The Covid-19 quarantine has given us time to reflect on the work we’ve done toward “creating capacity”, that is, resilience and resources for when “normal” breaks down. We’d like to share some thoughts about that work, and our focus going forward.

Author/archdruid John Michael Greer talks about “catabolic collapse“. That’s not the guns & ammo, post-apocalyptic-yet-still-powered-by-capitalism scenario favored in the media, but an ongoing process of societal disintegration. Looking at our mainstream institutions, economics or beliefs, it’s clear that we’ve been collapsing for a while. Events like pandemics punctuate the catabolic curve with sudden, eye-popping jumps set against the processes bedrocked as background, never foreground. Welcome to the apocalypse, we’ve saved you a seat.

The origins of the word “apocalypse” point to an “unveiling”, dropping illusion and finding revelation. As our global production systems and social institutions (eg. healthcare, education) are suddenly overwhelmed, their basic unsuitability is exposed. Just weeks ago so mighty, economies now sputter when faced with this latest adversity. As many have noted, this sudden spike in the process of collapse portends a larger undertaking in ecological and social entropy. And as Covid-19 takes its human toll worldwide, we’ve begun to see the best and worst that humanity can offer in its choice of loyalties, whether to human life or to economic systems, and the power struggles in finding the right balance (if such a thing exists). It’s another opportunity to consider, what is inherent in us as people, and what is the product of our systems? Growing up in systems preaching that “greed is good”, that “the only social responsibility of businesses is to increase profits”, or that “there is not alternative”, is it any wonder that the worst reactions to the crisis are marked by individualism, paranoia and accumulation?

Natural systems are rebounding because pollution and emissions are down, but it’s impossible to fist-pump about this while people are suffering, dying, or working beyond capacity to save lives. In fact, it’s a good time to question the very validity of work: which services are essential, how to use our “free time”. What solutions can the market offer to the health crisis, to overcrowded hospitals, to breaks in supply lines of essential goods and services? To those unable to meet their rent, mortgage or future expenses? Some claim our global, industrialized model is to blame for the virus, others cry that “the cure is worse than the disease“, that the economic effects of quarantining will create more destruction than the virus itself. 

We think these predictions are not endemic to economic science, but to a history of accumulatory, command and control dynamics which, via longstanding institutions including patriarchy and colonialism, have found their apex in capitalist realism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Short a few weeks of predatory feeding, the growth-based model shows its weakness against the apocalypse. Another veil is lifting.

What else can we see? What will the world look like whenever “this is over” (and how will we know when it is)?

Could this be the herald of another political economy based on abundance, not scarcity and greed? We can help nature to restore itself, cut down emissions, our consumption of mass manufactured and designed-to-break-down crap. We can radically curtail speculative ventures and fictitious commodities. Slash inequality from the bottom up, spend our time away from bullshit jobs to reimagine the world. Use this free time to reconnect, cherish our aliveness, break out of containment, care for each other, grieve what we’ve lost and celebrate what we still have.

We do have the frameworks, we have been creating this capacity for quite a while. From localized, yet globally connected systems of production that can rapidly respond to urgent needs without depending on massive global chains, to ways to organize the workforce into restorative and purpose-oriented clusters of people who take care of each other. This new economy will need a new politics and a more emancipated relation to the State: we have tried it and succeeded. What new worlds (many worlds are possible) can we glimpse from under this lifted veil?

Here’s a question: did you already know about these potentials? Are we still having this conversation among ourselves, or have these terrible circumstances gifted us with an opportunity for (apocalyptic) clarity? The normal is collapsing, while our weirdness looks saner than ever before. 

Timothy Leary famously called for us to “find the others“. I think that the others are all of us, and this may be the moment where more of us can recognise that. A few years ago, we created an accessible, easy to use platform to share the potential of the Commons with everyone. Today it’s more relevant than ever. The projects we work on (Commons Transition and DisCO) are based on two simple precepts:

1. Everyone can become a commoner
2. Commoners can make more commoners

This is why we strive to create accessible and relatable frameworks for people to find the commoner within themselves. But we need to grow out of our bubbles, algorithmically predetermined or not; we need to rewild our message beyond the people who already know. Movements like Degrowth, Open Source software and hardware, anti-austerity, Social Solidarity Economy, Ecofeminism, Buen Vivir…we are all learning from each other. We must continue to humbly and patiently pass the knowledge on, listen to more voices and experiences, and keep widening the circle to include everyone, until there are no others.

Please share this article with anyone who may benefit from these “crazy ideas” that suddenly don’t look so crazy anymore. Start a conversation with people who, aghast at the rapid collapse and lack of reliable systemic support, are eager for new ideas, solutions, hope. The greatest enclosure of the commons is that of the mind: our capacity to imagine better worlds, to be kinder to each other and to the Earth. This will not be an easy or straightforward process. We need to hold each other through the loss and pain. We need to keep finding the others among all of us, until there are no more.

• Originally published in Stacco.works
• Cover art photograph by Antonio Marín Segovia
• “On Panic Buying” by the Sam Wallman and Miroslav Sandev
• “We Must Reimagine Everything” was originally published in Spanish by Miguel Brieva Clismón. It was translated to English by Guerrilla Translation

The post No New Normal appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson are building a solidarity economy, anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises. This visionary project not only continues the historic Afro-American struggle for land, but shows how we can all make a just transition to a zero carbon, zero waste economy ourselves.

Above you will find the trailer a short film on Cooperation Jackson. You can find the full film below. Also, click here to see all our posts related to Cooperation Jackson.

The post Cooperation Jackson: Building a Social and Solidarity Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AureaSocial’s entrance

SELF-MANAGEMENT SPACE OPEN TO THE WORLD FROM 2O11

We date back to 2011 when the Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) was consolidated after a year of work and having actively participated in the mobilizations of the 15M, a movement formed by people who are free and independent from the political parties, which made the possibility of practicing self-organization resonate in the minds and consciences of many people and made it possible to remember that only people save people.

In this context, we found that the CIC’s permanent assembly began to run a space which a family with close affinity to social movments had ceded to them, to stop the Banco Popular from evicting the property. This bank was attempting to halt the mortgage agreement that they had with this family business.

As it was all done confirming to legality, after some time the court of Barcelona issued a judicial resolution where the Xarxa Integral de Profesionals y Usuaries SCCL, a cooperative tool of the CIC became the holder of the rental contract until 2023.

Here began a new stage based on self-management, which meant without subsidies nor from the state neither any regional or municipal aid of any kind.

