We are told everyday that unfettered economic growth and the accumulation of personal wealth is desirable, yet, though we may not always have the words to challenge it, we know the mantra ‘greed is good’ cannot be true: we see everyday and everywhere the toll it is taking on our lives, our communities and our environment.

Thanks predominantly to the overconsumption of natural resources by rich countries, the entire planet faces ecological collapse. We are overshooting the Earth’s biocapacity by 62% each year, and, as a result, species are dying off between 1,000 and 10,000 times the normal rate.

Corporations and states continue to treat people as commodities, our suffering and deaths are considered “negative externalities”; sacrifices at the altar of GDP growth. Inequality continues to rise, leading to social breakdown and vast waves of migration. Just 5 men have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3 billion people.

If human imagination and potential are boundless, why must we believe, when it comes to our economic model, that ‘there is no alternative’? Is this really the best we can do – continue to wait for wealth to trickle down?

At The Rules we believe that we are living within a system that by its very design values profit over people and planet. Capitalism stems from the same logic that saw it fit to sell people as slaves across the Atlantic; a logic that has given us sweatshops, and conflict minerals; farmers’ suicides and oil spills;.

The Rules is here to help midwife the transition to a post-capitalist world. As a time-bound project, we will exist until 2023, working to expose the core logic of our global system.

We are here to connect the dots between various local struggles, and between the millions of us who are feeling the pain of this failing system.

Stories are powerful. The status quo is set by the stories we have been told for decades, and so to challenge it, we must tell stories of beautiful alternatives and amplify those told by others.

Together, we have the power to change the stories, change our cultures and change the rules.

The post Postcapitalism & Beautiful Alternatives: A brief introduction to The Rules appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The election of Donald Trump has left millions, maybe even billions of us in shock. Although we may be looking with bewilderment at the US today, we should remember that he is not an isolated phenomenon. He is a symptom of a sickness that is raging all around the world. People are hurting, disillusioned with mainstream politics and increasingly angry at a neoliberal economic system that is destroying lives and the planet with increasing ferocity. And in their desperation they are willing to consider extreme measures to make themselves heard.

Demagogues thrive amid fear and insecurity, which is why they paint the world in such dark terms. It’s a strategy that has put right-wing populist leaders in power in an Axis of Egos: from Brazil to Turkey, the Philippines to Russia, authoritarian strongmen like Trump are on the rise. Meanwhile, many centrist liberals, like the Democratic Party in the US, have been so intent on rejecting left-wing populist solutions, and so sure of their ability to beat anyone running on a white supremacy platform with its misogyny and homophobia, that they opened the door for Mr. Trump to walk straight through. Their preference is always to maintain the status quo that has served them so well.

As dangerous as the election of Trump is for the world, we can also see in this moment the truth that we simply cannot rely on the electoral political system to save us, because it is designed to prevent the fundamental change we need. Its own survival is at stake and it will marshal all its champions and resources to defend itself and stop the emergence of a new system. But when we work, or continue working for change from the ground up; when we build or keep on building new ways of living and being with each other where we live; when we construct or keep constructing the future we know is possible with our own hands, rather than hoping distant leaders will build it for us, we find our true power. Finally, when we combine that with the unbending hope that has powered change through the ages, we know our power has meaning.

A 400-year-old economic system is dying and another is struggling to be born. Change on this scale is not going to be smooth or easy. We should not be surprised, then, that moments like this?—?where the establishment is dealt a body blow?—?become more and more common. We can despair when that blow comes in the form of right-wing extremists, or we can step-up. We are the ones we are looking for, who can and must grasp the opportunities in these crises that are undoubtedly there.

So it’s time to come together, taking time to remember the earth. Remember all the successful struggles for justice that came before us, and imagine all those to come. Remember that social movements are growing all over the world and realising the common struggle. Remember life. Then, organise. Find each other and help midwife the inevitable transition that brings forth from the ashes of neoliberal capitalism a system that works for the good of all life on Mother Earth. This is not just activism; this is our responsibility as human beings alive as this all unfolds.

This is why we are here.

In hope, love and solidarity,

/The Rules team

The post Trump: connecting the dots appeared first on P2P Foundation.

With the growing awareness of the vulnerability of the planet and its people in the face of the systemic crises created by late-stage capitalism, we need to ready the alternatives and begin creating the next system now. To do so, we need a full understanding of the current context and its characteristics. In our view, the dominant political economy has three fatal flaws.

Pseudo-Abundance

The first is the characteristic need for the capitalist system to engage in continuous capital accumulation and growth. We could call this pseudo-abundance, i.e. the fundamental article of faith, or unconscious assumption, that the natural world’s resources are infinite. Capitalism creates a systemic ecological crisis marked by the overuse and depletion of natural resources, endangering the balance of the environment (biodiversity extinction, climate change, etc).

Scarcity Engineering

The second characteristic of capitalism is that it requires scarce commodities that are subject to a tension between supply and demand. Scarcity engineering is what we call this continuous attempt to undo natural abundance where it occurs. Capitalism creates markets by the systemic re-engineering of potentially or naturally abundant resources into scarce resources. We see this happening with natural resources in the development of “terminator seeds” that undo the seeds’ natural regeneration process. Crucially, we also see this in the creation of artificial scarcity mechanisms for human culture and knowledge. “Intellectual property” is imposed in more and more areas, privatizing common knowledge in order to create artificial commodities and rents that create profits for a privileged “creator class.”

These first two characteristics are related and reinforce each other, as the problems created by pseudo-abundance are made quite difficult to solve due to the privatization of the very knowledge required to solve them. This makes solving major ecological problems dependent on the ability of this privatized knowledge to create profits. It has been shown that the patenting of technologies results in a systemic slowdown of technical and scientific innovation, while un-patenting technologies accelerates innovation. A good recent example of this “patent lag” effect is the extraordinary growth of 3D printing, once the technology lost its patents.

Perpetually Increasing Social Injustice

The third major characteristic is the increased inequality in the distribution of value, i.e. perpetually increasing social injustice.

As Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows us, the logic of capital is to concentrate more and more wealth into fewer hands through compound interest, rent seeking, purchasing legislation, etc. Our current set of rules are hardwired to increase inequality and injustice.

Enter the Commons

To what degree does the Commons and peer-to-peer production function as a potential solution for these three interrelated structural crises of capitalism?

