Background

The terms “Sharing Economy” or “Collaborative Economy” have been commonly used in recent years to refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models and forms of work, from the development of far-reaching corporate digital platforms that have become means of organising cooperative practices, to local, regional and community-led collaborative initiatives in sectors such as housing, tourism, transport, social enterprise, culture and the arts, etc. Researchers from many disciplines are currently conducting ethnographic studies of practices, cultures, socio-technical systems and lived experiences of collaborative economies, producing case studies and data sets documenting these realities and their impacts and implications, as well as developing methodological and epistemological insights and sensibilities about approaching these contexts
ethnographically.

The conference will feature parallel paper presentations, keynote talks and open discussion sessions.

Participation in the conference will be free of charge (but places will be limited).

The conference is supported by the COST Action “From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy” ( http://sharingandcaring.eu/), developing a network of actors focusing on the development of collaborative economy models and platforms and on social and technological implications of the collaborative economy through a practice focused approach.

Submission Themes

We are soliciting papers contributing ethnographic accounts and understandings of collaborative economy practices and communities, and therefore contributing to the development of a multi-faceted view on sharing and caring practices. We are also keen on receiving papers focusing on the methodological aspects of studying collaborative economi(es) e.g. collaborative ethnography, participatory action research, co-design etc.

Suggested themes include (but are not limited to):

• Ethnographic accounts of practices and/or of forms of community aggregation in collaborative economy settings
• Ethnographic case studies of collaborative economy initiatives, frameworks and platforms
• Instances of ethnographically-informed design of collaborative systems in support of collaborative economy practices
• Reflections on theoretical, epistemological and methodological challenges of studying the collaborative economy ethnographically

Submission Instructions

• Abstracts should be between 500 and 700 words
• Papers should be between a minimum of 3,000 and a maximum of 4,000 words plus references.
• Papers should be anonymised for submission
• Papers should be formatted according to the requested template.
• Submissions should be made through EasyChair.
• All papers will be peer reviewed by the Scientific Committee, and accepted papers will be included in the conference book of proceedings and invited for presentation at the conference.
• Following the conference, authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their contributions for consideration for inclusion into an edited book.

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: 15 April 2019

Notifications to Authors: 29 April 2019

Papers Submission Deadline: 19 July 2019

Notifications to Authors: 19 August 2019

Final Versions of Papers Due: 20 September 2019

Conference in Edinburgh: 25th October 2019

Organising Committee

Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh)

Proferssor Luigina Ciolfi (Sheffield Hallam University)

Scientific Committee

https://ulris.ul.ie/live/[email protected]Gabriela Avram (University of Limerick, IE)

Chiara Bassetti (University of Trento, IT)

Vida Česnuitytė (Mykolas Romeris University, LT)

Professor Luigina Ciolfi (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)

Professor Richard Coyne (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Morgan Currie (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Professor Dimitris Dalakoglou (Vrije University Amsterdam, NL)

Anna Farmaki (Cyprus University of Technology, CY)

Alessandro Gandini (University of Milan, IT)

Karen Gregory (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Athina Karatzogianni (University of Leicester, UK)

Cindy Kohtala (Aaalto University, FI)

Airi Lampinen (Stockholm University, SE)

Cristina Miguel (Leeds Beckett University, UK)

Maria Partalidou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GR)

Chiara Rossitto (Stockholm University, SE)

Mariacristina Sciannamblo (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, PT)

Professor Chris Speed (University of Edinburgh, UK)

James Stewart (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Özge Subaşi (Koç University, TR)

Penny Travlou (University of Edinburgh, UK)

For further information about the conference and/or CFP, please email us here: [email protected] [email protected]

The post CfP: “Ethnographies of Collaborative Economi(es) Conference” – University of Edinburgh, 25 October, 2019 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Watch the video if you haven’t already and visit our site for further info:
www.we-guild.co.uk

Remember that it’s a project in the making and it needs your support! So you can help make it happen by doing all that social media stuff (liking, following and especially sharing it!) and join the mailing list.
Or if you can think of other ways to support us we’d love to hear from you.

Let’s make We-Guild happen!

Reposted from  We-Guild’s website

The post We Guild: a peer to peer social safety network appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Who we’ve been, who we are becoming

If you’re not familiar with Guerrilla Translation (GT), here is what you should know. Founded in Madrid in 2013 and inspired by the 15M and Occupy movements, GT is a P2P and commons-oriented translation collective. It was conceived as a new kind of livelihood vehicle for activist translators that combines two compatible functions: a voluntary translation collective working for activist causes (eg. social, environmental, etc.) and an agency providing translation and general communication services on a paid contract basis. The proceeds from this paid commissioned work go, in part,  toward financing the social mission by retroactively paying translators for their voluntary (aka ‘pro-bono’) work. Sounds simple, right? But, as we soon found out, when trying to do something from scratch that’s radically new and commons-oriented, the devil is in the details.

The first thing we realized back in 2014 was that we needed a better system to organize the paid and pro-bono work.  We decided to adapt an abandoned open-source governance model and orient it towards our ideology and needs (the original had a strongly traditional “startup” flavor). We discussed it for more than a year but, due to lack of engagement, we never arrived at a final version. Meanwhile, GT was thriving: we were well regarded in our community, our translations were reaching more people than ever and we had an increasing stream of work offers. At the same time there was an imbalance between readily recognized productive labour, and all the invisible, reproductive work required to keep the project healthy.

Frustrated with this imbalance, some of us decided to take an extended sabbatical from the project. An exception to this pause was our very successful crowdfund campaign to translate and publish David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner, a Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. The campaign was important in several aspects, including the use of the Peer Production License and an innovative, distributed publishing model dubbed “Think Global, Print Local”. The lead-up to the campaign saw renewed activity on the pro-bono side, and the crowdfund succeeded in its objectives, leading to a book launch in the fall of 2016.

But after the crowdfund, GT still suffered from the same mixed condition: solid social capital, continued offers of paid work, but no clear governance structures to ensure a fair distribution of work and rewards whilst maintaining its social mission.

By 2017, the remaining team had achieved a very high level of interpersonal trust. It seemed like the right time to clarify our goals and values, revisit the unfinished governance model, and review nearly 5 years of lessons learned. To “reload” GT in an organised and sustainable way, we clearly needed an in-person meeting. We began to shape our ideal meeting, determining our goals and target invitees. Next, we got in touch with friendly experts in fields including tech, decentralised/non-hierarchical organizations, facilitation, and governance, inviting them to help us develop the governance model and a long-term survival strategy for GT.

