A. Allen Butcher • The School of Intentioneering • [email protected] • February 24, 2019

This paper (of 8,384 words) was first published as a blog post at: http://www.Intentioneers.net serving as a preview of the material to appear in a forthcoming book. For a history by the same author of the gifting and sharing counterculture see: The Intentioneers’ Bible: Interwoven Stories of the Parallel Cultures of Plenty and Scarcity for sale at Amazon.com

Please note, several sections have been excerpted; the full texts are available through the “read more” hyperlink to the original post.

1. Idealism versus Self-Interest

It is not the private interests of the individual that creates lasting community, but rather the goals of humanity. — I Ching (ancient Chinese divination text)

The correlation to reality: When I surveyed former members of the egalitarian, communal, intentional community East Wind in Missouri about why they joined and why they left, people said that they joined for idealistic reasons like sustainable, ecological lifestyle, feminism, cooperation, equality and such, and left for personal reasons, like going back to school, or to pursue a career not available in the community, or to focus upon a relationship and children. The I Ching got it right, although this is in slight contradiction to item number 10 “Individuality versus Community.”

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2. Class-Harmony versus Class-Conflict

The mutual respect among people of different socio-economic statuses in non-communal intentional communities creates the peace of class-harmony, as opposed to a disrespect leading to the violence of Marxist class-conflict.

The correlation in reality: Jesus of Nazareth (the inspiration for Christianity), Robert Owen (English advocate of the early cooperative movement in which the term “socialist” originated in 1827), and Charles Fourier (French utopian writer who advocated a “formula for the division of profits among capital, talent, and labor” see: Edward Spann, 1989, Brotherly Tomorrows, p. 165) all showed that community does not require economic equality among people. “Class-harmony community” accommodates people of different social-economic statuses living and working together. Jesus, or those who created Christianity, along with Owen, and Fourier got it right!

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3. Intentional versus Circumstantial Community

Intentional community, in which people deliberately define and live common values, as opposed to circumstantial community where people happen to live in proximity by chance, illustrates the “communal sharing theory,” which states that the greater the experience people have of sharing and/or gifting, the greater will be their commitment to the community thus formed.

The correlation in practice: Sharing and gifting involves material objects as well as thoughts, beliefs, feelings, emotions, leadership, and power, the practice of which builds resilience for survival of the community’s unique identity. It is through practicing gifting and sharing in many different formats that the communities movement is continually growing, differentiating, and evolving. Labor-gifting is used in communities which involve the sharing of privately-owned property, like cohousing and class-harmony communities, and labor-sharing is used in communities which involve the sharing of commonly-owned property, specifically communal societies. Intentional communities having both private and common property, like community land trusts, may practice any form of time-based economy: labor-exchanging, labor-gifting, labor-sharing.

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4. Sharing versus Privacy

The “communal privacy theory” states that increasing levels of privacy, afforded by resources or powers entrusted to individuals (called “trusterty”), does not reduce communalism as long as the ownership and responsibility remains under communal ownership and control.

The correlation to practice: “Trusterty” is the process of entrusting commonly-owned assets or powers to individuals for personal use or for service to the community. Egalitarian communal society entrusts assets and powers to individuals and small groups. Trusterty also refers to the trusted asset or power, for example in land trusts the term refers to both natural resources and to the responsibilities of the trustees. (The term “trusterty” is attributed to the Russian anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin.)

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5. Cofamily versus Consanguineous Family

The “cofamily” affirms and expands the options or possibilities of human culture beyond the common forms of the family of single-parent, nuclear, extended, and blended families, to include small groups of adults in community who are not related by blood or marriage.

The correlation to practice: A “cofamily” (which may also be called an “intentional family”) is a small community of three-to-nine adults with or without children, with the prefix “co” referring to: collective, complex, cooperative, convoluted, communal, complicated, conflicted, or any similar term, except consanguineous. A cofamily may or may not be a group marriage, as in the plural-conjugal structures of polyamory and polyfidelity. A cofamily may stand alone as a small intentional community or be part of a larger community such as cohousing or a communal society as a “nested cofamily” (sometimes also called “small living groups” or SLGs) whether comprised only of adults or formed around the care of children or those with special needs.

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6. Family or Cofamily-Based Childcare versus Large-Group Communal Childcare

People often romanticize “communal childcare,” and it is well that they do! Communal childcare is a beautiful thing when it works, and it works best in small groups such as cofamilies and nested cofamilies, primarily due to the need to limit the number of adults who must make and keep agreements about the children.  Large-group communalism has an inherent bias against children: as couples forming in the community leave to start a family elsewhere; as adults without children are concerned that the children who are born into the community will likely leave eventually and not become members, after the community pays the expense of raising them; and as large-group communal childcare in which parents cede decision-making power over their children to the group has proven unsustainable over the long term. Yet the problems are mostly among the adults! Meanwhile, Daniel Greenberg presents in his study of children in community the quote from an anonymous community member saying, “For our young children, community is the closest they’re ever going to get in this life to paradise!” (Anonymous, paraphrased from Daniel Greenberg, Communities no. 92, Fall, 1996, p. 12) ***

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7. Solidarity versus Alienation

In community people clearly see that we are all in this together, while in the monetary economy it is understood that everyone is in it for themselves.

