queens. She caused waves when she ran for the primary against Democrat old-timer Joe Crowley and won, after he had held the seat for ten terms.

https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1063917941383671808

She is very progressive – a self-described democratic socialist, clearly very passionate about social justice and environmental issues including climate change.

She is half Puerto Rican and she comes from a working class family. She ran an incredibly impressive grassroots campaign – didn’t take any money from corporate donors and had a passionate army of volunteers and small donations from ordinary people. Such a feat is almost unheard of. She won by focusing on the issues that her community cares about, running a positive campaign rather than making it about Trump. Central to her winning strategy was reaching out directly to the disengaged and disenfranchised who don’t normally vote, because politicians don’t normally speak to them.

She has a degree in Economics and International Relations and is incredibly intelligent and articulate and comes across as refreshingly genuine, with wheelbarrows of charm.

For you British readers – think Jeremy Corbyn, except a young Latina woman and more charismatic and even more progressive – and fresh, without the inevitable baggage of having been in politics for 35 years. But her democratic-socialist principles, her authenticity, being elected on the back of a grassroots movement – in those ways she’s very similar.

Even more exciting – she’s not alone, she’s part of a movement.

The new intake of Democrats from the recent mid terms is the most diverse ever, with more women than ever, historic numbers of people of colour, other minorities, as well as teachers and scientists running and winning. Many of these won on very progressive platforms and are bringing a much needed new energy into the stuffy and corrupt world of politics.

A organisation called Justice Democrats is recruiting, training and campaigning for Democrat candidates who back their platform of progressive policies.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC for a cool abbreviation) is one of seven new Congress members they helped to elect in 2018.

And the climate activists who were demanding a Green New Deal? They are from a group called Sunrise Movement, a group of young people campaigning for climate justice, green jobs and the transition to a zero carbon economy.

We need strategy, not ideas

What AOC, Sunrise Movement and Justice Dems are doing here is actually very strategic. They aren’t just having a protest to demand a Green New Deal. That would raise awareness and get the idea talked about, but essentially not much else. Democrats now control Congress but Republicans have the Senate and the White House. And most mainstreams Dems aren’t even that concerned about climate action anyway. Even if they were, they have zero hope of passing this incredibly radical policy package at the moment.

But the demand isn’t actually for a Green New Deal itself. Here’s where it gets a bit ‘policy wonk’ so stick with me. This is interesting I promise.

The actual demand is for Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi to set up a special committee. This would have a specific mandate to spend two years building out a proper detailed plan for how to implement a Green New Deal, and then in 2020 when the next election rolls around, this time the big Presidential one, they would then have the plan ready for their campaign, and ready to implement if and when they win. And now that Democrats have control of Congress, Pelosi has the power to set up committees – with no approval needed from the Senate or President.

There’s another interesting part to the demand, and that is that this committee would not allow its members to take donor money from the fossil fuel industry. A smart protection against conflicts of interest co-opting it.

So far, they have got ten Congress members to support the proposal, and counting. That’s pretty damn impressive work.

https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1063983199477473280

Nancy Pelosi herself has expressed some support for it, though hasn’t actually agreed. It’s extremely ballsy for AOC to make such a demand of her before even starting work, and siding with the external activists doing a sit-in was certainly a far cry from the usual wheeling and dealing behind closed doors that politicians usually engage in to get their ideas through.

But with this bold opening move AOC has made a name for herself and pushed ambitious climate action right onto the agenda. Pelosi may even need AOC’s support to be elected Speaker of the House, as she can’t afford to lose very many votes.

For a long time, I’ve been saying that the green left needs to stop fixating on great ideas for the end goal and focus more on strategy and tactics. That’s what’s actually happened here. The idea of a Green New Deal has been around for years, getting no where. Only now that it’s being used as part of a smart political strategy is it getting mainstream traction.

Do I think they will get their committee and make their amazing plan and then implement it in 2020 with the US becoming carbon neutral and amazing for working class people by 2030? Um… No. There are incredible obstacles in the way and getting any kind of decent climate or left wing policy through the US system is a colossal struggle – let alone something as radical as this.

But it’s good that this new movement is aiming high with their opening ask, because they will be sure to be haggled down whatever their opening is, even if it’s something that should have bipartisan appeal. By aiming big, they have moved the Overton window and shifted the conversation. A Green New Deal is now something that is within the frame of discussion, which is a significant change.

I’m very excited to see how this develops. If you’re as excited as I am, I suggest following the #GreenNewDeal hashtag on Twitter and following @Ocasio2018, @justicedems and @sunrisemvmt. And I’ll be writing about this more soon! And as always, subscribe to make sure you get the my next post.

Featured image credit: Corey Torpie, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons.

The post Green New Deal: A bold vision for America’s future appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Over several sunny days in June 2018, a diverse group of 60 activists and researchers from 30 countries convened for a multi-day meeting to discuss the collective building of post-capitalist futures. The meeting provided the opportunity for a rich exchange of perspectives and experiences, as well as deep discussion and debate. The goal of the meeting was not to achieve consensus both an impossible and unnecessary endeavour but rather to stimulate mutual learning, challenge one another and advance analyses.

One session of the meeting – Transformative Cities – was held not as a closed discussion but as a public event attended by 300 people at which prominent activists and academics engaged with municipal leaders and politicians on the role cities can play in building post-capitalist futures.

In line with the meeting, this report does not intend to advance one line of analysis, but rather summarise some of the key ideas and issues discussed and debated (not necessarily in the order they were articulated). To summarise necessarily means to leave things out. It would be impossible to fully capture the incredible richness of the discussion that took place, but hopefully this report provides a valuable sketch.

The Age of Monsters Our Capitalist Authoritarian Present

Capitalism in chronic crisis

Any discussion of the post-capitalist future must begin with an analysis of the current economic, social and ecological context and the ‘monsters’ we now face. Most of the world is experiencing the brutal realities of extreme forms of capitalism. Inequality has surged to new heights, with an estimated $32 trillion stowed away in tax havens by wealthy corporations. Multinationals are taking over government and societal functions, aided by a trade and investment regime whose goal is to secure corporate power over judicial and legislative arenas and to increase profit thwarting the best plans of governments with the threat of expensive lawsuits. The goal is to privatise everything. Trump both disrupts but also reinforces this model putting in place the most extreme deregulation agenda while also advancing a nationalist agenda that seeks to replace the ideology of ‘free trade’ with ‘bullying trade.’ In this and other things, he may not be unique, but simply part of a new norm.

This year (2018) marks the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis, but we must recognise that the ‘financial crisis’ is not time-bound: capitalism is in a constant state of crisis. Of the most interconnected companies in the world, nearly all are financial. They are at once large and extremely vulnerable: when one collapses (as Lehman Brothers did), they could all collapse. Given that another financial crash is inevitable sooner or later, it’s critical that we are ready to explain it and show that crisis is a permanent part of the logic of capitalism. The dominant economic model continues to externalise environmental impacts. Climate change is now irreversible. We are in a new stage of capitalism and a new geological time, the Anthropocene characterised by repeated environmental crises. Capitalism is now undermining the earth’s natural systems, creating a scenario of chronic crisis. Yet the drive for profit is leading to ever more expropriation and environmental degradation, with the financialisation of nature representing the peak in the processes of enclosure. The ecological dimensions of capitalism may raise the question as to whether we have reached the limits of capital expansion.

The issue of population and mass migration has also risen in the political agenda within Western countries. In the 1970s, population was discussed largely in terms of hunger and changes in agricultural production. Now population is framed by populist right politicians in terms of the threat of mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, or from Central America to North America. Instead of blaming the capitalist system, and in the context of prevalent austerity policies, many politicians in Europe are blaming refugees for people’s precarious living conditions. Authoritarianism is on the rise in places like Italy, Hungary and Turkey with proto-fascist forces surging everywhere.

The ‘fourth industrial revolution’

Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forums argues we are in the midst of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ with rapid technological developments transforming the economy and society. Whether it is third or fourth revolution, rapid technological change has certainly created a new theatre of struggle: technology’s potential and its dangers depend on how it is used and who has access. Five giant companies have emerged (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook) that are now the most powerful corporations in terms of market capitalisation. Their US $3 trillion is equal to all the co-operatives in the world.

Tech companies have inserted themselves between the state and people by controlling technological infrastructure, the roads of the twenty-first century. For example, Facebook sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to provide free internet in India under the condition that the company become the internet platform for the country. Tech giants can be seen as a cartel that has seized the means of production, in which people and their communications are the product. The falsely labelled ‘sharing economy’ consists of companies like Airbnb and Uber which have created a new form of subordination and seized control not just of people’s labour, but also their capital people’s homes and cars.

This corporate model requires unprecedented knowledge of people’s behaviour and communications and therefore has helped constructed a new system of surveillance capitalism. It has also turned the neoliberal idea that information-based price signals make for an efficient economy on its head. The accumulation of huge amounts of micro-data about people is changing the nature of how the capitalist system works. Airlines charge people a different price based on information accumulated about them. Non-human agents are now buyers and sellers in markets, and algorithms are replacing humans.

Technology is increasingly touted as a means to ending poverty. Missing from this narrative are the structural causes of poverty and inequality and any critique of the market. For the Gates Foundation and U.S. tech firms in Africa, lack of access to the markets is the problem and technology development is the solution. They ignore the potential loss of jobs to new waves of automation the replacement of workers by robots and machines in sectors like logistics and banking. Or the ways that automation can exclude people, for example with the drive for a ‘cashless’ society providing major benefits to financial firms but making daily living ever more difficult for people on the economic margins. They also obscure some of the environmental costs of technology. For example, the expansion of blockchain technologies such as bitcoins that rely heavily on servers powered by coal.

Similarly, some corporations continue to push for large-scale technological manipulation of the Earth’s systems as a solution to climate change. There is a risk of an attempt at the UNFCCC in 2020 to end the geo-engineering1 moratorium established in 2010 by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Inequality and war as the fundamental long-term reality in people’s lives

It is important to note that while certain trends have accelerated, the reality of dispossession and violence has long been a reality for much of the world. There is a danger of a western leftist nostalgia for a post-war European past that ignores that the social democracies of the West were made possible by imperial looting. The sale of neoliberal individualism as a solution was also only made possible by ongoing economic exploitation of labour in former colonies, post-Soviet countries and now in the West too. The story of Kenya in the last 40 years, for example, is not one of increased unemployment, but of a population that has never been employed millions of people who are excluded from the economy. Today’s neoliberalism has its roots in the liberalism of the Enlightenment, in which participation in the ‘sacred’ space was limited to white male slave- owners. In today’s context, that sacred space is reserved for the global elite – largely male and largely white. Any post-capitalist order dedicated to restorative justice will need to address and provide the reparations and restitution of this exploitative past and present.

Inequality is the fundamental reality for people’s lives across the globe. The Occupy movement succeeded in popularising the notion of the 99% and 1%. Even in the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world, 41 million people are living in poverty and another 140 million are just one pay check away from catastrophe. There is a significant population mostly people of colour who are permanently unemployed. For the 99% in America, as elsewhere, it is not possible to speak of a financial crisis that is ‘over’. As capitalist crises expand, War is emerging as the norm. In the United States, more than half of the discretionary budget goes to an increasingly automated military that makes use of robots and drones. As a consequence, fewer Americans are dying in combat, but there is no decrease in the number of people being killed by the U.S. military. Gaza serves as the new model for pacification and control. It is being used as a site to experiment with new military technology. The population has been deemed surplus: what happens to them doesn’t matter. Direct political resistance is met with violence. Anti-war mobilisation has tended to be separate from struggles for economic and environmental justice, but this is a false dichotomy. Social and ecological injustice is created by wars and fuels wars, with dispossession and exclusion facilitated by arms and security firms in the West and paramilitaries in the South.

Failures of the Left

As we think about post-capitalist alternatives, we have the imperative to analyse and learn from our own actions of social movements and political parties we have supported and allied with. Over the past century, there have been multiple examples of the left assuming political power Russia, China, South Africa, Latin America and failing to deliver or replicating systems of oppression. In Latin America, the ‘pink tide’ governments made important steps to reducing poverty but largely failed to structurally transform their economies and left office with social movements weaker rather than stronger. In Europe, the radical left is growing, but is divided and without clear answers on European integration or immigration. In Germany, for example, a huge internal debate is taking place inside Die Linke (the Left Party) over whether the party should focus more on the ‘German’ working class and less on the rights of refugees and LGBTs. Similar divisions were seen in the UK in the opposing positions on Brexit by the left. Meanwhile in Greece, the anti-austerity stance of the party Syriza was defeated by the Troika despite the overwhelming ‘No’ vote by its population in the referendum in 2015.

The Next System

Power and principles in a post-capitalist future

Around the world, people are creating models of a post-capitalist future and engaging in prefigurative experiments to hegemonic shifts. What principles, values and drivers need to be at the core of the ‘next system’? How do these diverse next system proposals redistribute and transform (or not) power among different types of actors: capital, the state, a ‘partner’ state, labour, citizens, communities, the market, the commons?

As part of its New Systems project, the U.S.-based Democracy Collaborative has developed a framework to look at this question based on an analysis of a wide variety of ‘new systems’ possibilities and proposals, mainly focused on the global North. (They draw on their own on-the- ground experimentation in Cleveland, where three locally-owned cooperatives, the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, have been incubated and supported by procurement from large, local ‘anchor’ institutions (hospitals and universities).

The framework identifies three theories of change that underpin the variety of new systems proposals. At the one end are social democracy and radical localism, which can be described as countervailing strategies of containment and regulation of the current system. In these proposals, power lies with capital and the corporatist state. Similarly, in proposals like Sweden Plus and Steady State Ecological Economics, power continues to lie with capital and the state, but substantial shifts are envisioned. This can be described as combining strategies of containment and regulation with some systemic elements.

At the other end of the spectrum is evolutionary reconstruction: new institutions can be built, scaled up and can ultimately displace the current system. This theory of change drives a variety of the new models emerging today, including worker-owned, localised economic democracy; commoning; and public and socialised economic democracy. For example, the UK city of Preston is now working to relocalise procurement based on the Cleveland model, which has been embraced as a positive model by the national Labour Party, inspiring it to set up a Community Wealth Building Unit to learn from and expand similar initiatives across the UK.

Cooperation Jackson in the US city Jackson, Mississippi focuses in particular on organising under- and unemployed members of Black and Latino communities and helping build worker-organised and worker-owned cooperatives. The group presents its vision of a new society in concrete, practical ways and works to share these with other municipalities.

However, it is important to note that not all solidarity economies are progressive in nature. There is already a strong tradition among the right in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe of organising solidarity economies of a distinctly fascist flavour. Hungary’s right-wing populist government is currently starting pension cooperatives to help ‘good Hungarians’. Solidarity economies certainly mutualise resources and values, but the question is for whom and at what scale.

Self-organisation and counterpower

A systemic crisis needs systemic alternatives. The goal of a new system must be broader than just replacing the capitalist system; it must also replace the anthropocentric system, the extractivist system, the racist system, and the patriarchal system. So what is a systemic alternative? The shift from dirty to clean energy, for example, is not in and of itself systemic. There must also be a shift in who controls and produces the energy. One measure of a systemic alternative is whether it empowers social movements and facilitates communities’ self-organisation. Another is whether it replaces extractive, exploitative means of production with regenerative ones that promote wellbeing globally.

The recent experiences and failures of the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America provide important lessons. Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government is one of the few to have survived the electoral backlash (and without the violence and chaos now afflicting Venezuela and Nicaragua), but even so, it is notable that indigenous communities and social movements were much stronger in Bolivia before Evo Morales and MAS were elected to power.