For the financial support we needed to host the meeting, we turned to Fundaction, a Europe-wide participatory grantmaking platform focused on social transformation. Fundaction offers several types of grants, among them Rethink, directed at exchange — and capacity building — activities and networking. We applied for the Renew grant in November of 2017. In late December 2017, the first round of voting for Rethink proposals was closed, and in January 2018, there was an official announcement of the Rethink grant awardees, with Guerrilla Translation as one of the 8 winning applications. We felt humble and grateful to have received this support and validation (highest number of votes received!), and remain thankful to Fundaction.

Rethinking among mountains and rivers

Hervás is a small mountain village in Extremadura, western Spain, where Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso (Guerrilla Translation’s cofounders) reside. Declared as an anarchist canton in the 1st Spanish Revolution and surrounded by beautiful nature, it seemed like the perfect (and cheapest!) place to host an fruitful encounter among the Guerrilla Translators and friends.

Prior to the encounter, we drafted a first version ⁰ of  “The Open Cooperative Cooperative Governance model”, inspired by the original, but tailored to fit the ideals of Open Cooperativism — a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the rich social tradition of the Cooperative movement. We wanted to provide a “graspable object for the workshop participants to engage with, critique and develop.

We created a project budget and an ideal guest list, and after many conversations and calendar reviews, we invited seven people external to the collective, including:

• Sarah de Heusch (SMart)
• Emaline Friedman (Holo)
• Bronagh Gallagher (Connecting Scotland)
• Richard Bartlett (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum)
• Natalia Lombardo (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum)
• Virginia Díez (Wikimedia Spain)
• Carmen Lozano Bright (Nodocomun, ex-GT)

These invited mentors were selected not only for their professional affiliation and relevant knowledge, but also for some of their personal qualities. We imagined how these people could interact as a group, and also serve as allies to the collective ongoing. The final composition of the workshop had a female-male ratio of 10 to 3, which reflects Guerrilla Translation’s own gender ratio.

Five of the six currently active members (Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate, Lara San Mamés, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel) represented GT in the meeting. Finally, Lucas Tello from Zemos98 was hired for workshop methodology and facilitation.

Clockwise from the top left: Carmen Lozano Bright, Stacco Troncoso, Natalia Lombardo, Bronagh Gallagher, Lucas Tello, Susa Oñate, Virginia Díez, Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Richard D. Bartlett, Ann Marie Utratel, Lara San Mamés, Sarah De Heusch, Emaline Friedman.

A most convivial workshop

From May 22nd to 24th, 2018, we worked together on Guerrilla Translation’s goals, values and future directions, while also building connections, mutual support and a convivial atmosphere.

Zemos 98 designed a methodology, in collaboration with GT, supporting inclusive collaborative processes, trusting peer to peer knowledge and accepting diversity as an intellectual basis for collective work.

On day one, participants split into two groups and began to define GT’s values and goals. Values included peer to peer learning, clarity, diversity, resilience connected to systemic self-reflection, fairness, adaptability, commoning, equity, intimacy, high quality crafted work, and being prefigurative while aspiring to political transformation through relationships within and beyond the collective.

Some fun portmanteaus and ideas emerged out of this exercise, including “Trustparency” (blend of trust and transparency) and “Simplexity” (acknowledging the need for a balance of complexity and simplicity). Another idea which struck a chord with everyone was the idea of “Punk Elegance”. It reflects that GT comes from a non-conformist, DIY/DIWO culture but still seeks high quality, aesthetic style and communicational mastery.

“My main reflection from the event is that we went to work on one collective but in the process, it felt like we were all working on all of our collectives all at once. ” – Richard D. Bartlett

Turning to the Goals, the teams saw GT as a space to concentrate on mentorship and peer to peer learning. Obviously this applies to mentorship in creating high quality, handcrafted translations and other communication strategies, but also to fostering collaborative culture. As a project, GT demonstrates that an alternative, post-capitalist economy is possible and can thrive on several levels. A first step is to offer translators (and other media workers) a way to do paid work apart from capitalist structures, and simultaneously create a translingual knowledge commons. GT also has the potential to encourage personal transformation towards commons-oriented futures based on concrete, daily practices (not theoretical frameworks), especially with its focus on the recognition of carework and power. As such, it could be an exemplary project for Open Cooperativism, and a transnationally oriented, multi-constituent space to do socially and ecologically valuable work while also creating commons.

How could we achieve these ambitious goals and hold true to the values? Over the following two and a half days, each group developed distinct prototypes and timelines for GT’s near- and mid-term future. This would help us plan a functioning model and lived practice.

On the third day, the teams presented a summary of their discussions, and their timelines for possible futures. Each team treated the same targets (community, governance, platform and financial), and presented cohesive yet contrasting visions of suggested near-term GT actions. The differences in each team’s results indicate a fundamental balance in all commons: the dialectic between culture (that which defines the group’s shared motivations and visions for the future) and structure (that which formalizes the group culture into recognizable legal/procedural forms). Culture and structure are codependent in a commons: you can’t have one without the other, and their artful balance can create resilient, self-organized communities.

You can read our in-depth workshop report for details of each team’s prototype, but here are some of the main takeaways:

During their presentation, Group 2 (comprised of Richard D. Bartlett, Virginia Díez, Carmen Lozano Bright, Lara San Mamés, Sarah de Heusch and Ann Marie Utratel) focused on group culture, human relationships and trust. The group suggested many strategies based around designing for commitment and valuing reproductive work as equal to productive work. The group argued that a resilient, matured culture needs to be in place to design structures to augment existing, practised values, instead of enforcing them technically.

In discussing business structures and priorities, Group 2 emphasized structural flexibility according to the collective’s needs. Concurrency was introduced, a computational principle describing work that happens not only in parallel (people doing different things), but also in different order (not a chain of dependencies). This concept would prove essential in combining both models. ¹

While Group 2 focused on culture, Group 1 (comprised of Emaline Friedman, Bronagh Gallagher, Natalia Lombardo, Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate and Stacco Troncoso) co-designed a possible structure to make GT’s community culture thrive.

The group imagined a free software digital platform to handle all accounting and transactional aspects and to clarify the governance agreements forged at the cultural layer. Similar to how a Community Land Trust perpetuates specific social values in a shared ownership structure, the platform represents the collective’s consent to a set of voluntary self-organised rules, while being responsible for overseeing and carrying them out. It transcends the role of a digital “bad cop” often seen in DAOs by functioning as an on-chain core to facilitate continual care-oriented discussions about the collective’s off-chain values. Using easily visualized value streams, Guerrilla Translators would be able to discuss and reprogram the platform to ensure that everyone is heard, and maintain fairness within the collective.