Commons are resources that are owned and managed neither by private corporations nor by the state. Instead, they are governed by their user communities. As the late Elinor Ostrom has shown, Commons have managed and maintained a healthy resource base for extremely long periods. Both private capitalism and state-centric development have been detrimental for the environment and the maintenance and regeneration of natural resources.

Digital networks (such as the internet) have recently enabled a new type of Commons where the knowledge required for human action and value creation has been mutualized. This has led to global open design communities, which jointly create open knowledge pools (e.g. Wikipedia), free software (e.g. the Linux Operating System) or open designs to enable physical production (e.g. Arduino motherboards, WikiSpeed cars, WikiHouse housing projects, etc.).

Commons-based peer production emerges when technology enables the creation of open, contributory systems that create Commons. Unlike physical resources (which need to be managed tightly), these digital Commons can be open for use by all of humanity (on the condition of having network access of course).

In what way do the Commons and peer-to-peer dynamics represent a potential response to the three systemic crises we’ve described?

As a first approach, we offer the following theses:

1. Under capitalism, the design of products and services is led by the desire to retain market scarcity, and therefore, to create commodities. In this context, corporate-driven innovation is always characterized by planned obsolescence. The global open design communities engaging in peer production and mutualization of productive knowledge have no such perverse incentives. These communities design to ensure participation and are “naturally” inclined to design sustainable products and services. Of course, this is not to say that relying on peer production is entirely sufficient to obtain full sustainability. The point is that peer production does not structurally create the need for unsustainable production.

2. Innovation under our current system actually depends on artificial scarcity and the intellectual property regime. The privatization and patenting of knowledge and technical solutions hampers the widespread distribution of necessary innovations. No such impediments exist in the open contributory systems of peer production communities, where innovation anywhere in the network is instantly available to the whole.

3. Peer production, independent of the profit motive, invites and facilitates the creation of solidarity-based forms of economic entities. Being generative towards human communities, these entities are more likely based on socially just forms of value sharing. This condition, though, requires that the value generated by peer production communities is not captured by extractive economic entities. In fact, this is the central locus of political and social struggle when peer production emerges in the context of the dominance of an economic system based on value extraction from human communities and the environment. The self-organizing characteristics of peer production, however, also enables the creation of new economic forms that are generative, and which can therefore produce more justice in the economic system.

The Revolution Is Already Happening

All over the planet, citizens are organizing to solve these three systemic crises. Their responses take three forms:

1. The sustainability and ecological/environmental movements, attempting to find solutions for the planet’s survival;

2. The “Open,” “Commons” and “Sharing” movements, stressing the need for shareable knowledge and mutualized physical resources;

3. The cooperative and solidarity economy, focusing on fairness.

All three of these movements are vital, yet alone they are not sufficient for a global, systemic response to these crises.To be effective, they must combine elements from the “free” (open/shareable), “fair”(socially just) and “sustainable” movements.

The good news is that Commons-based peer production is the best way to bring these three necessary aspects together into one coherent system. However, for this to happen, the various movements need enabling tools and capacities. An example is the open source circular economy (encompassing open and sustainable approaches). Here, open and participatory logistical and accounting systems allow citizens, entrepreneurs and public officials to scale up their circular economy cooperation in otherwise impossible ways.

Similarly, open and platform cooperativism — the convergence of socially just forms of production with shareable knowledge — allows all contributing citizens to create fair, generative livelihoods around the shared resources they need and co-create.

The task may seem daunting, but history shows that value regimes do change; in fact, they’ve changed at least twice in the last thousand years in the European sphere.

Richard Moore, in his wonderful book The First European Revolution, describes how Europe moved from the post-Roman plunder economy to a feudal regime based on land ownership. Rapid development of a new economy came in the 15th century (after the crisis of feudalism), based on making and selling commodities. This would eventually become capitalism.

We’ve seen post-capitalist practices emerging since the late 20th century — for example, the 1983 invention of the universally available browser. Citizens have been empowered to create value through open contributory systems; these create universally available knowledge, which in turn can be used for material production. This new value regime is now emerging globally, and can be paired with an ethical, generative economy to create sustainable livelihoods for those who contribute to the common good. These are the dots that we must connect in order to help usher in the post-capitalist world.

• Originally published in Truthout as part of the Connecting the Dots Series, a campaign by our colleagues at TheRules.org
  All images by Aotaro. CC BY 2.0.

The post Connecting the Dots 8: The Commons as the Response to the Structural Crises of the Global System appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Skewed Economics

The collective net worth of the richest 1% of humankind recently broke above 50% of all the planet’s private wealth. Rich people care greatly about being rich, both absolutely and in comparison with others. They understand that relative wealth brings political influence – which can be used to amass even more wealth. They succeed at using their wealth and political influence to capture an ever-growing share of global wealth and income.

At the other end of the spectrum are the world’s poor. The collective net worth of humanity’s poorer half is only 0.6% of the planet’s private wealth – as much as is owned by the 62 richest billionaires. You saw this right: the 62 richest people now have as much wealth as the 3,700,000,000 poorest human beings.

It’s not that the rich hate the poor. They may even wish the poor were better off. But the rich care more about their own share of wealth and income. And as their share increases, the other shares must shrink – especially that of the poorest. During 1988-2008, the average income among the richest 1% increased by 66%, while the global average income increased by only 24.34%.

This is actually okay, the rich tell us: while the poor may be losing in relative terms, they are gaining in absolute terms thanks to global economic growth. The Millennium Development Goals have spread word of this progress, and their recent successors, the Sustainable Development Goals, continue to reinforce the message: the poor are becoming better off. Wherever anyone may draw the international poverty line, the proportion of humanity living below it is shrinking.

This information is less comforting once we attend to what those in the poorer half can actually afford with their tiny incomes of $4–$20 per person per week. Most of them suffer at least one severe deprivation such as lack of adequate nutrition, safe drinking water, adequate housing, electricity, adequate sanitation, literacy, schooling or access to essential medicines. Each year, some 18 million people die prematurely from poverty-related causes, such as malnutrition, diarrhea, childbirth complications, childhood diseases, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, HIV/AIDS – conditions that hardly cause any premature deaths in affluent countries.