In Bolivia, as in other pink tide countries, the left reduced poverty but did not move to systemic alternatives. Economic power largely remains with the same elites as before. People from the movements thought they had taken control of the state, but instead were captured by it. Their goal became re-election, and with that came an increasing reliance on clientelism.

This trajectory can be seen in relation to energy. To its credit, the Bolivian government semi- nationalised the energy industry increasing the taxes paid by transnational corporations and giving the state-owned energy company a much larger role. But the goal became creation of the largest state-owned energy company. Small communities were prohibited from producing solar energy to sell to the grid, and thereby denied their own source of income. Giving real power to the community would have meant accepting less profit. The Bolivian case shows that state power has its own logic. In other words, if we assume engagement with the state is necessary, it must be radically transformed. When social movements put people in government, it is crucial to maintain and build autonomous counterpower outside the state.

The recent experience in Catalonia raises different but also important questions. There, the government went beyond the law to do what nationalist movements were asking of it. Although the movement was extremely powerful, capable of organising general strikes and powerful actions, it did not have the police or the army. It could not match the naked force of the Spanish state. Many of Catalonia’s elected officials including its vice president and several ministers are now in prison. These two different cases Catalonia and Bolivia remind us, á la Foucault, about power and the differences between force and coercion: the first eliminates the agent, while the second eliminates agency.

Democratisation of money

Democratisation of money must be a key element in the next system. ‘Economic man’ – the classic economic conceptualisation of people as rational, self-interested agents – is disembodied from biological time and ecological time. The body and the environment are both externalised in its formal accounting, although they bear the costs of unsustainable economic activity. It is also a debt-based system that invariably ends in crisis.

The reality of money production is that banks are not lending money, they are creating new money, which means there will always be a shortage between how much they put in and how much they want out. States, too have created money – as we have witnessed through the vast influx of capital provided by quantitative easing programmes in which trillions of dollars have been injected into the financial sector, chiefly supporting banks rather than investing in public services, essential infrastructure and a just energy transition. Overall, public money has been hijacked by commercial banking and speculative investors.

The question of the state’s role in post-capitalist monetary systems is key. There are many models and much discussion and debate about the best target the state or the commercial banking system for transforming monetary systems. One possibility is the democratisation of public budgets in which democratised, public control would replace the state system. Budgets would be built based on public need and would include a longer cycle of budgeting and public consultation. Democratisation would go further than ‘participatory monitoring/budgeting’: communities would both set the amount of the budget and decide how it is allocated. A monetary policy committee would decide how much the private sector can absorb and help determine tax (retrieval) rates.

Public ownership and transition

The demand for democratic control is also at the heart of a growing wave of local initiatives globally looking to de-privatise and regain public control of energy, water and other public services. TNI’s research in Reclaiming Public Services showed that there have been at least 835 (re)municipalisations of public services around the world since 2000.

This does not mean a return to the former models of bureaucratic state (national or local) control. Rather in many cases communities are seeking to develop new models that engage and involve workers and citizens. The shape of this varies though based on the political and economic context. In Croatia, demands for democratisation of public services have been a strategic way of preventing privatisation and asserting better democratic control over public companies. Activists are therefore calling for better monitoring of spending, more regular meetings with citizens and an independent supervisory committee. In Greece, the context of austerity though has meant local authorities have become eviscerated in their capacity to renovate public services. Citizens have therefore focused on developing community-based systems of solidarity to provide education and healthcare for all that often bypass state structures.

Energy has been a particularly important focus for developing post-capitalist alternatives, given the central role energy plays in the capitalist economy and the urgent need to transform our energy systems to prevent worsening climate change. Energy democracy provides a framework to democratise part of the economy and shift power with a big “P” – transforming society by means of shifting power in the power sector. Activists from Mauritius, South-Africa, Bolivia and the US shared how they have used demands for energy democracy and sovereignty to challenge private energy oligopolies and pollution affecting low-income communities, to demand a rapid just transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy and to explain the necessity for a democratisation of the economy.

Campaigners in a coalition called Power Shift in Mauritius managed to stop a coal plant by means of a hunger strike and by uniting middle class citizens, social movements and unions. They have advanced in its place energy proposals that would be based on solar generation in the countryside, helping to build connections between urban activists and rural sugar-growers. This is leading to new resistances in other arenas, for example against private grabbing of public beaches.

In South Africa, engaging unions has been key. Renewable energy was reframed as a threat to coal and steel workers, but movements have been active supporting union calls for a socially-owned renewable system. This notion of a just transition is critical to not only fight climate change, but also ensuring that workers and the most affected people are at the heart of the next energy system, in order for it to be just and democratic.

An aggregation of next systems?

To what extent will the next system be an aggregation of next systems? In the U.S., the context of decentralised government and an advanced stage of capitalism means that there are places ripe for new strategies and alternatives and others that are not. Local, small-scale initiatives can provide a means to get past the immense power of adversaries. In some contexts, the state can play a positive role alongside of local ‘next systems’, if they understand their role as facilitating and supporting such endeavours. While in other contexts the state – and national legal frameworks – are one of the key obstacles to transformative local practices.

Can we re-imagine the role of the state in a way that facilitates community self-organisation? In a non-hierarchic peer to peer (P2P) state, for example, the act of commoning could become the defining principle of the state. The nation (civil society) is a collection of commoners. P2P can create the conditions to optimise the specific what (resource), who (community) and how (rules) of commoning. Linux and Wikipedia are good examples: they provide the infrastructure, but they do not control the community. The potential is an economy that can be generative towards people and nature, by for example, enabling local manufacturing based on global design, which makes production not only more ecologically viable, but also better suited to community needs.

Emancipatory Futures

What must be done to embed emancipation at the core of the Next System? The experiences of the feminist movement and feminist organising, thinking and theory, offer important guidance here. The left has often asked the feminist movement to postpone its emancipatory agenda to wait until socialism or communism is in place. But new structures often simply replicate systems of domination. The MAS movement in Bolivia, for example, was very patriarchal before it came to power. It should come as no surprise that it replicated this in the government. Movements are also adversely influenced by the systems in which they function, even when they seek to change them. This can be seen, for example, in the external – often donor – pressure to professionalise organisations, which can create a separation between employed staff and the people and communities they work with. In order to transform society, social movements themselves must be transformed.

A promising example is emerging in the U.S. right now. The Poor People’s Campaign is resurrecting the intersectional movement built by Martin Luther King a half century ago, linking systemic racism, poverty, militarism and climate change. The campaign, which targets state governments, started with local community meetings involving a wide range of impoverished communities from indigenous people to war veterans. Significantly, the movement did not emerge from left, but from the faith-based movement. Led by two preachers, it uses the language of morality, rather than electoral politics.

The goal need not and perhaps cannot be to ‘unify’ movements around a single issue. The feminist movement speaks in terms of cross-movement organising, an approach that acknowledges that tensions can exist within and across movements. Transformative cross-movement organising focuses on the creation of emancipatory spaces and then joining other spaces in solidarity and humanity. An example is the ‘feminisms’ social movement in Spain, which features a diversity of women with different approaches, shared leadership and the exploration of new ideas. On March 8th 2018 feminists succeeded in organising a massive general strike focused not only on highlighting gender inequalities, but also the need to curb consumerism. ‘We strike to change everything’ as the slogan went.

Breaking the boundaries of imagination

A key step is to recognise and break through systems that limit the imagination. The feminist movement has shown that there are other ways of imagining human relationships. A new vocabulary can be used and different types of knowledge black feminist thought or migrant women’s experiences, for example can be valorised, prioritised and transmitted in creative ways, such as art and storytelling. In the Association for Women’s Rights in Development’s (AWID) methodology used to imagine feminist futures, imagination is the reality. A fantastical feminist village is created to articulate emotional, social and systemic alternatives. A similar transformative, emancipatory process plays out in real eco-villages, where the act of commoning forces people to reconfigure and critique relationships with themselves, nature, and ‘economic man’. It is often difficult, sometimes psychologically traumatic work, even for those with radical politics and particularly for those who have been socialised in capitalist systems.

Liberating our imagination enables us to challenge the limiting notion that capitalism and the nation-state are the only logical, possible systems. This is relevant to the question of the state’s role in emancipation. People’s experiences and ideas about the state diverge widely. Class, locality, race, gender, history all shape these perspectives. For some, the state is always present and must therefore be engaged, albeit carefully and with recognition that it is contradictory territory. Yet for others, this does not resonate. The Soviet state, for example, doesn’t even exist anymore. In Georgia, there is no functioning state to speak of. Survival is entirely dependent on the family, but people would prefer a progressive state to have a role. Taking the nation-state for granted or assuming that it is natural is to limit the imagination.

And what of the state’s role in emancipation? In his history of Black Reconstruction in America, African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois saw the state as a means, albeit limited, to open up space. He recognised that the state could not provide freedom, but that not being in chains was better than being in chains. Aside from post-1804 independent Haiti, in which former enslaved people took power, advanced a universalist vision, and inspired movements across the Southern hemisphere, there are precious few examples of the state being emancipatory. Insights from the women’s movement are useful in thinking about the state, power and emancipation. There is an important distinction to be made between power as domination (power over) and power to transform (power to). The former can be used to describe the state, with its power over resources and capital, which may provide distinctive levers of power. The latter expresses people’s own transformative capacity, the fact that the system depends on their contributions. In London, for example, social movements organised against proposed property development along the Thames in the mid-1980s. When the Labour Party gained control of the municipality, it used its power to stop the development and support movements to build an alternative. But the party didn’t create transformation; the social movements did. The distinction between power over and power to may provide a way to understand the ability of the state or political parties to facilitate (or not) transformation.

Radical movements of resistance and transformation

Agency, resistance and collective structures

Around the world, new forms of agency are emerging. Numerous intersectional political struggles are merging resistance with transformative processes. In Greece, for example, a grassroots, anti- racist solidarity movement emerged to both resist the Troika regime and to create new, collective, autonomous, solidarity structures to respond to people’s immediate needs. The movement goes well beyond a response to austerity in that it recognises crisis as a permanent new condition. People in the movement are reflecting on new institutions and new forms of politics. Self-organisation is a critical component of this as it connects the personal and the political. The movement is creating its own material structures of power and spaces where power is redefined. It is defending local spaces and promoting new practices of health, education and economy.

Some of these new structures, which pre-date the refugee crisis, were formed by the anti-racist movement to put migrant communities and Greek people on the same level to fight isolation, self-blame and embarrassment. The movement aims to create new and different social fabrics in communities, and involves diverse groups of people, including those without work, precarious workers, women, pensioners and migrants. It has revitalised living memories of Greek family networks, communal structures and solidarity structures that once existed. It is engaging and empowering people to create their collective solutions. The movement insists on a democratic approach, which means that the people in the community, not the activists, decide what issues they want to address.

Restoring political agency

Restoring agency is similarly critical to the movements in Croatia. After severe impoverishment and de-industrialisation in the 1990s, followed by the recent process of EU integration, people lost their sense of agency. EU elites treated Croatia as backward, in need of help and with neoliberal economics as its only salvation. But the left is now being re-born: a new generation of leftists have come of age who cannot be associated with the discredited former regime and are no longer constrained by the anti-communist discourse of Post-Socialist Europe. Diverse social movements ecological, cultural, student occupation, right to the city, refugee solidarity are engaged in joint efforts. A lot of work has been done to build the transactional capacity of civil society; the next step is building mobilisation capacity. In the Croatian context, people are very distrustful of politics. Despite scepticism about engaging in electoral politics, the movements recently organised a municipal platform to run the Zagreb local election, which succeeded in putting four people on Zagreb’s city council. The aim is not to become an electoral actor, but to use electoral politics alongside other strategies and to develop political involvement.

Occupying territory while demanding rights

In Brazil, the urban Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) involves 72,000 families in 32 occupations around the country. MTST emerged out of the agrarian landless movement (MST) and, like MST, considers itself a territorial movement. MTST is demanding that land serve its social function in accordance with the Brazilian Constitution, drawing attention to the fact that many human rights like decent living conditions, access to health care, and education are dependent on having a place to live. The movement is resisting real estate speculation in a context in which 1% of the population owns 30% of the land. In addition to occupation tactics, MTST engages in demonstrations and strikes, and targets the government. In the run-up to the World Cup in 2013, for example, MTST united with other movements and had some important successes, including a decrease in the price of public transportation.

But as with social movements in other ‘pink tide’ countries, the political context including the 2017 parliamentary coup against Roussef and the imprisonment of the former leftist Workers’ Party president Lula da Silva has been difficult and complex. (MTST in early 2018 protested Lula’s imprisonment by occupying his apartment, the purported reason for his imprisonment as it was falsely claimed he had won the apartment through a corrupt kickback).

The lesson from Brazil is that voting is not enough. As with the Bolivian experience, counterpower must be maintained. Since the coup, rights have been dismantled, impunity is rampant and a new anti-terror law deems social movements terrorists. MTST responded by thinking about new forms of participatory governance and uniting leftist movements in a platform called Vamos! (let’s go). The focus is on ideological education and political empowerment. Vamos! insists that everyone should participate in democracy, starting with meetings to set goals for the next president and the government on various issues, including gender, health, education, diversity. More than 500,000 people contributed to the online platform.

Power or counterpower, force or process?

The differences between these movements in Greece, Croatia and Brazil begs the question: what do we mean by counterpower? Of course, one possibility is to see it as a way to accumulate force to resist adversaries or remove them from power. But it is also important to consider the kind of power constructed in the process. Counterpower can be seen as a process in which pre- formative structures and ways of relating to each other are created. The struggle is not to take power but to build it. It may be preferable to speak about power rather than counterpower: building power goes beyond countering something, but about defining the political society we want a new hegemonic model.

At the same time, the full, complex story of these cases also begs the question: which power are we dealing with and at what level? In Greece, the ECB and the finance ministers of the eurozone simply refused to negotiate with Yanis Varoufakis, the democratically elected finance minister. In Croatia, the EU, with Germany in the driver’s seat, provides the social and economic blueprint to be followed. In Brazil, a democratically elected parliament supported by real estate speculators waged a coup against a democratically elected president. International financial power may be eclipsing that of the nation-state. And nation-state power may eclipse local power. For example, in Europe and the U.S., urban movements have welcomed refugees creating ‘sanctuary cities’ and the like but immigration rights are not a local-level competence. The challenge is that compartmentalised counterpower can be easily crushed. Even if they are not crushed, anti-systemic initiatives can end up inadvertently reinforcing rather than undermining capitalism. In Jackson, Mississippi, for example, its efforts to create community land trusts may have contributed towards trends of increasing land prices that force people to relocate.

For some, the answer lies in being aware and active at all levels local, national and international. For others, the emphasis is on preparing the ground, so institutions are in place when top-down power structures ultimately implode.

Preparing the ground: the transformative city

A key question is how can we scale up grassroots struggles to confront global forces like corporate and financial power? Cities will certainly be a core arena of struggle, as cities are not just local arenas but global too given they emerged as a result of globalisation, privatisation, and, most importantly, the rise of global finance. They both encapsulate global processes such as the ‘grabbing’ of cities by corporate and financial firms and the concomitant rise in expulsion, poverty and inequality. Yet throughout history, they have also been unique spaces where people without power can build cultures, economies and make their own histories. Cities have always endured and outlived more formal, closed systems. Today’s urban activism is therefore critical: people need to be organised and ready when the current ‘grab’ comes to an end.

