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

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

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

Robert Raymond: We are witnessing the rise of a solidarity economy movement, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including organizations like Cooperation Worcester in Massachusetts, Cooperation Humboldt and Cooperation Richmond in California, and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, among others. One of the leaders of this movement is Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, who recently wrote a book titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” Akuno was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in a working-class community where he watched the devastation brought by deindustrialization and the gang wars that hit L.A. in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. His family was deeply involved in various social movements, particularly the Afrikan People’s Party. Akuno was raised in a world marked by violent poverty, as well as radical activism. Akuno moved around in California and eventually wound up in Jackson, Mississippi. We spoke with Akuno about his work with Cooperation Jackson, the broader solidarity economy in general, and what particular challenges working-class African American communities are experiencing in the deep south.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: So how did you end up in Jackson, Mississippi, as director of Cooperation Jackson, having been born and raised in California?

Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson: So, I have a kind of varied background, particularly leading up to Cooperation Jackson. it really started in the early 2000s when I was the director of the School of Social Justice and Community Development in Oakland, California. During the second year of that project, I just woke up one night with a terrible nightmare. The nightmare was about, what were we really doing to prepare the kids we had recruited, in terms of a job, in terms of opportunity? Just kind of recognizing that given the shift of the economy that much of what we were preparing for was going to be rapidly becoming obsolete and that this was a population that was going to become increasingly more and more disposable.

I just woke up feeling like I kind of set these kids and their parents up with false hopes and false expectations. I just couldn’t live with that. So I started on a journey trying to figure out what could be done. What could working-class people — particularly black working-class people — what could we do to put more direct control and power in our own hands, toward shaping the economy, creating the economy that would serve us and serve our needs. That led me back to a road of really looking at and analyzing worker cooperatives and other types of solidarity economy institutions.

So then from that, I was a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Afrikan People’s Organization, and it was in the course of mid-2000s where we developed what became known as the Jackson-Kush Plan [a vision, starting in 2007, put together by a number of different organizations, including the Jackson’s People Assembly, to create jobs with rights, dignity, and justice that generate wealth and distribute it equitably based on the principles of cooperation, sharing, solidarity, and democracy].

One of my major contributions to that plan was really incorporating the Solidarity Economy framework within it and contributing what I had studied from a deep, deep dive into a study of the Mondragon and Emilia Romangna cooperatives — as well as some of the work that was being done by that Zapatistas. So, I just really brought that to the fore and tried to incorporate that within the Jackson-Kush Plan, which eventually wound up becoming a core component of debate and study within that organization. As we launched a major phase of that plan’s execution in 2013 with the with the election of Chokwe Lamumba to Mayor of Jackson, one of the main things that we were trying to move and shift as a result of pursuing that office was changing some of the municipal policies to make it so that it would be easier for a grassroots communities, working-class communities, to actually develop cooperatives to make a contribution towards the local economy, but also to put more direct control in worker hands. Unfortunately, Chokwe died shortly after, too soon before we could really execute what we all had in mind in terms of those policies. But the plan to move forward and to try to execute that vision, that moved forward and that became Cooperation Jackson. So that’s kind of how I got involved, and that’s part of the core genesis of how Cooperation Jackson got started.

So how would you describe Cooperation Jackson today?

Cooperation Jackson is an emerging network of cooperatives supporting solidarity economy institutions that are working to transform Jackson, its economy, and the social relationships. It’s starting with the establishment of more equity in the community but overall it’s trying to end some of the old school, longstanding differentials in the power that exists in the economy here locally. But to also be a model of the transformation of a more ecologically and regenerative way of doing production and putting the means of production directly in the hands of members of the community. So that’s just a short bit of what we’re trying to do, what we’re aiming to do, and what we’re on the on the road to do.

What do we need to know about Jackson, Mississippi, to understand why this project is so important?

Some key things I think to understand about Jackson, Mississippi. Number one: it’s the capital of the state of Mississippi, it’s a city roughly about 200,000 people. It’s over 80 percent black. If you follow the federal regulations, it’s overwhelmingly poor with more than twenty percent officially below the federal poverty line. We would argue that the real unemployment rate is between forty and fifty percent.