This global disaster engages human rights, for instance Article 25 of the Universal Declaration: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.” Where rights are at stake, immediate action is required. Those who continue to uphold the existing, highly skewed international economic and financial order delay the realization of human rights by many decades, thereby becoming responsible for hundreds of millions of poverty-related deaths in the meantime. If a more poverty-avoiding global order is possible, we must implement it as fast as we possibly can.

Rewriting the Rules of the Global Economy

We can rapidly realize the human rights of the world’s poor through global institutional reforms if these reforms reduce inequality – if they reverse the relentless rise in the share in global wealth and income going to the richest 1%. Think about it. It would take 2.4% of global private wealth to multiply the net worth of the poorer half by 5, namely from 0.6% to 3%. If this shift came entirely at the expense of the richest 1%, their share would decline from 50.4% to 48% of global private wealth. Would they not still have enough?

What sort of institutional reforms would rapidly improve the situation of the world’s poor? After decades of forcing free trade upon the world, the affluent states should finally be required to abolish their protectionist barriers that impede exports from poor countries: subsidies, tariffs and “anti-dumping” duties. At the very least they should have to compensate poor countries for the economic losses these barriers cause them.

Similarly, those who produce disproportionally large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions should be required to compensate the world’s poor, who emit very little and are much more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The needed funds should be raised by putting a price on emissions, with the additional benefit of slowing the increase of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.

Rich corporations and individuals should finally be made to pay their fair share of taxes. There is an elaborate infrastructure of tax havens, secrecy jurisdictions, letterbox companies and sham trusts, with clever lawyers, bankers, accountants and lobbyists, all working hard to hide wealth and profits and to create and exploit loopholes. This shady network drains poor countries of capital and slashes their governments’ tax revenues. It also facilitates arms and drug trading, human trafficking, money laundering and terrorism. Reforms are underway, but they are driven by the interests of the affluent states, do not yet consider the poorer populations whose losses are much larger.

We should recognize the world’s poor as entitled to a share of our planet’s natural resource wealth. There is no good reason why a small minority of humanity should be accepted as owning these resources and as entitled to charge everyone else for access. It is especially pernicious to treat unelected rulers – dictators and juntas – as entitled to sell the natural resources of “their” country or to use them as collateral for loans that the population will then be required to repay. Such loans and resource purchases unjustly impoverish the country and strengthen its illegitimate rulers, thereby perpetuating the tyranny.

Poor people should not be excluded from medicines, seeds, and other important innovations by high patent-protected markups. It makes sense to reward innovators so as to incentivize the innovations we need. But we must find a way of doing so that does not exclude the poor. The Health Impact Fund is one feasible such way.

It is a modest but most stringent requirement that we rise together to change the rules of our global order so that they no longer violate the human rights of half the human population. Together we can do this and build a much more beautiful world.

Written by Thomas Pogge for TheRules.org

The post Connecting the Dots 7: Human rights, inequality and poverty appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It wasn’t long before I too learned to connect the dots. I learned to see that the austerity-induced Structural Adjustment Program of General Ibrahim Babangida in 1986, then lauded as an ingenious economic solution to Nigeria’s problems, was a creature of the IMF, the World Bank, and the Trojan sentiments of free trade.

I saw connections between the incredible rise of charismatic Pentecostal preachers peddling a ‘prosperity gospel’ and the growing divides between the rich elites and the virulently faithful poor.

I understood that when electricity was snuffed out for the umpteenth time in one day, when people fanned their faces with newspapers at the airport to make up for broken air conditioners, or when more potholes riddled the federal highways after they had been fixed for billions of naira, there was a single story at work.

For many Nigerians, the marching instructions for life we had received in the shadows of our colonial past were incontestable. It was inconceivable to think about life except along the lines of social mobility – going to school, earning a degree or two, getting a job (if you are lucky, with a petroleum company), making more money than one could spend, and – for the religiously inclined (which isn’t saying much in Nigeria, since almost everyone is religiously inclined), making it to heaven on the strength of your tithes. When something disturbed that single story, the newspapers liked to call it corruption – or, with the caricaturized accent of the Hausa people of northern Nigeria, kwarrapshun. I called it breathing. But, to me, now a young academic, it seemed no one else strayed long enough to notice the contours of this suffocating monster – this giant Cthulhu with its tentacles in the machinated kitchens of McDonald’s and the poisoned soils of our lands; in the influx of foreign products and the loss of indigenous languages; and in the craze for leggings or whatever the Kardashians were wearing and the limp body of an anonymous factory worker in Vietnam, hanging by the rope she had given up on.

I dedicated my waking moments to connecting dot to painful dot. With every line drawn to complete this picture of despair, the need for urgency was more and more obvious. All the reports agreed with me: if we continue down this line of unfettered consumerism, of trickle-down economics, of championing neoliberal techno-utopic capitalist narratives of always-impending happiness, our children will have no world to walk on or play in. Africa would be a continent of plastic bottles and old Sony television boxes Germany thinks is outdated. My daughter, Alethea, would most likely grow up in a barbaric world, its id finally released from whatever moral moorings currently hold it in place. A Cthulhucene in all its glory.

However, as I connect the dots and negotiate what it means to respond to a world in crisis, and how we are already a part of the world that we desperately seek to understand, to fix, and to transcend, I realize that I have missed a dot. The one on my forehead. The one wrapped in my blind spot. The one that is entangled with our way of figuring crisis and co-producing the world. It is an easy spot to miss: in connecting the dots, we often invest the emergent picture with an externalized fixity it doesn’t have. We remove ourselves from the equation and pretend to be observers just observing pre-existing things.

Over the years, seeing has become more tactile. Less passive. The Cartesian idea that when we look ‘out’ upon the material world we are merely transcribing the stimuli of the outside to the scripts of consciousness within is losing its potency. At least in scientific circles, ever since the mere act of observation altered the ‘fundamental’ nature of nature – in experiments designed to figure out what light really is – scholars have been called to sit with the disturbing recognition that seeing is not reflexive at all. It is performative. Tentacular. Like Cthulhu. Even more intriguingly, what is ‘nature’ or ‘real’ (or seen) is entangled with the visual apparatus in play, which means that for each strange biological organism we meet (for instance, the brittle stars or ophiuroids) the world is different (not just appearing so).