During all this time, Aurea Social, a local of 1400 squaremeters located in the Poblet neighborhood (Sagrada Familia) is linked to, related with and  visited by all kinds of activists, communication and media channels, researchers of many different fields coming not only from Catalonia and Spain but from all over the planet earth.So much so that we have received visits and invitations to explain our self-managed experiences to places all over Europe, America, Asia, Africa and even Oceania.

Anthropologists, Sociologists, Political Scientists, Journalists, Universities, Cooperative Federations from all over the world have visited and communicated with us. We have been in touch with many different people, even with those who have not invented anything but have simply decided to make reflections, decisions and action for a way of life with parameters opposed to capitalism from a constructive and inclusive attitude with those people and collectives who understand that the real revolution is not possible without an individual and collective transformation based on mutual support, assembly, and horizontal and non-hierarchical organization

In this journey we have tried to be honest and sincere with ourselves and we have promoted and continue to promote individual and collective self-managed projects and the concept of the common as theoretical and practical reference.

In fields such as Health, Housing and Education we have collaborated with many people who wanted and felt the need to manage their lives from the sovereignty and not from the submission to the criteria of the system. Not everything has been a success, precisely in these aspects that we have been most self-critical and we have observed that our proposals in this respect without the necessary resources were simple intentions.

For this reason, the bet of giving shelter to productive projects throughout Catalonia when many of them were not viable within the capitalist system,within the networks generated by the Integral Cooperative became possible, it could be said that in these years we have put our legal tools at theservice of more than two thousand projectsto many different types of activities that one can imagine…

This is where our self-management strategy has proven most effective.

We have promoted a social economy outside the capitalist system in social currency that has moved the amount of 400,000 units only in last year

Today, after 7 years we are at a crossroads.

The Capital is once again putting pressure on the self-managed organizations and on our spaces.

We want to make a call to all the organizations of activists, self-managemened projects, anti-authoritarians, foundations, grassroots organizations, popular and libertarian associations from all over the world to support Aurea Social in this moment of attack of the Bank (Banco Popular /Santander) and the Capital against the self-managed spaces.

Now more than ever we need your support and not only your political but also your financial support to face this attack that wants to expel the Cooperativa Integral from a neighbourhood of Barcelona where we the witnesses that another way of life is possible.

We have generated an oasis of self-management in the midst of a capitalist, gentrified and submissive context with the forms and customs of domination that we neither share nor promote.

We need spaces where freedom of expression can be guaranteed, where in order to be free it is not necessary to be submissive to the authorities that are daily violating civil rights in Catalonia and in the Spanish state, in the present situation and in the future it is very important to maintain liberated spaces that do not depend on the state or in any of its instances in order to ensure that the culture of freedom is not threatened by the economic power of Capital.

We, therefore urge you to participate within your best ability in the crowfunding that we have set in motion which aims to raise funds for the collectivization of AureaSocial so that it does not become the property of the Bank.

Union, Action and Self-Management!!!

Photo by Fotomovimiento

The post Solidarity with Aurea Social, the Catalan Integral Coop’s open, self-managed space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This book should be read through to its end, i.e. chapter five, because its first four chapters on the precariat are only set in a more complex geopolitical context in that final chapter. To be honest, I was quite reactive at times during the reading of the first four chapters, because two very important structural elements were missing in Foti’s analysis. First is the commons itself, the other side of the antagonistic struggles of the precariat; and second is the ecological crisis, the very material conditions under which this struggle must occur today. Foti indeed calls for economic and monetary growth, and sounds like an unabashed neo-Keynesian, but only in the last chapter does he stress that this growth should be thermodynamically sound (i.e. he calls for monetary growth, but not growth in material services). Foti also almost completely ignores the role of the commons and ‘commonalism’ in the first four chapters, only acknowledging in a few parts of chapter 5, that it is a vital, constituent part of the precarious condition. If you don’t read chapter 5, you could mistakenly see Foti’s analysis as an exercise in re-imagining the class dynamics and compromises of the New Deal and post-WWII European welfare states, simply replacing working class with precariat, working class parties with social populism, and the New Deal with a social compact for green capitalism. For example, it would have really helped to know from the beginning that Foti realizes that material growth is impossible, something not clear in his language until the last chapter.

So, the fact that this is a remarkably well thought-out book about contemporary strategy for social change should be tempered by a few paradoxes that the author has not completely resolved.

Indeed, at the heart of the book also lies an enduring paradox: Foti calls for the most radical forms of conflict, and identifies with the more radical cultural minorities, acknowledging their anticapitalist and anarchist ethos, yet calls for mere reformism as a focus and outcome. This is, therefore, not a book about transforming our societies to post-capitalist logics; this is a book about a new reformism. This is a book against neoliberalism, not against capitalism. At times, it is plain ‘capitalist realism’, as Foti explicitly acknowledges that he sees no dynamic value creation outside of capitalism. For Foti, it is clear that if sufficient conflict and precariat self-organisation can occur, then a new regulation of capitalism can occur. He justifies this by a detailed analysis of the different regulatory modes of capitalism (Smith-ism, Fordism, jobs-ism) and how they relate to the Kondratieff economic cycles, drawing on the insights of Carlota Perez and others. Foti distinguishes crises of demand, where there is too much accumulation of capital, and not enough distribution. These crises, he says, are essentially reformist crises as people mobilize to restore balance in the redistribution, but not against the system per se. The crisis of the 30s and the crisis after 2008 are such crises, he convincingly argues. Other crises are caused by a failing supply, due to over-regulation of capital and falling profit rates, such as the crisis of the 70s, and these crises, which are inflationary, are revolutionary. This distinction between crises of accumulation and crises of regulation is, in my opinion, very insightful and true. This recognition may, of course, be troubling, but if true, we must take serious stock of it. We simply are not in revolutionary times right now, but rather in a struggle between national populism and social populism. From this analysis, Foti then argues that the first priority is for the precariat to re-regulate for a distribution of wealth, much like the old working class achieved after WWII.