Cities have a special role to play in ‘preparing the ground’ for transformation. Cities like New York and Oakland, California and Cadiz, Spain are forging ahead in tackling climate change. Local governments in some countries have been able to push back against neo-liberal plundering in their territories and develop alternative economies such as communal gardens. Municipal and ‘fearless city’ movements are growing worldwide and are using networked and horizontal structures to scale up their power, assert solidarity and exchange lessons. For urban activists, local transformation, when done right, has the potential to provide solutions to systemic, global problems. Local, grassroots activists can prefiguratively fight for their issues, meaning they can already do what they want the world to look like. This is the approach of Code Rood, a grassroots collective in the Netherlands that is using civil disobedience and other strategies to fight for climate justice while experimenting with resilient forms of sustainable living. The key is that local efforts are connected around the world; that practices of social innovation can be shared and replicated.

As discussed above, the question of institutional political power and its risks is relevant to these municipal movements. As with state power, so too with city power: for example, the new city government in Amsterdam led for the first time by the Green Left party intends to join other ‘fearless’ cities movement, fight for a just energy transition, tackle polarisation and re-define the relationship between government and citizens. But its ability to deliver on its good intentions depends on its ability to overcome entrenched power, its courage to oppose false market- led solutions, and its openness to constant dialogue with social movements and civil society organisations. Strong activism is vital for giving politicians both the leverage and motivation (i.e. sustained political pressure) to realise transformative change.

What can’t be left out of the discussions around cities, however – nor states for that matter – are the politics of natural resource exploitation on which they depend. Even progressive cities are often thriving from processes of extraction and dispossession in rural areas – whether it is food systems dependent on land dispossession, poorly paid migrant labour, soil erosion and toxic pesticides or dams providing energy and water to cities yet built on appropriated indigenous lands. Similarly states can develop progressive policies on the back of exploitation. This has clearly been the case in Latin America. Venezuela, for example is currently opening up 10% of the country to transnational mining in the name of funding social services.

Constructing a post-capitalist hegemony

Public policy to facilitate transformation

Tame it, smash it, escape it or erode it? Diverse thinkers from Marx to today’s John Holloway, Hilary Wainwright and Erik Olin Wright theorise a range of necessary, possible or impossible routes to ending capitalism. How can we build a post-capitalist hegemony in support of radical transformation and at what level? Concrete experiences inform a diversity of perspectives on the question. Reciprocally, the severity of the situation for many people their immediate struggle to survive reminds us that ideas must translate into concrete action.

In Uruguay, for example, the leftist government has sought to democratise institutions and to develop initiatives focused on the country’s large population of poor people. Industrial tripartite councils were created that gave workers a seat at the table with multinationals and bureaucrats. Workers were involved in defining the plans for key sectors and actively involved in how the government negotiated foreign direct investment. Alongside this, a national development fund was created to support development of worker-owned cooperatives, while the Plan Juntos (the Together Plan) aimed to address extreme poverty and vulnerability. Families in irregular settlements (on unsecure land) were supported to build their own houses, with support from technical staff who were required to live in proximity to the communities. But the houses were not the goal: the purpose of people’s participation was to support a process of transformation, and not to legitimate the policy. The goal was to move from a focus on symptoms to causes and to shift from individual experiences to structural and collective responses.

Or the need for autonomy?

Experiences in Bolivia, where communities have developed hundreds of autonomous community- managed water systems, provide a different perspective. Bolivian communities have long self- organised to address their needs and problems, including not only water but also security and garbage. They did not wait for the state to provide such services. Contrast this to the appealing narrative by President Evo Morales, which held that everything was bad before he came to power and that his ‘government of the people’ would solve the country’s problems. The consequence has been the demobilisation and fragmentation of what was a very strong movement. Behind the narrative lurked a new form of domination. From this vantage point, it seems that the focus should be on solutions that come from the people, with emancipation being not a goal, but a way of life. In Bolivia, people are not thinking in terms of ‘post-capitalism’ but in terms of autonomy and self-determination. They are not asking the state to solve problems, rather for it to respect the organising that is already happening.

Seizing the means of narrative production

As the Bolivia example shows, narrative power is critical. Corporations and elites are currently exerting enormous control over the news. Algorithms and social media are spreading misinformation, narrowing people’s perspectives and polarising society. Behind the myth of ‘free’ news is the exercise of power. But a media that serves the public can play a crucial role in bringing about post-capitalist transformation. Similarly, other cultural actors opinion-makers, the creative sector, designers and makers can be valuable and strategic allies as fellow commoners. They can help forge and strengthen cultural norms, ethics and values that support post-capitalist efforts.

A media that serves the public would be transparent about sources of funding and information. It would be participatory and engage in dialogue with citizens. And it would tell inspiring stories, connect to ideas, and motivate people into action. It would facilitate a process of transformation by challenging people’s biases and assumptions, bringing them different perspectives, and showing that another world is not only possible but already here.

NOTES

1. Geoengineering refers to a set of proposed techniques that would intervene in and alter earth systems on a large scale recently, these proposals have been gaining traction as a “technofix” solution to climate change. http://www.etcgroup.org/content/un-convention-still-says-no- manipulating-climate

The analysis in this report is written by Paige Shipman and Nick Buxton, but is the collective work of Achin Vanaik, Agnes Gagyi, Ana Mendez de Andes, Ashok Subron, Brid Brennan, Ben Hayes, Brett Scott, Brian Ashley, Christophe Aguiton, Christos Giovanopoulos, Daniel Chavez, Danjela Dolenec, Dany Marie, David Fig, David Sogge, Edgardo Lander, Erick Gonzalo Palomares, Fiona Dove, Firoze Manji, Gisela Dutting, Hakima Abbas, Hilary Wainwright, Inna Michaeli, Irene Escorihuela, Joachim Jachnow, Joel Rocamora, Kali Akuno, Laura Flanders, Lavinia Steinfort, Lyda Forero, Mabel Thwaites Rey, Marcela Olivera, Mary Mellor, Mary Fitzgerald, Myriam van der Stichele, Nuria del Viso, Pablo Solón, Phyllis Bennis, Renata Boulos, Sacajawea Hall, Saskia Sassen, Satoko Kishimoto, Sebastián Torres, Selcuk Balamir, Sol Trumbo Vila, Stacco Troncoso, Susan George, Tamás Gerocs, Thomas Hanna, Tom Henfrey, Vedran Horvat, Yuliya Yurchenko, Sopiko Japaridze. It does not mean that everyone agrees with everything written here, but it is an agreed summary of the discussions.

The post Building post-capitalist futures at the Transnational Institute Fellows’ Meeting 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Excerpt:

“I’ve always had an ideological critique about Facebook; the privatization of profit, and the socialization of all the effort, the value exchange there is really off, and I think that there’s major abuses of power. I think there’s lots of things that I don’t like about the Facebook business model. But, sort of around that Occupy time, I made a commitment like – look, it’s really popular to hate Facebook, and with people with my sort of values, we’re all proud of saying how Facebook sucks, and we’re so much cooler than that. But, I made a commitment to be, like, look, almost everyone that I know, all of my friends are here, and – if you’re at a party and all your friends are there, and you’re having a bad party, that’s kind of your own fault. If everyone’s there, then surely we can do something fun, and creative, and constructive with it. So, I really put a lot of effort into it, for a few years, trying to create a positive experience on Facebook. And it’s quite strange but I would actually have quite a few people mention to me, in person, they’d say, “Rich, I really appreciate what you’re doing on Facebook.” They’d give me this strange compliment, that I’m hosting kinds of conversations and bringing insight and drawing in sources of news that no one else is paying attention to, and so on – and quite intentionally doing it.

And then, it was January (of this year). We were really starting to pay attention to the abuses of Facebook, where it’s not just about ad selling, it’s now about vote selling…where the algorithms have really made a significant impact on the way that our democracies are functioning. And that, to me, was just a bridge too far. I felt like, instead of what I was trying to create – a bubble of positivity within this kind of shopping mall – I just crossed the line. I said, look, I feel like I’m actually propping up a really toxic and abusive place. So, I pulled out. I’ll come in and comment from time to time, but I’ve just stopped posting altogether. Which was a major shift for me, I was putting a lot of energy in there for a long time…but more and more, my energy is going into Scuttlebutt, because it’s constructive.”

Rich’s personal site: richdecibels.com/
The Hum: www.thehum.org/
Thread on Reinventing Organisations: www.facebook.com/stephenreid321/posts/2175422099199363

My personal site: stephenreid.net
Follow me on Facebook: facebook.com/stephenreid321

Photo by RAVEfinity

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Aaron Fernando: Education can take many forms, including the form of play itself. The TESA Collective is a co-op that creates games for various social justice organizations. It has worked directly with number groups, including unions and nonprofits, and its games now facilitate workshops and trainings that result in real-world social change — in addition to being used during casual get-togethers.

By using board games, groups are able to work through strategies and practice collaboration and organization in a low-risk environment. While this happens, the campaigns and projects that these groups are working on in their daily lives are kept in mind and used as context. Playing these games then becomes self-directed training around how to organize — training which plays out when people actually organize around issues like water management or workers’ rights.

For instance, TESA recently worked with The Nature Conservancy, one of the largest conservation nonprofits, to create a game specifically focused on dialogue and mobilization around water resource management. The resulting game, called “Water for Tomorrow” was built out by TESA hand-in-hand with The Nature Conservancy for its New York water management campaign with the same name as the game.

Organizations can choose to work with TESA and build games related to their causes and missions with varying levels of involvement. The Nature Conservancy took a highly involved approach over eight months and designed a game that would be fun to play, yet serious and complex enough to serve as a real educational material around water management.

“We use it as an engagement tool,” says George Schuler, director of conservation science and practice at The Nature Conservancy about “Water for Tomorrow.” “Instead of going into a community and showing them PowerPoints, we use the game as a way to get people talking about what are the challenges they face in their communities or in their own lives. … It’s almost a community engagement tool — instead of having a public hearing or a town hall meeting, we have game night.”

Photo courtesy of TESA Collective

Schuler and his team have noted that gameplay generates far more engagement and conversation than simply giving a presentation or lecture. “The game is targeted at what we call casual experts all the people that have a stake in water decisions or are affected by water decisions of others,” says Schuler. Each player acts as a stakeholder — farmers, local politicians, business owners, and so on — and often take on a different role than the one they play in reality. This approach helps people bring in their own experiences and collaboratively discuss water management in a much more open and relaxed setting than if they were listening to a lecture.

Although “Water for Tomorrow” is currently only used by The Nature Conservancy, one of TESA’s other games titled “Rise Up: The Game of People & Power” was created with sponsorship from a labor union Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and is publically available.

SEIU,which has approximately 2 million members in the U.S. and Canada, distributes “Rise Up” to its board and local chapters, but also uses the game during its Social Justice Leadership Academy. During this annual meeting of union member leaders, playing this game is one of the activities that gets members to think about strategizing and organizing in a hostile political environment.

Photo courtesy of TESA Collective

In Rise Up’s gameplay, people must cooperate to challenge “The System” in ten areas — internet, environment, government, and campuses. The game is difficult to win because the odds are stacked in favor of The System. “Our members work very hard every day and see that the economy is stacked against them,” says Ragini Kapadia, former Education Coordinator at SEIU who used the game during the trainings. “And through their lived lives, have experienced a rigged system.” Yet that’s the point of the game: for people to learn how to organize and bring about meaningful social change in reality. “We used a lot of real-life scenarios,” says Jeremy Wilson of SEIU about using Rise Up in the Social Justice Leadership Academy. “The game takes place in the context of the specific campaign you’re talking about — so maybe it’s the Fight for $15 (minimum wage) in a specific place. It’s a more accessible, fun way to do some of the hard thinking and hard teamwork before you actually get in the field and have to do it.”

TESA may be best known for its first game “Co-opoly,” which was launched in 2011. In “Co-opoly,” players play characters with different incomes and family sizes and like most games created by TESA, the game is cooperative so all players either win or lose together, depending on the success of their co-op.

In fact, when founding member Brian Van Slyke and a friend started TESA during the recession in 2008, the “intention wasn’t initially to get into games for social change,” says Van Slyke, adding that building games was just one part of the educational programming and development that they had been doing for various nonprofits. “But because of the initial success of ‘Co-opoly,’ that just naturally and organically took us down that road.”

In a piece on Truthout Van Slyke delves into the history of using games for educational and political purposes. Among many, these include a board game titled “Suffragetto” which was created by a women’s suffrage organization over a century ago and a critically-acclaimed computer game called “Papers Please” in which one plays an immigration officer in a corrupt dystopia.

“Rise Up” is TESA’s most recent game, but after the 2016 election, the TESA team observed that perhaps the game was a little too real, with so many social battles being fought against “The System” in reality. “People were playing the game, and they just looked tired,” says Van Slyke. “People just seemed like the world was crushing them.” So TESA decided take a somewhat lighthearted approach to their next game for battle-weary social justice organizers. Its title? “Space Cats Fight Fascism.”

Header image of members playing Rise Up during their trainings courtesy of SEIU

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The work of artist and activist, Cassie Thornton is included in the upcoming Playbour– Work, Pleasure, Survival exhibition at Furtherfield, curated by Dani Admiss. In this interview I wanted to explore the following questions as revealed in her current Hologram project:

• What do current conditions say about trust and care, and can we trust the current, governing systems to have our best interests at heart?
• How do we produce non-hierarchical trust and care that thrives outside of the doctor/patient relationship, which is especially important in the U.S., where it is a profit making industry?
• How do we reverse engineer all this tragedy, and put power back where it needs to be?
• How do we begin to build solidarity?

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the U.S., currently living in Canada. Thornton is currently the co-director of the Reimagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social center at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

Thornton describes herself as feminist economist. Drawing on social science research methods develops alternative social technologies and infrastructures that might produce health and life in a future society without reproducing oppression — like those of our current money, police, or prison systems.

Interview

Marc Garrett: Since before the 2008 financial collapse, you have focused on researching and revealing the complex nature of debt through socially engaged art. Your recent work examines health in the age of financialization and works to reveal the connection between the body and capitalism. It turns towards institutions once again to ask how they produce or take away from the health of the artists and workers they “support”. This important turn towards health in your work has birthed a series of experiments that actively counter the effects of indebtedness through somatic work, including the Hologram project.

The social consequences of indebtedness, include the formatting of one’s relationship to society as a series of strategies to (competitively) survive economically, alone, to pay the obligations that you has been forced into. It takes so much work to survive and pay that we don’t have time to see that no one is thriving. Those whom most feel the harsh realities of the continual onslaught of extreme capitalism, tend to feel guilty, and/or like a failure. One of your current art ventures  is the Hologram, a feminist social health-care project, in which you ask individuals to join and provide accountability, attention, and solidarity as a source of long term care.

Could you elaborate on the context of the project is, as well as the practices, and techniques, you’ve developed?

CT: Many studies show that the experience of debt contributes to higher levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Debt disables us from getting the care we need and leads us away from recognizing ourselves as part of a cooperative species: it is clear that debt makes us sick. In my work for the past decade, I have been developing practices that attempt to collectively discover what debt is and how it affects the imagination of all of us: the wealthy, the poor, the indebted, financial workers, babies, and anyone in-between. Under the banner of “art” I have developed rogue anthropological techniques like debt visualization or auxiliary credit reportingto see how others ‘see’ debt as an object or a space, and how they have been forced to feel like failures in an economy that makes it hard for anyone (especially racialized, indigenous, disabled, gender non-binary, or ‘immigrant’) to secure the basic needs (housing, healthcare, food and education) they need to survive, because it is made to enrich the already wealthy and privileged.

“The rise of mental health problems such as depression cannot be understood in narrowly medical terms, but needs to be understood in its political economic context. An economy driven by debt (and prone to problem debt at the level of households) will have a predisposition towards rising rates of depression.”⁴

After years of watching the pain and denial around debt grow for individuals and entire societies, I was so excited to fall into a ‘social practice project’ that has the capacity to discuss and heal some of this capital-induced sickness through mending broken trust and finding lost solidarity. This project is called the hologram.