And then we exist in the larger context. This is the largest city in Mississippi, but it exists as a progressive bubble in a very red and ultra-reactionary state. … I think to understand Jackson and what’s been going on here, and some of the success that we’ve had, is that we’ve been living with the politics that everyone else is now also experiencing with the Trump regime — the kind of virulent racism, the outright misogyny, you know the viciousness, we’ve been living with that for quite some time. That has been the norm and order of the day here in Mississippi for well over 50 years. Not much has really changed in that regard into the politics.

It produces a certain level of clarity that you have in the community’s minds about what their interests are, and who’s opposed to those interests, that I think has made some of the different aspects of the work that we’ve been trying to do somewhat simple. That clarity enables our work to really move in a way that may be a bit harder in other communities. That’s a critical thing to understand. That doesn’t mean that there’s still not a great deal of organizing work that has to happen, but for us, trying to convince people that there are problems is the easy part — that you don’t really have to sell to anybody. The challenging part is what is your solution and is it viable? That is where there’s a lot of organizing work that has to be done to convince people that doing economics in a different way is a viable alternative that can challenge the stranglehold of the powers that be. So, first and foremost, we’re putting forward as solid a vision as we can to get people to see a different future as possible, and then to work our way towards building the models and the institutions that we need — to actually live, breathe, practice, and embody the vision that we want to see.

What is the connection between cooperatives and economic democracy in Jackson? And what other new economics interventions are you exploring?

A core element that cooperatives speak to are questions of self-reliance and self-sufficiency, particularly regarding historically oppressed, exploited, and marginalized communities. In order to change that situation it has to start from within, and with the resources and the talents that you yourself possess. We’ve got to be very clear that there are no external saviors coming to save the day. And that our liberation is in our own hands ultimately. So just starting with the clear foundation which I think Mississippi brings to bear every day, that the search for solidarity really starts within, within your own community and folks who are sharing similar experiences. So that kind of foundation runs through the black community particularly here given the circumstances I just described.

Another key thing that I will say is that the solidarity economy is not something that we have to invent or parachute or convince people of. Given the vast majority of people’s economic situation, if there wasn’t some level of solidarity that people were practicing — particularly with their families and their extended loved ones — many people just wouldn’t make it through the day or the month. You know, paying bills, eating, providing child care support to each other. There’s a great deal of solidarity that already exists as an informal solidarity economy, and what we’re just trying to do in many respects is to build on that foundation and move it from an informal set of practices and relationships to a more formal set of practices and relationships, and create a dynamic wherein, you know, people can exchange, trade, and barter, and still share with each other across familial relationships or just basic communal relationships. And trying to scale that up so that we can do time-banking, perhaps throughout the city in the next couple of years. We’re also working on an alternative currency. You know, so this organic composition already exists in that community and our challenge is how to connect it much more explicitly to the formal piece.

It really sounds like Jackson is up against a lot, with the far right in political power and having been entrenched in a kind of structural racism for decades — centuries. Do you think that things like alternative currencies, or even cooperatives alone, can transform the economy of a place like Jackson?

So, that is where the politics have to come in very clearly, and where we try to interject them very clearly. It’s to say that we’re not just trying to build cooperatives for cooperatives’ sake. We’re trying to build vehicles, very explicitly and very intentionally, of social transformation. What we’re trying to do is fundamentally change the relations of production in our community. If people can create their own livelihood, I won’t say business, because it’s more than just business — but if we can create and control own livelihoods, it eliminates the long legacy of exploitation, of abuse, that people — particularly black people — have suffered in this community.

We believe that you have to have very explicit and intentional politics that goes along with the development of cooperative businesses and enterprises, so people are very clear on why they are trying to build a certain level of equity and what we hope that will lead to. You know, if we change the social relationships, we change the balance of power in this society and remove people from being in positions of dependency — particularly economic dependency — and move them to places of being able to exercise real strength because, say, they control their own resources and they’re not afraid of somebody kicking them out of their house, or they’re not afraid of somebody firing them from a job. That control gives you far more power to say what you want, and to do what you want, and to exercise your own will when you control those fundamental basics.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Hear more from Kali Akuno in Upstream’s latest episode — part two of their worker coop series. Listen to the episode here.

