How do you role-model a democratic workplace?

This was the question on Austen Cordasco’s mind as he set out to integrate new technology to improve decision-making within Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN).

Purpose and community

For more than 30 years, CAN, a workers’ co-op, has catalysed the movement of cooperatives and social enterprises across the UK, helping people work better together through principles of democracy, autonomy, and concern for community.

As a visionary organization committed to empowering and supporting other co-ops, it is important to CAN that they effectively role-model an “active democracy”, where their workers have a voice.

How do we move forward together?

However, as the organization grew, this was proving to be difficult. CAN’s team is geographically distributed across the UK and the time delay in-between meetings, combined with the chaotic nature of email, was leading to big losses.

Austen, a Director and Worker-Owner of CAN saw an opportunity for their board of directors to be more effective and efficient by adopting an online decision-making tool to aid with governance. They chose Loomio.

The power of making decisions online

“Quality of directorship is dependent on the quality of decisions we make, so Loomio has been game-changing for us,” says Austen.

Using Loomio helps CAN to do their decision-making online and organize different threads of conversation, while Loomio’s proposal tool helps CAN move conversations to clear outcomes, creating shared understanding and impact.

Austen adds that using Loomio enables CAN to “effectively have a director’s meeting open all the time,” which not only increases productivity, but also saves money for the organization.

“Our board group has been particularly transformative, enabling continuous governance, improving response times and increasing our agility, resilience and sustainability… Loomio saves us thousands of pounds every year” —Austen Cordasco

More effective co-ops in the UK and beyond

Overall, incorporating Loomio into their company toolbox significantly improves the speed and efficiency of their working together. Undoubtedly, as CAN becomes more agile in their decision-making, they will be able to help even more organizations in the UK put purpose and community at the heart of their work.

Reprinted blog by Madina Knight, John Gieryn. You can see the original post here! and learn more about CAN on their website.

The post Helping UK cooperatives thrive appeared first on P2P Foundation.

12.00pm, Thu 23 May 2019 – 6.00pm, Sat 3 August 2019

Arts Catalyst
74-76 Cromer Street
London
WC1H 8DR

FURTHER INFORMATION

Free, no need to book

we-are-in-this together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” — Rosi Braidotti

Towards the Planetary Commons is a new exhibition investigating agency and autonomy in the face of global ecological crises. Encompassing artist film, an evolving installation and a programme of talks and workshops, the programme reflects on different ways of living and how new knowledge can emerge from struggles against current ecopolitical challenges.

Part I
Showing Marwa Arsanios: Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) and Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2(2019)
23 May – 6 July 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 22 May, 6.30pm 

Part II 
Showing Paloma Polo: The earth of the Revolution (2019) 
11 July – 3 August 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 10 July, 6.30pm 

Neoliberal policies imposed on communities of humans and non-humans reinforce strategies of land grabbing and monoculture, threatening the land and its biodiversity. Whilst corporations and governments alike remain removed from accountability for pollution, natural resource extraction and displacement of entire communities, across the world, in regions such as the Philippines and Kurdistan, people are collectively adopting new modes of decision-making and self-governance through approaches inspired by eco-feminism, class struggle and planetary commoning practices. 

In one room of the exhibition is a rotating programme of artist films by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios and Spanish artist Paloma Polo, all of which are presented for the first time in the UK. 

In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) Arsanios addresses forms of self-governance and knowledge production that have emerged from the autonomous women’s movement in Rojava. Shot in the mountains of Kurdistan and through recorded testimony, the film tracks the practical work of the movement – how to use an axe, how to eat fish within its biological cycles of production, when to cut down a tree for survival and when to save it. It explores how individuals come to a conscious participation in the movement; how they become part of the guerrilla, highlighting group learning as essential to the movement itself. In the film, the soundtrack of testimonies, analyses, and critical histories from those within and in proximity to the movement are edited together in a single, solid density. In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 (2019) Arsanios focuses on the ecofeminist groups that form part of the movement, honing in on the alliance between communities of women, nature and animals and problematising the care roles ‘naturally’ assigned to women. 

The second phase in the programme, will see artist Paloma Polo’s The earth of the Revolution (2019) premiered for the first time. Emerging from Polo’s research in the Philippines, cultivated over three years, and during which time the artist located herself at the heart of the ongoing democratic struggles in the region – a struggle in which marginalised countryside communities are actively fighting for democratic and progressive transformations, emancipation and the common good – this new work offers viewers a glimpse into the political practices that underlie the revolution. Segmented into scenes, the film closely follows the guerrilla as they go about their everyday tasks, from lessons and habitual meetings, reporting and assessments to personal conversations and confidences, moments of solitude and rest. Blurring the distinctions between documentary and artist film, The earth of the Revolution seeks to expand our understanding of how revolution manifests itself in a contemporary context, reflecting on some of the positive human elements and processes that might arise from such conflicts. 