The group also envisioned GT as an educational opportunity for those interested in translation, open cooperativism and non hierarchical organising in digital spaces. The group also worked on the recognition of reproductive work and onboarding strategies for new members. ²

Each group identified qualities already present in the collective: multi-skilled team, peer recognition, established network, good reputation, offers of work, investment potential, attractive branding and an innovative economic/governance model. Historically, the collective has also had a high proportion of female members (75-85%), and has been committed to keeping real-life needs and realities in focus, creating better conditions for digital work.

The needs included a new legal structure and invoicing/payment systems compatible with the model; seed funding for two years to develop both the cultural (community/governance) and structural (platform and legal/financial) aspects of the collective (and open source them to a wider community); the need to incorporate and train new, committed members (to a total between 10 and 15); and adapting the structure to support new spin off collectives of illustrators, coders, designers, etc. Everyone agreed that the GT core team needed a follow up meeting to process the outputs of this workshop and make decisions.

“What a great personal and professional experience GT was. It really made it tangible how strong, efficient, and fun it is to collaborate with people who are professional in what they do, and have different points of view and experiences. That makes collective intelligence really work. It also made clear for me what a woman’s way of dealing with things is; that is, letting emotions and personal aspects come into consideration, in listening and not being an “authority” kind of organization. It was great.” – Sarah de Heusch

The two groups then presented their proposed timelines, and offered mutual feedback. These details aren’t described here ³, but (spoiler alert!) we will recount how the proposed timelines would eventually be merged during the follow-up meeting.

On the final day we met to hold a closing circle. Two questions were asked:

1. What are you taking home from this encounter?
2. Would you like to engage with GT ongoing (and how)?

Everyone expressed gratitude about the workshop and towards the production team, especially Lucas Tello, whose unobtrusive yet deeply effective moderation created a solid support and also allowed for plenty of space for a convivial atmosphere. Everyone felt that they had learned a lot — not just about GT or the project, but about themselves and their own groups and collectives. Some people expressed that it was the best workshop event they had ever attended. Everyone was enthusiastic about the social occasions, the sharing of food, being out and about in Hervás, as a part of the bonding and motivating experience.

Vulnerability, transparency and the willingness to explore apparent contradictions and tensions were qualities also appreciated by the group, as well as the cultivation of intimacy as a precondition for creating alternatives to more typically hierarchical or patriarchal relations. Finally, the female to male ratio was also highlighted as a unique feature of the gathering, with the three men present expressing deep gratitude for being in such a space — something they don’t often find available.

The participants agreed to help GT become a flagship project for Open Cooperativism, and the members of GT committed to a follow up meeting to treat the results of the workshop “while the iron was hot”. (This meeting would take place in Hervás in late June, exactly one month after the initial workshop).

Cultivating Culture, Building Structure

The Guerrilla Translation Reloaded workshop was acknowledged by all attendees as a success. GT members and invitees created a spectrum of possibilities, colourful yet tempered by reality and experience. But how could GT make a coherent framework of the suggestions?

To answer this, Guerrilla Translation’s core team (Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Susa Oñate, Lara San Mamés, Stacco Troncoso, and Ann Marie Utratel), met once more in Hervás for a three-day follow-up meeting.

After a review of the prototypes, the team decided to hold a series of thematic conversations to reach agreements in key areas. These included how to bring in new members; our community; communication rhythms and tools; our availability and chosen areas of work; how to track and value carework; ways of mentoring and mutually supporting each other; and how to publicly relaunch the project during September 2018.

The core team also agreed to adopt and develop the patterns described in Richard Bartlett’s Patterns for Decentralised Organising. Richard passionately defended the need for more intimacy and group culture during the workshop, and the patterns provide an excellent starting point ⁴. They are:

• Intentionally Produce (Counter) Culture
• Systematically Distribute Care Labour
• Make Explicit Norms and Boundaries
• Keep Talking About Power
• Navigating the Communication Landscape
• Introduce New Tools With Care
• Make Decisions Asynchronously
• A Toolbox For Decision-Making
• Use Rhythms to Address Information Overload
• Generate New Patterns Together
• Get Unstuck With An External Peer

Concurrency: A Shared Timeline

Having reached an agreement in most issues, the core group proceeded to create a timeline reflecting the best elements of each prototype. This was no easy task but an overall narrative framework was proposed to help us make sense of what was on the table.

“Concurrency”, seen above, was one of the main features of this framework. As a reminder, this was a concept brought up by Richard Bartlett describing “a computational term that’s a useful management principle: not just that your work can happen in parallel (people doing different things), but in different order (not a chain of dependencies).”

The team was eager to work through the apparent contradictions and form resilient systems, so the timeline was divided into two main sections:

• STAGE ONE: Minimum Viable Model (assumed to end between 6 and 12 months)
• STAGE TWO: Lucas 9000 (assumed to begin between 6 and 18 months)

The flexibility in how these relative stages begin and end is due to the unpredictable nature of concurrent events. Stage One has many of the Culture fostering ideas expressed by Group 2. Most of the Structural ideas proposed by Group 1 start concurrently in this first Stage but more slowly, maturing further in Stage 2. Each stage has its characteristic features:

Stage One

Stage One is characterized by the use of a Minimum Viable (MVM) Economic/ Governance model. This is based on immediate implementation (if not full execution) of the Open Coop Governance Model, including changes agreed on post-meeting. Stage One would prioritize three lines of work:

• Research and implementation of MVM legal structure: Including options such as: an association in Spain, the “group hub” equivalent of SMart, Open Collective, or an Estonian e-company, as possible ways for the collective to invoice and receive funding.
• Community Building: Applies to the existing community (and its tools and processes), and additional community members via a handbook, selected outreach, etc. This includes prospective work circles.
• Project Funding: Seeds funds are required to support the first two main goals and other specifics for GT to mature into Commons-oriented Open Coop. This targeted work involves detailed project proposals, budgeting and alliances.

During Stage One, the team would use their existing communication and workflow tools as a sandbox for Stage Two.

Stage Two

Stage Two is characterized by the implementation of Lucas 9000, the “One Stop Shop”, all-in-one tool for Guerrilla Translation’s needs.