MG: What kind of people were involved?

CT: The entire time I lived in the Bay Area I was precarious and indebted. I only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I participated in. As the city gentrified beyond the imagination, I was forced to leave. I didn’t want to let those networks die. So, at first, the people who were involved were like me– people really trying to have a stake in a place that didn’t know how to value people over real estate and capital

The hologram project developed when, as I was leaving the city, I had invited a group of precariously employed, transient activists and artists to get together in the Bay Area for a week of working together. We aimed to figure out ways to share responsibility for our mutual economic and social needs. This project was called the “Intentional Community in Exile (ICE)” [the ICE pun was always there, now an ever more intense reference in the public eye] and it grew out of an opportunity offered by Heavy Breathing to choreograph an event at The Berkeley Art Museum. They allowed me to go above and beyond my budget to invite a group of 8 women together from across the US to choreograph methods of mutual aid: sharing resources, discussing common problems and developing methods for cooperating to co-develop an economic and social infrastructure that would allow us to thrive together, interdependently. What would it mean for our work as activists and artists to feel that we had roots within an intentional community, even if we didn’t have the experience of property that makes most people feel at home?

Facebook event: “In departing from the idea of a long term home, family, property, or ownership, ICE models a mutual aid society to sustain creative and political practices within a hostile economic system. This project is about finding ways to exit economic precarity by building human relationships instead of accumulating capital– or to make exile warm. After a one week convergence of a small group of collaborators, ICE presents a discussion and performance of life practices as well as frameworks for material and immaterial mutual support.”

The Hologram was one of many ideas that developed as part of this project. One of the group members, Tara Spalty, founder of Slowpoke Acupuncture, (and one of the two acupuncturists you will see at SF protests or homeless encampments) and I fell into this idea when combining our knowledge about the solidarity clinics in Greece, our growing indebtedness and lack of medical records, and the community acupuncture movement. Then the group brainstormed about what the process would be like to produce a viral network of peer support.

MG: What inspired you to do this project? (particularly interested in the Greek influences here and what this means to you)

CT: My practice of looking at debt became boring to me by 2015 as it became more and more clear that individual financial debt was a signal of a larger problem that was not being addressed. The hyper individualism produced by indebtedness allows us to look away from a much bigger deeper story of our collective debts, financial and otherwise. We don’t know what to do with these much bigger debts, which include sovereign debts, municipal debts, debts to our ancestors and grandchildren, debts to the planet, debts to those wronged by colonialism and racism and more. We find it so much easier to ignore them.

When visiting austerity-wracked Greece after living in Oakland, I noticed that Oakland appeared to have far more homeless people on the street. It made me realize that, while we label some places “in crisis,” the same crisis exists elsewhere, ultimately created and manipulated by the same financial oligarchs. The hedge funds that profit off of the bankruptcy in Puerto Rico are flipping houses in Oakland and profiting off of the debt of Greece. We’re all a part of the same global economic systems. The “crisis” in Greece is also the crisis Oakland and the crisis in London. For this reason, I have been interested in what we can all learn from activists, organizers and others in crisis zones, who see the conditions without illusions.

This led me to an interest in the the Greek Solidarity Clinic movement, which since “the crisis” there has mobilized nurses, doctors, dentists, other health professionals and the public at large to offer autonomous access to basic health care. I went to go visit some of these clinics with Tori Abernathy, radical health researcher. Another project using this social technology is called the Accountability Model, by the anonymous collective Power Makes Us Sick. These solidarity clinics are run by participant assembly and are very much tied in to radical struggles against austerity. But they have also been a platform for rethinking what health and care might mean, and how they fit together. The most inspiring example for me was in at a solidarity clinic in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece. The “Group for a Different Medicine” emerged with the idea that they didn’t want to just give away free medicine, but to rethink the way that medicine happens beyond conventional models, including specifically things like gender dynamics, unfair treatment based on race and nationality and patient-doctor hierarchies. This group opened a workers’ clinic inside of an occupied factory called vio.me as place offer an experimental “healed” version of free medicine.

When new patients came to the clinic for their initial visit they would meet for 90 minutes with a team: a medical doctor, a psychotherapist and a social worker. They’d ask questions like: Who is your mother? What do you eat? Where do you work? Can you afford your rent? Where are the financial hardships in your family?

The team would get a very broad and complex picture of this person, and building on the initial interview they’d work with that person to make a one-year plan for how they could be supported to access and take care of the things they need to be healthy. I imagine a conversation: “Your job is making you really anxious. What can we do to help you with that? You need surgery. We’ll sneak you in. You are lonely. Would you like to be in a social movement?” It was about making a plan that was truly holistic and based around the relationship between health, community and struggles to transform society and the economy from the bottom-up . And when I heard about it, I was like: obviously!

So the Hologram project is an attempt by me and my collaborators in the US and abroad to take inspiration from this model and create a kind of viral network of non-experts who organize into these trio/triage teams to help care for one another in a complex way. The name comes from a conversation I had with Frosso, one of the members of the Group for a Different Medicine, who explained that they wanted to move away from seeing a person as just a “patient”, a body or a number and instead see them as a complex, three dimensional social being, to create a kind of hologram of them.

MG: Could you explain how the viral holographic care system works?

CT: Based on the shape above, we can see that we have three people attending to one person, and each person represents a different quality of concern. In this new model, these three people are not experts or authorities, but people willing to lend attention and to do co-research, to be a scribe, or a living record for the person in the center, the Hologram. We call these three attendees ‘patience’. Our aim is to translate the Workers’ Clinic project to a peer to peer project where the Hologram receives attention, curiosity and long term commitment from the patience looking after her, who are not professionals. Another project using this social technology is called the Accountability Model, by the anonymous collective Power Makes Us Sick.

So the beginning of the process, like that of the Workers’ Clinic, is to perform an initial intake where the three patience ask the Hologram questions which are provided in an online form, about the basic things that help or hurt her social, physical and emotional/mental health. When this (rather extended) process is complete, the Hologram will meet as a group every season to do a general check in. The goal of this process is to build a social and a physical holistic health record, as well as to continue to grow the patience understanding of the Hologram’s integrated patterns.

Ultimately, over time we hope to build trust and a sense of interdependence, so that if the Hologram meets a situation where she has to make a big health decision (health always in an expansive sense) about a medical procedure, a job, a move, she will have three people who can support her to see her lived patterns, to help her ask the right questions, and to support peer research so that the Hologram is not making big decisions unsupported.

But, in order for the Hologram to receive this care without charge and guilt free, she needs to know that her patience are taken care of as she is. I think this is one part of the project that acknowledges and makes a practice built from the work of feminists and social reproductive theorists – you can’t build something new using the labor of people without acknowledging the work of keeping those people alive; reproducing the energy and care we need to overturn capitalism needs a lot of support. Getting support from someone feels so different if you know they are being, well taken care of. This is also how we begin to unbuild the hierarchical and authoritarian structures we have become accustomed to – with empty hands and empty pockets.

And then, the last important structural aspect of the Hologram project is the real kicker, and touches on the mystery of what it means to be human outside of Clientelist Capitalism – that the real ‘healing’ (if we even want to say it!) comes when the person who is at the center of care, turns outward to care for someone else. This, the secret sauce, the goal and the desired byproduct of every holographic meeting– to allow people to feel that they are not broken, and that their healing is bound up in the health and liberation of others.

The viral structure, is built into this system and there is a reversal of the standard way of seeing the doctor and patient relationship. In this structure it is essential that we see the work of the Hologram as the work of a teacher or explicator, delivering a case that will ultimately allow the patience to learn things they didn’t previously know. This is the most important, (though totally devalued by money) potent and immediately applicable, form of learning we can do, and it is what the medical system has made into a commodity, at the same time as it is seen as ‘women’s work’ or completely useless.

MG: Could you take us through the processes of engagement. For instance, you say a group of four people meet and select one person who will become a Hologram, and that this means they and their health will become ‘dimensional’ to the group. Could you elaborate how this happens and why it’s important for those involved?

CT: We are about to experiment, this fall, with what it means for these groups to form in different ways. We will start with four test cases, where an invited, self-selected person will become a Hologram. She will be supported to select three Patience in a way that suits her, based on an interview and survey. The selection of Patience is a part of the process that we have not had a chance to refine. It is not simple for any individual to understand what support looks like for them, or who they want support from, if they’ve never really had it.

The experiments we will work through this fall will attempt to understand what changes in the experience of the whole Hologram when the Hologram is supported by Patience who are trusted friends and family, acquaintances or highly recommended strangers. An ‘objective’ perspective from an outside participant also adds a layer of formality to the project, because, instead of a casual gathering of friends, an unfamiliar person signals to the other members of the hologram to be on time, and make the meetings more structured than a regular friend to friend chat.

The onboarding process for the Hologram and the Patience includes a set of conversations and a training ritual, which are still quite bumpy. The two roles every participant is involved in, requires a different set of skills, and so they both involve a special kind of “training” that one can do in a group or independently. This “training” is a structured personal ritual that allows participants to witness and adapt their own communication habits so that they feel prepared to participate and set up trust, curiosity and solidarity for the group in the opening intake conversations.

At the completion of the intake process, the Hologram (1) transitions to become a Patience. At this time, the Hologram (1) begins a short training to transition to the other role, and she is supported by her Patience to do this work. At the conclusion of the Hologram’s (1) transition to Patience, and the completion of the new Hologram’s (2) intake process, the original Hologram’s (1) Patience become Holograms (3,4,5).

MG: The Hologram project was first trialed as part of an exhibition called Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time at the Elizabeth Foundation Project Space in New York City, March 31-May 13, 2017. What have you learnt in more recent undertakings of The Hologram project?

CT: Since the original trial one year ago, which lasted for 3 months, the research has shifted to looking at building skills and answering acute questions that will accumulate to support and build the larger project. Starting in the Spring of 2017, I began to offer the Hologram project as a workshop, where participants could test the communication model that is implicit in the Hologram format. The method for offering it is, as a performance artist and rogue architect, creating a situation in a space where people go through a difficult psycho social physical experience together. In the reflective conversations that follow, I ask the groups to use the personal pronoun ‘we’ for the entire duration of the conversation. The idea is that one person’s experience can be shared by the group, and even as temporary Patience we can take a leap and share their experience with them for a duration of time, allowing a Hologram to feel as if their experience is “our” experience. And this feeling that one is not alone in an experience, if carried into other parts of life, has the potential to break a lot of the assumptions and habits that we have inherited from living and adapting to a debt driven hellscape.

1. Graeber, David. The Newstatesman. We’re racing towards another private debt crisis –so why did no one see it coming? 18 August 2017. bit.ly/2we2Bv5
2. Kimberly, Amadeo. Austerity Measures, Do They Work, with Examples. The Balance. 2018. thebalance.com/austerity-measures-definition-examples-do-they-work-3306285
3. Amadeo, Kimberly. Medical Bankruptcy and the Economy: Do Medical Bills Really Devastate America’s Families? The Balance. Updated May 16, 2018. thebalance.com/medical-bankruptcy-statistics-4154729
4. Davies, Will. Wallin, Sara. Montgomerie, Johnna. Financial Melancholia –Mental Health and Indebtedness. PDF Edition. 2015. perc.org.uk/project_posts/financial-melancholia-mental-health-and-indebtedness/

Reposted from Furtherfield.

The post Art, Debt, Health, and Care: an Interview with Cassie Thornton appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview was completed in early 2016 as part of the research for Joyful Militancy. We (carla and Nick) sent Marina Sitrin a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind the book, and then included a couple questions based on Sitrin’s other writings (especially Horizontalidad — published in English as Horizontalism — and Everyday Revolutions). As time went on in the researching, interviewing and writing of the book our ideas and articulations shifted and for that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

Interview:

carla & Nick (c&N): Based on what we’ve told you about the book project, can you tell us what resonates and what doesn’t?

Marina Sitrin (MS): I am so excited for this project. It all resonates deeply with things I have been thinking, witnessing, fearing and dreaming. The role of joy, in particular in the way you describe it, is often absent – though not entirely – from our conversations and constructions in the northern part of the Americas and Europe. I do see joyful militancy as closely tied with emotion, on the individual and collective level, and will get to that with some of the later questions. It is both a fairly large and abstract concept, and at the same time a very simple direct and emotive one.

How do we feel when we participate in a movement or group? What are our relationships to others in the group? Does it feel open? Caring? Social? Is there trust? Why do we come back to assemblies and actions? Are people open to one another?

c&N: We have been told that “joyful militancy” or “militancia alegre” is a more common notion in Latin America.  Do you know anything about the genealogies or origins of “militancia alegre” in Latin America?

MS: I don’t know of any specific genealogy, but there are for sure many examples of the practice and language of care, trust, love and affect throughout the history of movements in Latin America. I see joyful militancy as both a practice and an articulation – ideally both together. As a practice it does not always come with an articulation of the experience, and then there are those groups and movements that have the explicit language of care and love, but do not always practice it. My first exposure to it as a concept together with a practice was in Argentina in the post 2001 popular rebellion and all the social creation that transpired.

In Argentina, when people found themselves without even the basic means for survival, they turned to one another. They did this without political parties, intermediaries or any sort of hierarchy. People explained this moment in history as a rupture, a break with past ways of organizing, but also a break in their finding one another – looking to one another. The effects of the dictatorship maintained a hold on many aspects of daily life, including fear of the other and a culture of turning one’s back in silence. HIJOS, the children of the disappeared, had been organizing for a few years in this silence, with internal forms that focused more on social relationships than an “end”. Their argument is that, at least in part, it was people in society who allowed the dictatorship to take place, with what they call a social silence. They organize in neighborhoods, speaking to people, face to face, and trying to recreate community. Their internal forms of organizing are also focused on social relationships, and in particular horizontal and affective forms. They speak of love as a relationship necessary in their group’s internal relationships as well as the sort of movement that has to be built. HIJOS in many ways was a precursor to the forms of organizing a few years later with the neighborhood assemblies, unemployed movements and recuperated workplaces, among tons of other collectives and networks that emerged.

I would love to share quote after quote of people in the movements in Argentina. I was honestly a bit surprised at how much people spoke of love and care as necessary to create the sort of world they desire. But now, in retrospect, the fact that the forms of organizing are all about social relationships—paying attention to power, making sure people are heard and can speak, prioritizing voices often excluded and ignored, organizing events with food, drinks, music and other tools that make them more social—were crucial and often just necessary for survival. Care is at the heart of the new forms of organizing. Horizontalism as a relationship is all about a shifting relational form between individuals and a group – paying attention to both – now. It is not a means to an end, but the means are a part of the end, and the end keeps changing.

Another example from Latin America, and one that is more of a practice and less something talked about as a tenet around which they organize, is the Zapatista communities. Their forms of organizing are based in assemblies striving for all people to participate equally and in creating structures of care, from health care to food and education, and then also creating processes for alternative adjudication—all of this is deeply affective, even if they do not shout to the world that they are joyous and grounded in affect. The joy is seen in these affective practices as well as in the celebratory nature of many of day to day experiences.

I see the concepts of joyful militancy, affective politics and a care/love-based organizing as also directly tied to prefigurative politics, and that has a long history and roots in Latin America. By prefigurative I mean as much as possible creating the desired future alternatives in the present.  This is an idea and practice that has roots all over the world, from the IWW in the US to the writings of W.E.B DuBois, and the practices of anarchists and autonomous activists in Latin America. It has become more popular and widespread, both in theory and practice, in the last twenty years with the rise of more autonomous and horizontal organizing, particularly in Latin America, but also with the Global Justice Movement and Occupy and movements of the Squares.