Arts Catalyst’s second space will take the form of a ‘living room,’ an evolving installation showcasing case studies that emerge from the programme, presented within the framework of a modular environment designed by artist Lorenzo Sandoval. Works by collective practice They Are Here, artists-in-residence throughout 2019, will be presented alongside Sandoval’s installation. They Are Here draw from research over the past two years into Wardian Cases, a botanical container developed in the early 19th Century to transport plants across great distances. Prototypes for New Wardian Cases (2019) are material structures modelled on non-European architectural histories that function as a form of speculative design. In the context of the public programme, They Are Here will present a live-mix of their new audio-visual work, BRUNO, an enveloping, free-ranging meditation on the relationships between ecology, migration and the urban environment. 

Towards the Planetary Commons is part of Arts Catalyst’s Test Sites programme, an ongoing co-inquiry exploring the rapid transformations in human and non-human lives caused by environmental change. Featuring works by international artists, this next phase in the project opens up the programme to broader planetary perspectives. An accompanying programme of talks, conversations and workshops will be announced soon via Arts Catalyst’s website.

Image: Paloma Polo: Still from ‘The earth of the Revolution’ (2019), courtesy the artist

Reposted from the Arts Catalyst website: https://www.artscatalyst.org/towards-planetary-commons-reimagining-infrastructures-autonomy

The post Arts Catalyst Event in London, UK – Towards the planetary commons: reimagining infrastructures for autonomy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

January 2019

We, intellectuals, academics, artists, activists and others in solidarity, as well as organizations, associations and collectives from across the world, express our solidarity with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in this critical moment in its history, and condemn the ongoing campaign of disinformation, lies, and slander directed against the Zapatistas.

For us, and for many others around the world, the Zapatista struggle is a key referent for resistance, dignity, integrity and political creativity. 25 years ago, the cry of Ya Basta! was a historically transcendent event and one of the first categorical rejections of neoliberal globalization at a planetary scale, because it opened the way toward the critique and refusal of a model that at that time seemed unquestionable. It was and continues to be an expression of the legitimate struggle of indigenous peoples against the domination and contempt they have suffered for centuries and for their rights to autonomy. The self-government that the Zapatistas have put into practice with the Juntas de Buen Gobierno(Good Government Councils) in the 5 Caracoles is an example of radical democracy that inspires people and should be studied in social science departments around the world. For us, the Zapatista construction of autonomy represents the persistent and honest search for an alternative and emancipatory model crucial for a humanity facing the challenges of a world that is rapidly sinking into a deepening economic, social, political, ecological, and human crisis.

We therefore express our concern for the Zapatista communities and many other indigenous peoples in Mexico whose territories are being attacked by mining, tourism, agribusiness, and large infrastructure projects, etc., as recently denounced by the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and the Indigenous Governing Council (CIG) of Mexico. At this very moment, the new Mexican administration is imposing a series of large-scale development projects — including the Trans-isthmus Corridor, a one million hectare commercial tree planting project, and the so-called “Mayan Train”– that Subcomandante Moisés, EZLN spokesperson, recently denounced as a humiliation and provocation that would have very serious impacts on the territories of the Mayan peoples of southeastern Mexican.

In addition to the devastating environmental effects and the massive tourist development the “Mayan Train” is designed to unleash, we are concerned about the pseudo-ritual asking permission from Mother Earth that was used to legitimize the race to begin laying its tracks, an act that the Zapatista spokesperson denounced as unacceptably mockery. We are outraged by ongoing preparation for further attacks on Zapatista territories and the denial of indigenous people’s rights, including their right to prior, free and informed consultation and consent, as established in ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on Indigenous Peoples. This represents a serious violation of Mexico’s international commitments.

We echo the EZLN’s total rejection of these and other mega-projects that seriously threaten the autonomous territories and ways of life of indigenous peoples. 

We denounce in advance any aggression against Zapatista communities, either directly by the Mexican State, or through groups or organizations of armed or unarmed “civilians.” We hold the Mexican government accountable for any confrontation that may arise through the attempted implementation of these mega-projects, which represent an already defunct, unsustainable and devastating model of “development” that is determined within the highest spheres of power in violation of the rights of original peoples.

We call on all good-hearted people to see through the current wave of disinformation about the Zapatistas and about the proposed mega-projects, and to be alert to the imminent risk of aggression against Zapatista communities and other indigenous peoples.