Header image of Kali Akuno courtesy of Cooperation Jackson. 

The post Cooperation Jackson’s Kali Akuno: ‘We’re trying to build vehicles of social transformation’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In 2011 Shareable organized the Share San Francisco conference to promote the city as a platform for sharing, which in turn inspired the “Sharing Cities” movement. The goal of Sharing Cities was to create horizontal linkages between local communities and serve as a platform to coordinate policies for encouraging the growth of sharing economies. Shareable itself, under the “Sharing Cities” tag, highlighted commons-based projects like open-source hailing platforms and other shared mobility projects, coworking spaces, participatory budgeting, multi-family cohousing/coliving arrangements, tool libraries, community land trusts, neighborhood gardens, shared renewable energy, municipalist projects like those in Barcelona and Jackson, hackerspaces and repair cafes, and many more.

Shareable created the Sharing Cities Network as a support platform for the project. According to the project’s website:

Fifty cities around the world began mapping their shared resources in October and November 2013 during Shareable’s first annual #MapJam. This was just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network – an ambitious project to create one hundred sharing cities groups by 2015.

As of this writing, there are seventy-three cities worldwide listed on their Community Maps page, each one with a detailed map of sharing projects and assets. In addition, the movement led to a series of Sharing Cities Summits, the second of which in 2017 set up the Sharing Cities Alliance — which includes thirty-odd cities worldwide — as a standing body.

The book Sharing Cities is the outgrowth of these nine eventful years. Following an introduction by Gorenflo, in which he summarizes the background of the Sharing Cities movement, states its basic principles and assesses its significance, the book — a collaborative effort by fifteen people — provides over two hundred pages of case studies of local sharing economy projects in dozens of cities.

The case studies, organized topically into eleven chapters, offer fairly comprehensive and systematic coverage of sharing projects in pretty much every functional subdivision of local economies, including land ownership and housing, food, cooperative finance, micro-manufacturing, transportation — and, well, everything else.

As Gorenflo notes in the introduction, the commons “was part of, but not the core of,” the initial Share San Francisco meeting. This changed, he says, because of the realization that “sharing” functions could and would be coopted by the above-mentioned corporate Death Star model if the movement did not explicitly embrace open and commons-based models.

Even more so, it changed because of the Sharing Cities movement’s interaction and cooperative engagement with a number of other commons-based movements. From organizations like the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation) founded by Michel Bauwens, to scholar-advocates of commons-based municipal economies like Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione (the closest thing the municipalist movement has to organic intellectuals), and even actual large-scale municipalist policy efforts (those emerging from M15 in Barcelona and Madrid, commons-based movements in Bologna and Amsterdam, older movements like Cooperation Jackson and the Evergreen Initiative in Cleveland, and the efforts that have since proliferated in hundreds of other cities), the Sharing Cities project has drawn inspiration from many areas.

In addition this ecosystem of movements includes a number of Autonomist thinkers like Massimo De Angelis who emphasize the commons as the kernel of an emerging post-capitalist society. And the role of the city in post-capitalist transition has been a theme in the work of thinkers ranging from Murray Bookchin to David Harvey.

All these things coming together amount, between them, to Steam Engine Time for commons-based municipal economies. This is more true than ever in the last couple of years. As even nominally leftist governments like Syntagma in Greece show their impotence or unwillingness to act in the face of neoliberal assault, and fascist or fascist-adjacent leaders come to power in a growing share of the West, municipal platforms and networks of such platforms have become the primary base for popular empowerment.

The importance of the urban commons to cities today is that it situates residents as the key actors — not markets, technologies, or governments, as popular narratives suggest — at a time when people feel increasingly powerless. To paraphrase commons scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, the city as a commons is a claim on the city by the people. Furthermore, a commons transition is a viable, post-capitalist way forward….

And if the various strands of municipalism add up to an ecosystem, Shareable and Sharing Cities occupy a vital niche in that ecosystem.