Going back to Latin America, while the more contemporary movements organize with affective politics as one of the hearts, consciously and intentionally, there is a long history of this sentiment as a part of organizing, including say the FORA in Argentina (the largest Anarchist federation in the world) which was a part of organizing Patagonia Rebelde, a free region in the south of Argentina in the early 1900s. While it was brutally repressed, the movement organized to create a free society then and there, rather than demanding or building towards a future society. This included all sorts of different social relationships which entailed care, trust and love as their foundation. This is a history that many contemporary movement participants have ideas about, but few have read about it in great detail. It is one of those funny things where historical memory is somehow imbued in current practice, even without a direct intentionality.

I also wonder about liberation theology and the role of love and care in Latin American movements today. Similar to the role of the memory of anarchism in Argentina, in some parts of Latin America, the liberation theologists actively supported revolutionary movements and for sure brought in the importance of love and care in the present – not just the future. Of course the Catholic church as a whole, like the communist parties, were all about the future and not the present.

c&N: You have described the work you do as a form of militancy.  Can you say what you mean by this concept?  What is militancy about, and what does it do?

MS: I also describe myself as a militant. I say this in part to counter the concept of activist, especially as it is understood in parts of Latin America, which is as oriented to NGOs – more ‘professional and paid’. In Spanish una militante is often someone who was a part of something, such as a movement or group, though not something like Greenpeace. It describes a more direct action sort of politics. And, in English, as it sounds, it has a force or action orientation – not militaristic, that is not what I mean – but determined and maybe hard left. I am not sure exactly how best to translate it alone; I use it as an alternative to identifying as an activist and to indicate direct involvement and revolutionary politics.

As for the work I do, I tend to think of it as militant research, and by this I mean a form of research and investigation that is together with people in movement, so again, militant meaning a sort of direct participation and action. I try as best as I can to not only use interview-based work, but to be involved in those things I write about and to engage back and forth with movement participants (if I am not active in that movement all the time) so as to check and make sure I am reflecting what people are doing/thinking. Sometimes this leads to a lot more work or investigation, as happened in Argentina when I was close to finishing the book Horizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina.^[i] I thought it was just about finished and circulated it with a number of movement participants. I got great feedback, and a few women from two different unemployed movements gently told me, compañera, you cannot publish this, it does not include the direct struggles of the Mapuche or Guarani, not in their own words. So, I took another many months, built relationships with a few indigenous communities in the far north, was fortunate to be joined by one of these two women when I went, and then was able to finish the book.

All together then, this sort of work can become a form of militancy as it can help connect people from different groups and movements who might not otherwise meet one another. For example, having developed relationships with more autonomous movements in Greece, and collaborating with a network of assemblies who translated Horiozntalidad into Greek, we found that not only were the voices in the book useful, but there was an opportunity to create direct relationships. So twice I helped initiate visits of Argentines to Greece. The second such visit was a worker from a recuperated workplace who met with workers in Vio.Me in Thessaloniki, and after the visit and exchange of ideas the Greek workers decided absolutely to recuperate their workplace. They say that without the direct exchange of ideas they might not have done it. The sharing of movement contacts and relationships across movements, countries and continents is for me a part of being a militant who does militant research.

c&N: What’s been your experience of sad militancy^[ii]–meanness, shame, fear, guilt, and ideological purism–in movement spaces?

1.     What sustains sad militancy?
2.     What provokes or inspires it?  What makes it spread?

MS: I have put off this question for second to last. And now am again taking a break, since as important as it is, it is such an ugly and sad part of our movements I am going to wait a moment before writing about it. I will answer it however, since it is also what has destroyed so many groups and movements – so utterly important.

Sad militancy can come from many places. First, and important to identify is when it comes from external forces, people who are paid to disrupt movements and do so in all sorts of ways from disrupting democratic processes and assemblies, to those who spread gossip and create divisions amongst people in the movement. This has been seen in so many movements historically and there is a great deal to learn from these experiences, particularly the disruption of the Black Panthers – and here I am thinking of some of the lesser known and insidious tactics such as “poison pen letters”.

I would like to end it there, but sad militancy is not just something that people from the outside are paid to do – and in fact, they are able to be paid to do it because we are so susceptible to it. On a basic level, the space a group or movement creates from the beginning is key – the tone and openness, or not, makes a big difference if one wants to focus on new relationships with one another. Along these same lines, ideological rigidity and hierarchies in ideas, formal and informal, create a closed and eventually nasty space for those not ascribing to the ideology or a part of the clique. People do not stay in movements that organize in this way, or if they do it is with a sort of obedience that is not transformative for society and instead creates versions of the same power and hierarchy – with people not being actors or agents of change, not to mention that dignity cannot grow or flourish.

My early organizing experiences were fortunately with anti-racist and later Central American Solidarity movements, with people who had been a part of the civil rights and later anti-nuclear movements, so they had a focus—at least in part—on social relationships and democracy. Later however, when I decided I needed to be a part of a revolutionary group that was organizing against capitalism as a whole, well, I found myself in a few different centrist socialists groups which were really soul deadening. It was all about ideology and guilt. One could never do enough, and could never know enough or quote enough of whomever was the revolutionary of the day (James Cannon, Tony Cliff, etc.). It was also politically all about the end and not the day-to-day. This even included women: one would think after the radical feminist movement these groups would get that relationships have to change now, but no, it was all about the future free society we all had to work for – accepting relationships as they are pretty much. I later came around some anarchist groups, thinking that they would be more open and focused on the day-to-day, as that is what I had read from the theory, but found the rigidity around identity too harsh and since I was not squatting or dressing a certain way I was kept at arm’s length – which was fine since I felt too rejected to try very hard.

Enough of these icky groups. I think the big question for today is how do we organize in ways that try to prevent sad militancy from creeping into our practice. Articulation of a joyful movement is important, and not as easy as one might think since there is so much resistance to the idea of feelings, which is also to say, relationships. Many in Argentina reflected on this, especially men in the unemployed movements and workplaces who would joke that they would approach people on the street and ask if they wanted to join a “love movement” and get punched. But it was a real question of machismo they were addressing. I do not mean just men here either, though it is the joke. Social relationships are increasingly given lip service, but we often do not work on them in our movements in a way that makes them dynamic enough to really create an affective space. Relationships here means not only how we treat one another individually, but things like our democratic practices as a whole and how and if we adjudicate or resolve conflicts that arise. So first, talking about it and stating clearing that it is important. But then, some movements do this and still sad militancy sneaks in, or jumps in, depending … it often concerns democratic practices and questions of flexibility—it is crucial to be able to change our practices as well as our ideas. That does not mean to be without clear ideas that are collective, but to avoid the ideological traps that can happen. Autonomous and anti-authoritarian movements are hardly exempt from this. In Occupy we sometimes found people arguing they were more horizontal than others, or more autonomous … this creates a closed and defensive space.

One way to try and keep our movements and groups more open is to be more open ourselves. To call things out when we see them. Not in a hostile way, but in the sense of identifying it and talking about it collectively, in special assemblies or in the moment. This is tricky as it can come off as hostile and people can easily get defensive – we live in a society where we are all so very fragile that calling someone out almost always leads to defensiveness … so figuring out ahead of time how we will deal with these issues as they come up and sticking to it. I am thinking now of how Occupy Farms in Albany California, learning from some of the difficult and sometimes nasty things that emerged in Occupy, organized based on a few common agreements and to participate all had to agree. Things that included participation – not as a ‘work ethic’ sort of thing, but that if one was going to be a part of a collective farm, one had to be a part of a working group that did things (without creating ableist hierarchies, of course).

This avoided people coming to just hang out and speaking in assemblies from a position of ideas alone without practice. In Argentina, when people were disruptive in assemblies, it was called out (this was learned first by having assemblies destroyed by disruption). People are told to stop, and if it does not work they are asked to leave. It is more complicated than that, but that is the essence for some assemblies. In the 15M they had a group of people that was always roving during assemblies to try and support those people who were disrupting, believing they needed support, and not to be silenced.

c&N: What’s been your experience of joyful militancy?

1.     What inspires/encourages/sustains it?
2.     How do you try to embody it?

MS: My first experiences with joyful militancy, without having a name for it at the time, were very specific and location-based. I went to Seattle in 1999 to participate in the protests. Later in the day, when the repression picked up, I found myself alone and scared for a moment – only a moment however as an experienced anarchist from San Diego helped me quickly join their affinity group. Not only did I come without an affinity group, but what I knew of them was from reading Murray Bookchin on the Spanish Revolution. It was all a wonderful idea, like assembly based decision making and councils, but I had no direct experience with them. I had been a part of a few different hierarchical socialist groups and left all of then in part due to the hierarchy and centrism, but also what for sure can be called sad militancy. I had witnessed mass assemblies and direct democracy, including in Tepotzlan Mexico where people had taken over the town in the later 1990s, but still had had no direct participation – I did not know what it felt like to be a part of it. Not until Seattle.

So, this wonderful person, whose name I have since forgotten, brought me into a small group and together we blocked an alley where delegates were trying to pass, and supported one another in the massive tear gas attacks by the police, as well as negotiated road blocks of burning dumpsters and projectiles launched to protect people from the police. It was quite scary, but I did not feel fear as much as energy. I was now with a small group of people who were taking care of each other, checking in with one another all the time and taking breaks to do so.  And then that evening there was a spokescouncil and I felt that “aha” moment where it all made sense. The ideas I had read about with direct democracy and people caring for one another was all around me, even amidst the tear gas and injured people – perhaps even because of it – which brought up the stakes and made the care and trust all the more important. It was a short lived experience, but has marked me forever.

As for longer, deeply grounded movements based in affective politics and joyful militancy, that for sure would be Argentina post 2001. While emerging from necessity, from a rupture in society that was both crisis and a newfound finding of one another on the streets, it continued in many of the movements, taking deep root and becoming the place from which people organized and mobilized. What sustained it in many places was concrete projects around which people were organizing, from running workplaces to maintaining popular kitchens or media groups, together with open discussion of what it was/is. Collective reflection cannot be underestimated, and by this I do not mean only having assemblies to discuss what we are doing or will do next – and not either reflecting on what we have done. But reflecting on the meanings behind what we are doing and why. Taking time to explore ideas and our feelings related to them. There were constant discussions and assemblies in all of the movements, from the recuperated workplaces during lunch and breaks to weekly gatherings within the unemployed movements and parts of the agenda of the neighborhood assemblies. There were also assemblies comprised of people from the different movements to discuss things together, like autonomy, autogestion and affective politics, and this was done in a way that reflected the politics of the movements, with openness and care, in the discussions and infrastructure – meaning there was food and breaks with music and murgas, helping to facilitate the celebratory and emotive elements involved in all of it.

As for my personal attempts to try and embody a politics of affect and joyful militancy, I don’t know. On a very basic level, but one that really does mean a lot, and at the risk of being dismissed as unserious, I try and be open, smile, and really listen and ask questions with others in the movements. Welcoming people, asking about their lives and being friendly is a bigger deal than most people realize. Feeling welcome into a space that is new, feeling like people care about who you are and not just what action you are participating in is huge. On a more general level, I try and create space for others to speak and be heard, and in a way that is meaningful. This often means things like helping to make sure there is facilitation that allows and develops listening, as well as creating a warm climate and atmosphere around discussions, assemblies and other spaces. I like to think I try and reach out to younger and sometimes lesser experienced participants so as to help them feel heard and involved. This is almost always with younger women. In Occupy in New York, I shifted early on to focusing on the legal group since we did not have much of one when it began. A space or movement without legal support, especially in an action that is not legal in certain respects, is not serious, and for sure does not have affect and care at its core. We must protect all people in their/our bodies; this means legally and in the streets with affinity groups. Within the legal group of Occupy we quickly discovered that we not only needed to create legal support for the hundreds arrested, but also to create spaces of mediation for the conflicts coming up in the Plaza. I was a part of a legal subgroup, together with Safer Spaces, that was trying to set up a mechanism not only for mediation but also the adjudication of conflict. Without ways of resolving conflict within our movements we cannot say we take care, trust and affect seriously.

c&N: Because we think joy and sadness are always moving and shifting into new configurations, we are really curious about how these shifts take place.  Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy into sad militancy, or vice-versa?  What leads to these shifts?

MS: I have seen movements go from joyful to sad, though it is usually soon before they break up as that specific form of movement. From my experience, this has often been when there is very specific activity on behalf of one or a few people who are extremely disruptive and their disruptions are not dealt with. Our culture of silence or even being polite and not wanting to say things out loud, at least not collectively is a real problem. It allows one or a few people to dominate groups of hundreds and event thousands as was the case with Occupy. This was not the only thing that happened with Occupy, but was among them. In Argentina I saw it happen with left political parties intentionally destroying horizontal assemblies (something that is much harder to do today since they have learned hard lessons and changed their practices). I also saw it with the role of money in movements: from the unemployed movements having to be “managers” of state money and deciding who gets it or not as the government never gave enough, to NGO money in movements creating divisions and finally, to what was for sure government intervention by way of paid disruptors who—when all the other forms of disruption did not work—used direct violence, burning homes and shooting at participants until the land-based movement dispersed. This however raises bigger questions about defense of movements, perhaps for another book.

c&N: In your book, Everyday Revolutions,^[iii] you continually return to the rejection of ideology and how important this has been for movements to create communities based in love and trust. It sounds like in Argentina, what is being rejected is the traditional ideology of Marxism that tends towards vanguardism, hierarchy, and so on. Is there something about all ideology that gets in the way of love and trust across differences?

MS: After the 2001 economic collapse people in Argentina came together from all sorts of backgrounds, as well as networked across all sorts of social classes and identity based groups. The unemployed with the formerly identified urban middle class, the Guarani and Mapuche with media collectives and children of the disappeared (HIJOS) and workers recuperating their workplaces with all of the above. People organized in their locations and came together out of necessity. They forced out four governments in the first months of the rebellion with sheer popular power – people in the streets banging pots and pans (cacerolando). No one called people together, not unions or political parties, they did not have formal leaderships, banners or posters, or even united slogans in the beginning. They came together banging pots and pans and created the song – Que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo (They all must go, not even one shall remain). And it worked. They forced out presidents, heads of the judiciary, economy and other ministries. There was a rejection of what was – of political parties and forms of hierarchy (power over) that people saw as responsible for the economic crisis and mass privatization which in part destroyed the economy.

Again and again people who I spoke with while living there and those I’ve visited over the years insisted that they did not want to replicate the forms of organization that they saw as responsible … not only responsible for the crisis, but also all those groups and forms of organizing that were also seen as unable to respond sufficiently to these groups – so forms on the right and left. All political parties. So, yes, what you suggest with a rejection of Marxism as an ideology is true, but it was also true for anything that seemed to harken a pre-formed ideology or set of ideas. People wanted to create things anew – social relationships and forms of organizing. And this is where we get to some of the ideas in your next question. There were and continue to be consistent forms and ways of thinking about organizing and while it was in no way an ideology – there is an amazing consistency in the ways people across class and identity spoke and speak about these forms: new – rejecting the old – and creating something new in similar ways. I believe this is tied to what is being rejected, but will get to that next.

c&N: You continually point to the concepts of horizontalism, affective politics, autogestion, and autonomy as concepts that are widely shared among movements in Argentina. It’s clear that they’ve been central to constructing and sustaining movements, and warding off ideology and co-optation. You quote a number of movement participants who seem to refuse any concrete definition of the movements they’re part of, and you call these concepts “living words.” It seems clear that you and the voices you highlight are refusing rigid definitions of these terms–autonomy, horizontalism, love, and trust–so that they can be part of an ongoing discussion, and that this is different from an ideology. Can you say more about these differences? What is the difference between an ideological concept and a living word?