To read the list of current signatories and add your own name, visit: http://solidarityfrombelow.org/

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Republished from Remix the Commons

Joan Subirats(1) (UAB) Conferencia FEPSU 2016

AA: In your recent article in La Vanguardia(2), you set out a framework for a cultural policy, you refer to putting into practice the key community values that should underpin that policy… Maybe we could start there?

JS: For me, whereas in the 20th century the defining conflict was between freedom and equality – and this marked the tension between right and left throughout the 20th century because in a way this is the frame in which capitalism and the need for social protection evolved together with the commodification of life while at the same time the market called for freedom – ie: no rules, no submission. But the need for protection demanded equality. But in the 21st century there is rejection of the notion of protection linked to statism: Nancy Fraser published an article(3) in the New Left Review, it is a re-reading of Polanyi and she claims that this double movement between commodification and protection is still valid, but that the State-based protection typical of the 20th century, where equality is guaranteed by the State, clashes since the end of the 20th century with the growing importance of heterogeneity, diversity and personal autonomy. Therefore, if in order to obtain equality, we have to be dependent on what the State does, this is going to be a contradiction…. So we could translate those values that informed the definition of policies in the 20th century, in 21st century terms they would be the idea of freedom (or personal autonomy, the idea of empowerment, not subjection, non-dependence) and at the same time equality, but no longer simply equality of opportunities but also equality of condition because we have to compensate for what is not the same (equal) in society. If you say “equal opportunities”, that everyone has access to cultural facilities, to libraries, you are disregarding the fact that the starting conditions of people are not the same, this is the great contribution of Amartya Sen, no? You have to compensate for unequal starting situations because otherwise you depoliticize inequality and consider that inequality is the result of people’s lack of effort to get out of poverty. So equality yes, but the approach is different. And we must incorporate the idea of diversity as a key element in the recognition of people and groups on the basis of their specific dignity. That seems easy to say, but in reality it is complicated, especially if you relate it to culture, because culture has to do with all these things: it has to do with the construction of your personality, it has to do with equal access to culture just as cultural rights and culture have to do with the recognition of different forms of knowledge and culture – canonical culture, high culture, popular culture, everyday culture, neighbourhood culture …
So for me, a cultural policy should be framed within the triple focus of personal autonomy, equality and diversity. And this is contradictory, in part, with the cultural policies developed in the past, where there is usually confusion between equality and homogeneity. In other words, the left has tended to consider that equality meant the same thing for everyone and that is wrong, isn’t it?, because you are confusing equality with homogeneity. The opposite of equality is inequality, the opposite of homogeneity is diversity. So you have to work with equality and diversity as values that are not antagonistic, but can be complementary. And this is a challenge for public institutions because they do not like heterogeneity, they find it complicated because it is simpler to treat everyone the same, as the administrative law manual used to prescribe `indifferent efficiency’: it is a way of understanding inequality as indifference, right?

AA: In your article you also talk about the opposition between investing in infrastructures versus creating spaces and environments that are attractive to creators and you put an emphasis on the generation of spaces. What is being done, what has been done, what could be done about this?

JS : In Barcelona we want to ensure that the city’s cultural policies do not imply producing culture itself, but rather to try to influence the values in the production processes that already exist, in the facilities, in the cultural and artistic infrastructures: the role of the city council, of the municipality, is not so much to produce culture as to contribute to the production of culture. Which is different, helping to produce culture…. Obviously, the city council will give priority to those initiatives that coincide with the values, with the normative approach that we promote. There are some exceptions, for example, the Grec festival in Barcelona(4) in July, or the Mercé(5), which is the Festa Mayor, where the city council does in fact subsidize the production of culture, so some productions are subsidised but generally what we have is a policy of aid to creators. What is being done is that 11 creative factories (fablabs) have been built, these are factories with collectives that manage them chosen through public tenders. There are now 3 factories of circus and visual arts, 2 factories of dance creation, one factory of more global creation housed at Fabra & Coats, 3 theatre factories and 2 visual arts and technology sites. So there are 11 factories of different sorts and there are plans to create others, for example in the field of feminist culture where we are in discussion with a very well consolidated group : normally all these creative factories have their management entrusted to collectives that already become highly consolidated in the process of creation and that need a space to ensure their continuity. Often the city council will cede municipal spaces to these collectives, sometimes through public competitions where the creators are asked to present their project for directing a factory. This is one aspect. Another aspect is what is called living culture, which is a programme for the promotion of cultural activities that arise from the community or from collectives in the form of cooperatives and this is a process of aid to collectives that are already functioning, or occasionally to highlight cultural activities and cultural dynamics that have existed for a long time but have not been dignified, that have not been valued, for example the Catalan rumba of the Gypsies, which is a very important movement in Barcelona that emerged from the gypsy community of El Raval, where there were some very famous artists like Peret. There we invested in creating a group to work on the historical memory of the rumba, looking for the roots of this movement, where it came from and why. Then some signposts were set up in streets where this took place, such as La Cera in El Raval, where there are two murals that symbolise the history of the Catalan rumba and the gypsy community in this area so that this type of thing is publicly visible. That is the key issue for culture: a recognition that there are many different cultures.