The correlation to experience: Time-based economies, whether labor-exchanging (e.g., Time Dollars), labor-gifting (e.g., volunteering, “giving back,” and “paying it forward”), or labor-sharing (i.e., whether anti-quota or vacation-credit labor systems), by valuing all community-labor equally no matter what is done or who is doing it, provide freedom from the alienation of monetary economics.

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8. Abstract Principle versus Unique Situation

Confusing the image for the essence is a common mistake. “Any idea of God is just that —an idea. Confusing the idea of God with the true ineffable nature of the Mystery is idolatry.” (Timothy Feke and Peter Gandy, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians, 2001, p. 27)

The correlation in community: The psychology professor Deborah Altus (Washburn University, Topeka, KS) explains that the Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner, who wrote Walden Two, a utopian fiction applying his theories of behavioral engineering, appreciated Sunflower House (KS) and Los Horcones (Mexico) because those communities affirmed empiricism (the scientific method) in a deliberate, systematic way, in contrast with Twin Oaks (VA) and East Wind (MO) in which the founders initially attempted to emulate Skinner’s utopian fiction Walden Two (1948) as a blueprint, although eventually evolving their own unique systems. In his 1949 book Paths in Utopia (p. 139) Martin Buber concurs with Skinner saying, “Community should not be made into a principle; it should always satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction. The realization of community, like the realization of any idea, cannot occur once and for all time; always it must be the moment’s answer to the moment’s question, and nothing more.” Emmy Arnold, wife of Eberhard Arnold, cofounders of the Society of Brothers or Bruderhof wrote, possibly in reference to the Bruderhof’s on-again-off-again relationship with the much older, larger, and more traditional Hutterites, “A life shared in common is a miracle. People cannot remain together for the sake of traditions. Community must be given again and again as a new birth.” (Emmy Arnold, 1974, Children in Community, 2nd edition, originally published 1963, p. 173)

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9. Communal Economics versus Exchange Economies

The well known Morelly’s Maxim written in the 18th century of “from each according to ability; to each according to need” is now updated in the 21st century to apply to groups as opposed to individuals by the present author in Allen’s Aphorism as “from all according to intent; to all according to fairness.” Ability is to intent; as need is to fairness.

The correlation in community: As Daniel Gavron wrote about the Kibbutz movement in Israel, the red line between communalism and the exchange economy is whether all labor is valued equally or whether differential compensation is used to reward different types of labor. “… [W]hereas previous changes in the kibbutz way of life, such as increasing personal budgets [see: 4. Sharing versus Privacy] and having the children sleep in their parent’s homes [see: 6. Family versus Communal Childcare], did not alter the fundamental character of the institution, the introduction of differential salaries indicated a sea change.” (Gavron, 2000, Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia, p. 9)

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10. Individuality versus Community

There must be brotherly [and sisterly] love, a wholeness of humanity. But there must also be pure, separate individuality, separate and proud. —D. H. Lawrence

The correlation in community: Many writers about community have focused upon the opposing dynamics of the individual versus the community, some suggesting the need for individuals to give up attachments to their own interests in order to support what brings and keeps the community together. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s 1972 book Commitment and Community considers a large range of these issues. An example would be in communal groups where each member is given a private room, which is a basic need for individual privacy that communal groups generally recognize. Yet a dynamic seen in such groups is that some new members spend the first months of their membership focused upon fixing up their rooms, like building a sleeping loft or raised bed with storage below, installing a parquet floor, painting the room, building shelves and so on, then soon after it is done, they drop membership and leave. They never make the transition from focusing upon themselves to focusing upon the group. In the opposite case of over-bearing group-think and manipulative group processes, the individual loses the ability to think critically and independently (see: Tim Miller, 2016, “‘Cults’ and Intentional Communities,” Communities Directory 7th Ed., FIC; and Marlene Winell, 1993, Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion). Survival of an intentional community requires that at certain points the individual and the group must be interlocking, yet both must be sufficiently autonomous to resist submergence of one by the other. [This is somewhat contrary to item number 1 “Idealism versus Self-Interest.”]

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11. Social Pressure Justified by Idealism versus Dissenting Non-Compliance

When the irresistible force of personal needs hits the immovable object of the attachment to communal ideals, a cognitive dissonance results of people doing one thing while saying something contradictory about exactly what it is they are doing.

The correlation in community: For about a decade East Wind Community, about a quarter-century Twin Oaks Community, about sixty years the Kibbutz movements, and for probably a few centuries the Hutterite colonies, all struggled to make something work that tends to not work well in large communal societies; designing and maintaining communal childcare systems in which the community rather than the parents make all the decisions for the children. [See: 6. Family or Cofamily-Based Childcare versus Large-Group Communal Childcare] In many cases the community sentiment is essentially that of course a communal society must have a communal childcare system, while typically the children who grow up in communal childcare systems refuse to raise their own children the same way, resulting in their leaving the communal society to have children and sometimes causing the communal community itself to privatize or disband.