Conceived as being built “with, and on” Holo, following Emaline Friedman’s suggestions in Group 1, Stage Two sees GT as a DCO or “Distributed, Cooperative Organization”, a spin/critique of Ethereum-based “Decentralized, Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs). The latter are code-based entities capable of executing payments, levying penalties, and enforcing terms and contracts without human interaction. Lucas 9000 will be agent-centric, serving the ideas and core values of the human Guerrilla Translators.

With Lucas 9000 implemented as an Open Cooperative DCO, Guerrilla Translation will use this Holo-based platform to process financial transactions (external invoicing, pro-bono work, hours-based carework metrics). The legal structure would be built around this distributed cooperative framework, based on Holo’s emergent network and with HoloFuel (Holo’s recently created non volatile and asset backed cryptocurrency) as a medium of exchange. Lucas 9000 would also provide clear, visual, information about the health of the collective, facilitating community conversations, and a suite of open source tools (dApps) to manage workflow and collaborations.

All community work during Stage One is further developed in Stage Two, where the collective foresees a multi-lingual, globally distributed team working through the platform, informing its community-centered development as well as fluid working circles attending to the collective’s needs.

“The future of the project seems really bright because of the clarity of vision. Doing meaningful social and political work for groups and projects isn’t just an afterthought. The determination to build that into the org structure speaks volumes to the wisdom of the group: that investment of time is powerful, that translators and editors should be able to openly do passion work, following their hearts together, and that collective prioritization teaches everyone involved, and nurtures and hones shared values. And I can’t leave out something about prototyping alongside sheeps playfully chasing each other and goats bleating…” – Emaline Friedman

The Lucas Plan: A Synthesized Timeline

The synthesized timeline was named “The Lucas Plan” ⁵. The team scheduled all agreed tasks from each timeline over a two year period, following the general framework described above.

The synthesized timeline can also be consulted ongoing as a spreadsheet here.

What now for Guerrilla Translation?

At the time of writing (late August 2018), the Guerrilla Translation gang is feeling energized and inspired to carry out our tasks.

• As a Community, we are mapping our capacities, setting our community rhythms, reclaiming GT’s social capital, stating our commitments, and mentoring and supporting each other. We are drafting a first version of the Guerrilla Translation handbook and contacting specific translators.
• In Governance, we are researching legal structures in Stage 1 of the timeline. We are also updating the governance model with all the knowledge and decisions made after GT Reloaded. We are also beginning to gradually implement it.
• Financial tasks include creating both project budgets according to our timeline and detailed funding proposals, and sharing these with prospective partners. We are also exploring new income streams.
• In Tech, we are clarifying and training in our workflow/ communication tools, updating the websites, and collaborating closely with Holo for future implementation of Lucas 9000.

If you want to know more, the full workshop report detailing our conversations and decisions is accessible. If you’re interested in collaborating with us as an individual or organization, we recommend you read the full report.

Left to Right: Mercè Moreno Tarrés, Lara San Mamés, Georgina Reparado (in spirit), Ann Marie Utratel, Susa Oñate, Stacco Troncoso

We are excited and ready for this journey. Guerrilla Translation has gone through many iterations, changes, disappointments and successes since its founding in 2013. We are all older, wiser, and hopefully also humbler and kinder. As we write these words, Guerrilla Translation feels reloaded and ready to dance. Please join us!

This post was written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel based on the collectively written Guerrilla Translation Reloaded Full Report. All images (except the “Rethink” screenshot) are by the Guerrilla Translation team and licensed under a Peer Production, P2P Attribution-ConditionalNonCommercial-ShareAlikeLicense. The Fundaction “Rethink” image was created by Sylvain Mazas and licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence.

Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License.

Footnotes

<sup>0. [The updated version of the Open Coop Governance Model (V 2.0) has been drafted. It is a dramatic overhaul from version 1.0 and can be read here. Complimentary, the version history is listed here]
1. [For a full account of Group 2’s findings, read the relevant section of the Guerrilla Translation Full Report in our wiki.]
2. [As with Group 2, a full account of Group 1’s presentations can be found here.]
3. [Once again, for full details on each group’s procedures and proposals, read our full workshop report.]
4. [If you’re interested in Richard D. Barttlet’s and Natalia Lombardo’s excellent work on decentralized, non-hierarchical organizing check out their website: The Hum. We highly recommend their workshops.]
5. [This is also a reference to the inspiring British design/technological sovereignty movement in the late seventies]</sup>

The post Punk Elegance: How Guerrilla Translation reimagined itself for Open Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Elena Martínez Vicente is a product designer, specialized in designing better processes and more understandable products for humans. She was a designer with the P2PValue project and has extensive experience collaborating with commons, communities and P2P projects, including an ongoing collaboration with the P2P Foundation on our publications and the Commons Transition Primer.

Silvia and Elena are team members in  P2P Models, a research project examining the infrastructure, governance and economy of decentralized, democratic organizations, with a particular focus on value allocation and distribution.

We asked them to tell us about their experiences working in the commons, in academia,  and in the broader world.

Elena, Silvia, tell us a bit about your backgrounds, interests and how you came to be involved in the P2P Models project.

Elena: Since 2006, I have worked as an Interaction Designer in the private sector, also working for NGOs and cooperation projects in general, whenever I had a chance. From my days as a student, and intermittently, I have been in and out of activist groups, feminist and commons communities. It is not until 2016 that I could finally dedicate my entire time at work to “designing for the good ones”. Since then, I have been trying to translate difficult concepts for the common(s) people through infographics, post, illustrations and simple designs. I also try to bring some sanity to free software, since often in large projects, very good intentions are left on the wayside because it is “a pain in the ass” to use them as these projects do not give the right importance to design and user experience.

Silvia: Really, I was never in touch with these themes before, in fact, I think I always avoided using technology in general (I’m now more concerned about how important and powerful this kind of knowledge is). I was always very confused about what to study. I have a lot of diverse interests: dancing, carpentry, philosophy…and although now I find it positive, at that time I felt pressure to “find my speciality”. What I knew, was I liked to write and I was interested in social issues and this led me to Anthropology. Partly because of diverse life experiences, years later I started a master’s degree in Gender Studies and Development Cooperation in Madrid, which offered an internship in Colombia. This experience reinforced my liking for research. When I was back in Madrid, a friend told me about this job opportunity and I did not hesitate to try it.

Can you describe what P2P Models is about? Who else is on the team, and what stage is the project in right now?