Then there is the area of civic centres: approximately 15% of the civic centres in the city are managed by civic entities as citizen heritage, and those civic centres also have cultural activities that they decide on, and the city council, the municipality helps them develop the ideas put forward by the entities that manage those centres.

So, if we put all those things together, we could talk about a culture of the urban commons. It is still early stages, this is still more of a concept than a reality, but the underlying idea is that in the end the density and the autonomous cultural-social fabric will be strong enough to be resilient to political changes. In other words, that you have helped to build cultural practices and communities that are strong and autonomous enough that they are not dependent on the political conjuncture. This would be ideal. A bit like the example I often cite about the housing cooperatives in Copenhagen, that there was 50% public housing in Copenhagen, and a right-wing government privatised 17% of that public housing, but it couldn’t touch the 33% of housing that was in the hands of co-operatives. Collective social capital has been more resilient than state assets: the latter is more vulnerable to changes in political majorities.

AA: You also speak of situated culture which I think is very important: setting it in time and space. Now Facebook has announced it is coming to Barcelona so the Barcelona brand is going to be a brand that includes Facebook and its allies. But your conception of a situated culture is more about a culture where social innovation, participation, popular creativity in the community are very important…

JS : Yes, it seems contradictory. In fact what you’re asking is the extent to which it makes sense to talk about situated culture in an increasingly globalized environment which is more and more dependent on global platforms. I believe that tension exists and conflict exists, this is undeniable, the city is a zone of conflict, therefore, the first thing we have to accept is that the city is a battleground between political alternatives with different cultural models. It is very difficult for a city council to set out univocal views of a cultural reality that is intrinsically plural. Talking about situated culture is an attempt to highlight the significance of the distinguishing factors that Barcelona possesses in its cultural production. This does not mean that this situated culture should be a strictly localist culture – a situated culture does not mean a culture that cuts off global links – it is a culture that relates to the global on the basis of its own specificity. What is most reprehensible from my point of view are cultural dynamics that have a global logic but that can just as well be here or anywhere else. And it’s true that the platforms generate this. An example: the other day the former minister of culture of Brazil, Lluca Ferreira, was here and talked about a program of living culture they developed, and they posted a photograph of some indigenous people where the man wore something that covered his pubic parts but the woman’s breasts were naked. So Facebook took the photograph off the site, and when the Minister called Facebook Brazil to say ‘what is going on?’, they told him that they didn’t have any duty towards the Brazilian government, that the only control over them was from a judge in San Francisco and that, therefore, if the judge in San Francisco forced them to put the photograph back, they would put it back, otherwise they wouldn’t have to listen to any minister from Brazil or anywhere else. In the end, there was a public movement of protest, and they put the photo back. The same thing happened here a few days ago, a group from a municipal theatre creation factory put up a poster with a man’s ass advertising a play by Virginia Wolff and Facebook took their entire account off the net – not just the photograph, they totally removed them from Facebook. And here too Facebook said that they are independent and that only the judge from San Francisco and so on. I believe that this is the opposite of situated culture because it is a global cultural logic, but at the same time it allows itself to be censored in Saudi Arabia, in China, that is to say it has different codes in each place. So to speak of situated culture means to speak of social transformation, of the relationship between culture and social transformation situated in the context in which you are working. But at the same time to have the will to dialogue with similar processes that exist in any other part of the world and that is the strength of a situated culture. And those processes of mutuality, of hybridization, that can happen when you have a Pakistani community here, you have a Filipino community, you have a Chinese community, you have a Gypsy community, you have an Italian community, you have an Argentinean community: they can be treated as typical folkloric elements in a theme park, or you can try to generate hybridization processes. Now at the Festival Grec this year there will be poetry in Urdu from the Pakistanis, there will be a Filipino theatre coming and a Filipino film fest at the Filmoteca – and this means mixing, situating, the cultural debate in the space where it is happening and trying to steep it in issues of cultural diversity. What I understand is that we need to strive for a local that is increasingly global, that this dialogue between the local and the global is very important.

AA: Returning to social innovation and popular creativity, social innovation is also a concept taken up pretty much everywhere: how is it understood here? Taking into account that in the world of the commons, Catalonia, and especially Barcelona, is very well known for its fablabs, which are also situated in this new era. How then do you understand social innovation and how do you see the relationship between education and social innovation?