But even if we acknowledge this conjuncture, I would argue that Foti insufficiently balances his outlook between reforming capitalism and constructing post-capitalism, between antagonistic conflict and positive construction of the new. He argues that without income, there can be no such construction. This is very likely true, so we need to rebalance redistribution in a way that income growth can lead to immaterial growth compatible with the ecological limits of our planet, and use these surpluses to transform societal structures. Foti calls for social (or ‘eco’ populist) movements and coalitions as the political means to that end, pointing to Podemos and En Comu, and perhaps Sanders and Corbyn, as such forces, supported by to-be created Precariat Syndicates. He also puts forward the thesis that the enemy is national populism, an alliance between retrograde fossil fuel capitalism and the salariat. On the other side, we find a possible alliance of green capitalism (a real effort, not a marketing ploy) with the precariat, with the former fighting for top-down coalition and the second for bottom-up regulation. This division of the working class is, in my view, far too stark and perhaps even defeatist. I would very strongly argue to seek alliances and develop policies that can give hope to the salariat. The thrust of our work for the Commons Transition aims at precisely that. (Elsewhere in the book, Foti does call for an alliance with progressive middle classes, but if these are not the workers with jobs, where then are these?)

Foti correctly critiques, in my view, people like Mason and Rifkin for failing to problematize the post-capitalist transition. They make it seem like an inexorable process if not affirming that we are already post-capitalist, as some others do, but in my view, Foti himself fails to pay proper attention to this transition. What if the re-regulation of capitalism doesn’t work, for example? Then at some point, say in about 30 years, as Kondratieff cycles would indicate, we would still face a crisis of over-regulation, and a more revolutionary moment. For Foti, we have to take it on faith that green capitalism will be a successful new regulatory mode of capitalism. What if it turns out to be a unworkable compromise and that more drastic action is needed? But Foti has no faith in alternatives to capitalism, which means that the only alternatives would then be eco-fascism as a new feudalism with only consumption for the rich, lifeboat eco-hacking, a situation akin to that of medieval communes, or dictatorial eco-maoism — say, Cuba on a global scale.

Contra this ‘capitalist realism’, our contention at the P2P Foundation is that post-capitalism is both necessary and possible, even if we recognize that today is possibly a reformist moment in that evolution/transformation. In that context, the construction of seed forms, the recognition of other forms of value creation (which can be monetized!), of other forms of self-organization, are absolutely a vital side of the coin in the dialectic of construction and conflict. Foti seems to forget that the traditional working class did not simply ‘fight’, but constructed cooperatives (both consumer coops and producer coops), unions, parties, mutualities and many fraternal/sororal organizations. The very generalization of the welfare system was an extension, by means of the state, of the solidarity mechanisms of the working class, which had taken decades to develop. But vitally, the identity of the working class itself was always more than a mere reaction to capitalism: this was a movement toward another type of society, whether expressed through socialism, social-democracy, anarchism, and other variants. When that hope was all but lost, that was also the end of the strength and identity of working class movements. There can be no offensive social strategy without a strong social imaginary, and reformist designs alone won’t do. So commonalism (Foti’s term for what we’d call “commoning”) is not just something that we do when we come home from work, or tired from our conflictual organizing against an enemy from whom we want mere redistribution. On the contrary, it is vital part of the class formation and identity. This is why we stress our identity as not just precariat, which is a negative formulation that characterizes us as the weaker victims of the capitalist class, but as commoners, the multitude of co-constructors of viable futures that correspond to contemporary, emancipatory desires. We cannot simply trust green capitalism; we vitally need to build thermodynamically sound and mutualized provisioning systems as commons, even if we have to compromise with capitalism. Post-capitalism should not be essentialized as something occuring ‘after the revolution’, but as an ongoing process, dynamically inter-linked with political self-organizing and conflict.  In this book, Foti is only really good at conflict. Even if we look at conflict, I would argue that the strength of the reformist compromise after WWII was very much linked to the fear of the flawed alternative that existed, and that the forms of compromise were the result of decades of invention of new forms.

If we take that view, then I believe the contradiction in Foti’s book can be resolved. In that case, we do not have to ask the radical precariat to give up its values for a reformist compromise, but to productively combine them with a radically transformative post-capitalist practice.

There is another issue with Foti’s book. He strongly stresses the superdiversity of the precariat, and the key role of gender and race/migration unity in their struggles. He also mentions en passe the need for a potential Eurasian alignment between Europe and China, now that the Atlantic unity has been broken by Trump. But, at the same time, this is really a very Eurocentric book, calling for a new compromise in Europe and ‘advanced western states’. Obviously, since in the Global South it is the salariat and proletariat which are growing, there is a theoretical difficulty here. But what if, as we contend at the P2P Foundation, a thermodynamically sound economy would require a cosmo-localization of our global economy combining global sharing of knowledge with substantial relocalization of physical production (as even big bank reports now recognize)? Only if we acknowledge this, can we actually have a new global view of solidarity, as both elements benefit workers, salaried and precarious, in the whole world.

In conclusion, I find Foti’s book to be an excellent first half of a book, which would have been much better and sound if it had more extensively struggled with the commons equation of the precariat. The commons is not something we do ‘afterwards’, after a successful New Green Deal; it is something that is as ongoing and vital. Theoretically, in a few paragraphs at the end of the book, Foti seems to recognize this but does not integrate it in his strategic vision, or only marginally.

Readers who miss this aspect could look at the ten years of research and analysis the P2P Foundation has conducted on that other half of the equation. However, we may suffer from the other weakness. We have intentionally not focused on the conflict part — the natural inclination of the left, which needs no help. Instead, we focus on showing how the self-organization and construction of commons (which inevitably comes with conflict) is just as essential a part of the programmatic alternatives of the precariat. Not only as proposals of electoral parties and syndicates, but as expressions of actual practice. Our orientation is to try to achieve a greater understanding by emancipatory forces — of the salariat, the precariat, and progressive entrepreneurial groups — of the importance of integrating the commons as a programmatic element in their struggles and proposals. We will probably retain our bias towards the constructive side of the equation, fully aware that this alone is insufficient, and requires the kind of understanding of struggle and its attendant strategies as provided by Foti.

In conclusion, Foti’s enduring quality is to have systematically worked out what the conflict part of the equation entails, and that is a very important achievement. Bearing in mind what we think is missing in this book, there is nonetheless much to be learned. I believe that among the different perspectives and weaknesses in the approaches of people like Foti and the commons-centric approaches of the P2P Foundation (and others), there is ample room for convergence and mutual enrichment.

Photo by Andrew Gustar

The post A P2P review of Alex Foti’s General Theory of the Precariat appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Niko Georgiades: Athens, Greece – Tools born from the internet, applied across autonomous networks and movements seeking alternatives to capitalism, are providing the infrastructure of alternative societies. In the last of our specials on community currencies and alternative economies, we showcase FairCoop, a self-organized and self-managed global cooperative created through the internet outside the domain of the nation-state.