This is not the same as saying that everything exists in the mind – a position that invests words, language, stories, culture, consciousness and other forms of representation with undue power. In fact, it is to say the ‘opposite’: that the material world is alive and agentic and ethically involved; that matter matters; and that the mind/matter binary we inherited from western frames of knowledge-making blinds us to how truly entangled ‘we’ are with the world. That’s how much things are entangled and connected: even the way we see ‘things’ is part of their production.

African elders – an increasingly legendary group of wisdom holders I have only read about in books and stories – came around to this argument through other means. They said that in times of urgency slowing down was an appropriate response. For them, urgency wasn’t apocalyptic or even a human imperative. It was an opportunity to ‘reconnect’ with a world in trance – a world that is never still. A world layered with multitudinous temporalities and charged with dead ends and surprising detours. A world that is always an ethical disruption of our fixed notions of justice. Slowing down was a way of taking care. It happened by sitting at the intersection points where it was no longer easy to exteriorize blame or a unilateral cause of a ‘problem’. It is how we know that there is more at stake, and that our moral victories our conventional tools of activism have wrought against the 1 percent, against Monsanto, or against ‘systems’ leave a lot to be desired.

What I call attention to is the last dot: us. Our way of seeing. Our ways of touching – and how the effects of seeing this way have perpetuated a white architecture of responsiveness. An uncontested gentrification of political action. I am saying that Cthulhu’s tentacles have infiltrated our eyes, blinding us to other spaces of power, keeping us in the anaesthetic hallways of protest-making and advocacy.

This is not to say making protest and ‘standing up’ to a ‘system’ that touches us in harmful ways is not worthy of our attention. How we respond to crisis depends on the specificity of the context that evokes a response. The point is that the very particularity of the frame excludes other responses from mattering, making other possibilities meaningless and unintelligible. This is all worth struggling with: knowledge and justice are just as embodied and entangled and connected as we suppose the world ‘outside’ is. Drawing charged lines from neoliberal capitalism to ecological devastation to the Ebola virus and psychopathology and to the surge of prosperity gospel in Africa will always be inadequate until we account for the epistemologies, the ways of knowing and seeing, that are complicit in their materialization.

Connecting the dots is sacred work. Now I take it seriously enough to wonder how mountains would do it.

Written by Bayo Akomolafe for TheRules.org

Photo by theogeo

The post Connecting the Dots 6: The dot on my forehead: how we understand the crisis is part of the crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Climate change cannot be addressed in isolation from the wealth-hoarding of capitalism that has made the world so unequal that a mere 62 individuals have the same aggregate wealth as 3.7 billion. Terrorism cannot be tackled in the absence of deep inquiries about what happens when money is treated as more sacred than life or spiritual tradition. Political corruption cannot be wrangled in without taking account of the commercialization of elections that treats each candidate like yet-another-product to be bought and sold in the marketplace of ideas.

And so on and so forth…

Mystics throughout the ages have told us that separation is an illusion. Western science has come to the same conclusion with the discoveries in quantum mechanics showing how the great diversity of distinct objects we perceive are, deep down, interwoven patterns of energy that cannot be fundamentally divided into pieces. Similarly, the findings of Darwinian evolution tell us that all life is connected in a woven tapestry of mothers birthing daughters in an unbroken thread for 3.6 billion years that gives us a web of life on Earth. Psychologists and sociologists remind us that there is no monolithic self (the Buddha was right!) as we observe how social norms shape and influence our behavior in profound and powerful ways. We are social networks functioning as tribal groups.

These truths—whether garnered from spiritual practice or the empiricism of scientific inquiry—are a reminder that all apparent differences arise from a prior unity that often remains hidden from view. Everything IS connected. And we must hold this truth in mind as we go about the business of transitioning our civilization away from its runaway growth curve of mass consumption. The Earth is finite and there are boundaries which we must not cross if we want to continue to be part of the cosmic dance that is life on this beautiful planet.

More specifically, the local struggles in different places around the world are also connected. Peasant farmers kicked off their land in India share a common plight with sex workers trafficked into the Netherlands alongside illicit flows of money, drugs, and guns. Rising food prices in Mexico are linked to the explosion of student loan debt in the United States. The Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is linked to chronic droughts in the Middle East over the last few decades which were shaped and influenced by factory pollution during Western industrialization. And these patterns of human displacement are meshed together with the empire-building of the United States in its unquenchable thirst for control of the world’s oil supply.

We could easily let this massive clockwork of complexity overwhelm us. If it’s all connected, where and how shall I intervene? Isn’t it all too big for me to do anything about? Again, this is the beauty of interdependence. Tug at the right piece of frayed string and the whole rug will unravel before you. In the case of the global economy, there happens to be a singular string that ties it all together—the central logic of growth at all costs that says the only measure of progress is rising GDP (Gross Domestic Product, the aggregate price of all goods bought and sold during a given period of time).

We have been told that the only way to end poverty is to grow our way out of it. That all boats will be lifted with the rising tide of consumer purchases. Yet this half-truth deceives in at least two ways—having to do with dots that are not connected by their arguments—the first being that many valuable human activities do not involve the exchange of money (mothering, for example). The second is the biological fact that some kinds of growth are good for an organism while others are not. Growing up to be healthy and strong is good. Runaway cancer in the bowels will probably kill you.

Humanity needs to think systemically. We need to act from a place of holistic insight. And we need to do so collectively, as the singular humanity of 7.4 billion souls living together with the rest of our biological kin here in Earth. A good place to start is by acknowledging prior unity and then immediately going about dismantling the logic of economic growth. Tug on this narrative string and the rest of the story gets weaker. Pull enough of it out and you can begin threading it into a different story, one that recognizes our common plight and holds up life as the sacred principle at the heart of it all.

But to do so, we’ll have to connect the dots.

Onward, fellow humans.

Written by Joe Brewer for therules.org

The post Connecting the Dots 5: What If It’s All Connected? Humanity and the Global Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

And he has not disappointed. In his first two months in power over 27,000 civil servants have been fired, duties on mining exports removed, state subsidies on essential services lifted, negotiations with ‘vulture funds’ on billion dollar debt repayment resumed and all this justified by a complicit corporate controlled media. In anticipation of the dissent that will follow, special power has been given to police to repress demonstrations after a ten minute warning.