JS : What I am trying to convey is that the traditional education system is doing little to prepare people and to enhance inclusive logics in our changing and transforming society, so in very broad lines I would say that if health and education were the basic redistributive policies of the 20th century, in the 21st century we must incorporate culture as a basic redistributive policy. Because before, the job market had very specific demands for the education sector: it knew very well what types of job profiles it needed because there was a very Taylorist logic to the world of work – what is the profile of a baker, of a plumber, of a miller? How many years you have to study for this kind of work. There is now a great deal of uncertainty about the future of the labour market, about how people will be able to work in the future and the key words that appear are innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, flexibility, ability to understand a diverse world, teamwork , being open to new ideas: this has little to do with traditional educational profiles, but it has much to do with culture, with things that allow you to acquire that backpack of basic tools that will help you navigate in a much more uncertain environment. And for me, to find the right connection between culture and education is very important because it allows the educational system to constantly transform itself by taking advantage of the creative potential of an environment that is much more accessible now than before because of new technologies, and therefore to make the transition from a deductive system where there is a teacher who knows and tells people what they need to know – to an inductive system: how do we explore what we need to know in order to be able to act. And that more inductive, more experimental logic has to do with creativity whereas the traditional education system didn’t postulate creativity, it postulated your ability to learn what someone else had decided you needed to study. It’s art, it is culture that allows you to play in that field much more easily …

Translated from Spanish by Nancy Thede.

1 Joan Subirats is Commissioner for culture in the city government of Barcelona led by the group Barcelona en comu. He is also professor of political science at the Universitat
autonoma de Barcelona and founder of the Institute on Governance and Public Policy.

2 “Salvara la cultura a las ciudades?”, La Vanguardia (Barcelona), Culturals supplement, 12
May 2018, pp. 20-21. https://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20180511/443518454074/cultura-ciudadesbarcelona-crisis.html

3 Nancy Fraser, “A Triple Movement”, New Left Review 81, May-June 2013. Published in Spanish in Jean-Louis Laville and José Luis Coraggio (Eds.), La izquierda del
siglo XXI. Ideas y diálogo Norte-Sur para un proyecto necesario Icaria, Madrid 2018.

4 Festival Grec, an annual multidisciplinary festival in Barcelona, now in its 42nd year. It is
named for the Greek Theatre built for the 1929 Universal Exhibition in Barcelona:
http://lameva.barcelona.cat/grec/en/.

5 Barcelona’s annual ‘Festival of Festivals’ begins on Sept 24, day of Our Lady of Mercy, a city holiday in Barcelona. It especially highlights catalan and barcelonian cultural traditions and in recent years has especially featured neighbourhood cultural activities like street theatre. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mercè.

Photo by PJ Nelson

The post Interview with Joan Subirats: The challenges of a cultural policy for the city 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.

Fortunately, there exist many experiments with non-capitalist modes of assessing and exchanging value, sharing goods and services, and making decisions that can help us transition to a more sustainable political economy based on principles of degrowth. One of the best ways to generate non-capitalist subjects, objects, and spaces comes from systems designed to manage common pool resources like the atmosphere, ocean, and forests. Commons-based systems depend upon self-governance and reciprocity. People rely on and take responsibility for each other, finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill their needs. This also allows communities to define the guidelines and incentives for guiding their own economic behavior, affording people more autonomy and greater opportunity for protecting and cultivating shared values. Commons-based systems cut across the private/public, market/state dichotomy and present alternative economic arrangements defined by communities.

According to David Bollier, “As the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.”³ Already, there is evidence of this happening. The commons is spreading rapidly among communities hit hardest by recent financial crises and the failures of austerity policies. In response to the failures of the state and market, many crises-stricken areas, especially in Europe and South America, have developed solidarity economies to self-manage resources, thus insulating themselves from systemic shocks in the future. It seems likely that a community’s capacity to share will be crucial to its survival on a wetter, hotter, and meaner planet.

From the perspective of researchers, there are several different ways to define the commons. In most cases, the commons are understood to be material objects. For example, the atmosphere and ocean are global commons, because they are resources we must all learn to regulate and share collectively. This notion of the commons as material resource goes hand-in-hand with another notion that the commons can be both material and immaterial, a product of either nature or culture. Using this second definition enhances our appreciation for what is often undervalued by traditional economic measures such as care work, shared knowledge production, and cultural preservation. Together, both these perspectives are helpful in devising political and economic strategies for managing the commons, which remains the dominant interest of most commons researchers and policymakers.