Silvia: I am still understanding what this project is about…hahaha. I’m lucky enough to have some master classes with Samer, our principal investigator, to know more about the tech part. I have a much clearer image about the social side of the project. We want to better understand how the governance and the distribution of value work happens in the CBPP (Commons Based Peer Production Communities), in order to know how blockchain could be useful for them. Fortunately, we have a sociologist-computer scientist in our team, David Rozas, who can be the link between the social and the tech part. We are 7 people in total, with different backgrounds and education but with activism in common. Also, we have a lot of collaborators and advisors who help us. We are at the beginning of the project, still taking off, maybe in the most challenging stage or where we should take more important decisions.

Elena: P2PModels is a research project full of difficult tech concepts so it is a beautiful challenge for me. Basically, we can summarize it in a question: Could we advance to a Commons Transition with blockchain?

The project has three main branches to build decentralized, democratic and distributed organizations. We intend to collaborate with international communities to learn from them and to think about technologies that could help to improve the lives of the people who work in these communities.

The people involved are Samer Hassan, principal investigator, David Rozas and Silvia in the sociological part right now, Sem and Antonio as tech advisors and Geno, our word-translator for humans. And, we are hiring tech unicorns and project managers too.

What are some of the projects being studied?

Elena: Right now, we are centered in designing better processes within the team, building the basis as a group and rethinking our team culture. A very important (and invisible) task. In terms of productive work, we almost have the pilot communities, for the ethnographic research. Secondly we are working on the brand, the new website and the communication strategy. We are just a few people doing a lot of stuff!

Silvia: That is one of the important decisions we should take and we are still thinking about it. We have drawn up the criteria to choose which projects could be interesting to study, and it seems like in the next months we can start some provisional social research but as I said, this is also under construction! We are full of verve, and we want to take on a lot of case studies but we have to be aware of our capabilities, in terms of time etcetera.

Blockchain-enabled projects are meant to be about decentralizing power, but treat this in a technical way. How do you see this project addressing other issues about decentralizing power, taking into account gender, race, class…?

Silvia: Thank you for asking this question. We strongly believe that the decentralization of power is possible beyond the technical part. Because of that we are giving the same value to both the tech and social sides of the project. Personally­, I’m really focussed on bringing a gender perspective to the project, of course an intersectional one. We are going to put all our efforts into this in order to carry out gender-mainstreaming in the project, starting first within our team and our own culture. We believe strongly that “the personal technical is political”.

Elena: Decentralizing power is the foundation, in your own dynamics and in your relationships as a working group. And it is true, I can see a lot of white men people talking and talking about decentralizing power in both blockchain and the commons. What they do not ask about is their own race, class or gender privileges of being there, maybe they have some women people behind doing the invisible work? Are their personal relationships unequal? Great speeches, theories and papers are useless without considering this.

Communities involved in contributory accounting have different concepts of value and value tracking. Can we avoid the mindset that says that the only value worth tracking is exchange value?

Elena: We have to try it!! It is a partial way, inherited from capitalism and therefore a patriarchal way to see value. People contribute in different ways to the group. What about emotional value? I always work better with people who take care of me and who I love. I do not know if this type of value can be tracked, but we all know that it is there, we cannot ignore it and try to measure and track all the facts.

Silvia: Yes, I think we can. Feminist economy has been doing this, challenging the heterodox economy, for many years. It is a matter of having the will and developing a broader outlook. It is not easy, I have never worked before in tech and I am still struggling with how to apply my knowledge in this field. I assume it is going to be a very creative process.

What about invisible or affective work? Can these be tracked and measured?

Elena: Affective and invisible work is the base of all groups and society. I am not interested in measuring them, but maybe we could try to train in empathy, listening and learning a little more. In Spain, for example, assemblies, work meetings… are often held at 8 p.m. This is absolutely incompatible with the caring done outside of work, and nobody seems to mind. This makes people that have to care disappear from decision making and groups. In my opinion, it is a capitalist heritage that we need to rethink.

Silvia: I don’t know if it is a matter of measuring. The feminists working in development cooperation, for example, have done a really good job with time, using surveys or calculating the contributions of domestic and affective work to the GDP. On the other hand, I think a very important first step is to consolidate the idea of invisible and affective work as the base of life, and understanding how without it, there is nothing else. This kind of work must not be in the periphery, waiting to be measured or recognized; we have to put it in the center, as Amaia Pérez Orozco explains so well.

Although commons based peer production is an emancipating way of pooling our productive capacities, these communities are often dominated by male, white, economically privileged individuals. What is the role of “peer to peer” in confronting these disparities?  

Silvia: We cannot be so innocent in thinking that in “peer to peer” production there are no power relationships. These commons based initiatives have a lot of potential, challenging capitalism and exploring new ways to build economy, but of course they have to implement a lot of mechanisms to avoid reproducing patriarchy, racism, and other structures of domination. It is still necessary to make the struggle against knowledge- or power-inequality a priority in these communities.

Elena: P2P communities have made important advances in decentralizing power but, like Silvia said, we cannot think that everything is already done, because in most cases, we’re all white, first world people. We have to make an effort to introduce measures that help us to re-think and re-design real peer to peer values. I am not an expert, but I can still see, typically, a white, upper-class man doing free software or exchanging p2p value.

Silvia, how does your background in feminism and anthropology fit into the project? How do these affect Commons and P2P practices, in academia and “in the real world”?

Silvia: Well, the entire group has expressed from the beginning how important the social branch of the project was for them. They have helped me to overcome this “imposter syndrome” I had (I know the theory, however, I am still in the empowerment process…). Well, I think a new person on a team always enriches it. Because of my background, maybe I can give some different perspectives to achieve this non-techno-determinism view that the project wants to maintain. This maybe goes more for the academic part. On the other hand, I think my inexperience in tech makes me a good translator and mediator with the “real world”.

Elena, you have done design work on a number of P2P-related projects. Are there specific challenges you try to address in communicating this field? How can ideas like P2P and the Commons be represented visually, and especially to non-academics?

Elena: I am always thinking that we should be capable of talking about commons with the mainstream, and one way to make this possible is with design and communication.

Academic people have the ability to make a simple concept complicated. In this way, we need journalists and designers who translate these complicated minds, papers and concepts to the people. People can easily understand the value of urban gardens in their neighborhood, or the way energy cooperatives are an advantage for the environment and your pocket, but books or essays about p2p communities are very complicated and full of difficult concepts. In that sense, the Commons Transition Primer we did last year is an excellent advance. In the last few years, feminism has done this with excellent results, so, we should try, shouldn’t we?

We talk about a Commons Transition. Do the two of you see this taking place? If so, how?