During a conference on alternatives to capitalism inside of the self-organized and squatted Embros Theater in Athens, Greece in the summer of 2017, a Catalan speaker (who remained anonymous for safety purposes) gave a presentation on FairCoop, which informed much of this reporting.

Alternative economies are typically separate economic structures operating outside of the traditional economy and based on the common principles of a community. FairCoop is a function of an alternative economy and was built out of the necessity to provide an “alternative system outside of capitalism” and merge many autonomous movements and networks together to form a society based on each community’s values.

FairCoop was created a few years after a nearly half a billion euro banking system expropriation action from 2006-2008, generally attributed to Enric Duran. The expropriation of monetary value from the banks was used to fund social movements and as a way to jump-start alternatives to the capitalist system.

Watch the video below for an introduction to FairCoop:

During the presentation on FairCoop, the speaker inside of Embros Theater said that in Catalonia, Spain, around 2009, 2010, the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) was created, to “build another society by self-organizing” and to provide the needs of the people, “from food, housing, education, and health, etc.”

Since the creation of the Integral networks in Spain seven years ago, “a lot of people [have been] working for the commons” as there are more than 1,000 projects that are autonomously self-organizing to create cooperative networks of sharing.

Watch the video below, or see our full report here, for more information on the CIC [also see The Catalan Integral Cooperative: An Organizational Study of a Post-Capitalist Cooperative by George Dafermos]:

The idea for FairCoop was brought to an assembly in 2014 as a proposal by Enric Duran and was created by people within the movement to serve as economic infrastructure for a new society.

The Catalan speaker described FairCoop as “an open global cooperative, self-organized via the Internet and remaining outside nation-state control,” but one “that is controlled by a global assembly.” The speaker explained, “We don’t say cooperative in the traditional way, we say cooperative because we work with economy and we work in a participatory way and in a equal way.”

The steps taken to get to the point of the creation of FairCoop were explained by the speaker as followed:

“The first action was hacking the banks [expropriation of money through the internet], the second action was hacking the state [creating a taxing system to fund the creation of autonomous alternative systems], and the third one was hacking the money markets.“

“Usually the powerful money markets attack the weak economies and they get their resources with inflation and things like that. So, for centuries people have lost a lot of resources, a lot of capital” from those in control of the money – the speaker continued, “with FairCoin we are, like, revenging on that, let’s say, and we are recovering value.” They are growing that value to “use it for the commons” and assist in building their self-managed alternative society, said the presenter.

“They’re are many people in more than 30 countries” that have combined their local currencies and communities into autonomous local nodes and are connected in a network of cooperatives, said the speaker, who gave examples in the presentation about a Guatemalan and Greek sharing network.

“Local nodes acts as decentralized local assemblies of FairCoop, and meeting point between global projects of FairCoop and the various projects developed locally, creating links, synergies, knowledge development and growth of the entire ecosystem we are creating together. Autonomously, they serve as a point to spread, help and welcome people in FairCoop, as well as an exchange point of FairCoin.” – Description of a local node, FairCoop website

To build “a society without money, takes money,” and also requires having a plan to fight against capitalism by empowering the “local, regional, and global level,” so, the speaker said FairCoop created a “global assembly” to determine the value of the currency in a way of “self-management in the political process, not in the market“.

Listen to the fifteen minute presentation on FairCoop (full presentation with Q&A session is further down the post):

Audio Player

FairCoop was described as “a political movement building an alternative” that operates with many open decentralized working groups and assemblies deciding by consensus what actions to take in the FairCoop.

“FairCoop understands that the transformation to a fairer monetary system is a key element. Therefore, FairCoin was proposed as the cryptocurrency upon which to base its resource-redistribution actions and building of a new global economic system.” – FairCoop website

FairCoop utilizes FairCoin cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies, the most famous being Bitcoin, are digitally created on the internet, decentralized, and out of the control of central governments.

The difference between FairCoin and Bitcoin, said the speaker, is that “in Bitcoin, they are not one community, there are many different interests fighting each other, like what’s happening in the capitalist world is happening in the Bitcoin.”

They utilize FairCoin to the “benefit of the self-management of the alternative economy, not in the benefit of decentralizing capitalism that is around Bitcoin,” and to economically sustain the process of building the network of FairCoop.

For a bit of an explanation on what FairCoin is, watch this excerpt of an interview with Theodore, from the Athens Integral Cooperative, below:

Cryptocurrencies are block-chain transactions tracked through public ledgers, however, FairCoin has recently created the world’s first ever “co-operative blockchain … by creating an algorithm based on mining processes that rely on a proof of co-operation.”

FairCoin was developed “as a transition tool for building that eco-system at the global level that can be useful for supporting the building of autonomy and the building of self-organizement” around the world, said the speaker.

The speaker said that with the self-management of FairCoin, they are recovering value instead of extracting it from the people as the current banking system with its money markets does.

Faircoin governance image

In efforts to control all of the FairCoin, 80 to 90 percent of the FairCoin is now in the hands of the “movement“, said the speaker. With FairCoin, the value of funds is over 2 million euros and the speaker said, “this is just the beginning of the way how we are creating value by this hacking.”

When asked for a practical example of how FairCoop could be put to use in the self-managed Embros Theater, the speaker said that the first step would be to start accepting FairCoin for the transactions of economy inside the theater, such as beer. The next step would be to share that you accept FairCoin, which will then be seen in the FairCoop network and when more people start exchanging FairCoin, local nodes create assemblies focusing on different qualities that branch out to the global networks.

The speaker touched on Freedom Coop, which according to their website, is a “European Cooperative Society (SCE) that creates toolkits for self-management, self-employment, economic autonomy and financial disobedience for individuals and groups striving for fairer social and economic relationships.”

On the larger scale of building “a new way of life,” newly created Bank of the Commons is “a project for bringing on an alternative banking system to the world“, said the speaker, who explained it’s a way to bring different movements, cooperatives, and different groups the “capacities for doing their activities without the control of the normal banks.”

See the 2017 FairCoop Structure Chart for a visual learning experience of how the networks connect to each other:

After the presentation by the Catalan speaker, dozens of audience members asked many clarifying questions as to how this system of an alternative economy works. The presentation lasted a bit over two hours. Listen to the full presentation below:

With the building of these networks of social economy and solidarity, people are rethinking their ideas of how society could be more equitable. Creating alternative economies using the internet and autonomous working groups to decentralize the power has many people in Europe and across the world very excited at the prospects of a new society outside of capitalism and nation-states. In the words of the speaker, the future of mass movements providing real change are based in being able to have economic power, “As a movement, we need to be stronger economically to be stronger politically.”