Simultaneously in Venezuela, Chavez’s successor Nicolas Maduro is facing the first ever opposition controlled parliament in over a decade, in Brazil, President Dilma Rousseff is struggling against a parliamentary impeachment process while in Ecuador indigenous and workers movements have staged mass protests against President Correa.

What is happening to the continent that once captured the imagination of citizen’s movements globally, ousting neoliberal governments en masse and embodying the potential and hope of the World Social Forum’s slogan “Another World is Possible”?

Resurgent beginnings

In 2005 newly elected leftist governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador and Venezuela spectacularly rejected George W. Bush’s imperial world view and, in particular, his Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). This was an unprecedented, head-on challenge to US government intervention in the region. These governments began to strengthen regional cooperation and trade and at the national level, raising duty on primary material exports, re-nationalising key industries, and using these funds to develop social programs which lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of extreme poverty. In Argentina there were major conquests in the area of human rights – marriage equality, transgender rights, pensions for women working at home and the trial and imprisonment for many of those responsible for human rights violations during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

What they did not do, however, was create major, lasting structural change – i.e. changing the rules that create poverty and inequality in the first place. The nature of the Latin American economy has essentially stayed the same. Since colonial times the continent has been an exporter of primary materials and this remains true today. In fact, during the past decade the production of monocultures for export such as soy has actually increased, creating mass environmental destruction and evictions of small-holder farmers from their lands. There was little investment in diversifying production or in substantial improvements to health and education. Instead, social programs were created to increase consumption, making more families dependent on the financial system.

The critical thing to remember is that the existence of these social programs depended, in turn, on commodity prices. In 2013, the global price of soy reached a high of $600/ton but one year later fell to $350/ton while oil prices toppled from $100 a barrel to between $28-50. As this commodity bubble continues to burst today, many of the ‘achievements’ of the past decade are being eroded by rising inflation, wage stagnation and financial uncertainty, and in the case of Argentina, this has enabled the right wing take centre stage with multi-million dollar media campaigns and the promise of “change.” We now know that what will follow will be more of the same, without the safety net for those living in poverty.

Starting from the bottom

Like all national governments all over the world, even these more progressive South American governments, have for decades remained subservient to the rules of the global capitalist system which requires them to serve first and foremost the special interests of private corporations and international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF (who in turn serve the corporate interests from the Western countries that control these institutions). This system has emptied politics of all moral and ethical sentiment. It has quite simply transformed the meaning of life in to wealth creation and governments everywhere from Argentina to India, from Greece to the United States, have simply become facilitators for increasing GDP.

What then of the social movements across South America that played a key role in developing neoliberal counter narratives and brought these progressive governments to power in the early 2000s? Many have been weakened by internal divisions as they navigated new political and governmental terrain. In Argentina, for example, many social movements chose to work with the government, receiving substantial state funding for social housing and other projects. This in turn lead to a loss of a autonomy and weakened political discourse – as mass deforestation for mono-cultivation of soy and contamination of water sources from oil and mining projects advanced, they remained silent.

But many others have continued to question the state and centralized systems of power and, thanks to the social policies of progressive governments there are more and more young people in particular who have had access to education opportunities and alternative political narratives. A program called “connecting equality” in Argentina distributed over four million laptops to secondary schools while a Digital Inclusion program enabled access to internet across the Brazils´ favelas (not that hardware or technology are silver bullets). Today information flows through thousands of Facebook and WhatsApp groups enabling dialogue and challenging the main stream media and official government narrative.

For over three decades power has been centralized in a global financial system and logic of economic growth that is leading us towards certain collapse and planetary destruction. Recent experiences in South America have proven that even so-called socialist governments are unable to escape from the straightjacket of neoliberal logic.

For the Zapatistas it has always been clear: “We think, fundamentally, that the future story of Latin America, not only of Mexico but for all of Latin America, will be constructed from the bottom – that the rest of what’s happening, in any case, are steps.”

Connecting the dots

Each and every day behind the façade of corporate media and politicians, people are taking steps. Social movements in South America from Indigenous communities who have recovered land to worker controlled factories to cooperatively owned business of all types are starting to see that that change does not come through the ballot box; rather, it lies in reclaiming and redistributing power. Fuelled by a decade of social progress and strengthened political conscience, the steps of an emerging Latin American body politic are firmer, clearer and more dignified.

Historian Tony Judt described the time from 1989 onwards as being “consumed by locusts” and stated that “The thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.” The past decade of ‘progressive’ governments with continued poverty and inequality in South America has actually helped cultivate a rising movement, showing us where the locusts are being bred, freeing our imaginations and helping us connect the dots between the global neoliberal system. Both existing and emerging social movements will continue to inspire, teach and increasingly walk together to challenge the mantra of economic growth, globalized trade terror and amputation of natural resources. The limitations of the Pink Tide and the increasing callousness of the global power elites are fanning the flames of imagination and giving birth to visions of a post-capitalist horizon.

Written by Fionuala Cregan for therules.org

The post Connecting the Dots 4: Post Pink Tide: Another World Is Still Possible appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The islanders must have realized that their obsession with heads would quickly spell their doom. As the project wore on, they no longer had sufficient wood to build fishing boats or houses, nor trees from which to gather fruits and nuts. They must have seen this disaster unfolding—slowly starving to death and forced to live in caves for shelter—right up until they felled the last palm. It was all because of a myth, but a myth so powerful that, despite knowing its madness, they could not resist it.

Humans are strange creatures. We create our own myths and then we live by them almost as though we didn’t create them at all, as if they were handed down to us by the gods. And this is not just a characteristic of small societies. Our global civilization has its fair share of powerful myths, one of which is remarkably similar to that which destroyed Easter Island. Just as multiplying heads became the sacred rule of Easter Island economics, so there is one sacred rule that underpins our global economic system: namely, that GDP must grow, and must grow at all costs. Why must GDP grow? Because GDP growth is equivalent to human progress.

We tend to take the GDP measure for granted as though it has always existed. Most people don’t know that it was invented only recently. It has a history. During the 1930s, the economists Simon Kuznets and John Maynard Keynes set out to design an economic aggregate that would help policymakers figure out how to escape the Great Depression. Kuznets argued for a measure that would help us maximize human well-being and track the progress of human welfare. But when World War II struck, Keynes argued that we should count all money-based activities—even negative ones—so we would know what was available for the war effort.