Silvia: Well, to be fair, I would not say that this would be a transition, but a return to the past. Women have being doing Commons and alternative initiatives for centuries, the novelty now is the inclusion of some technologies like blockchain. I do not dare to make predictions… Deep down, what I would like is that this happens in a coherent way with the bases of the Commons, that is with equity, solidarity and an awareness of interdependence.

Elena: Step by step, I can see little advances in people’s mentalities, or in local politics. For example, recently the Madrid council has received a UN Public Service prize for a collaborative free software platform called Decide Madrid. It is an excellent sign and means that our work and efforts working in the commons are important and can provoke social change.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Silvia: I would like to give special thanks to my colleague Elena. From the beginning I’ve felt her sorority, and it is really a pleasure to share my workspace with such an experienced person and woman. It is great to have her support and knowledge in this uncertain and masculinized sector.

Elena:

 Elena Martínez Vicente studied Fine Arts in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she spent her final two years enjoying a grant in Venice, Italy.

Silvia Díaz Molina studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. After two years living in Vienna (Austria), participating in different volunteer work and activism, she joined the Gender Studies and Development Cooperation Master’s Degree at the Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales, because of which she had the opportunity to do an internship in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), where she wrote her thesis about “Afro-descendant women from the Colombian Caribbean, sexual violence and the construction of memories about the armed conflict”. In April 2018, she became part of the P2PModels project as a researcher, developing the social side of the project.

Lead image by Gaelx, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0; text image by Janita Top, Unsplash

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Jacobson discusses the history of the “wages for housework” movement, connecting it to the contemporary movement for unconditional basic income.

Republished from basicincome.org

The post Basic Income & Women’s Liberation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Fighting for Care Work Resource

1. What is the key idea of the Care Revolution?

Care Revolution wants to shape care and self-care according to needs with a fundamental change in societal direction

Care Revolution activists are working for a good life in which all people’s needs can be met in full without excluding anyone or exploiting others. Building on insights from feminist politics, Care Revolution puts the fundamental significance of care work at the core of its social critical analysis and political action. From birth, people are dependent on the care of others, without which they could not survive. Beyond childhood and youth, and times of sickness and frailty, people are also dependent on others in their everyday lives. The possibility of getting help and support in a difficult situation is an important criterion for a good life. This also applies to the possibility of being able to care for others without having to be disproportionately disadvantaged.

Care work is an activity that all people carry out. They care for themselves, for their health, for their education, they cook for themselves or for other people, bring up children, advise friends, and care for relatives who need support. Some care work is paid, for example that carried out by carers or nursery school teachers. Most of this work however is done within families by women and is unpaid; often it is not considered to be work at all.

“Day of invisible work” at the 1.May demonstrations in Freiburg in 2014.

Currently, more and more people face the increasingly difficult task of mastering the balancing act between employment and unpaid care work for themselves and others. They live with the constant threat of failing to meet demands. In their employment, they are confronted with increasing demands on flexibility from the company, continually rising performance pressure, as well as salaries, which are often too low compared to the cost of living. According to the neoliberal credo of individual responsibility, each individual is required to combine high professional requirements with increasing self-organisation tasks and the growing demands of familial care work.

This situation is aggravated by the fact that, in order to reduce costs, many state welfare services, for example in the health or education system, are being cut rather than expanded. It is primarily many women who suffer in this deficient state infrastructure as they carry out most of the socially necessary care work in the home alongside their paid employment. In high-earning families, part of this work is passed on to poorly paid migrant domestic workers who do not have social security. In this way, high earners solve their problems on the backs of those for whom even this precarious work means an improvement to their catastrophic position. State tolerance of these working conditions in private households, which fall below societal minimum standards, is aggravating a global division of labour that ignores the basic needs of care workers from countries in Eastern Europe and the global south.

Care Revolution as a political strategy

The obvious response that meets needs is to organise and carry out the work needed in families and institutions together and without discrimination. For those in the Care Revolution network, attending to people’s needs, space for empathy and solidarity, as well as genuine democracy in politics and the economy are essential. With the following steps, it is possible to come closer to the aim of good care and a good life:

• Sufficient income for all in order to secure a sustainable livelihood: This primarily means a substantial minimum wage without exceptions, an unconditional basic income and a significant improvement in pay for work in care careers.
• Sufficient time to be able to care for one’s close ones and oneself alongside paid employment, and maintain time for leisure. This primarily means a considerable reduction in working hours for full-time workers, special arrangements for people with a lot of care responsibilities, and a non-discriminatory division of care work between men and women.
• A social infrastructure that truly supports care and self-care: This primarily means an expanded and free education and health system, affordable accommodation, free local public transport and support for self-help networks and commons projects. This can be realised by redistributing societal wealth.
• Real involvement in societal decision-making: This means comprehensive self-governance, starting in the care sector. This can be effected via a council system that enables national coordination and democratic control. Many care projects, such as health centres, nurseries or educational establishments can also be organised decentrally with local self-governance in districts or neighbourhoods.
• Non-discriminatory society: This means that there is no exclusion, no discrimination and no privileges owing to one’s ethnic origin, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability or occupational skills.

Care Revolution’s aim is a society based on solidarity. Those in the Care Revolution network understand this to be a radically democratic society, oriented towards human needs and, in particular, towards caring for one another. In a society based on solidarity, the needs of all people in their diversity are met, without people from other global regions being discriminated against. Correspondingly, Care Revolution means that it is no longer profit maximisation but human needs that are the focus of social, and thus also economic action.

2. Who is part of the Care Revolution? What do they do?

Care Revolution network actors call for more time and resources for paid and unpaid care work.

In the Care Revolution network, there are initiatives from different areas of society and with different political priorities. These include organisations of caregiving relatives, disability groups, parent groups, migrant groups, ver.di and GEW trade union site groups in the field of care and childcare, social movement organisations, queer feminist groups and radical left-wing groups. In March 2014, sixty such initiatives came together in Berlin for the first time to prepare and hold a conference, which 500 people attended. Shortly after this, these and other initiatives founded the Care Revolution network. Currently, the network is limited to Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

Logo of the Care Revolution network.

Examples of groups represented in the network

A significant proportion of the initiatives represented by Care Revolution come from a feminist or queer feminist background. Some have fought since the 1970s, as part of the second wave of feminism, for a revaluation of unpaid reproductive work. Today, older and younger activists in the Care Revolution network again want to comprehend the feminist agenda as a more general form of social criticism, including through their struggles for improved care resources. Here, priorities are quite varied. Some highlight the gender gap in care work and demand recognition of this socially necessary work. Others are active in groups that combine anti-capitalist and feminist positions and discuss their own life circumstances in relation to structural crises. The latter involved Care Revolution in the Blockupy protests.