The post Greece: Alternative Economies & Community Currencies Pt. 3 – FairCoop appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Niko Georgiades: Athens, Greece – Experimenting with alternatives to capitalism has continued to become more popular as huge wealth divides devour chances of relieving poverty across the world. During the summer of 2017, a speaking engagement at the self-organized squat of Embros Theater in Athens, Greece, showcased alternatives to capitalism. In the second of our three part series on alternative economies and community currencies, we spotlight Kenya’s Sarafu-Credit.

Community currencies are types of complimentary currencies shared within a community that are utilized as a means of countering inequality, class, debt, accumulation, and exclusion.

With community currencies, lower-income communities are given the ability to improve living standards by building infrastructure sustainability through networks of sharing, providing access to interest-free loans, and increasing the economic viability of the community.

This is a major departure from conventional national currencies. Most are generated today through fractional reserve banking, wherein units (“broad money” or M3) are created at the bank when loans are instantiated and destroyed upon repayment.

During economic slowdowns including the US Great Depression, the “velocity of money” drops as fractional currency is unavailable. Locally issued “Depression Scrip” substituted for fractional money in the 1930s. Today alternative currencies that improve velocity of money by distributing credit creation power to the whole population are taking root in many countries.

The first speaker of the discussion at Embros Theater was Caroline Dama, a Board member of Grassroots Economics (GE). GE is a “non-profit foundation that seeks to empower marginalized communities to take charge of their own livelihoods and economic future” in Kenya.

Caroline Dama, Board member of Grassroots Economics

Will Ruddick, who started the Eco-Pesa (no longer in circulation), a complementary and community currency, founded Grassroots Economics in 2010, which has created six networks of community currencies that now works with over twenty schools and twelve hundred businesses in Kenya.

In 2013, 200 businesses, 75% of which were owned by women, became part of the new self-organized and self-determined community currency, Bangla-Pesa, in Mombasa’s largest slum, Bangladesh.

Kenya’s government quickly saw the formation of these community currencies as a threat. Five individuals involved with Bangla-Pesa, including Will Ruddick and Caroline Dama, were implicated on charges of undermining the national currency, the shilling. They were all eventually cleared of all charges and the Sarafu-Credit system continues to break new boundaries and change the narrative of alternative economic systems.

SARAFU CREDIT – BANGLA-PESA

Drastic economic and social inequalities run rampant throughout Kenya as at least 46 percent of its population is living in poverty. With basic needs like clean water and healthcare becoming hard to attain, the Sarafu-Credit community currency system was created as a safety net for citizens to improve living conditions.

The word sarafu means currency in the Kiswahilli language. Sarafu-Credit is system of community currencies used as a “regional means of exchange supplementing the national currency system.”

The community in Bangladesh, the biggest slum in Kenya’s second largest city, Mombasa, is very poor and has little access to the shilling, the national currency. Caroline Dama, from GE, stated that the community is “able to come together and come up with a system to exchange our goods and services” using “community dollars.”

A Bangla-Pesa voucher

These community currencies are complimentary with the national currency and Caroline stated that not all of them work towards abolishing the current currency or system, but that they are “trying to make sure that the community banks have a way to survive in times that they wouldn’t otherwise survive.”

“it’s a form of community governance and self-taxation … the community has been able to come up with its own rules to solve its own problems.” – Caroline

GE explains Sarafu-Credit as: “A network of businesses, schools, self-employed and informal sector workers form a cooperative whose profits and inventory are issued as vouchers for social and environmental services as well as an interest-free credit to community members. These vouchers circulate in the community and can be used at any shop, school, clinic or cooperative businesses and form a stable medium of exchange when the Kenyan Shilling is lacking. This injection of money into the community in the form of a community currency, based on local assets, increases local sales and helps directly develop the local economy. Sarafu-Credit, Grassroots Economics’ Kenyan Community Currency program, creates stable markets based on local development and trust.”

How the Sarafu-Credit system works

Caroline stated that only with a bottom-up approach can the community create economic equality. “Communities thrive when they are able to make their own decisions.”

“Community currency gives that power to the people because they are talking to each other, they are able to exchange, and now they are meeting their basic needs, they have enough to sell and when they sell they can pool their resources together to build that better school.” – Caroline

Graph of how the Community Currency Vouchers operates

“If we have problems in the society we want to deal with … what we do, is we can come together as businesses instead of waiting for the government to do it for us”, said Caroline, who stressed the importance of self-determination and community empowerment.

The community currency vouchers are issued for social services and mutual credit for all sustainable needs of the community.  According to the Grassroots Economics website, “The community currency circulates around the community helping to connect local supply and demand for people who lack regular access to national currency.”

Furthermore, Caroline gave an example of women in a village collectively working on projects together, like helping each other build new houses. They would make each person in their network a new house and they would gather the material needed to build the house from other cooperative businesses.

There was a lively discussion with plenty of questions after the presentation on Sarafu-Credit’s Bangla-Pesa. One of the many questions focused on hatching new ideas around sharing-based communities, instead of exchange based communities that could present inequalities based on the ability of services to exchange. Caroline said,

“We are trying to move into a community whereby we are recognizing individual talents … that there is diversity in the community and that we should move away from the idea that we should monetize that. We try to live in a community that recognizes peoples needs, not monetizing them.” – Caroline

Grassroots Economics have created .pdf with their user guide and have plenty of resources on their website. The video below shows how the Bangla-Pesa works.

To hear the full speech and question session of Sarafu-Credit listen below:

For further reading on the Bangla-Pesa, here are a few attention-worthy papers:

• Complementary Currencies for Sustainable Development in Kenya: The Case of the Bangla-Pesa (PDF)
• Re-imagining Money to Broaden the Future of Development Finance – What Kenyan Community Currencies Reveal is Possible for Financing Development (PDF)
• Trust and Spending of Community Currencies in Kenya (PDF)

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Niko Georgiades: Athens, Greece – While capitalism and consumerism dominate the culture of the United States of America and the Western world, community currencies are creating a buzz elsewhere. The radical need for alternative economies and community currencies is becoming more commonplace among societies across the globalized world dealing with the crisis of mass poverty and inequality. In part one of our three part series shining a light on some of these alternatives, we look at the Athens Integral Cooperative.