Nevertheless, whether material or immaterial, the commons are viewed as a given concept or thing, ignoring that more fundamentally they are generated by social practices. In other words, there are no commons without commoners to enact them. From an enactive perspective, commons are not objects, but actions generated by many different actors in relationship. Whereas the prior notions assume that individuals need to be regulated and punished to prevent overconsumption (an assumption known as the tragedy of the commons), an enactive perspective on commons conceives the individual in relation to everyone (and everything) involved in co-managing the more-than-human commons. It therefore diverges from the prior two notions in assuming a relational epistemology rather than being premised on a liberal epistemology based on the individual. From a Buddhist perspective, one could say that the commons emerges co-dependently with a field of objects, forces, and passions entangling the human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and machinic.

The more-than-human commons thus does not dualistically separate the material and immaterial commons, the commons (as object) from the commoners (as subjects), nor does it separate humans from nonhumans. Instead, the commons are always understood as a more-than-human achievement, neither wholly produced by nature or culture. Commoning becomes, as Bayo Akomolafe points out, a material-discursive doing shaped by practices and values that engage humans with their environments.⁴ In Patterns of Commoning, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that all commons exceed conceptual distinctions, because they are not things; rather, they are another way of being, thinking about, and shaping the world.⁵ Commoning is about sharing the responsibility for stewardship with the intent to construct a fair, free, and sustainable world—a goal that is all the more important given the unequal distribution of risks posed by intensifying climate change.

Read the entire essay/issue at The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics.

Zack Walsh is a PhD candidate in the Process Studies graduate program at Claremont School of Theology. His research is transdisciplinary, exploring process-relational, contemplative, and engaged Buddhist approaches to political economy, sustainability, and China. His most recent writings provide critical and constructive reflection on mindfulness trends, while developing contemplative pedagogies and practices for addressing social and ecological issues. He is a research specialist at Toward Ecological Civilization, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany. He has also received lay precepts from Fo Guang Shan, an engaged Buddhist organization based in Taiwan, and attended numerous meditation and monastic retreats in Thailand, China, and Taiwan. For further information and publications, please connect: https://cst.academia.edu/ZackWalsh, https://www.facebook.com/walsh.zack, and https://www.snclab.ca/category/blog/contemplative-ecologies/.

Illustration by Alicia Brown

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Ajuntament de Barcelona. Economia Cooperativa, Social y Solidaria y Consum, 2017

Download the original document here.

The Impetus Plan for the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona, is the result of a municipal initiative. Its aim is to offer a transformative socio-economic vision of the urban reality. It includes an action programme and aims to contribute towards reducing social and territorial inequalities, while promoting an economy at the service of people and of social justice.

The Impetus Plan comprises a diagnosis, the development process and the set of actions desired to be carried out in the city over the coming years. It is structured into the following parts:

•  The social and solidarity economy in Barcelona: analyses the reality of the transformative socio-economic fabric of the city and its roll-out across the territory
•  The Planning Process: explains the process involved in drafting the Plan and related co-production and co-responsibility dynamics.
•  Contents of the Plan: describes the general and specific objectives, lines of work, measures and actions to be implemented.
•  Development of the Plan: indicates the different agents involved in the Plan’s execution and spaces for joint and participatory work.
•  Budget, Monitoring and Evaluation: details the budgetary allocations, as well as the impact assessment criteria used.
•  Annex. Towards a New Socio-Economic Policy: offers an overview of the plural economy and of the proposal for the city’s socio-economic transformation.

Excerpts:

As explained below, this Impetus Plan is the product of dialogue between the SSE sector and the City Council, which gave rise to a shared diagnosis. The report The Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona developed a compilation of needs that are summarised in the following challenges tag cloud.

These challenges, detected by the SSE fabric itself, show those aspects that require input in order to consolidate and strengthen the social and solidarity economy movement. This Impetus Plan contains measures and actions related with these challenges, which often require internal work by the sector itself. In this sense, co-production and co-responsibility in achieving them are essential.

To highlight those that enjoy the greatest consensus, efforts need to be channelled towards improving the coordination of the sector in a global sense. This will make it possible to create a greater shared identity; increase communication outreach to disseminate the principles and values of the SSE among citizens; make spaces available to the SSE so that it can become the backbone of neighbourhoods and districts; improve inter-cooperation to strengthen social market construction; place emphasis on disseminating and training in democratic and participative governance as an eminently transformative element; and influence socially responsible public procurement, based on eco-social values, as a fundamental strategy.

Tag cloud of challenges, Impetus Plan for the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona

Commons collaborative economy sector

Meetings were held, along with the sharing of spaces for diagnosis, with BarCola, the collaborative economy hub that groups together 18 organisations. In March 2016, the city hosted the Commons Collaborative Economies: Policies, Technologies and City for the People (“Procomuns”) event whose sessions featured participation by over four hundred people and led to a declaration of 120 measures for public policies on commons collaborative economy matters, which were then put forward in the Municipal Action Plan (PAM).