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12. The Parallel Cultures of Exchange Economies versus Communal Economics

While America is generally described as a “capitalist country” the dominant culture is actually fairly well balanced between the aspects of competition and of cooperation. The theory of “parallel cultures” as developed by the present author says that the two economic systems are intertwined or interwoven, such that the debt-based monetary system and the non-monetary time-based system are mutually dependent.

Although the monetary system gets all the glory (via economic metrics such as GNP/GDP), the fact is that industrial, agricultural, governmental and all other forms of production are dependent upon the uncounted labor which provides domestic and community services, usually performed by women. If the non-monetarily-compensated work in domestic reproduction, often called “women’s work,” were to be monetized, it would add significantly to the country’s GNP/GDP. As it is, the corporate/private and government/public world is dependent upon the non-monetized domestic labor of women and men for the raising of each generation of wage-earning and salaried employees.

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13. Utopian Countercultural Lifestyles versus Imposed Reality of the Dominant Culture

Cultural innovations often arise from utopian theory or from within intentional communities, or they are picked up by communities from the outside-world and adapted or evolved, then are disseminated back into the outside-world where they may result in changes in the dominant culture. Three examples of this dynamic are: feminism, legal structures for communalism, and freedom from taxation.

The correlations in community—Feminism: Charles Fourier (1772-1837) of France was an eccentric utopian philosopher and writer who focused upon cooperation rather than communalism, and like Robert Owen who inspired the cooperative movement in England, Fourier is credited with being an early inspiration to the French worker and consumer cooperative movements (Beecher and Bienvenu, pp. 66-7). Both Fourier and Owen inspired later class-harmony communities [see: 2. Class-Harmony versus Class-Conflict]. Using a pen-name, Fourier published in 1808 his Theory of the Four Trends and the General Destinies in which he stated that, “the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.” Beginning in the 1840s, as Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu write in their 1971 book, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, this statement became “one of the battle cries of radical feminism,” contributing to the revolutionary movements of 1848 throughout Europe (B. & B., p. 196). Fourier is also “credited with coining or giving currency to the term … feminism” (Nicholas Riasanovsky, 1969, The Teaching of Charles Fourier, p. 208), which later became, along with the cooperative movement, two primary aspects of socialism, with the first use of the term “socialist” appearing in the Owenite London Cooperative Magazine in 1827. Feminism became a mass movement of its own through the suffragette and material-feminist organizing (see: Dolores Hayden, 1981, The Grand Domestic Revolution) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with feminism’s second wave occurring during the radical protests and organizing of the 1960s and ‘70s. According to Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her 1972 book Commitment and Community, it was from a 1960s New York women’s liberation group that Twin Oaks Community adopted the word “co” to use as a neutral, non-gender-specific pronoun, in place of “he” and “she,” and “cos” in place of the possessive “his” and “hers” (Kanter, p. 23; see also Kinkade, The Collected Leaves of Twin Oaks, vol. 1, p. 115 and vol. 2, p. 23). In a letter from Kat Kinkade to Jon Wagner, professor of sociology at Knox College, Galesburg, IL, around 1980, Kinkade wrote about Twin Oaks and East Wind Communities that, “sexual equality … is fundamental to our idea of ‘equality,’ and equality is fundamental to our approach to changing society. There is no platform of our ideology that is more central.” To which Jon Wagner replied in his 1982 book Sex Roles in Contemporary American Communes, “These communities may be among the most nonsexist social systems in human history.” (Wagner, pp. 37-8)

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Motivations for Communitarian Gifting and Sharing

The intentioneering of cultural innovations in utopian theory and communitarian cultures is often motivated by the desire among people to live in ways more consistent with their greatest values and highest ideals of personal responsibility for self, society, and nature than what the dominant culture offers or supports. As explained in section 12 “The Parallel Cultures of Exchange Economies versus Communal Economics,” the gifting and sharing cultures give rise to monetary economics, which became the “dominant culture” expressing the negative values of possessiveness and competition, while monetary economics similarly gives rise to countercultural systems of gifting and sharing representing the positive aspects of cooperative culture first learned in eons of tribal culture. Ever since the advent of money people have devised forms of time-based economies to escape the evils of monetary economics, including endless warfare, mass slavery, wealth amidst poverty, and environmental decline.

When money is not used within a community, encouragement and reward for participation requires creative methods for expressing group affirmation and appreciation for the time and skills contributed by each person. Since there is no monetary reward for motivating work in the time-based economy, forms of positive reinforcement for contributing time in labor or work may include:

• Personal satisfaction for doing work valued and appreciated by others, or which serves the common good;
• Recognition by friends for one’s good work, especially when offered personally, and
• Knowing that other members are also doing the best quality work they can for the community.

This latter form of positive reinforcement results in a sense of group awareness and commitment, or esprit de corps to use a military term, which helps to avoid or decrease burnout, or the loss of the intention originally inspiring the individual due to the daily effort required to maintain commitment and participation.