In the summer of 2017, the self-organized squat of Embros Theater hosted a speaking engagement discussing community currencies and alternative economies. After the discussion, we interviewed Theodore from the Athens Integral Cooperative (AIC) inside a social center in Exarcheia (Athens, Greece) about the parallel economy they are creating. Theodore gave a run down of what AIC is, the importance of it, as well as its struggles and how it modeled itself after Catalan Integral Cooperative (see our special on the Catalan Integral Cooperative).

“We are building a substantial, alternative, and autonomous economy.” – Theodore of the Athens Integral Cooperative

Alternative Economies in Greece: an Interview with Theodore from the Athens Integral Cooperative

WHAT ARE COMMUNITY CURRENCIES & ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIES?

• Community currencies are types of complimentary currencies shared within a community that are utilized as a means of countering inequality, class, debt, accumulation, and exclusion.
• Alternative economies are typically separate economic structures operating outside of the traditional economy and based on the common principles of a community.

Aggressive neoliberal policies have created a vicious cycle of austerity in Greece for the last seven years. Many people living in Greece, even today, experience a lack of dignity, unable to gain access to employment, housing, education, healthcare, and having to deal with pension and salary cuts.

In 2011, as the crisis was beginning to deeply impact public life, a ‘movement of the squares‘ swept through Greece, modeled after the indignados in Spain and the Tahrir Square Uprising in Egypt. Thousands took the public commons, occupying Syntagma Square across from the Greek Parliament in central Athens. Through direct democracy, they imagined a future without capitalism; this movement eventually made its way across the Atlantic Ocean to the USA in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

These movements in Spain and Greece birthed political parties, Podemos and Syriza respectively, that have each taken power, and yet the effects of the crisis continue and evolve with no end in sight. We sat down with Theodore to talk about capitalism, the crisis, and the alternatives that have taken form to provide a sustainable living.

Theodore told us that a lot of people lost their jobs when the crisis first hit and that the banks imposed austerity measures and “social rules that were unbearable.”

“We tried to continue with our lives by building autonomous movements and trying to live by ourselves. This was a necessity during this seven years of our financial crisis where people [started] to create social groups and movements in order to cope with the diminishing structure of society, both economical and social.” – Theodore

Autonomous networks, mostly created by self-organized assemblies of anarchists, anti-authoritarians, autonomous groups and individuals, are a counter-force to the social services that the State either never provided, or stopped providing for the people due to the crisis. As Theodore stated, these networks are needed to gain the basic fundamentals of life.

Self-organized forms of resistance to capitalism and ways of implementing mutual aid to those in need are producing experiences that advance the prospects of the ability to live in an equal society, devoid of poverty.

Among the networks of resistance throughout Athens there are at least an estimated 1,000 assemblies with over 5,000 people participating in them. These assemblies are akin to horizontally organized working groups, each working towards a branch of fulfilling the needs of a community, or society, like; healthcare (see video below), housing, food, organizing space and even alternative economies that push to instill a non-consumer based economy.

ATHENS INTEGRAL COOPERATIVE

Self-organized through direct democracy, Athens Integral Cooperative operates through an assembly that makes collective decisions based on consensus. The Athens Integral Cooperative (AIC) was inspired by the Integral networks of Spain, which Theodore says are “similar movements, cooperatives, and individuals who have managed to integrate their activities to a bigger network that could actually produce economy of livelihood.”

“From 2015 to now, we established an infrastructure for our network that is premises that we can do the exchanges and a platform that we can work the exchanges out.” – Theodore

In describing the ideas behind the alternative economy of AIC, Theodore said that “time banks” were “the first step in the social economy“. Time banks are “not money that you can claim from someone” and it isn’t debt; it is peer-to-peer exchanges, or services, that are valued by the hour. The hour is not exact, but is a tool by which to measure productivity.

“It [time banking] has this very good social effect of making people understand they can exchange their production.” – Theodore

The “social economy” is a facet of networks of cooperatives, individuals, organizations, and more, which have created institutions and policies prioritizing the social good over profits. The infrastructure built within a social economy is based on the common values or principles of the community(s) that are in participation with the social economy.

Theodore said that AIC works to integrate “individuals, collectives, and social forces, that already make a social economy” into a substantial economy. In the Integral network, there is “no such thing as debt or accumulation.”

Theodore of the Athens Integral Cooperative

Exchanges through the network are done with a self-institutionalized monetary unit through a digital platform using the LETS network (Local Exchange Trading System), using the free software of Community Forge. The alternative currency holds value only within collective working groups and cannot be exchanged outside of the network.

The goals for the “solidarity economy” of the Athens Integral Cooperative are clearly stated on their website as follows:

• Horizontal organization, with participation in general meetings, collective decision making and solution finding
• Coverage of basic needs and desires rather than consumerism focusing on self-sufficiency
• Jointly defining a fair price/work ratio on products and services
• Producing quality goods and services while minimizing our energy and ecological footprint
• Reciprocity in relations beyond the logic of profit and “free market” monopolies
• Monetary autonomy within the network using a local self-institutionalized monetary unit (LETS network)
• The foundation of and support for productive projects
• Cooperative education, direct democracy and ecological awareness

“People are always interested in finding a way of escaping the present situation.” – Theodore

AIC has at least 100 participants and around 30 people providing production in the substantial economy. Compared to the eco-networks of the model Integral societies in Spain, this is small, but as Theodore said, the necessary transformation into an alternative economy “takes time” especially in an urban environment. He furthered that people can’t rapidly “evolve to another system” without understanding the culture of it.

As Theodore says, education is key. One of the first goals of the AIC is educating and inspiring the community to become self-managed and autonomous within the networks. They are working on making their community full of producers, not simply consumers. They are re-learning the value of the exchange, of their production, and of their productive value.

Theodore stated that things would have progressed much more if, during the time that the crisis was hitting, people knew what they now know.

“The interest of the people was huge, I mean, hundreds of people were gathering in assemblies, trying to find a way out. But, we didn’t have the knowledge then.” – Theodore

This said, Theodore was still very optimistic. Theodore participates in the assembly of the Alliance of the Commons, which he states is “another step of the gathering of social forces.” The Alliance of the Commons is important, Theodore said, because in order to have a “community that is self-managed, we have to have a political basis.”

“The , they bring the Commons as a political issue, as a political subject. So far, the alternative economy didn’t have the political direction … it was useful only for taking the pressure off the people.” – Theodore

Athens Integral Cooperative is pursuing a cultural revolution to transform the culture of consumerism and valuing one’s life in fiat currency, like the Euro or Dollar, into a culture of “autonomous exchange and autonomous productivity,” said Theodore, who continued by saying AIC was “doing a very good job at it.”