In the end Keynes won, and his version of GDP came into use. GDP was intended to be a war-time measure, which is why it’s so single-minded—almost violent. It counts money-based activity, but it doesn’t care whether that activity is useful or destructive. If you cut down a forest and sell the timber, GDP goes up; GDP does not count the cost of losing the forest as a habitat, or as a future resource, or as a sinkhole for carbon. What is more, GDP doesn’t count useful activities that are not monetized. If you grow your own food, clean your own house, or take care of your aging parents, GDP says nothing. But if you buy food from Tesco, hire a cleaner, and send your parents to a nursing home, GDP goes up.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with measuring some things and not others. GDP itself doesn’t have any impact in the real world. GDP growth, however, does. As soon as we start focusing on GDP growth, we’re not only promoting the things that GDP measures, we’re promoting the indefinite increase of those things. And that’s exactly what we started to do in the 1960s. GDP was adopted during the Cold War for the sake of adjudicating the grand pissing match between the West and the USSR. Suddenly, politicians on both sides became feverish about promoting GDP growth. GDP growth became a sacred rule. And we remain in thrall to it today.

The imperative for growth is incredibly powerful; probably the most powerful force in our world. When the entire global political establishment puts its force behind this goal, human and natural systems come under enormous, overwhelming pressure.

What does this pressure look like in the real world? In India, it looks like corporate land grabs, which leave peasant farmers dispossessed. In the U.K., it looks like privatization of public services—with corporations eager to exploit untapped markets. In Brazil it looks like deforestation, which is eating the Amazon at a rapid clip. In the U.S. it looks like fracking, backed by a government desperate for cheap energy. Around the world it looks like trade agreements that strip away regulations that protect workers and the environment. And for all of us it looks like longer working hours, expensive housing, depleted soils, polluted cities, wasted oceans, and—above all—climate change.

We normally think of these as separate crises. But they are not: they are all connected. They all proceed from the same deep logic of GDP growth, the collective madness at the heart of our economic system. To fight them as separate issues is to mistake the symptoms for the disease.

People who spend their lives pushing against these destructive trends will tell you how futile it feels. It is futile because our governments don’t care. They don’t care because according to their most important measure of progress, destruction counts as good. Indeed, under the tyranny of GDP growth, the destruction must continue at all costs. The problem here is not that humans are inherently destructive. The problem is that we have created a myth that encourages us to behave in destructive ways, and have given that myth the power of a sacred rule. As Joseph Stiglitz has put it, “What we measure informs what we do. And if we’re measuring the wrong thing, we’re going to do the wrong thing.”

Why does GDP growth retain such a hold on our imagination? Because we assume that when GDP goes up, it makes our lives better: it raises our incomes, it creates more jobs, it means better schools and hospitals and so on. This may have been true in the past. But unfortunately it no longer holds. In the United States GDP has risen steadily over the past half century, yet median incomes have stagnated, the poverty rate has increased, and inequality has grown. The same is true on a global scale: since 1980, global GDP has grown by 380%, but the number of people living in poverty has, according to World Bank numbers of people living on $5 a day, increased by more than 1.1 billion. Why is this? Because past a certain point, GDP growth begins to produce more negative outcomes than positive ones—more “illth” than wealth, as the economist Herman Daly has put it (if “ill” is the opposite of “well,” “illth” is the opposite of “wealth”).

GDP growth might make sense on a planet with endless room and endless resources. But we don’t live on such a planet. In fact, we’re already overshooting our planet’s biocapacity by more than 50% each year. There are no longer any frontiers where accumulation doesn’t directly harm someone else, by, say, degrading the soils, polluting the water, poisoning the air, and exploiting human beings. At this point in our history, GDP growth is creating more misery than it eliminates. And the problem is not just that the growth is inequitably shared, although that it is a major issue; the problem, rather, is aggregate growth itself. In our era of climate change, even sober scientists are pointing out that growth is leading us down a path that that has widespread famine and mass displacement just around the corner.

Yes, some try to reassure us that our economy is gradually “decoupling” from material throughput, and that soon we will have growth without destruction. But study after study has proven that it’s not true. In fact, global consumption of materials has nearly doubled over the past 30 years, and accelerated since 2000.

The rule of GDP growth may seem sacred, but it is not. As quickly as we created it, we can pull it apart. And pull it apart we must—it’s time for the giant stone heads to roll. There are already movements in this direction. A number of states and countries have adopted much more sensible alternatives, like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which seek to promote human and environmental well-being. There are many others we might consider, and it doesn’t much matter which we choose—indeed, each city or country could pick a different measure, or no measure at all. The important thing is that we shake off the tyranny of GDP growth and open up a creative, democratic conversation about what kind of world we want to live in.

Written by Jason Hickel for therules.org

The post Connecting the Dots 3: To Save The Economy, We Have To Break Its One Sacred Rule appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Most of the root causes of inequality and poverty relate to global rather than national dynamics. In the most practical and important sense, there is one global economic system. There are networks of national systems within it, but they are all part of, and increasingly subservient to, a single, mother system.

You don’t have to work from this perspective for long to recognize that there is a single set of rules governing this global economic system. They may be implemented in different ways or clothed in different language, but they are as true for the United States and Greece as they are for China and South Africa.

It’s important to realize that this global system, with its single set of rules, is actively being governed. There are people who see its wholeness clearly and operate from that perspective. Right now, most of these people, unsurprisingly, sit in organizations that have genuine planetary reach — private corporations, international institutions like the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, and a small number of large nongovernmental organizations. Unsurprisingly, the people with the most power in the global economy are those who align with its interests: They maintain their power by effectively promoting and implementing the rules of the status quo.

This isn’t some conspiracy theory, merely a truth about the nature of complex adaptive systems. The top priority of any system is to survive. Once a network becomes sufficiently complex, it becomes self-organizing. From that point on, it will always “want” to survive. One way the global economic system does this is to draw into positions of influence those people who best serve that purpose. A capitalist system, whose prime directive is the production of capital, will work constantly to refine and improve its ability to do just that. It will continue until it is stopped by an external force of some kind, or it collapses under its own weight. Unless a politically significant mass of people actively chooses otherwise, the rules of the system will govern us, not the other way round. If the rules are to be changed, we cannot expect the system to autocorrect. We must change them manually.