MS: First, the idea of a living word comes not from me, but people in the movements. I repeat it a lot since I love the way it captures what people are doing and striving towards, but it is for sure a concept that is also living and dynamic, from within the movements in Argentina. What is rejected is ideology, as I understand people in the movements, by this they mean any predetermined set of ideas or concepts that then are applied to life – to concrete situations. I don’t know that all ideology is rejected as an analysis for what is wrong in society – so elements of Marxism to explain capitalism … it is possible, but what is rejected is a set of ideas that will then “free” people or make for new social relationships. The focus of the movements is how people organize and relate now – in the day to day – and from there construct the future. This already implies a dynamic as the everyday changes, and thus the future, as related to the everyday, must change. The same is true for the ideas around which much of the organizing takes place.

Take for example Horizontalidad – a word that did not exist before in Spanish, or if it did it might have been used a few years prior by HIJOS, the children of the disappeared in Argentina… Horizontalidad was and is described as a relationship, a way of coming together without power over the other, as a way of having conversations and relating more generally. It is always described as a changing relationship since as people relate to one another they change and the group changes, thus the concept of the tools used also must change, thus the living part of the word. It is ever-changing and dynamic as it is used in life by people… It is not a description of a relationship either – not direct or participatory democracy, nor consensus – it is a relationship itself that might or might not use these other tools.

Similarly, autonomy and autogestion. Autonomy was used, together with horizontalidad and autogestion to articulate the focus of the movements being on and with one another – not looking ‘up’ but horizontally. Seeing power as something created together, and also as a live thing, not something to take or be given. Autonomy has been used to distinguish both movements and groups, as well as individuals. Deciding for ourselves or oneself. Not having a party or politician dictate what to do or how… autonomy is a practice and dynamic – not an ideology and theory – and the danger of calling it a theory is that it can become less “alive” less of a practice. In a number of movements, when offered ‘gifts’ and subsides from the state, they continued to call themselves autonomous while simultaneously organizing based on the agenda of the state, and eventually the splits within the movements became too big. But that is another story, and entails sad militancy: with the stagnation of autonomy, the trust and care within the movements also unraveled.

One of the things that I believe has helped keep autonomy and horizontalidad as living words is the practices connected with them. It is not abstract. To be autonomous and horizontal is related to concrete practice. So what is that practice? Those movements that self organize, from the recuperated workplaces (of which there are over 350) to the self organized unemployed movements (a handful still) and media networks and alternative outlets (of which there are around 60) have all continued, even with challenges, and they all argue that part of their ability to face the challenges posed by the state has been their level of self-organization or autogestion. They also intertwine this practice of autogestion with a practice of autonomy and every changing relationships of horizontalidad.

This brings us to affective politics: a politics based in affect, trust, care and love, as people in the movements describe it. This is something I describe more earlier, but it cannot be left out of any question related to the dynamics of the movements and how they are rejecting ideology and instead are creating ever-changing dynamic relationships.

c&N: We have the sense that the situation in North America is a lot different Argentina and other places in Latin America. One of the most striking differences, from our perspective, is that the dense networks of love, care, and trust do not seem to exist in the same ways among the Left in North America, especially among European-descended settlers. What’s your impression of these differences, and what are the implications for movements in North America?

MS: Hmmm … I think a lot of this has to do with identity, class, experience and options in life. People who lack options, such as the unemployed workers in Argentina or the population facing a total economic collapse, have seemed to come together in very similar ways; both movements rejected hierarchy, power-over, and ideology while at the same time creating new ways of being together, self-organizing grounded in horizontal relationships and affect. As the movements continued over time it does seem like those that have self-organized out of necessity have lasted longer and continued with the same dynamic forms of organizing based in new social relationships.

Saying all this, I am now thinking about a conversation I recently had with two young people, one Mexican and one US, who had both been living in Oaxaca for years, collaborating with the Universidad de la Tierra and Gustavo Esteva in particular. They are now in another part of Mexico struggling to organize a social center, a small editorial (printing books and booklets) and a few other projects, all based in horizontal, autonomous and affective relationships. They are facing internal challenges for sure, and that is some of what we spoke about, but they continue and are quite motivated and really lovely, passionate, smart young organizers. They would be examples of people from the left, working with others on the left, to create these sorts of space – and while they need to self organize to survive, it is not to the same degree as say the unemployed in Argentina. They could get other jobs, even if with difficulty … so maybe I am contradicting myself, or maybe the first response to organize with autogestion, autonomy and horizontalidad, developing and grounding in affect, is something that is first a response, but can also be something intentional, if one is very very careful with each step and moves slowly. And, if we could all spend years with Gustavo Esteva, learning and sharing, well, that would be a wonderful gift.

So, after being so wordy here, the conclusion is that while joyful militancy is easier to maintain in places where organizing is based in necessity and the rejection of ideology and pre-formed ways of organizing take root much faster, it is not impossible or even improbable in other spaces where people have less urgency and necessity in their survival questions and options … what it does require in these ‘left’ spaces is a lot of attention to maintaining relationships as flexible and ever-changing. Learning from our companeros in the global south.

c&N: Where do you see love, trust, horizontalism, and autonomy being generated and sustained in North America? Or, do you see other, alternative common notions that animate North American movements?

MS: While I do for sure see autonomy, horizontalism, affect, trust and love animating US and Canadian movements, it is not what occurs to me first for these regions. Too often, at least in the US, there is a sort of territoriality of left ideas and sadly ideologies, even in the more autonomous spaces, so rather than flexible and caring ideas guiding our actions and relationships we cling to ideas and notions such as autonomy as a rigid dogma – “I am more autonomous than you” using forms of comparison with actions and even life choices. It has even occurred more recently with horizontalism, so rather than seeing it as an ever-changing relationship that must change as people change and a group changes, it is used as a particular definition of a form of consensus decision-making. We saw this in particular around the Occupy plazas. I have no idea where this came from since it has nothing to do with the way Argentines use it, but instead people argued for horizontalism to mean absolute consensus, not the striving for consensus, but that all must discuss and agree with the exception of one. (Something impossible in groups of people who do not know one another and particularly large groups as we had in New York, with over a thousand or two thousand people in assemblies at times.) What this points to is the rigidity that people—even those who have not been organized in movement or groups before—tend towards, which is a sort of hierarchy of ideas instead of flexible open relationships … maybe we have not broken from the traditional forms of change on the left as many others have. Or maybe when we become more flexible, those who have preconceived ideas of how change should happen jump in so fast and occupy the space that it seems like that is the majority opinion when it is not. I could explore this more, but would rather begin to think about those spaces where people have organized in these more dynamic and open ways.

Historically, there are tons of examples from the history of the US as well as around the world – we just have to look for them and listen well. For example, SNCC was grounded in participatory and direct democracy, with attempts at creating leadership and horizontal relationships, as well as beloved community overall. The radical feminist movement is fairly well known for working on more affective and care-based ties, focusing on sharing personal stories and creating atmospheres of openness within the movement. Following chronologically is the Anti Nuclear movement in the 1970s and 80s that in many areas was based in direct democracy and affinity groups, making sure to take care of each person bodily as well as with emotional support. I could go into many more examples, though that perhaps is for another project.

c&N: A common perception we’ve been grappling with is that joyful militancy is naïve—a failure to appreciate how bad things are (if you’re not sad/angry/cynical, you’re not paying attention) – how do you react to this?

MS: That is total nonsense. And I do not call many opinions nonsense, really, almost none. But from my experience, those people from whom I have learned about joyful militancy and affective politics are people in unemployed movements, people living in situations such as shanty towns, with nothing to live on and no real future prospects. Or, workers facing a life of unemployment taking over their factories. Or women in the Southern Non Violent Coordinating Committee in the south of the US. Here of course I did not participate, but have spoken to people who were involved in the movement and I read a great deal, and the concept of Beloved Community was key to what they were trying to construct. Inspired in part I believe by this form of organizing is now Black Lives Matter, who are best known for their interruptions in business as usual; less known is that the organizers try and ground their organizing explicitly in the politics of care and love. Black Lives Matter as a hashtag created by co-founder Patrisse Cullors was made famous almost instantaneously, though lesser known is the simultaneous “love letter” that was written by Alicia Garza, the other of the three women co-founders. Written to “Black folks” it speaks of the importance of loving oneself as well as organizing based in love. And recently, in interviews I have done and read with people who are spending lots of time in Rojava, from Janet Biehl to Kurdish women militant researchers, they all speak of the joy, happiness, laughter and smiles that fill the spaces of self-defense and creation that are the autonomous Cantons of Rojava. Women there speak of the importance of this care, joy and laughter. If they do not appreciate how “bad” things are, then, well, shit, no one does.

I do not write this to dismiss the question, it is an important one, and one I get all the time. Affect is not seen as serious. Both due to what people think is something “soft” or not looking to the bad, but also I think it is a deeply gendered and race-based argument. The people I know who are or did ground their organizing explicitly in affect, joy and beloved community are on the margins of society – they are women in groups and networks all over the world, the unemployed and queer movements in Argentina, SNCC in the US and currently the coordinators of Black Lives Matter, women in Rojava … I could go on and on, but the reality is the opposite of the argument being put forward. I do not want to place ideological or identity boxes on those posing these questions, but from my experience they do not come from similar backgrounds as the movements and networks I just mentioned. And last, forget academia. The idea that affective politics or love based organizing is seen as serious in social movement theory is just, well, not happening. I have been asked so many times, “what is that?” and then told to remove it from articles (which I refuse). Emotion yes, and negative emotion, for sure, but love and affect, no, it is seen as not serious. Who dominates the academic world? Some real similarities with those on the left also making the critique. But, I don’t want to spiral into who is to blame for not taking it seriously; it is not particularly useful. Most important is to do what you both are doing, which is bringing this form of organizing more into the public discourse as an option for organizing.

___________________________________________

^[i] The English translation of this book, edited by Marina Sitrin, was published as Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland: AK Press, 2006

^[ii] Earlier in our process of researching and writing the book, we were using the concept of ‘sad militancy’ to describe the ways that radicalism can be intertwined with shame, fear, guilt and ideological purism. We later changed ‘sad militancy’ to ‘rigid radicalism’ in the book, in order to avoid confusion with the emotion of sadness.

^[iii] Marina Sitrin. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. London: Zed Books, 2012.

Images by Pete Railand at Justseeds

Lead image of Marina Sitrin from an interview with M Cem Menguc, “Horizontalism: This, But Not This (1001 Plateaus, # 1)”

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

The post Care is at the heart: an interview with Marina Sitrin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview with Silvia Federici was conducted in early 2016 by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery for Joyful Militancy. For this interview we (Nick and carla) sent a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind our book project, and had a conversation with based on the themes of our book and Federici’s other work.

Silvia Federici: My politics resonate with your idea of “joyful militancy.” I’m a strong believer that either your politics is liberating and that gives you joy, or there’s something wrong with them.

I’ve gone through phases of “sad politics” myself and I’ve learned to identify the mistakes that generate it. It has many sources. But one factor is the tendency to exaggerate the importance of what we can do by ourselves, so that we always feel guilty for not accomplishing enough.

When I was thinking about this conversation, I was reminded of Nietzsche’s metamorphoses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his image of the camel. The camel is the prototype of the militant who burdens herself with huge amounts of work, because she thinks that the destiny of the world depends on her overwork. Inevitably she’s always saddened because the goal is always receding and she does not have the time to be fully present to her life and recognize the transformative possibilities inherent to her work.

carla and Nick: You said that you feel like there are so many sources to sad militancy[1] and can you speak to some more of those?

Federici: Sad militancy comes from setting goals that you cannot achieve, so that the outcome is always out of reach, always projected into the future and you feel continuously defeated.  “Sad politics “ is also defining your struggle in purely oppositional terms, which puts you in a state of permanent tension and failure. A joyful politics is a politics that is constructive and prefigurative. I’m encouraged by the fact that more people today see that you cannot continuously postpone the achievement of your goals to an always receding future.

Joyful politics is politics that change your life for the better already in the present. This is not to deny that political engagement often involves suffering. In fact our political involvement often is born of suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something about it, it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is feeling the solidarity of those around us. Militants in Argentina speak of  “politicizing our sadness.”

This is why I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves. This has been a common practice in political movements in the past. But it is one that produces constantly dissatisfied individuals. Again, what we do may lead to suffering, but this may be preferable to the kind of self-destruction we would have faced had we remained inactive.

The inability to make politics a rewarding experience is part of the reason why, I think, the radical Left has been unsuccessful in attracting large numbers of people. Here too we are beginning to learn however. I see that many young militants today are recognizing the importance of building community, of organizing activities that are pleasurable, that build trust and affective relations, like eating together for instance. It is not an accident that Indigenous peoples’ movements in Latin America give so much importance to the organization of events like the fiestas.

Nick and carla: We wanted to ask you specifically about the feminist movement and what are some of the ways that feminists and other movements have struggled with sad militancy in the past. We’re thinking of Jo Freeman’s essay on “trashing” from the ‘70s, where she talks about real tendencies to destroy relationships within the feminist movement.[i] In one of the interviews that you’ve done, you mention “truculent forms of behavior that were typical of the movement in the ‘60s” and that you see new forms of kindness and care emerging that maybe were absent back then. So we wanted to ask you about how things have changed from your perspective, and whether you see a connection between trashing and what is now called call-out culture in contemporary movements.

Federici: When I wrote about truculent behavior, I was thinking of relations in the male Left and male-dominated organizations, where you found a lot of protagonism and peacock-like competition, as well as a manipulation of women, sexual and otherwise. These were among the factors that motivated the rise of the women’s liberation movement. Not only women’s demands were pushed off the agenda, but everyday relations were often degrading for them.

A good description of women’s lives in male-dominated organizations is Marge Piercy’s “The Grand Coolie Dam,”[ii] where she powerfully describes the many forms of subordination women suffered in male-dominated groups. In comparison, the organizational forms the women’s movement adopted were a major improvement. Possibly feminists moved too far in the opposite direction. I am thinking of Jo Freeman’s critique of the “tyranny of structurelessness.”[iii] But she’s excessively critical of the feminist movement. I don’t agree that feminists were especially prone to trashing each other. The attack on leadership, for instance, though it often worked against people’s capacity to express themselves, also opened the way to more egalitarian relations—like ensuring that everyone would have a change to speak in a meeting. The resistence against women getting credit for authoring articles or speaking too much in public was a legacy of the experiences we had made in male-dominated organizations. In time, it is a fear that most women left behind, as they felt more confident in their own powers.

Some of the bitterness that you find in Jo Freeman comes perhaps from the fact that, when we joined the women’s movement, many of us believed that we had reached a sort of paradise. As I wrote in “Putting Feminism On Its Feet,” when I began to work with other women I truly felt that I had found my home, my tribe.[iv] We thought that we had reached a place where everything would be harmonious; where there would be love, care, reciprocity, equality, cooperation—sisterhood as we called it. So we dis-activated our critical thinking and left our defenses down. Unfortunately, we didn’t reach paradise, and the disappointment was especially severe because we assumed that in the women’s movement we would find happiness, or at least we would not encounter the kind of jealousies, power plays, and power relations we had experienced with men.

Spinoza speaks of Joy as coming from Reason and Understanding. But we forgot that all of us bear on our bodies and minds the marks of life in a capitalist society. We forgot that we came to the feminist movement with many scars and fears. We would feel devalued and easily take offense if we thought we were not properly valued. It was a jealousy that came from poverty, from fear of not being given our due. This also led some women to be possessive about what they had done, what they had written or said.

These are all the classical problems and distortions that life in a capitalist society creates. Over time you learn to identify them, but at first, many of us were devastated by them. For me coping with this realization has been an important learning process. But I have also seen women leaving the movement because they were so deeply hurt by it.