Stay tuned with Unicorn Riot for more on alternatives to capitalism, as we have two more specials on community currencies coming out in the next couple of weeks.

Photo by ashabot

The post Greece: Alternative Economies & Community Currencies Pt. 1 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“You may personally be able to escape capitalism by moving off the grid and minimizing your involvement with the money economy and the market, but this is hardly an attractive option for most people, especially those with children, and certainly has little potential to foster a broader process of social emancipation. If you are concerned about the lives of others, in one way or another you have to deal with capitalist structures and institutions. Taming and eroding capitalism are the only viable options. What you need to do, is participate both in the political movements for taming capitalism through public policies and in socio-economic projects of eroding capitalism through the expansion of emancipatory forms of economic activity. We need a renewal of an energetic social democracy to neutralize the harms of capitalism in ways that facilitate initiatives to build real utopias with the potential to erode the dominance of capitalism.”

Erik Olin Wright explains the four strategies:

(the excerpt is from the book, Real Utopias)

“Capitalism breeds anti-capitalists. In some times and places the resistance to capitalism becomes crystallized in coherent ideologies with systematic diagnoses of the source of harms and clear prescriptions about what to do to eliminate them. In other circumstances anti-capitalism is submerged within motivations that on the surface have little to do with capitalism, such as religious beliefs that lead people to reject modernity and seek refuge in isolated communities.

But always, wherever capitalism exists there is discontent and resistance in one form or other.

Historically, anti-capitalism has been animated by four different logics of resistance: smashing capitalism, taming capitalism, escaping capitalism, and eroding capitalism. These often co-exist and intermingle, but they each constitute a distinct way of responding to the harms of capitalism.

These four forms of anti-capitalism can be thought of as varying along two dimensions. One concerns their relationship to the problem of transforming capitalism: strategies can either envision transcending the structures of capitalism or simply neutralizing the worst harms of capitalism. The second dimension concerns the primary target of the strategy: strategies can either primarily work through the state and be directed at macro-levels of the system, or strategies can be directed at the micro-level of the system and focus directly on the economic activities of individuals and organizations. Taking these two dimensions together gives us the typology below.”

Smashing Capitalism

“In the 20th century various versions of this general line of reasoning animated the imagination of revolutionaries around the world. Revolutionary Marxism infused struggles with hope and optimism, for it not only provided a potent indictment of the world as it existed, but provided a plausible scenario for how an emancipatory alternative could be realized. This gave people courage, sustaining the belief that they were on the side of history and that the enormous commitment and sacrifices they were called on to make in their struggles against capitalism had real prospects of eventually succeeding. And sometimes, if rarely, such struggles did culminate in the revolutionary seizure of state power.

The results of such revolutionary seizures of power, however, were never the creation of a democratic egalitarian, emancipatory alternative to capitalism. While revolutions in the name of socialism and communism did demonstrate that it was possible “to build a new world on the ashes of the old,” the evidence of the heroic attempts at rupture in the 20th century is that they do not produce the kind of new world envisioned in revolutionary ideology. It is one thing to burn down old institutions; it is quite another to build desirable new institutions on the ashes. Why the revolutions of the 20th century never resulted in robust, sustainable human emancipation is, of course, a hotly debated matter.

…

The evidence from the revolutionary tragedies of the 20th century is that smashing capitalism doesn’t work as a strategy for social emancipation. Nevertheless, the idea of a revolutionary rupture with capitalism has not completely disappeared. Even if it no longer constitutes a coherent strategy of any significant political force, it speaks to the frustration and anger of living in a world of such sharp inequalities and unrealized potential for human flourishing, and in a political system that seems increasingly undemocratic and unresponsive. If, however, one wants to actually transform capitalism, visions that resonate with anger are not enough; what is needed a strategic vision that has some chance of working in practice. ”

Taming Capitalism

“The idea of taming capitalism does not eliminate the underlying tendency for capitalism to generate harms; it simply counteracts their effects. This is like a medicine which effectively deals with symptoms rather than with the underlying causes of a health problem. Sometimes that is good enough. Parents of newborn babies are often sleep-deprived and prone to headaches. One solution is to take an aspirin and cope; another is to get rid of the baby. Sometimes neutralizing the symptom is better than trying to get rid of the underlying cause.

In what is sometimes called the “Golden Age of Capitalism” – roughly the three decades following World War II – social democratic policies, especially in those places where they were most thoroughly implemented, did a fairly good job at moving in the direction of a more humane economic system. More specifically, three clusters of state policies significantly counteracted the harms of capitalism:

1. Some of the most serious risks people experience in their lives — especially around health, employment, and income – were reduced through a fairly comprehensive system of publicly mandated and funded social insurance.

2. The state assumed responsibility for the provision of an expansive set of public goods paid for through a robust system of relatively high taxation. These public goods included basic higher education, vocational skill formation, public transportation, cultural activities, recreational facilities, research and development, and macro-economic stability.

3. The state also created a regulatory regime designed to deal with the most serious negative externalities of the behavior of investors and firms in capitalist markets: pollution, product and workplace hazards, predatory market behavior, etc

…

Perhaps the three decades or so of the Golden Age were just an historical anomaly, a brief period in which favorable structural conditions and robust popular power opened up the possibility for the relatively egalitarian, social democratic model. Before that time capitalism was a rapacious system, and under neoliberalism it is rapacious once again, returning to the normal state of affairs for capitalist systems. Perhaps in the long run capitalism is not tamable.

Defenders of the idea of revolutionary ruptures with capitalism have always claimed that taming capitalism was an illusion, a diversion from the task of building a movement to overthrow capitalism.

But perhaps things are not so dire. The claim that globalization imposes powerful constraints on the capacity of states to raise taxes, regulate capitalism and redistribute income is a politically effective claim because people believe it, not because the constraints are actually that narrow. In politics, the limits of possibility are always in part created by beliefs in the limits of possibility. Neoliberalism is an ideology, backed by powerful political forces, rather than a scientifically accurate account of the actual limits we face in making the world a better place. While it may be the case that the specific policies that constituted the menu of social democracy in the Golden Age have become less effective and need rethinking, taming capitalism remains a viable expression of anti-capitalism.”

Escaping Capitalism

“One of the oldest responses to the onslaught of capitalism has been escape. Escaping capitalism may not have been crystallized into systematic anti-capitalist ideologies, but nevertheless it has a coherent logic.