Women in Exile, which also participated in the first Care Revolution conference, calls for refugees to be housed in apartments rather than in camps where there is no privacy or protection against attacks. The initiative is demanding this for women and children as a matter of urgency but also calls for all camps to be dissolved. The initiative combines its public relations activities for this aim with informing refugees about their rights, and positions against racism and the migration regime.

In recent years, labour disputes regarding paid care work have made the headlines. These disputes have been innovative in various ways. For example, the ver.di site group and the staff council at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin demanded a collective agreement regarding minimum employee coverage from the company that operates Berlin’s university hospitals. This labour dispute was supported by the association Berlinerinnen und Berliner für mehr Personal im Krankenhaus (‘Berlin residents for more hospital staff’) with actions to demonstrate solidarity; it did this explicitly in the interests of potential patients. On 1 May 2016, this collective agreement was achieved after over four years of disputes. A second example are the disputes in German municipal nurseries. In the 2015 strikes, there were calls for a societal revaluation of care work in nurseries and social services, as well as an increase in pay to reflect this. There were increased and partially successful efforts to gain parents as allies for this cause.

Care revolutionaries at the 1.May demonstration in Hamburg in 2015.

There are also labour-managed companies that support Care Revolution’s ideas. One example are the carers at Lossetal care centre, which is a working part of the Niederkaufungen commune. Other members of the commune, neighbours and relatives are involved as much as possible in the care facilities for care-dependent individuals and people with dementia in particular. This should improve quality of care. It is also an expression of the social objective that people in neighbourhoods should provide each other with mutual support. The care centre complements this with the required professional input.

In familial care work, the initiative Armut durch Pflege (‘Poverty through care’) can be mentioned. This initiative created the association Wir pflegen – Interessenvertretung begleitender Angehöriger und Freunde in Deutschland (‘we care – interest representation for accompanying relatives and friends in Germany’). The aim of the initiative is to give a voice to those affected by difficult situations and their demands, and to bring about material improvements for relatives who are carers, for example, through a substantial care allowance. As such, the association’s demands also relate to the human dignity of the people being cared for, which should not be dependent on their ability to pay. The organisation Nicos Farm pursues the same aims by different means: Children and young people who are dependent on lifelong care owing to a disability should also be able to have a dignified life if their parents themselves are in need of care or are deceased. The organisation aims to implement a project involving accommodation, employment opportunities and therapy at Lüneburger Heide in Germany.

Framework conditions for joint action

The Care Revolution conference in March 2014 was a moment where mutual interest, as well as the different needs and difficult situations were as evident as the desire for a joint explanation regarding the social suffering experienced. At the conference, the widespread weakness in the implementation of the individual initiatives became evident, as did the reasons for this: because no economic pressure can be established in that kind of care work, because the work is frequently carried out by isolated individuals, and because, in neoliberal discourse, completing care tasks is the responsibility of the individual. Above all, the conference underlined a desire to address these issues through joint action.

Moved care revolutionaries.

Cooperation between the different initiatives is not easy: There are real, varied struggles and alternative projects on care work. There is recognition of the similarities between them and the desire to support one another. However, individual, often existential battles are necessarily at the heart of the initiatives’ work. Activists’ lack of flexibility due to care responsibilities, precarious living conditions, and lack of time and money further impede joint action. Additionally, there is still a lack of experience of joint action actually resulting in more success. All of this is currently preventing Care Revolution from gaining more of a public presence.

Cooperation between the different initiatives is not easy: There are real, varied struggles and alternative projects on care work. There is recognition of the similarities between them and the desire to support one another. However, individual, often existential battles are necessarily at the heart of the initiatives’ work. Activists’ lack of flexibility due to care responsibilities, precarious living conditions, and lack of time and money further impede joint action. Additionally, there is still a lack of experience of joint action actually resulting in more success. All of this is currently preventing Care Revolution from gaining more of a public presence

3. How do you see the relationship between Care Revolution and degrowth?

Care Revolution and degrowth can fight for a society based on solidarity together

In terms of content, we see an important link between Care Revolution and degrowth in the fact that both concepts relate to prospects for a good life. This also applies, as far as we can judge, to the other movements that are represented by and brought together under the Degrowth in Movement(s) banner.

At first glance, there appears to be a fundamental contradiction in that degrowth places emphasis on ‘less’: It is about combining less use of resources with a good life for all where everyone’s needs are met. In this scenario, a necessary decrease in economic growth should not be a threat to standards of living but rather represent an opportunity. In contrast, Care Revolution is ultimately seeking more: More time, a more supportive social infrastructure and more material security are unavoidable prerequisites for an improvement in the position of care workers. For the health, care, education and childcare sectors, it is also about more employees and higher wages.

It gets politically interesting when these two aims are combined: less use of resources by society and more care resources. Then this is about reducing all areas that are destructive to humans and the ecological foundations of human life. Examples include armaments manufacturing, coal power stations or the current structure of individual transport. At the same time, it is about growing specific areas that are necessary for self-care and care for one another and creating the conditions for this. It is about developing concepts for how a reduction in soil sealing can be combined with an expansion of nurseries, how a reduction in the consumption of consumer goods can be combined with more material security and support for relatives who are carers, how more employees in healthcare and education can be combined with a societal reduction in working hours. In general, it means thinking about how a society can be structured to meet people’s care needs and preserve the ecological foundations for human life at the same time.

We believe that bringing together degrowth and Care Revolution is worthwhile because of the parallels between the two concepts. Both make one uncompromising demand of a desirable society: It must make a good life possible for all people globally and for subsequent generations. This premise brings with it the idea that a society that cannot guarantee this should be changed. Against this backdrop, degrowth and Care Revolution can meet precisely where they both place a pointed emphasis on anti-capitalism. For the degrowth approach, there is the central idea that an increase in the efficiency of energy and resource usage is not enough to sufficiently reduce consumption. Not only must production processes change but the production scope and the way one uses consumer goods must too. Mobility, access to washing machines, tools or libraries, as well as the use of gardens will have to be much more collectively managed in order to enable access for all. If successful, such a transformed economy would not mean a sacrifice, but would mean having other, richer social relations. This equally positive reference to the interdependence of human beings is very similar to Care Revolution’s thinking on care and care work. To be dependent on one another is a fundamental part of human life. As such, it is also immensely important to focus on human collaboration and solidarity in political actions and in the development of societal alternatives.