There is a large amount of sociological and psychological material about what motivates people, suggesting that “carrot and stick” approaches which inspire hope-of-gain versus fear-of-loss is not the most important concern. Daniel Pink explains in his 2009 book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us that once our basic survival needs are met, our greatest motivation for what we do is the resulting personal growth and development that we realize, toward expressing our individual human potential. The author analyzes the components of personal motivation as being first autonomy, or the desire to direct our own lives, then mastery, or the desire to continually improve what we do (and the more it matters to others the better), and also the desire to be of service to an ideal or something that is larger than just one’s own life. Alfie Kohn writes in his 1999 book, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes that “artificial inducements” only work for a period of time, after which the lack of a meaningful context for what we do can cause people to lose interest in the bribes offered. Rewards can actually work against creativity as they discourage risk-taking when the safest way to earn a reward is to follow the methods designed and imposed by others. Kohn identifies the conditions for authentic motivation as collaboration with others, the meaningfulness of the work, and choice or self-direction, all of which can be provided in the social-economic-political design of intentional community.

Natural Law as the Unified-Field Theory of Human Society

The thirteen correlations of theory and practice above present fundamental dichotomies in human culture. Many of these and probably others can also be written as ironies of human culture, yet however presented they may also be considered to be behavioristic principles of “natural law,” and together affirmed as aspects of the unified-field theory of communitarianism, or of the practice of intentioneering, as expressed in the application of our highest values and ideals in our chosen lifestyle.

Natural law integrates in one coherent world view a set of moral principles for the design of spiritual, political, economic, and other social issues. These aspects of our existence at the juncture of the physical and the spiritual aspects of the universe justifies both common and private property by affirming respect for social, environmental, and personal responsibility in our applications of the laws-of-nature.

These correlations of intentional community, or of intentioneering theory and experience, represent at least some of the psychological laws of behaviorism. These balance the group’s right to self-determination in creating its social contract, including a behavior code and a system of property ownership and/or control, against the individual’s subjective needs and wants. The individual’s participation in the mutual processes of decentralized, self-governance, toward common expressions of “the good life,” results in our cultural evolution through successive approximations of paradise on Earth.

Definitions:

• Behaviorism (behavioral psychology) — A philosophical theory that all behavior ultimately results from external environmental influences upon, or conditioning of, the individual’s internal cognition, emotions, and attitudes.

• Natural Law (political or religious philosophy) — A body of unchanging moral principles influencing human conduct, whether recognized through reason or revelation.

• Intentioneering (compare with communitarianism) — The effort to design and live a preferred lifestyle or culture; coined from the terms “intentional community” and “behavioral engineering.”

Photo by Maia C

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For more information, please visit Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), which has a directory of ICs and a huge amount of other material. 

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Hello y’all, I’m representing the Tech Workers Coalition.

The TWC is a network of progressive and left-wing workers throughout the tech industry who are trying to organize and bring the labor movement into Silicon Valley, particularly parts of it that have not been grounds for labor organizing thus far. You can consider us to be a kind of workers center, that facilitates the building of new communities and new networks that are separate and in opposition to the business interests of the tech industry.

We’re mostly made up of people in various white-collar occupations in the industry: programmers, engineers, product managers, and so forth. But it’s important to note that we really want to help organize the entire industry, across all occupations and stratas: everybody from cafeteria workers, to customer service reps, to data scientists. In fact, TWC originally started as a group whose main purpose was to help unionization campaigns among service workers, and to enlist the support of the skilled technical workers at various sites. But since then, our ambitions have grown, especially as the experience of being in solidarity with service workers has lead to more of us thinking of ourselves as workers as well, as part of the same struggle.

So with regards to labor organizing in and against platform capitalism, we’re very excited and enthusiastic about considering the possibilities for leveraging the strategic position of skilled technical workers in the tech industry, in conjunction with the ongoing movements of what we could call “platform workers”. In other words, we’d like to think seriously about the potential to build a class alliance between the workers that build platforms and the workers that use – or are used by – platforms.

For example, imagine if Amazon warehouse workers were able to coordinate with Amazon engineers. Or if Deliveroo workers could organize with Deliveroo programmers. Bringing in the skilled technical layers of platform capitalism into the labor movement opens up a whole realm of possibilities for what we can accomplish.

Of course, right now, we’re a bit of a ways off from any of that. There has been a lot of spontaneous organizing and unrest happening in the industry in the past couple of years, but still the key task right now for us is to start with the basics of agitation and organizing. This is where “workers’ inquiry” comes in.

Our use of workers’ inquiry is a bit different than what’s been discussed before. We’re not academics or researchers, we the workers are ourselves doing the inquiry – on ourselves!

Our premise is that getting workers to talk to each other about problems that they have in the workplace is a powerful way to agitate, and build toward organizing; and that for would-be organizers like the core of TWC, there is no way in hell that you can have an effective campaign if you don’t know what your coworkers are actually thinking about and care about. It’s also an effective way to better understand what we can call the “class composition” of the tech industry; or in other words, where are people coming from in terms of backgrounds and occupations, where are they specifically located in the industry, what supply chains they’re a part of, and so on.