The Planning Process for the Impetus Plan for the SSE in Barcelona

Statistics on the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona

According to the study The Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona (2016), the city is home to 4,718 socio-economic initiatives that, according to their legal structures, form part of the social and solidarity economy.

Some of the most significant data are:

—— 2,400 third social sector organisations —— 1,197 worker-owned enterprises —— 861 cooperatives —— 260 community-economic initiatives

In total, they account for 53,000 people employed, over 100,000 volunteers, over 500,000 consumer cooperative members and approximately 113,000 mutualists.

SSE initiatives exist in all sectors of economic activity: from energy through culture to the food sector.

Barcelona is home to 861 cooperatives of all types, representing 20% of all the cooperatives in Catalonia. The large majority are worker cooperatives: these account for 77% of the total (numbering 667, of which 36 are social initiative cooperatives).
Furthermore, the city is home to 31 consumer and user cooperatives, which operate in a very wide range of activity fields: food, paper, energy, health, etc.
Since 1993, the city’s main housing cooperatives have built 2,093 homes in Barcelona, and today a new model is emerging known as housing cooperatives with assignment of use rights.
In the education area there are 19 education cooperatives, of which 80% are worker cooperatives, 10% consumer cooperatives and 10% mixed.

They concentrate around 2,500 members, over 5,600 students and they employ over 750 people.

There are also 13 free schools running plus various child-rearing and shared education initiatives for ages between 0 and 3 years.

Worker-owned enterprises enjoy a significant presence in the city: they represent 25.4 % of Barcelona’s SSE enterprise fabric, although a challenge in this sector’s articulation is detected. All local development projects must count on the strength of the third social sector because, with 2,400 organisations in the city, it represents over 50% of SSE initiatives: 48 of them correspond to special work centres and 20 are work integration social enterprises (WISE).

The seven ethical finance organisations operating in Catalonia are all based in Barcelona. Furthermore, in the insurance sector, the EthSI (Ethical and Solidarity Based Insurance) seal exists to certify insurance products, brokers and agents in line with SSE criteria. In Spain there are seven certified companies, four of them based in Barcelona. Community economies have emerged in the city as self-managed and innovative projects in the creation of new forms geared towards resolving people’s needs. In this respect, especially worthy of highlight are 23 citizen-managed facilities, 59 agro-ecological consumer groups, 13 exchange markets, 21 time banks and 20 community market gardens.

Read the entire document; download the PDF here.

The post Impetus Plan for the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona 2016 – 2019 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About the authors and their positions

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

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

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

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

What is the key idea of the 15-M movement

A heterogeneous movement with a common denominator

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

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

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

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

The context

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

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

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

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

From the squares to the neighbourhoods

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

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

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

The autonomous perspective within 15-M

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

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

Autonomy and Heteronomy in history

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

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

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

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

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

The alternative

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

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

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

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

Concrete local and political action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration from as well as advancing and implementation of degrowth ideas

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

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

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

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

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

Which suggestions do they have for each other?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outlook: space for visions, suggestions or wishes

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

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

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

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

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

Links and literature

Links

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

Applied as well as further literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Tom Raftery

The post Degrowth in Movements: 15M from an autonomous perspective appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“A striking brand of political momentum is building, driven by the resurgence of citizen-led initiatives around the commons – movements which amount to a contestation of existing regimes and models. Taking place at a certain turning point of European history, these phenomena refute the “end of history” hypothesis of 1989, with the disarming of the sharp polarisation between the ideologies of capitalism and communism, and point to alternatives to an exhausted narrative. Free individuals are reinventing together a form of political mobilisation and innovative organisation.

In the contemporary political landscape, the commons blur the lines of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ sectors as we have known them in the last century. Today’s approach to commonality is: “mine as much as yours”. The commons reintroduce in the political landscape an old archetype of political ecology: the steward, the warden, the custodian – of nature, resources, land, or neighbourhood.

The commons reject and provide alternatives to the deeply ingrained ideologies associated with the market and the state: the former’s refrain of growth, extreme individualism, and hyper-competitiveness; and the latter’s coercive standardising model. The movement of the commons and its importance on the ground, as well as the accompanying language of common goods increasingly taking root, constitutes a fundamental challenge to corporate privatisation, commodification and the grabbing of land, culture, and social ‘acquis’ following a neoliberal logic of extraction.

Kaleidoscopic Fluidity

The immense diversity of meanings ascribed to the commons testifies to the rich and multifaceted significance this concept has acquired. But the differing ways in which this term has been deployed in varying contexts and moments in time also pose a dilemma for imposing a definition or framework. Applied in contexts ranging from urban public spaces to agriculture, from natural ecosystems to the virtual world, the contents of this edition alone demonstrate this diversity.