Challenging the Truism That “Growth Is Good”

There are few rules of the single global economy more fundamental than its prioritization of growth. The mantra that “growth is good” has been repeated so often that it has the feel of common sense. It is almost impossible to think of how economies might work, let alone how inequality and poverty might be reduced, if we aren’t growing the amount of capital there is in the world through ever-increasing production and consumption.

This logic pervades all international debates and plans. Take, for example, the recent “Sustainable Development Goals.” They rest on the fundamental assumption that every country, every company and even every human being must grow their material wealth over time, as a precondition to anything else. This is measured in GDP for countries, and profit for businesses. In other words, they obey the rule that the global economy must grow continually through the perpetual growth of all of its parts.

But what if there is a fatal flaw in this logic? What if this rule is not fit for the purpose of guiding us into the future? What if, instead of being a panacea for all that is good, it is a driver of so much that is bad?

The evidence is clear. Totalitarian growth of all parts of the system has not only led to destabilizing the climate by making sure consumption is always increasing, everywhere, but has also created vast amounts of poverty and inequality. This might sound counterintuitive at first glance — doesn’t more money mean less poverty? But consider this: Since 1990, global GDP has increased 271 percent, and yet both the number of people living on less than $5 a day, and the number of people going hungry has also increased, by 10 percent and 9 percent, respectively. Add to that the wage stagnation across wealthy nations, and increasing inequality both within and between countries pretty much everywhere, and the shakiness of this basic logic becomes evident. Aggregate economic growth does not translate into less poverty.

Maybe this would only be problematic, something that could be fixed by tweaking the growth model while keeping the basic imperative in place, were it not for the second part of the problem. The imperative for every part of the system to constantly grow its material wealth is destroying us, in the most real and painful way. The consumption-driven mechanisms we use to achieve it, and the GDP measure we use to define it, have us locked on a path to ruin by actively encouraging us to treat finite natural resources as if they were infinite, and prioritize the growth of the money supply over everything else. Said another way, the perceived moral imperative for economic growth actually contradicts the laws of nature.

Connecting the Dots

It is only by connecting dots that we start to be able to see the true shape of the challenges we all face. Whatever our issue-focus, there are underlying rules and norms that affect every facet of human life. Growth is just one.

At first glance, connecting dots in this way might make the job of radical change feel more difficult. We struggle hard enough to affect change locally, let alone nationally, let alone globally. But something liberating and empowering happens when you start to connect the dots to see what’s going wrong; the same process also allows you to connect the dots between the struggles for making things better. We start to see that what’s driving the destruction of the rainforest in Indonesia is the same basic set of rules that are causing rising food prices in Kenya, and the explosion of student debt in the United States. We become connected, in very real and actionable ways, by a realization that we are all being screwed by the same basic set of rules.

Most importantly, we start to see new and different solutions. Ideas that previously seemed to only mitigate one problem can start to be seen to mitigate all.

For example, strong local economies with independent currencies and food sovereignty challenge the monoculture model of “development.” Gift economies that deny the commodification of life disrupt the system’s rules by their very existence. As we contract new types of relationships, with each other, with our communities, with nature itself, we will usher in new types of social relations based on a vast range of diverse and mutually supporting solutions that will render the old paradigm, with its slavish adherence to ideas like perpetual growth, wholly obsolete.

These new models and experiments are already taking place all around us. From the Brixton pound in Britain, to the Zapatistas in Mexico, to Rojava, the Kurdish free state in northern Syria, a new breed of post-capitalist thinking is taking hold and spreading through networks of conscious people. However, the mainstream media is not set up to see these shifts. They are pushing the old story of growth, lifting boats, charity and “financial access.” And in their blindness lies our opportunity. The antidote lies in our ability to see how the old system is connected, while recognizing the patterns in the diversity and wellspring of wonder and power that is filling the void of the crumbling edifice of growth-based capitalism. The question is, will we connect the dots before it’s too late?

Article by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk. theRules.org

Photo by Ales Kladnik

The post Connecting the Dots 2: Transforming the Global Economy Before It’s Too Late appeared first on P2P Foundation.

They’re all symptoms of the same disease: neoliberal capitalism.

This is not the story we’re most often told. Instead, we’re encouraged to see the many economic, political, environmental and societal crises faced by communities around the world as separate. In this story, rising food prices in Kenya, for example, have nothing to do with exploding student debt in America. But this simply isn’t true. They are both inevitable outcomes of the same neoliberal logic that says that life must ultimately serve capital, rather than the other way round.

It’s only when we connect enough dots that we can expose the deep logic and rules that govern the whole global economy. Rules like, “material growth, everywhere, at all costs”; a ridiculous idea on a planet with finite resources. And it’s only when we connect the dots that we can see that the people who have the most power in this system aren’t the most thoughtful, talented or worthy, but merely those who most effectively obey these rules.

Like all stories, the way to undermine its power is to be conscious of it. Understanding and then exposing the deep logic and rules of the global system is one of the most important political acts we can engage in. It’s the beginning of our own de-programming, and it leads us to alternative solutions to these whole-system problems. Alternatives like strong local economies that can bypass debt-based currencies, and food sovereignty approaches that challenge the monoculture model of neoliberal ‘development.’ Alternatives that are already to be found all around us; from the Brixton Pound in Britain, to the Zapatistas in Mexico, to Rojava, the Kurdish free state in northern Syria.

The mainstream media is not set up to see these shifts and so continues to push the old story of “growth at all costs”. It’s up to us to connect the dots. To expose how oppressions around the world are connected. And to recognise that something wonderful and powerful is emerging all around us, outgrowing the cruel limitations of neoliberal capitalism by embracing life in all its glorious, indescribable diversity.

Will you help us connect the dots and build the alternatives before it’s too late?

Here’s how you can help:

Watch and share our short video to keep #ConnectingDots between our global oppressions:

Keep connecting dots

Saying “everything is connected” is pretty popular these days. ‘Intersectionality’ is the latest buzzword.  ‘Systems thinking’ is the discipline du jour.  Everyone, it seems, is trying to make sense of this dawning awareness that the challenges we face do not stand alone. Climate change, for example, is not just about carbon emissions but also economics, race relations, patriarchy and power. There is no line of disconnect, except where we draw it with our minds.

Starting with How

Simply saying that everything is connected doesn’t get you very far, though. The real challenge is to understand how. When it comes to the root causes of inequality and poverty, many of the all-important hows are not only to be found in every national economy, but transcend them all.