…

This impulse to escape is reflected in many familiar responses to the harms of capitalism. The movement of poor farmers to the Western frontier in 19th century United States was, for many, an aspiration for stable, self-sufficient subsistence farming rather than production for the market. Escaping capitalism is implicit in the hippie motto of the 1960s, “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

The efforts by certain religious communities, such as the Amish, to create strong barriers between themselves and the rest of the society involved removing themselves as much as possible from the pressures of the market. The characterization of the family as a “haven in a heartless world” expresses the ideal of family as a noncompetitive social space of reciprocity and caring in which one can find refuge from the heartless competitive world of capitalism. And, in time-limited ways, escaping capitalism is even embodied in long distance hikes in the wilderness.

Escaping capitalism typically involves an avoidance of political engagement and certainly of collectively organized efforts at changing the world. Especially in the world today, escape is mostly an individualistic lifestyle strategy.

…

There are examples of escaping capitalism which do bear on the broader problem of anti-capitalism. Intentional communities may be motivated by the desire to escape the pressures of capitalism, but sometimes they can also serve as models for more collective, egalitarian and democratic ways of living. The D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) movement may be motivated by stagnant individual incomes during a period of economic austerity, but it can also point to ways of organizing economic activity that is less dependent on market exchange. And more generally the “life style” of voluntary simplicity can contribute to broader rejection of the consumerism and preoccupation with economic growth in capitalism.”

Eroding capitalism

“The fourth form of anti-capitalism is probably the least familiar. It is grounded in the following idea: All socio-economic systems are complex mixes of many different kinds of economic structures, relations and activities. No economy has ever been – or ever could be – purely capitalist. Existing economic systems combine capitalism with a whole host of other ways of organizing the production and distribution of goods and services: directly by states; within the intimate relations of families to meet the needs of its members; through community-based networks and organizations; by cooperatives owned and governed democratically by their members; though nonprofit market-oriented organizations; through peer-to-peer networks engaged collaborative production processes; and many other possibilities. Some of these ways of organizing economic activities can be thought of as hybrids, combining capitalist and noncapitalist elements; some are entirely noncapitalist; and some are anti-capitalist. We call such a complex economic system “capitalist” when it is the case that capitalism is dominant in determining the economic conditions of life and access to livelihood for most people. That dominance is immensely destructive. One way to challenge capitalism is to build more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks within this complex system where this is possible, and to struggle to expand and defend those spaces.

The idea of eroding capitalism imagines that these alternatives have the potential, in the long run, of expanding to the point where capitalism is displaced from this dominant role. An analogy with an ecosystem in nature might help clarify this idea. Think of a lake. A lake consists of water in a landscape, with particular kinds of soil, terrain, water sources and climate. An array of fish and other creatures live in its water and various kinds of plants grow in and around it.

Collectively, all of these elements constitute the natural ecosystem of the lake. (This is a “system” in that everything affects everything else within it, but it is not like the system of a single organism in which all of the parts are functionally connected in a coherent, tightly integrated whole. Social systems, in general, are better thought of as ecosystems of loosely connected interacting parts rather than like organisms in which all of the parts serve a function.) In such an ecosystem it is possible to introduce an alien species of fish, not “naturally” found in thelake. Some alien species will instantly get gobbled up. Others may survive in some small niche in the lake, but not change much about daily life in the ecosystem. But occasionally an alien species may thrive and eventually displace the dominant species. The strategic vision of eroding capitalism imagines introducing the most vigorous varieties of emancipatory species of noncapitalist economic activity into the ecosystem of capitalism, nurturing their development by protecting their niches, and figuring out ways of expanding their habitats. The ultimate hope is that eventually these alien species can spill out of their narrow niches and transform the character of the ecosystem as a whole.

This way of thinking about the process of transcending capitalism is rather like the typical stylized story told about the transition from pre-capitalist feudal societies in Europe to capitalism. Within feudal economies in the late Medieval period, proto-capitalist relations and practices emerged, especially in the cities. Initially this involved commercial activity, artisanal production under the regulation of guilds, and banking. These forms of economic activity filled niches and were often quite useful for feudal elites. As the scope of these market activities expanded they gradually became more capitalist in character and, in some places, more corrosive of the established feudal domination of the economy as a whole.

Through a long, meandering process over several centuries, feudal structures ceased to dominate the economic life of some corners of Europe; feudalism had eroded. This process may have been punctuated by political upheavals and even revolutions, but rather than constituting a rupture in economic structures, these political events served more to ratify and rationalize changes that had already taken place within the socioeconomic structure.

The strategic vision of eroding capitalism sees the process of displacing capitalism from its dominant role in the economy in a similar way: alternative, noncapitalist economic activities emerge in the niches where this is possible within an economy dominated by capitalism; these activities grow over time, both spontaneously and as a result of deliberate strategy; struggles involving the state take place, sometimes to protect these spaces, other times to facilitate new possibilities; and eventually, these non-capitalist relations and activities become sufficiently prominent in the lives of individuals and communities that capitalism can no longer be said to dominate the system as a whole.

This strategic vision is implicit in some currents of contemporary anarchism. If revolutionary communism proposes that state power should be seized so that capitalism can be smashed, and social democracy argues that the capitalist state should be used to tame capitalism, anarchists have generally argued that the state should be avoided – perhaps even ignored – because in the end it can only serve as a machine of domination, not liberation. The only hope for an emancipatory alternative to capitalism – an alternative that embodies ideals of equality, democracy and community – is to build it on the ground and work to expand its scope.

As a strategic vision, eroding capitalism is both enticing and far-fetched. It is enticing because it suggests that even when the state seems quite uncongenial for advances in social justice and emancipatory social change, there is still much that can be done. We can get on with the business of building a new world, not on the ashes of the old, but within the interstices of the old. It is far-fetched because it seems wildly implausible that the accumulation of emancipatory economic spaces within an economy dominated by capitalism could ever really displace capitalism, given the immense power and wealth of large capitalist corporations and the dependency of most people’s livelihoods on the well-functioning of the capitalist market. Surely if non-capitalist emancipatory forms of economic activities and relations ever grew to the point of threatening the dominance of capitalism, they would simply be crushed.

The central argument of this book is that the idea of eroding capitalism is not a fantasy. But, I will argue, it is only plausible if it is combined with the social democratic idea taming capitalism. What is needed is a way of linking the bottom up, society-centered strategic vision of anarchism with the topdown, state-centered strategic logic of social democracy. We need to tame capitalism in ways that make it more erodible, and erode capitalism in ways that make it more tamable. One concept that will help us to link these two currents of anti-capitalist thinking is real utopias.”

Photo by Can-

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