The reason that these kinds of discussion sessions can be effective is because oftentimes, especially in tech, workers feel like their gripes and grievances are their own problems. But once you start hearing other workers openly complaining and being angry about certain aspects of the industry, you start to realize that these aren’t, in fact, individual problems, but systemic problems. You also might start to realize that maybe you’re not some kind of “entrepreneur” or a temporarily-embarrassed founder or startup CEO, but that you are in fact a worker, who is under surveillance and managed and exploited. You are a cog in capitalism, just like everybody else.

And so for the Tech Workers Coalition, a lot of what we’ve been doing is grounding our organizing around creating space to simply hang out and talk, and discuss our gripes and grievances with the industry, and help our fellow workers develop some class consciousness. Or at least a bad attitude about work. And in this way we can start to build the foundation on which an alliance between skilled technical workers and platform workers and other segments of the working class can be developed.

So how do we go about doing inquiries?

Mostly, we’ve done the straightforward thing of having an event for a couple of hours where people show up, break off into groups of 2-4, and go through a questionnaire. And then maybe have a big group discussion.

The questions inquire into different aspects of working in tech, ranging from the details on specific occupations and the commodities and services that are produced, to general grievances that people have, or have seen expressed around them. So questions can be pretty simple conversational topics, like “Where do you work? What’s your job title? What tools do you use?”, and they can also be somewhat agitating, like “what do you dislike most about your workplace? How many hours do you work every week? What’s the stupidest thing you’ve seen management do?”

This stuff may seem pretty basic, which it is. This isn’t really complicated or advanced stuff here. Again, it’s worth emphasizing that a key objective right now is to simply get people to talk to each other in a critical manner and engage in some mutual and collective agitation.

To this end, the general inquiry sessions have been relatively effective and there’s been some good positive feedback. Some people have appreciated just having a space where people can openly vent frustrations and gripes about the tech industry, as opposed to more mainstream networking spaces where the expectation is that you are very cheerful and optimistic and enthusiastic. So in our spaces, instead of having to spin working 80 hours a week as “oh the work is so challenging and I’m learning so much”, you can admit “yeah this actually really sucks, I’d rather have an actual life outside of the workplace”.

For others, it has been useful to have a space to ground themselves into local concrete issues, as opposed to the big-picture macro-political stuff that they are used to thinking about. A lot of us are already very politicized, but we tend to think about politics in a very abstract and global way; so it’s really helpful to have discussions that force us to think about our own lives and how politics and political economy is impacting us on a day-to-day basis and how the workplace can be a node through which you can make a difference both for yourself and for others.

There has even been at least one case where a fellow worker, who is now a very enthusiastic member of TWC, explicitly pinned a workers inquiry session as being a pivotal moment when he recognized himself as a worker rather than a professional or an entrepreneur and how suddenly all this pressure was lifted from him. I’m not special! I’m just a fucking cog! Who cares!

All in all, we’re definitely going to continue to use workers inquiry as a strategy to facilitate conversations and reflections, as well as genuine relationships.

So inquiries have been a great tool to help build relationships between workers, but it’s also been effective at helping us understand what kinds of grievances and gripes that people around us have, that are driving them into organizing spaces. Or in other words, it helps shine a light on why the hell we techies are getting all worked up even though we supposedly have it really good with nice salaries and ping pong tables.

We can generally categorize tech worker grievances into three areas.

The first is standard workplace issues: things like bad management, long working hours, salary disparities, etc. I think it’s noteworthy that tech workers can still be riled up about basic workplace issues despite being relatively privileged and economically secure. We still may be working 60-80 hours a week, with an abusive manager, and heavy surveillance at work, and so on. Long working hours is definitely one of the popular grievances. Another is transparency around salaries; this is especially relevant when it comes to patterns of women and people of color getting underpaid, but not having a good way to figure this out with hard numbers. All in all, with regards to organizing, the fact that basic workplace issues are still a source of unrest means that we can apply a lot of the old lessons of union organizing to the tech industry.

The second category is issues of what we could call the “social composition” of the workplace, specifically issues of diversity (or lack thereof), and racism and sexism. Sexual harassment is a particularly key point of contention in the tech industry, and a lot of workers are really keen on figuring out ways to deal with it. And the general lack of management interest in dealing with these types of issues can be a big source of disillusionment and anger. So a key goal moving forward is going to be crafting strategies for rank-and-file solutions to issues of racism and sexism. We’ve actually already had some level of organizing success in certain workplaces where people were able to put collective pressure on serial harassers and get them disciplined or kicked out.

The third category is ethical and political issues. This is mainly with respect to how a company generally fits into the larger political context. For example, a company’s management trying to smooch up Donald Trump can be a serious source of anger for a workforce which is largely anti-Trump. It’s worth noting that this kind of grievance has actually been a very visible source of unrest for some time now; for example, workers at big companies like Google and Comcast had walkouts to protest Trump’s immigration policies. The ethics of technology are also a hot-button topic right now; for example, people working for various kinds of data companies are getting increasingly uneasy with the realization that actually, they’re working for surveillance companies. Shortly after the 2016 US election, a whole bunch of tech workers signed on to a petition pledging to never work on tech that could be used for the surveillance and targeting of minority groups. There’s also a disconnect between workers and companies on issues of privacy and security; a lot of workers take seriously the importance of privacy, but of course this runs against the very reason why a lot of tech companies exist in the first place.