Poster for the action week Care Revolution in Erfurt in May 2016.

A joint effort with other movements is an especially attractive notion, as is fighting together. Both Care Revolution and degrowth can identify with the topic of ‘a society based on solidarity, a life based on solidarity’, which touches on the need for changes in societal institutions as well as changes in one’s own lifestyle. Both analyse the destruction of the human being as a social being and ecosystems in capitalism and contrast this with the principles of a society based on solidarity. As such, both are anti-capitalist projects at their core. If this is true, then both movements also pose questions about social transformation: How do individual struggles, experiments and political changes intensify to the point that an alternative to capitalism, based on solidarity, becomes reality? We consider the search for transformation strategies to be part of a joint project for needs-oriented social movements.

4. Which proposals do they have for each other?

Care Revolution’s strength is that very heterogeneous initiatives are calling for comprehensive social changes together.

One strength of the initiatives under the Care Revolution banner is their heterogeneity, as the topic of care speaks directly to people from different backgrounds with different political ideas, life concepts and desires. At the first conference in March 2014, it was impressive to see how this diversity was combined with mutual respect and curiosity.

We believe this relates to the fact that care has reference points in all social and political settings. Care addresses vital needs, which underlines the absurdity of wanting to treat, teach, advise or care for people according to the principle of maximum profit. People with different life experiences and different life situations are coming to the conclusion that society must be entirely redesigned, at least with regard to care. It is relatively easy to imagine alternatives in care as the necessary social infrastructure can largely be realised decentrally, in local districts or villages.

Nurseries, healthcare establishments and social centres can be organised with forms of direct democracy. All those directly affected by negotiations regarding care institutions can be involved. This is primarily possible because care workers of different kinds are meeting on a level playing field: both those for whom care is a career, and those who are involved in care within families or self-care. They can meet each other as experts who are pursuing the same aim of organising care well with different skills and interests. Experiences in the care sector and in struggles for better care conditions can also make comprehensive socialisation, which goes beyond the care sector, appear more realistic and more desirable. Freeing all areas of production and how we live together from the framework of valorisation and market competition is also a condition for protecting the ecological foundations of life.

Care Revolution action “DIE-IN” on the major shopping street “Zeil” in Frankfurt in 2013.

With regard to commons projects, we believe Care Revolution activists can learn a lot from movement approaches such as those who participate within the Degrowth in Movement(s) project. Unlike in the care sector where initial efforts are being made, there are already multiple projects there, where people are jointly developing and living out part of a more liveable future on a small scale. We are thinking here of community repairs, fab labs (public workshops equipped with 3D printers), communal gardens or the many projects in community-supported agriculture.

5. Outlook: Space for visions, suggestions or wishes

Needs-oriented movements can develop a liveable alternative to capitalism together where they combine their alternative projects and transformation strategies.

The different movements and practices under the Degrowth in Movement(s) banner have certain features in common: The centrality of human needs, attentiveness to life in general, the importance of real social relationships and fair social framework conditions make up a shared core, with quite different emphases. From this core, the consequences of capitalist development, which destroy the ecosystem as much as human beings as social creatures, may be criticised. Projects promoting a life based on solidarity can be brought together in discussion and in practice. Individual efforts can be linked and societal alternatives developed.

Strengthening these links to one another is perhaps what is most urgent. This involves the different movements developing a liveable alternative to capitalism through exchanging ideas. It is also about them finding a shared focus in their projects and in their solidarity-based lifestyle. If this is successful, the movements can achieve something together that each individual cannot.

Partial movements also have something to contribute. For example, if migrants are caring for people at home in miserable working conditions, this creates an opportunity for a needs-oriented movement based on solidarity with different reference points: the right of the person requiring care to be well cared for, the right of the relatives to not be solely responsible for care, the rights of the migrant carers to good working conditions and good pay, the rights of the migrants’ children or relatives and the people in their home countries who care for them. It is necessary to account for all these justified demands, which affect the care system here, as well as the unfair distribution of work globally. If movements focusing on migration, care or the global division of labour work closely together, they can support each other with a comprehensive overview of the situation.

Redesigning towns and villages based on solidarity also requires joint action. Organising a collective social infrastructure in districts entails removing the care sector from valorisation. Communal gardens require free access to land. Experiments in co-living, shared repair workshops, community kitchens or policlinics should not be restricted or impeded by the fact that their rental payments have to generate sufficient returns. Reducing private car use requires a correspondingly developed local transport network and thoughts on how urban sprawl and the spatial separation of life and work can be addressed. By bringing together the many individual projects, a new, more strongly contoured image of liveable towns could emerge; discussing necessary conditions should enable us to determine more clearly how a societal alternative could function. By the very different activists from different individual movements meeting and becoming politically active together, they can support each other in thinking of and practising alternatives without old and new exclusions.

Links

Interview with Gabriele Winker on the book ‘Care Revolution. Schritte in eine solidarische Gesellschaft’ (in German)
Care Revolution homepage
Care Revolution’s partners (including all groups and initiatives mentioned in the text)
Care Revolution regional groups
‘Her mit dem guten Leben für alle weltweit! Für eine Care Revolution’ (information on the Care Revolution conference in Berlin in 2014, in German)
Video documentation of Care Revolution actionconference in Berlin in 2014

Applied as well as further literature

Biesecker, Adelheid; Wichterich, Christa; Winterfeld, Uta v. 2012. Feministische Perspektiven zum Themenbereich Wachstum, Wohlstand, Lebensqualität. Berlin: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. <http://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/sonst_publikationen/Biesecker_Wichterich_Winterfeld_2012_FeministischePerspe.pdf>

Fried, Barbara; Schurian, Hannah (ed.) 2015. Um-Care. Gesundheit und Pflege neu organisieren. Berlin: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
<http://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Materialien/Materialien13_UmCare_web.pdf>

Praetorius, Ina 2015. Wirtschaft ist Care. Oder: Die Wiederentdeckung des Selbstverständlichen. Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Schriften zu Wirtschaft und Soziales 6). <https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/2015-02-wirtschaft-ist-care.pdf>

Winker, Gabriele 2013. Zur Krise sozialer Reproduktion. In: Care statt Crash. Sorgeökonomie und die Überwindung des Kapitalismus. Baumann, Hans and others (ed.). Zürich: Edition 8. 119-133. <http://www.tuhh.de/t3resources/agentec/sites/winker/pdf/Krise_sozialer_Reproduktion.pdf>

Winker, Gabriele 2015. Care Revolution. Schritte in eine solidarische Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned skepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

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