On the other hand, the feminist movement, because it stressed the importance of sharing experiences and engaging in a collective examination of our everyday lives and problems, gave us important tools to deal with this situation. Through “consciousness-raising” and the refusal to separate politics from our everyday reproduction it created forms of organization that built trust and showed that our strength was rooted in our mutual solidarity.

I found a vision in the women’s movement that allowed me to overcome some bitter experiences and over time insulated me from disappointment. I see politics now as a process of transformation; a process by which we learn to better ourselves, shed our possessiveness and discard the petty squabbles that so much poison our lives.

I think that this has been a collective experience that has left a mark on other organizations as well. It seems to me that, over the last two or three decades, the women’s movement has been the most important influence on the organizational forms of most radical movements. You don’t find today, on a general level, the kind of behavior that was common among men thirty or forty years ago, not at least among the new generations, although there is still a good amount of machismo around. But you also have men who genuinely want to be feminist, and define themselves as anti-patriarchal, or organize against male supremacy—all unthinkable stands—with few exceptions—in the ‘60s.

carla: I have all these questions! There seems to be some kind of paradox in this: that joy is about feelings and relationships, but not just an individual feeling. And while we want to speak to the power of joy, it can’t be turned into a commandment, and in fact it gets lost when it becomes something imposed on people. But it also can’t be about just feeling happy or feeling good, or being okay with the way things are. It feels like a little bit of a paradox and I haven’t figured out how to think that through. A lot of my activism over the years has been around youth liberation and working with children having more of a say, and getting that form of oppression into the discussion and into activist spaces, and my work was very centered around that in a public way. I don’t want to replicate individualism in liberation; I want it to always be connected to the larger systems and social struggles. But it also needs to be about thriving right now, because they’re kids! And when things were working well it seemed that there was a lot of room for freedom and growth but it was held and felt collectively, without a bunch of rules or norms. There was happiness, sure, but also difficulty and a willingness to work through it. So it feels like a constant paradox to work through joy …

Federici: I like the distinction between happiness and joy. Like you, I like joy because it is an active passion. It’s not a static state of being. And it’s not satisfaction with things as they are. It’s part of feeling powers and capacities growing within yourself and in the people around you. It’s a feeling, a passion, that comes from a process of transformation and growth. It does not mean that you’re satisfied with your situation. It means, again using Spinoza, that you’re active in accordance to what your understanding tells you to do and what is required by the situation. So you feel that you have the power to change and feel yourself changing through what you’re doing, together with other people. It’s not a form of acquiescence to what exists.

Nick and carla: We’ve found your concept of the accumulation of divisions really compelling, and the ways you’re centering how capitalism is always using white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization, and other oppressive hierarchies to create divisions and enable exploitation. Your historicization of those divisions is powerful, because you show how the state and capitalism have deepened and entrenched patriarchy and racism as a strategy to stop resistance and enable more intense exploitation. And for us, in this book we really want to center the importance of rebuilding trust and connection and solidarity across those divisions, while leaving space for difference and autonomy. One of the things that we like about your work is that you don’t jump to a simple unity—that overcoming these divisions doesn’t look like a simple unity. And so we wanted to ask you to talk about that a little more. Is there a distinction between divisions, which are hierarchical and exploitative, and differences, which might be something else? And can you talk about the positive horizon you see for resisting the accumulation of divisions while warding off a kind of homogenizing unity?

Federici: Yes, the distinction between differences and divisions is important. When I speak of “divisions” I speak of differences that carry hierarchies, inequalities, and have a divisive power. So, we need to be very clear when we speak of “differences.” Not all should be celebrated.

The lesson we learned in the ‘60s from the women’s movement and the Black Power movement is that the most effective way to respond to unequal relations is for those who have less social power to organize autonomously. This does not exclude the possibility of coming together for particular struggles. But in a society divided along racial and gender lines, unity is a goal to be achieved, not something that can be assumed to already exist. Organizational autonomy, or at least the construction of autonomous spaces within mixed organizations—as it often happens in Latin America—is a necessary condition to subvert these divisions. The women’s movement could not have developed the understanding of the situation of women that it developed if women had remained in male-dominated organizations. It was crucial for women to move away from these organizations to even begin to think about their problems and share their thoughts with each other.

You cannot think of a problem, give voice to it, share it with others, if you fear that you will be dismissed, ridiculed, or told that it is not important. Moreover, how could women have spoken of sexuality and their relations with men in front of them? And how could Black militants speak openly of their experience of racism in front of white people?

Autonomy within movements that are working toward unity but are traversed by power relations is fundamental. A crucial reality would have remained hidden if the feminist movement had not organized autonomously and this is also true of the Black Power movement. Important areas and forms of exploitation would have continued to be unnoticed; would not have been analyzed and denounced and would have continued to be reproduced.

carla and Nick: You often point to Latin America and other places where the social fabric is much stronger in general, and movements are a lot more capable of reproducing themselves and meeting their own needs, relying less on the state and capital. The maintenance of communal and cooperative forms of life seems to be central to the capacity for sustained struggle and resistance. Can you elaborate on all this?

Federici: I went to Nigeria in the ‘80s and one of the big surprises for me was to discover that large amounts of land were still managed communally. That doesn’t mean that in communal land regimes relationships are necessarily egalitarian. Generally men have more power than women; but until recently they could not sell the land. Clearly these communal regimes have gone through many changes, especially because of colonial domination. But the fact that communal ownership has been widespread in Africa until at least the nineteenth century and, in some regions, continues even today, has had a deep impact on relationships and people, which is why I believe so much violence has been and is necessary to privatize the land and the continent’s immense natural resources.

It’s the same thing in Latin America. In Mexico, in the 1930s, during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, some land was returned to indigenous communities that had been expropriated by colonial invasion. Today the Mexican government is trying to re-privatize everything, but until recently at least thirty percent of the country’s land was still held communally.

Again, this is not a guarantee of egalitarian relations. Women in these communities are coming forward, criticizing the patriarchal relations often prevailing within them. A good example are the Zapatista women. As you can read in Hilary Klein’s book Compañeras, many of the transformations that have taken place in Zapatista communities, like the application of the Revolutionary Law On Women, have been the product of the struggle that women have made against patriarchalism. But communal land regimes guarantee the reproduction of the communities that live on the land.

Today many of these communities are facing dispossession because of land privatization, deforestation, the loss of water to irrigate their milpas. But when they are forced out and come to the cities, they still act as a collectivity. They take over land though collective action, they build encampments, and take decision collectively. As a result, in many cities of Latin America, new communities have formed that from their beginning were built collectively. It appears that the narcos now try to infiltrate some of these communities. But when people take over the land and cooperate to build their houses, to build the streets, to fight with the government to connect the electricity and get water pipes, there is a good chance that that they will be able to respond to this threat, and you can see that there’s a new social reality emerging in these communities.

As Raúl Zibechi often points out, something new is emerging in these communities because they have had to invent new forms of life, without any pre-existing model, and politicize the everyday process of their reproduction.[v] When you work together, building houses, building streets, building structures that provide some immediate form of healthcare—just to give some examples—you are making life-choices, as all of them come with a high cost. You must fight the state, fight the police, the local authorities. So you have to develop tight relations with each other and always measure the value of all things.

Nick and carla: Following up on that, part of what we are curious about is how we can learn from places where, in general, the degree of politicization is higher and the social fabric is much stronger. What kind of lessons can North American–based organizers draw from this for organizing in our own communities? How can people in the global North learn from all of the vibrant struggles and forms of life in Latin America while being attentive to differences in context at the same time?

Federici: This is a discussion that is taking place in New York. People in the social movements who are inspired by the struggles in Latin America are now thinking in terms of territorial politics, the territory being a place where you have some form of collective control and even self-government. Clearly, the situation in the US is profoundly different. But thinking in terms of territory enables us to see that the neighborhoods in which we live are not neutral spaces, they are not just conglomerates of houses and people. They are very politically structured. In New York, for instance, since the ‘70s, there’s been a process of “spatial de-concentration,” whereby every neighborhood has been studied by local and federal authorities to figure out how to better control the movement of people and guarantee that the wrong people do not go to certain neighborhoods. Subway lines, bus lines, playgrounds have been restructured, to make sure that poor people cannot easily go to places of wealth.

So looking at our neighborhoods as “territories” in this case means recognizing those factors of tension, of crisis, those power relations that traverse them that divide people but can also bring them together. The social centers that have opened in recent years in New York are attempting to do that, trying to engage in practices that create “territory,” that is, create forms of aggregation. Building more collective forms of reproduction is a key aspect of this process. It is indispensable if we want to create “communities of resistance,” spaces where people are connected and can engage in some collective decision-making.

carla and Nick: Maybe one thing to follow up on this. In that question you talked about the forgotten impacts of really subtle things like architecture, planning, and in Caliban and the Witch you talk about the forgotten impacts of the witch hunts, and how those impacts are still with us today. Are there underappreciated movements of joy and transformation where we haven’t fully appreciated the impacts?

Federici: There are so many movements. The Suffragette movement, for example, is always portrayed as a bourgeois movement, but I’m discovering that it had a working-class dimension as well. But rather than thinking of particular movements, what most matters is discovering and recreating the collective memory of past struggles. In the US there is a systematic attempt to destroy this memory and now this is extending across the world, with the destruction of the main historical centers of the Middle East—a form of dispossession that has major consequences and yet is rarely discussed. Reviving the memory of the struggles of the past makes us feel part of something larger than our individual lives and in this way it gives a new meaning to what we are doing and gives us courage, because it makes us less afraid of what can happen to us individually.

Nick and carla: Another thing that we wanted to talk to you about is the style and tone of intellectual engagement. Your style is so generous, and you have a really militant critique of capitalism, but you’re always pointing to examples in a range of different movements and you seem to reserve really pointed attacks for large destructive institutions like the World Bank. It seems to us that this differs from a lot of radical critique today, which can be very focused on exposing complicities or limitations, talking about the ways that movements are lacking, that they haven’t yet reached this or that, as well as targeting individuals. So we wanted to ask: Is this style something that you’ve cultivated and that you’re intentional about, and maybe more generally, can you talk about the potential of theory in intellectual work today, and what joyful theory might look like? What makes theory enabling and transformative, and what gets in the way of that?

Federici: It’s partially a consequence of growing old. You understand things that when you’re younger you didn’t see. One thing that I’ve learned is to be more humble and to hold my judgment of people until I know them beyond what I can make out from what they say, realizing that people often say foolish things that they do not really believe or have not seriously thought about.

It also comes from recognizing that we can change, which means that we should stress our potential rather than our limits. One of the most amazing experiences in the women’s movement was to see how much we could grow, learning to speak in public, write poetry, make beautiful posters. All this has given me a strong distaste for the impulse to squash everything at the first sign that something is not right.

I’ve made it a principle not to indulge in speech that is destructive. Striving to speak clearly, not to make people feel like fools because they don’t understand what I say, is a good part of it. That’s also something I’ve taken from the women’s movement. So many times we had felt humiliated, being in situations where we didn’t understand what men had said, and didn’t have the courage to ask what they meant. I don’t want to make other people ever feel this way.

carla and Nick: You’re really good at that! One of the things we were talking about this morning is the question of identity and a lot of the critiques of sad militancy that we have read really make identity into the problem quite a bit more than we would want to. We’re trying to think through how to speak to the power of identity and experience while also pointing to power of transformation and working across difference, and how the two of those aren’t antithetical in the way they’re sometimes set up, that they’re crucial for each other.

Federici: I think the critique of identity has taken on dimensions that are not always justified. What people often criticize as identity is actually the position that a person has had in the capitalist organization of work. For example, is being a housewife an identity? Yes, it’s an identity, but it is also a particular place in the capitalist organization of work, like being a miner, it’s also a particular form of exploitation. Identity is often used in a way that hides that exploitation. That’s when it becomes problematic.

Moreover, behind identity there’s also a history of struggle and resistance to exploitation. Identity can be a signpost for a whole history of struggle. When I say I am a feminist, for instance, I consciously connect myself to history of struggle that women have made. Identities can be mutable as well. “Woman,” for example, is not a fixed identity. The concept of woman has undergone a tremendous change over the last fifty years.

The problem has been the wedding of “identity” with the politics of rights, as when we speak of women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, as if each group were entitled to a packet of entitlements, but in isolation from each other, so that we lose sight of the commonalities and the possibility of a common struggle.

Nick and carla: That’s really helpful. Our last question is about hope. Spinoza himself is pretty wary of hope, but he sees it as quite future-oriented: to hope is also to fear, because you’re attached to a future object or outcome. More generally hope is often equated with a naïve optimism: it can become fixated on a certain outcome. But in one of your interviews,[vi] you talked about it as something that’s a lot more open-ended. It’s more the sense that we can do something. Do you think that hope is necessarily attached to a vision of the future?

Federici: Hope is positive if it is an active passion; but only if it does not replace the work necessary to make our action successful.

**

Silvia Federici is an Italian activist and author of many works, including Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective and organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign in the ‘70s. She was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.

[1] Note: when we interviewed Silvia Federici, we were still using the phrase “sad militancy” in place of “rigid radicalism.” The original terminology is retained throughout.

[i] Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” JoFreeman.com, n.d., http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/trashing.htm.

[ii] Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Dam,” (Boston: New England Free Press, 1969).

[iii] See Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Ms. Magazine, July 1973.

[iv] Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on Its Feet,” Social Text 9/10 (1984), 338–46.

[v] See Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, trans. Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2010); Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.

[vi] Silvia Federici, “Losing the sense that we can do something is the worst thing that can happen,” interview by Candida Hadley, Halifax Media Co-op, November 5, 2013, http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/audio/losing-sense-we-can-do-something-worst-thing-can-h/19601.

Lead image of Silvia Federici by Luis Nieto Dickens

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

The post Feeling Powers Growing: An Interview with Silvia Federici appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview with Gustavo Esteva was conducted in 2014 by carla bergman and Nick Montgomery for Joyful Militancy. For this email interview we (Nick and carla) sent a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind our book project, and then included a series of questions based on Esteva’s other writings. As time went on in the process of researching, doing interviews, and writing the book, our ideas and articulations shifted, and for that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

Consider joining the collective of supporters for Gustavo Esteva: For decades, Esteva has been supporting grassroots movements and initiatives; however, he recently lost his main source of income. At the age of 81, he has no savings or pension and is facing some very large medical bills. Many of us have experienced his hospitality, the grace with which he offers his time and wisdom, and the deep love and support he provides to his friends, family, and fellow-travellers. Please consider sharing or donating to this Fundly page on a monthly or a one-time basis.

carla & Nick (c&N): What is your initial reaction to the preamble on joyful militancy: how did it feel?  What resonated, and what didn’t?  Are there particular pieces that make you curious?  Excited?  Annoyed?

Esteva: It feels great! I am excited and curious about the whole thing, the approach, which clearly resonated with my theory and practice.

Your distinction between joy and sadness is obviously rooted in an old tradition but presented in a new way, more clear, more open, and you escape immediately from the temptation of a binary separation. I can associate the proposal and many specific statements with my own experience.

We have been using in recent years a word in Spanish that does not function in English: sentipensar. What is behind the word is that you can not think without feeling or feel without thinking…but there is a dominant, absurd conviction that you can and must separate thinking and feeling, and you can thus get “scientific thinking”, “objective thinking”, etc. supposedly separated from any subjectivity and feeling and consequently more valid. I feel a profound connection between our sentipensar and your concepts of joyful militancy and sad militancy.

There is a serious challenge in the proposal: how to assume it and apply it without falling into sadness, i.e. classifying, excluding, disqualifying? Yes, the idea is to live in “a truly radical, creative, and joyful way”. In that expression, are we not disqualifying the “other” ways, which will not be “truly” radical? We need to be very careful to say what we want to say.