So, those are the three general categories of grievances among tech workers. Hopefully it’s a little more clear now why TWC is optimistic about the prospects for bringing skilled technical workers into a larger working class movement. And one more thing I would note about this is that among all those grievances, by far, the most prevalent motivation for people who are agitated and want to organize is around issues of solidarity, either with underrepresented minority groups, or with tech workers who are not in relative positions of privilege, like contract workers and temporary workers. And it’s worth repeating that TWC originally started as a group that wanted to get skilled technical workers to be in solidarity with service workers on tech campuses.

So with this in mind, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea to think that we could organize tech workers to disrupt the disruption of the labor market, and resist right alongside platform workers.

And just a couple of notes about our actual organizing. I’d like to say that in general, it’s been going really well. And actually it’s going a lot better than a lot of us expected. Late last year we set some goals for the organization for 2018, and already we’re hitting those goals or surpassing them. In addition, there’s a lot of spontaneous organizing that’s happening independently of each other. At one big workplace where we have a presence, we’re discovering that there are a bunch of other informal groups who are also organizing to pressure management or subvert the company or whatever. And this gets at the concept of “invisible organization” that some people mentioned earlier today. So TWC in no way has a monopoly on tech worker organizing, which is great. It means there is a lot of energy around this stuff. Although we’re definitely the coolest.

There was also a really interesting recent case where the engineers at a tech startup ran a really successful unionization campaign, and all 15 or so engineers and programmers were on board. But then, after about a week after they told the company, they all got fired. Which is kind of hilarious; a tech startup fired all their tech workers. But in any case it’s a great example of the contradictions that we’re talking about here, and last week TWC helped organize a rally and a picket outside the company and we had about 70 people show up. And one thing to keep in mind about this kind of stuff is that even if initial attempts at organizing are met with retaliation like this, at the end of the day, that’s just going to increase the gap between management and workers in the tech industry.

So yeah. Things are going good. And we’re excited for 2018.

Photo by Berliner.Gazette

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As we have painfully learned from the previous industrial and digital revolutions, technology is not entirely value-neutral, meaning neither good nor bad. Under the social and economic system of capitalism, most technological innovation has been driven by the desire to maximize profits, reduce space/time limitations (i.e. how long it takes to make and deliver a commodity or service), and eliminate labor costs. So, while it is true that the technology does not determine its own use (not yet anyway), its application and value have largely been determined by a small subset of humanity. We want to make sure that we change this equation with the Third Digital Revolution. How we structure the ownership, control, and use of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution will either aid humanity in our collective quest for liberation, or deepen still our species’ inhumanity towards itself and our dear mother earth. One thing is painfully clear, and that is if these technologies remain the exclusive property of the capitalist class and the transnational corporations they control, these tools will not be used for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of humanity, but to expand the profits and further consolidate the power of the 1% that rule the world. Under their control, these technologies will lead to a crisis of global unemployment on a scale unseen in human history. The end result will be a global dystopia, a social nightmare predicated on massive poverty, lawlessness, state repression, and ever greater human disposability rather than the potential utopia these technologies could potentially enable.

Confronting the Challenges: Class, Race, Gender, and Ecological Limitations

GYASI WILLIAMS (LEFT) AND AMALYA LIVINGSTON OF THE COMMUNITY PRODUCTION INITIATIVE.

In order to make the future that we want, we have to openly confront the stark problems already at the heart of the Third Digital Revolution, and there are several glaring problems already in plain sight. Despite great efforts toward democratizing the Third Digital Revolution by making much of the technology “open source”, historically oppressed and disenfranchised communities remain excluded. The same access gulf seen in the current “digital divide” is being replicated and deepened. Instead of a ubiquitous transformation, with equal access and distribution, what in fact is emerging is a “fabrication divide”.

This divide is layered, multi-dimensional, and compounded. The first and obvious barrier to access is cost. Those who can afford the machines will eventually be able to produce whatever they want, while those who can’t will remain dependent on the inequitable market, the forces that manipulate it, and the increasingly antiquated methods of production they employ to produce their consumer goods. While this revolution is spurred on by the dropping cost and rapid development of fabrication technology, indigenous and working-class Black and Latin-x populations will still find themselves at least a step behind as the cost of early adoption will continue to advantage the already privileged.

The issues of cost and accessibility lead directly to a discussion of class. The working class is almost always alienated from the market mechanisms that enable people to take the best advantage of emerging technology. Further still, the dismantling of society by the neoliberal project has eroded the bonds of social solidarity and eradicated the safety nets created through working-class political victories. The emergence of the Third Digital Revolution within this socio-political context will only widen the inequality and access gaps that already exist. For example, the recent elimination of net neutrality combined with years of starving public schools of funding and eviscerating city services ensures that libraries and any other public services that once helped to counterbalance the technological gaps experienced by the working class during the latter half of the 20th century are becoming ineffective or altogether nonexistent.