Some of these cases pertain to earthly, material resources, such as Vandana Shiva’s vivid account of the David vs. Goliath battle of subsistence farmers’ resistance to the attempted monopolistic capture of all seeds by an ever dwindling number of multinational corporations. Jonathan Piron’s case study in forest conservation shows that the commons can be a space for innovation and experimentation, while Ewa Sufin-Jacquemart and Radoslaw Gawlik’s examination of water management stresses the crucial need for communities to take ownership, in the broad sense, of the common goods they rely on. Richard Wouters and Liesbeth Beneder take a look at the potential for harvesting resources from outer space – a fascinating prospect though one which threatens to delay the much needed acknowledgement that even non-finite resources must be managed in a way that is equitable, just and does not cause harm.

Data and information constitute less tangible forms of the commons, and Julia Reda discusses the digital commons and pioneering platforms for managing knowledge online. Cities have also become the scene of struggles against the private appropriation of space. Eric Piolle’s experiences in Grenoble illustrate the challenges to the management of public spaces for the common good, while Daniela Festa’s descriptions of original initiatives by ‘urban stakeholders’ in Italy teach us that the urban commons are about far more than simply passive stewardship.

To these we can add the governance regimes and decision-making models, establishing novel hybrid structures and procedures. Tomislav Tomaševi? contends that the strict dichotomy between state and market as regulators of resources and public life is outdated, with both experiencing a certain crisis of legitimacy. Dirk Holemans explores a third option described as ‘autonomy’, rooted in a different economic approach to creating and measuring value through alternative means than the market and the state, bearing an implicit critique of the inadequacies of both these mechanisms.

From a European perspective, Sophie Bloemen and David Hammerstein criticise the EU for a lack of leadership in this area, while on the other side of the coin, Vedran Horvat shows the disruptive potential of social movements and transnational struggles – illustrating the potential of the commons to stimulate solidarity across borders. Underlying all this, Tine de Moor charts a historical trajectory that situates today’s initiatives within a long and rich history of collective resource management and collaboration.

Harnessing the Untapped Potential of the Commons

The proliferation of citizen-led initiatives for the management of resources is a development that Greens in Europe must pay close attention to. The commons help highlight the weak links and fault lines in current policies that need to be addressed. In the face of a challenged institutional realm and the increasingly emboldened grassroots mobilisation, the Greens must grasp the underlying political lessons for 21st century politics that the commons can teach.

One fundamental issue the commons raise is that of power, of which the concentration has had and has far-reaching implications. In the panel interview, Hilary Wainwright describes the commons as containing a new kind of power, in contrast to the traditional dominant power of the state, a power whose transformative capacity stems from its autonomous and creative nature. Equally, the transformative potential of the commons becomes clear when we grasp the idea that anything which can be privatised and used for profit can also be thought of within a commons perspective, as the discussion between Ugo Mattei and Molly Scott Cato demonstrates.

Michel Bauwens, however questions whether the commons, as a new narrative or new ‘value regime’, can or should truly emancipate itself from the state or if it is rather to be seen as a struggle for a certain vision of the state. Danijela Donelec underlines this perspective when she asserts her vision of the commons as politically useful when confronting the state and presenting potential models for reform, rather than as distinct autonomous zones that could potentially rival or even surpass the power of the state.

An exploration of the commons risks leading us into the trap of believing that power seized will automatically lead to fair organisation and inclusive decision-making, as John Clarke warns. Instead, it can provide a language for alternatives and making these a reality on the ground through a process of trial and error which, as with all genuinely inclusive democratic practices, is a laborious and painstaking process which necessitates a constant re-examination to ensure that we are moving in the right direction.

We should be heartened, however, that this journey has already begun.”

This article was originally published here.

The post The Commons: A Quiet Revolution appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In recent years we have been through “a zombie attack” against the socialization and culture born in the Internet. This is known as the stage of recentralization, whose best-known proponent is the FbT-model. This is a socialization model that cut off conversations, wherever they took root, and the birth of new identities and the abundance of the Internet generally. There was no lack of strategies, and in fact, the distributed world worked for the creation of vaccine against the virus. But the response to this attack finally came from something much more basic and fundamental: Personal autonomy. Already, the debate on net topologies is a debate about the autonomy you have to participate in the creation of information, the definition of your agenda, and the possibilities you have to be authentic. The collision was inevitable, and — just like in the great movie “Warm Bodies,” something was alive in the zombies, they weren’t completely dead — our desire for personal autonomy was still alive. This explains the birth of, perhaps not numerous, but more and more islands in the net that are betting on a distributed world. The key words of the future are autonomy and sovereignty.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Esperanto)

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