And I have a problem with the words “activist” and “militancy”…which we cannot cease to use!

1. On the one hand, the military implication: an activist is “an individual who favors, incites or demands intensified activities, especially in time of war” (Webster). On the other hand, the role assumed by the activist as a “leader”. An activist is a person activating others. This may imply that you think that the others, the people, are not active; we need to activate them. This is usually wrong: the people are always doing something, they are moving. Or, even worse, you think that the people are moving but in the wrong direction and you know the right direction. You thus try to activate them in the right direction. A kind of vanguard, again.
2. Militancy cannot be delinked from war, the military. Militant is: “1. Fighting; engaged in war; serving as a soldier. 2. Of a combative or warlike character or disposition; ready and willing to fight.” Militancy is “fighting spirit, attitude or policy” (Webster).

True, we are involved in a war. The powers that be are waging a war in which we, the people, are the identified enemy. We are in what the Zapatistas called the Fourth World War. Are we engaged in it, serving as soldiers in such a war, in one of the sides? “Choose well your enemy,” says an old Arab proverb; “you will be like him.” If our enemy is an army, you will become an army…

Some of us (activists, militants) have suffered the urgency and the compulsion to do something against those oppressing us (“the dominant order”) and for a decent society, a different kind of world. For many of us, it is almost impossible to resist this impulse…and we don’t want to resist it: we feel that it makes us human and protects our dignity. But very often this impulse shapes us as sad militants and destroys the joy of being alive and thus fighting (to fight is to dream).

In my case, after a long, solid period of sad militancy, the path to escape from that condition was three-fold:

1. My experience at the grassroots. Unable to understand what I was seeing and experiencing at the grassroots with the lens, the categories, in which I was educated, I took off one day those lenses and began to see and experience a whole new world, full of joy, creativity, and conviviality.
2. My late discovery of the Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Deleuze and Guattari, and particularly its preface by Michel Foucault opened my heart. For Foucault the book poses some of the questions implicit in your presentation: “How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order? Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica.” It was not easy to read the book itself; perhaps it is too French, and too located in a specific intellectual context of certain time and place. But it is fascinating and useful. As Foucault clarifies in the preface, the book combats three adversaries: the sad militant, the technicians of desire (psychoanalysts and semiologists), and fascism, particularly “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” And he states, firmly: “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”
3. The most important, what seems to be the most radical sentence of the Zapatistas: “We are quite ordinary women and men, children and old people, that is to say, rebels, non-conformists, uncomfortable, dreamers.” (La Jornada, 4 August 1999). With the Zapatistas we learned to be activated by ordinary men and women and accepted their leadership…instead of trying to lead them, as activists, organizers, etc. And we learned with them, with the people, how to transform our militancy into a joyful, peaceful struggle. This was probably the “final” cure (I hope) from the Leninism guiding my political activities and in fact my whole life until the mid-80s but still surreptitiously present in the 90s.

c&N: How did you come to grapple with sad/joyful militancy: i.e. how did it emerge as something you’re oriented towards (how’d you get here?)

Esteva: As most things in my life, I got ‘there’ through practice, experience.

In the 60s, when I became associated with a group in the process of organizing a guerrilla in Mexico, whose members were assuming that they were already the vanguard of the proletariat because they had the revolutionary program, I was fully immersed in what we now call sad militancy. Our ‘program’ was evidently an intellectual construction in the Leninist tradition. We had already our criticism of Stalinism, etc. but we still were in the tradition of trying to seize the power of the state for a revolution from the top-down, through social engineering. We were thus preparing ourselves (military training, etc.) and organizing. I can apply to the experience your description: “perfectionism, suspicion, cynicism, fear, ideological purity, competition, race to radicalism, fear of mistakes/humiliation, self-hatred…” Of course, as you observe, there were moments or conditions of joy, laughter, intensified emotion, exhilaration… The environment of conspiracy and clandestinity and the shared ideology shaped real camaraderie and episodes full of joy, but it was clear that the experience itself was pure sad militancy: “creating boundaries, making distinctions, comparing, making plans, and so on.” One day I will share many stories of that phase of my life that illustrate this very well. How the whole experience ended makes the point better than any of those stories: one of our leaders killed the other leader because of a woman. The episode evidenced for us the kind of violence we were accumulating in ourselves and wanted to impose on the whole society. In the military training, for an army or a guerrilla, to learn how to use a weapon is pretty easy; what is difficult is to learn to kill someone in cold blood, someone like you, that did nothing personal against you… Nothing sadder than that.

The joy of living, the passion for fiestas, the capacity to express emotions, the social climate that I found at the grassroots, in villages and barrios, in the midst of extreme misery, began to change my attitudes. My participation in different kinds of peasant and urban marginal movements gave me a radically different approach. The break point was perhaps the explosion of autonomy and self-organization after the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985. It became for me a life-changing experience. The victims of the earthquake were suffering all kind of hardships. They had lost friends and relatives, their homes, their possessions, almost everything. Their convivial reconstruction of their lives and culture would not have been possible without the amazing passion for living they showed at every moment. Such passion had very powerful political expressions and was the seed for amazing social movements. In the following years the balance of forces changed in Mexico City, already a monstrous settlement of 15 million people. There was a radical contrast between the guerrilla and these movements. The very notion of militancy changed in me: it was no longer associated with an organization, a party, an ideology, and even less a war… It was an act of love.

c&N: What’s been your experience of sad militancy in everyday life—and especially in radical spaces?

Esteva: In the 60s, in the preparation of our guerrilla, an important aspect of our training was to bring our ideological commitment and the principles of our training as would-be guerrillas to our daily lives. This attitude brought coldness, separation, sadness…

Emma Goldman expressed this in a beautiful way:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business. I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

One very important point is that in the practice of sad militancy it is almost unavoidable to fall in love with power. You are trying to seize it –from the State- or to create your own power, “people’s power”, “popular power”. And this obsession, this fascism, is applied to the life in the family, with friends, with every one. It is one that very radical and progressive men can be feudal at home, in their attitudes with their wifes and children. Machismo is everywhere in sad militancy.

c&N: What sustains sad militancy?

Esteva: Dogmatism, even fundamentalism, the strong conviction that you own the truth,  objective truth, scientific truth – and that theory guides practice: you must obey your theory, the program, the ideas…

c&N: What provokes or inspires it?  What makes it spread?

Esteva: The separation of means and ends. The joy is projected to the future –the promised land, the new society- and all kinds of means are accepted for your high ideals, means that can be very sad and terrible: killing, betraying, oppressing… This is very serious business and you must commit all your effort, energy, feelings, connections, etc. to the revolutionary goal, subordinating to it every minute, every emotion, every love…

This is contagious. Of course, there is a kind of exhilaration in this attitude: you are saving the world, you are fighting against the identified enemy, you are offering the sacrifice of your life for the common good, etc. etc. But you can commit the worst crimes and be very sad in this endeavor.

c&N: What’s been your experience of joyful militancy? can you speak to the Zapatistas and the use of this tactic?

Esteva: The Zapatistas are of course a perfect illustration for the alternative attitude.

In a letter to the Argentinian people in 2003 subcomandante Marcos wrote:

…sometimes you forget the points and lines that in the maps mark frontiers… All scientists know that music, dance, food and feeling are fundamental ingredients to construct what some call utopia, but is possible and necessary: a new world, that is, better. Here in Mexico, a place of transgressors of oblivion, and professionals of hope, there are some human beings who have decided to keep awake the powerful organizing a fiesta that some disoriented call an uprising and is nothing but the common dance of dignity. The dance in which the human being is, and is human.”

In a letter to Eric Jauffret, on July 5, 1995, subcomandante Marcos wrote:

We are not fighting with our weapons. Our example and our dignity now fight for us. In the peace talks the government delegates have confessed that they have studied in order to learn about dignity and that they have been unable to understand it. They ask the Zapatista delegates to explain what is dignity. The Zapatistas laugh, after months of pain they laugh. Their laughter echoes and escapes unto the high wall behind which arrogance hides its fear. The Zapatista delegates laugh even when the dialogue ends, and they are giving their report. Everyone who hears them laughs, and the laughter re-arranges faces which have been hardened by hunger and betrayal. The Zapatistas laugh in the mountains of the Mexican southeast and the sky cannot avoid infection by that laughter and the peals of laughter emerge. The laughter is so great that tears arise and it begins to rain as though the laughter were a gift for the dry land…With so much laughter raining, who can lose? Who deserves to lose?

In December 2007, in their intervention in the symposium to honor Andrés Aubry, subcomandante Marcos shared that a young woman told him a few years before: “If your revolution does not know how to dance, don’t invite me to your revolution”. This is probably a variant of a statement commonly attributed to Emma Goldman that occurs in several variants: If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!; If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!; If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution; A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having; If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.

No quote, however, can illustrate the character of Zapatismo as joyous militancy better that the daily life in Zapatista communities. Yes, you have the amazing sense of humour of subcomandante Marcos and many comandantes and comandantas. But there is nothing like the joy and freedom of the children in Zapatista communities. The Zapatistas work a lot, very day, and they are dealing with all kinds of hardships, restrictions and aggressions. They have real motives to be sad. And they know how and when to cry. But they laugh all the time and they have wide spaces for creativity, hospitality, love. There is no event without a fiesta. They have created a convivial society, perhaps the first.

We use the word aesthetic to allude to the ideal of beauty. The etymological meaning, almost lost, associate the word with the intensity of sensual experience, it meanse perceptive, sharp in the senses. That meaning is retained in words like anesthesia. Comparing a funeral in a modern, middle class family and in a village in Mexico or India, we can see then contrast in how you express or not your feelings and how joy and sadness can be combined with great intensity.

Zapatismo is clearly an aesthetic movement, both for its beauty and the intensity of the senses in it.

c&N: What inspires/encourages/sustains joyful militancy?

Esteva: Again, one important lesson from the Zapatistas. If you are not separating means and ends, your struggle embodies and takes the shape of the outcome. If you are looking for a society without violence, you are not using violence in the struggle. Joy, love, kindness, everything that you want in the decent society you are tying to create, appear in the militancy, in the real, immediate actions of the struggle.

c&N: How do you try to embody it?

Esteva: Gandhi said this beautifully: Be the change you wish for the world. Instead of preaching, telling everyone what to do, qualifying and disqualifying everyone, focusing your effort and energy in identifying the ‘enemy’ and fighting against it, I try to do the kind of things in which I believe and to embody, in my daily live, the attitudes and practices of the new society as I imagine it.

For a long time now, I have been try to apply in my daily life Paul Goodman’s advice:

Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!

c&N: Because we think joy and sadness are always moving and shifting into new configurations, we are really curious about how these shifts take place.  Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy into sad militancy, or vice-versa?  What leads to these shifts?

Esteva: Yes, continually, day after day and almost hour after hour, in the Oaxaca Commune, our experience in 2006. Our movement evolved in a continual confrontation between the people themselves, self-organized and autonomous groups, and a variety of organizations of a vertical structure—unions,  “vanguards”, etc. —most of which can be typically described as sad militancy. There was a continual fluctuation and shifting. I do think that the main factor producing the shifts to sad militancy was power, the struggle for power, the way in which many militants were mirroring the power we were fighting against in what they saw as the construction of “popular power”. Such struggle was often projected inside the movement, when the militants were competing for power and transforming their comrades into enemies as an expression of rivalry. In the same way, the shift to joyous militancy came from the creativity and joy of the people themselves. In the radio we controlled, we had a very popular program: “Barricade love,” beautiful love stories emerging during the nights in the barricade, when young people were preparing themselves to defend the neighborhood from the police and the governor’s goons. A lot of ingenuity and creativity emerging from the people became a limit to the actions imposed by sad militants.

c&N: A common perception we’ve been grappling with is that joyful militancy is naïve—a failure to appreciate how bad things are (if you’re not sad/angry/cynical, you’re not paying attention) – how do you react to this?

Esteva: There is a point in the critique: we need to be continually aware of the horror, not to hide it…as the ‘system’ does. Reaction: irony, laughter, ridiculization… When Galeano states: “Who is not afraid of hunger, is afraid of food” and I comment this statement saying: “We cannot expect a moral epiphany in the CEOs of Monsanto and WalMart,” we are combining the awareness of the horror, paying attention to it, with the joy of laughing at them and doing our own thing.

c&N: There’s also a perception that joyful militancy is just a symptom of privilege (in the north American context). How do you think about joyful militancy in the context of privilege and oppression?

Esteva: My feeling is that such perception is a prejudice. The poor and oppressed should be sad. I did learn sad militancy with highly educated people, middle-class professionals and so on. I did learn joyful militancy with urban marginal, peasants and particularly indigenous peoples – under extreme oppression and misery.

c&N: How do you think about joyful militancy across divides of colonialism, ageism, heteropatriarchy, racism, ableism, etc?

Esteva: It is what may erase those divides! It is the way out!

At the end of the interview, Esteva included some pertinent quotes from other authors:

Radicalism is not “a certain set of ideas, but rather an attitude, an approach”, doubting everything, “readiness and capacity for critical questioning of all assumptions and institutions which have become idols under the name of common sense, logic and what is supposed to be natural…Radical doubt as a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options… The radical approach…starts from the roots”, i.e., man, “but we speak of man as a process;…of his potential for developing all his powers; those for greater intensity of being, greater harmony, greater love, greater awareness. We also speak of man with a potential to be corrupted of his power to act being transformed into the passion for power over others, of his love of live degenerating into the passion to destroy life (“Introduction,” by Erich Fromm, in Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness, London: Marion Boyars, 1972, pp.7-9).

“This call to face facts, rather than deal in illusions-to live change, rather than rely on engineering-is an attempt to re-introduce the word ‘celebration’ into ordinary English… To discover…what we must do to use mankind’s power to create the humanity, the dignity and the joyfulness of each one of us” (“A Call to Celebration” in Illich, Celebration of Awareness, p.14-5)

In English ‘convivial’ now seeks the company of tipsy jolliness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite to the austere meaning of modern ‘eutrapelia’ which I intend. (OED: Of or belonging to a feast or banquet; feasting or jovial companionship; fond of feasting and good company; disposed to enjoy festive society; festive; jovial)… ’Austerity’ has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while for Aristotle and Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship… Thomas deals with disciplined and creative playfulness…a virtue that does not exclude all enjoyments, but only those that are distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. For Thomas ‘austerity’ is a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which he calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations. (Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, New York/Evanston/San Francisco/London: Harper & Row, 1973, pp, xxiv-xxv).

From Michel Foucault’s Preface to Anti-Oedipus:

Whence the three adversaries confronted by Anti-Oedipus. Three adversaries who do not have the same strength, who represent varying degrees of danger, and whom the book combats in different ways:

1. The political ascetics, the sad militant, the terrorists of theory, those who would preserve the pure order of politics and political discourse. Bureaucrats of the revolution and civil servants of Truth.
2. The poor technicians of desire — psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and symptom — who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack.
3. Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus’ opposition to the others is more of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini — which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively — but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

I would say that Anti-Oedipus (may its authors forgive me) is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time (perhaps that explains why its success was not limited to a particular “readership”: being anti-oedipal has become a life style, a way of thinking and living). How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior? The Christian moralists sought out the traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest traces of fascism in the body.

Paying a modest tribute to Saint Francis de Sales, one might say that Anti-Oedipus is an Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life.

This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide for everyday life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

• Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

• Do not become enamored of power.

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

Image of Gustavo Esteva from Joyful Threads on vimeo

The post The very notion of militancy changed in me: an interview with Gustavo Esteva appeared first on P2P Foundation.