While there has been a great deal of public discussion about the advance of the Third Digital Revolution and what benefits and threats it potentially poses, there has been little discussion about racial inequity within the Third Digital Revolution. Without a major structural intervention, the Third Digital Revolution will only exacerbate the existing digital divide. Again, here the problem is layered and compounded, for the advances in automation and artificial intelligence that the Third Digital Revolution will advance will disproportionately eliminate many of the low-skill, low-wage manual labor and service sector jobs that historically oppressed communities have been forced into over the last several years. Given some projections of massive job loss due to automation, there is a real question about whether the potential benefits this transformation could have will outweigh the severe pain and loss Indigenous, Black and Latinx working-class populations will face as this technology advances.

Even less discussed than the class and race-based impacts of the Third Digital Revolution are the gender disparities that are likely to deepen if there is no major intervention in the social advance of this development. Despite recent advances, it is no secret that women are grossly under-represented in the technological and scientific arenas[2]. The question is, how can and will the gender inequities be addressed in the midst of the social transformations stimulated by the Third Digital Revolution? Will the existing gender distribution patterns remain, be exasperated, or will they be eliminated?

The Third Digital Revolution, like its predecessors, will undoubtedly make fundamental shifts not only to human society but to the planet as well, many of which have yet to be anticipated. One likely shift that must be examined is the potential of accelerated environmental catastrophe. Currently, 3D printing is all the rage, and for good reason. It inspires the imagination and hints at a future where we are able to download or create a file that will allow us to fabricate just about anything that we can imagine. The key question that hasn’t been asked is how will humanity manage personal fabrication on a mass scale? The earth’s resources are finite. Nevertheless, capitalism has ingrained in us an infinite desire for commodities. While the methods of production under capitalism have been horrifically destructive to the environment, there is no guarantee that the appetites that have been programmed into us over the last several hundred years will suddenly accommodate themselves to ecological balance and sustainability if we are suddenly given the ability to fabricate what we want in the privacy of our own homes. There is a great deal of consciousness-raising and re-socialization about our ecological limits and responsibilities, accompanied by major policy shifts, that must be done to prevent the resource depletion and massive fabrication waste that is likely to result from this technology becoming broadly adopted.

All of these challenging facets of the coming Third Digital Revolution must be addressed, and quickly. The Third Digital Revolution is emerging in a society with immense inequality and imbalance with regard to the integration of existing technology from the previous Industrial and Digital Revolutions. As these historic developments converge into the Third Digital Revolution, the concern is that not only will this inherited inequity continue but will be drastically deepened for all of the reasons listed above. Those of us seeking to realize the potential of the Third Digital Revolution to help our species realize its full potential, must create the means to combat this deepening inequity, and democratize this transformation. If we can do that, we may very well be able to lay the foundation for a democratic and regenerative economic order, one that could potentially eliminate the extractive, exploitative, and utterly oppressive and undemocratic system that we are currently subjected to.

Those who seek to assist in democratizing the technology of the Third Digital Revolution must understand that any initial investment at this time is risky. The road ahead is not clear. What we do know is that we cannot afford to leave the development of this technological revolution solely up to actors like Amazon, Google, Walmart, or the US Department of Defense. In their hands, it will only serve to further extract profits from the majority of humanity and maintain the imperial dominance of the US government through force of arms. However, finding capital players willing to make “non-extractive” investments that center on tech justice, cooperative business innovation, and production driven to fulfill human need over profit realization are hard to find. There are many organizations experimenting with getting this technology out to vulnerable populations to aid us from falling further behind the technological access gap, but none of us really know what will work initially, nor when the technology will be at a significantly advanced stage to truly replace the existing mode of production. The stakes are high, as are the risks at this stage. Nevertheless, we must struggle, as all early adopters should, to not only avoid being left out in the cold but to help guide the development in a democratic and egalitarian manner.

Creating the Future, Taking Risks, Co-Constructing Solutions

Early adopter risk-taking is exactly what Cooperation Jackson is embarking upon with the launch of our Community Production Center and Community Production Cooperative[3]. Our aim is to make Jackson, Mississippi the “city of the future”, a Transition City anchored in part in the practices of a “Fab City”[4] that would transform our city into an international center of advanced, sustainable manufacturing utilizing 3D printing and other innovative tools of the Third Digital Revolution. The only way we are going to come anywhere close to attaining anything like the utopia these technologies promise is by democratizing them and subjecting them to social use and production for the benefit of all, rather than the control and appropriation by the few.

The democratization of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution, both in their ownership and use, is one of the primary aims of Cooperation Jackson. To realize this aim we struggle for Tech Democracy[5] and Tech Justice first and foremost by educating our members and the general public about the promises and perils of the technology so that people can make informed decisions. We suggest this as a general framework of struggle. The next course of action we suggest is the pursuit of self-finance to acquire as much of this technology as we can, with the explicit intention of controlling these means of production and utilizing them for the direct benefit of our organization and our community.