Globalisation is a word that’s been in common use for at least thirty years. At this point, It feels old hat; the 90s version of the social justice struggle.

But that sort of easy dismissal surrenders crucial intellectual ground. It removes from view not just basic facts – e.g. global trade is the lifeblood of most national economies – but some critical realities about how the world works.

The first critical reality is that, in the most practical and important sense, there is one global economic system. There are networks of national systems within it, but they are all part of, and increasingly subservient to, a single mother-system.

This is an astonishingly important idea to get our heads around. Instead of starting with, for example, the US or Greek economies and then looking for where it links to the global system, we start with the global, look down at the US and Greek economies and start to connect dots to see how they are similar.

You don’t have to work from this perspective for long to recognise that there is a single set of rules. They may be implemented in different ways or clothed in different language, but they are as true for the US and Greece as they are for China and South Africa.

The second point is that this one system, with its single set of rules, is being governed. There are people who see its wholeness clearly and operate from that perspective. Right now, most of these people, unsurprisingly, sit in organisations that have genuine planetary reach; private corporations, international institutions like the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, and a small number of large NGOs.

This leads to the third truth, which is that the people with the most power in the global economy are those who align with its interests. Which is another way of saying that they effectively promote and implement its rules. This isn’t some conspiracy theory, merely a truth about the nature of complex adaptive systems. The top priority of any system is to survive. Once a network becomes sufficiently complex, it becomes self-organising. From that point on, it will always ‘want’ to survive. One way the global economic system does this is to draw into positions of influence those people who best serve that purpose. A capitalist system, whose Prime Directive is the production of capital, will work constantly to refine and improve its ability to do just that. It will continue until it is stopped by an external force of some kind, or it collapses under its own weight.

Connecting these dots leads us to one very important realisation: even the most powerful people in the world have no choice but to obey the rules as long as they want to be rewarded by the system, with more power or wealth. In other words, unless a politically significant mass of people actively choose otherwise, the rules of the system will govern us, not the other way round.

The system itself will not see human suffering as an imperative to change its rules as long as those rules serve its immediate survival. It has no inherent predictive capacity. It is self-organising but not independently sentient. It can no more ‘feel’ human suffering than it can foresee its own destruction at the hands of climate change. Only us humans, with our predictive capacities, can do that. If the rules are to be changed, we cannot expect the system to auto-correct. We must change them manually.

Growth as Given

There are few rules of the single global economy more fundamental than growth. The mantra that “growth is good” has been repeated so often that it has the feel of common sense. It is almost impossible to think of how economies might work, let alone how inequality and poverty might be reduced, if we aren’t growing the amount of capital there is in the world through ever-increasing production and consumption.

This logic pervades all international debates and plans. Take, for example, the recent “Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs). They rest on the fundamental assumption that every country, every company, even every human being, must grow their material wealth over time, as a precondition to anything else. This is measured in GDP for countries, and profit for businesses. In other words, they obey the rule that the global economy must grow continually through the perpetual growth of all of its parts.

But what if there is a fatal flaw in this logic? What if this rule is not fit for the purpose of guiding us into the future? What if, instead of being a panacea for all that is good, it is a driver of so much that is bad?

The evidence is clear. Totalitarian growth of all parts of the system has not only led to destabilising the climate by making sure consumption is always increasing, everywhere, but has also created vast amounts of poverty and inequality. This might sound counter-intuitive at first glance – doesn’t more money mean less poverty? But consider this: since 1990, global GDP has increased 271%, and yet both the number of people living on less than $5 a day, and the number of people going hungry has also increased, by 10% and 9% respectively. Add to that the wage stagnation across the developed world, and increasing inequality both within and between countries pretty much everywhere, and the shakiness of this basic logic becomes evident. Aggregate economic growth does not translate into less poverty.

Maybe this would only be problematic, something that could be fixed by tweaking the growth model while keeping the basic imperative in place, were it not for the second part of the problem. The imperative for every part of the system to constantly grow its material wealth is destroying us, in the most real and painful way. The consumption-driven mechanisms we use to achieve it, and the GDP measure we use to define it, have us locked on a path to ruin by actively encouraging us to treat finite natural resources as if they were infinite, and prioritize the growth of the money supply over everything else. Said another way, the perceived moral imperative for economic growth actually contradicts the laws of nature.

It is only by connecting dots that we start to be able to see the true shape of the challenges we face. We all face. Whatever our issue-focus, there are underlying rules and norms that affect every facet of human life. Growth is just one.

At first glance, connecting dots in this way might make the job of radical change feel more difficult. We struggle hard enough to affect change locally, let alone nationally, let alone globally. But something liberating and empowering happens when you start to connect the dots to see what’s going wrong; the same process also allows you to connect the dots between the struggles for making things better. We start to see that what’s driving the destruction of the rainforest in Indonesia is the same basic set of rules that are causing rising food prices in Kenya, and the explosion of student debt in America. We become connected, in very real and actionable ways, by a realization that we are all being screwed by the same basic set of rules.

Most importantly, we start to see new and different solutions. Ideas that previously seemed to only mitigate one problem can start to be seen to mitigate all.

For example, strong local economies with independent currencies and food sovereignty challenge the monoculture model of ‘development’. Gift economies that deny the commodification of life disrupt the system’s rules by their very existence. As we contract new types of relationships, with each other, with our communities, with Nature itself, we will usher in new types of social relations based on a vast range of diverse and mutually-supporting solutions that will render the old paradigm, with its slavish adherence to ideas like perpetual growth, wholly obsolete.

These new models and experiments are already taking place all around us. From the Brixton Pound in Britain, to the Zapatistas in Mexico, to Rojava, the Kurdish free state in northern Syria; a new breed of post-capitalist thinking is taking hold and spreading through networks of conscious citizens. However, the mainstream media is not set up to see these shifts. They are pushing the old story of growth, lifting boats, charity and ‘financial access’. And in their blindness lies our opportunity. The antidote lies in our ability to see how the old system is connected, while recognising the patterns in the diversity and wellspring of wonder and power that is filling the void of the crumbling edifice of growth-based capitalism. The question is, will we connect the dots before it’s too late?

The post Connecting the Dots 1: Keep Connecting Dots…. appeared first on P2P Foundation.