Another course of action we suggest and are embarking upon is organizing our community for political and economic power to expand and reinforce our Community Production efforts. Our aim is to gradually make Community Production ubiquitous in our community, with the explicit intent of gradually replacing the exploitative and environmentally destructive methods of production in use at present. A related course of action is to utilize our political power to make demands on the government, the capitalist class, and the transnational corporations to remove the controls they have on the technology, like exclusive patents, in order to make these technologies publicly accessible. Another essential demand on the government is to make massive investments in these technologies to make them public utilities and/or commons[6]and to ensure that the corporations make restorative investments in these utilities for the public good.

We also think that public/community partnerships should be pursued on a municipal level to establish direct community ownership over these technologies to help ensure that vulnerable populations and historically oppressed communities gain direct access, with the prerequisite being where these communities are sufficiently organized and possess a degree of political power within the municipality. Public/community partnerships could also be essential towards capitalizing these democratic pursuits, by enabling the community to use both its tax wealth and various vehicles of self-finance to build out the necessary infrastructure in a manner that will ensure that it remains in the community commons or public domain. It is essential that these types of pursuits be public/community partnerships, with the community being organized in collective institutions like cooperatives, credit unions, community development corporations, etc., and not your typical public/private partnerships that will only remove this infrastructure from the commons or public domain as soon as possible in our neoliberal dominated world.

Further, given the steady decline in union membership, density, and overall social and political power, coupled with the ever-growing threats of automation, mechanization, big data, and artificial intelligence to the working class as a whole, we want to appeal to the various unions, in and out of the AFL-CIO, as the most organized sector of the working class in the US, to take the challenges of the Third Digital Revolution head on. In fact, we think organized labor should be leading the charge on the question of Community Production, as it is in the best position given its resources, skills and strategic location in society to steer the Third Digital Revolution in a democratic manner. In this vein, we want to encourage organized labor to utilize the tremendous investment resources it has at its disposal to start creating or investing in Community Production Cooperatives throughout the US to further the ubiquitous development and utilization of the technology to help us all realize the benefits of a “zero-marginal-cost society”[7] to combat climate change and eliminate the exploitation of the working class and the lingering social and material effects of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, etc. It is time for the cooperative and union movements, as vehicles of working-class self-organization, to reunite again, and Community Production units could and should be a strategic means towards this end.

Finally, we have to keep pushing forward-thinking universities, particularly public colleges and universities, and philanthropists to also provide support to community production development efforts seeking to democratize control of this technology early on.

These are the core elements of what we think is a transformative program to utilize and participate in the development of the Third Digital Revolution for the benefit of our community and the liberation of the working class and all of humanity. We want and encourage other historically oppressed communities throughout the United States to follow this path, Jackson cannot and should not follow this path alone.

Supporting Cooperation Jackson and the Center for Community Production

If you agree with this analysis, in whole or in part, we need your help to bridge the Fabrication Divide. Cooperation Jackson is seeking broad public support for the development of our Community Production Center. We are aiming to raise $600,000 to complete the purchase of the facilities, build out them out, and equip them with all the utilities and equipment needed to create a dynamic Production Center. You can help build the Center for Community Production by becoming a National Donor or Investor and recruiting others to do the same. The $600,000 figure does not have to be daunting, if we can recruit 600 people to donate and/or invest $1,000 each, we can easily meet this goal. So, let us not be swayed, but moved to organize to turn this vision into a transformative reality.

[1] We draw our primary definition of the Third Digital Revolution from the work of Neil Gershenfeld, particularly his more recent work “Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution”, co-written with Alan Gershenfeld and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld.

[2] For more detail on the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields see, “Women still underrepresented in the STEM Fields”, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/10/21/women-still-underrepresented-in-stem-fields.

[3] We derive our notion of Community Production from Blair Evans and INCITE FOCUS based in Detroit, Michigan. For more information see INCITE FOCUS https://www.incite-focus.org/ and “Green City Diaries: Fab Lab and the Language of Nature” http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/greencity1113.aspx.

[4] Fab City is a concept that grew out of the Fab Lab Network. For more information on this concept and emerging network see http://fab.city/about/.

[5] We are adopting the concept of Tech Justice from LabGov, which describes itself as the “laboratory for the governance of the city as a commons”. For more information see http://www.labgov.it/.

[6] We utilize the notion and definition of the Commons utilized within the Peer 2 Peer Network. For more details see “What it the Commons Transition?” at https://primer.commonstransition.org/1-short-articles/1-1-what-is-a-commons-transition.

[7] We have adopted the notion of a “Zero-Marginal Cost Society” from Jeremy Rifkin and his work, “The Zero-Marginal Cost Society: the Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism”.

The post Countering the Fabrication Divide: The Third Digital Revolution and Class, Race, Gender and Ecological Limitations appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“This week, I am delighted to welcome Alexander Douglas, a lecturer in philosophy at St. Andrews University, to the show, to talk about his recent book: The Philosophy Of Debt. It was great to talk to Alex about the nature of debt and money, and how all of this stuff is explicitly linked to the power relations and class structure of our society. We also got to talk about how this MMT stuff can be viewed or fits in from a Marxist point of view, a synthesis of which I think could be extremely fruitful.”

You can find Alex’s blog here, and his book here.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

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