On the purely theoretical side, commons-based scholars of post-capitalist transition (De Angelis, for example) have done superb work on the commons as a new mode of production growing within the interstices of capitalism. But aside from general recommendations like growing the commons by incorporating a growing share of the material prerequisites of physical and social reproduction into its circuit, they have been light on the nuts and bolts of institutional examples of such practice. And activists like Chokwe Lumumba and Ada Colau have done amazing work in building local municipal platforms to promote a commons-based model of economic development. But when it comes to developing the full range of tangible alternatives and integrating them into a cohesive commons-based economy, such local movements have been quite uneven in identifying the possibilities. For example Cleveland and Jackson have focused heavily on incubating cooperative enterprises under the inspiration of Mondragon, but have in my opinion failed to take advantage of the potential of open-source information and cheap open-source micromanufacturing machinery for community bootstrapping.

The combined and coordinated development of all the possibilities for sharing economies within a community’s discretion, to the full extent of its discretion, would be revolutionary beyond anything we have seen. What if a municipality incorporated all vacant municipal land and housing into community land trusts, and acted as a cooperative enterprise incubator on the Cleveland and Jackson models, and used the surplus capacity of city and public utility fiber-optic infrastructure to provide low-cost community broadband, and made the unused capacity of public buildings available as community hubs, and implemented participatory budgeting and citizen policy platforms, and facilitated the creation of open/cooperative sharing platforms as alternatives to Uber, and facilitated the creation of hackerspaces and repair cafes and Fab Labs and garage factories, and required government offices and public education facilities to use open-source software and mandated that all publicly funded research and scholarship be in the public domain? All at the same time? It would amount to an entire commons-based economy, comprising a sizeable core of the entire local economy, with synergies and growth potential beyond imagining.

This is where Shareable comes in, and where it has done more than anyone else to kick-start needed action. Shareable took the lead not only in encouraging municipalities to become platforms for supporting and facilitating local sharing economies. It also promoted concrete mapping projects in individual cities to systematically identify and catalog all the potential assets for incorporation into a commons-based economy, and publicized concrete examples of commons-based praxis in all areas of social, economic, and political life from around the world. The subsequent emergence of other efforts at urban commons mapping and commons-based development policies in specific cities around the world (particularly notable is the P2P Foundation’s efforts in Ghent) is arguably the fruit of a seed planted by Shareable.

If scholars like De Angelis point to the commons as the core of the post-capitalist economy, and Barcelona and Madrid point to the municipality as the primary locus for facilitating commons-based projects, then Shareable has taken the lead in cataloging and sharing the full range of specific examples of such projects and encouraging others to follow their example.

Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons embodies this cataloging and sharing project. Given the number of localities with municipalist movements, and the number of local activists and tinkerers worldwide developing commons-based projects, there are more projects on the ground than would fit into a thirty-volume encyclopedia, let alone one book. But the survey in Sharing Cities is a representative sample of the full range of what’s being done; every case study can be taken as a proxy for what others are doing in countless other communities around the world.

In short, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in what’s being done on the ground to build the society of the future.

The post Book of the Day: Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But above the surface, islands dot the horizon. Green, lush sanctuaries. Islands of alternatives. Movements and communities rethinking ownership, dismantling hierarchies, prioritizing cooperation and generosity, and putting people and planet before profit. The islands are there, if we know where to look for them.

In Episode 2 of this highly-acclaimed 2-part series on Worker Cooperatives, the Upstream podcast builds on the conversation started in Episode 1, which explored how co-ops can serve as a force to widen spheres of democracy within our society. Episode 2 shifts the focus outward, exploring how cooperatives navigate the tumultuous waters of global capitalism.

The episode takes a deep dive into the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, the largest network of federated cooperatives in the world. The Upstream team takes listeners on a journey through the Basque region of Spain where Mondragon is located, and explores Mondragon’s successes and challenges through candid conversations with several worker-members at Mondragon Headquarters and at various cooperatives within the federation.

After presenting an in-depth exploration of the recent and mixed history Mondragon, Upstream takes us across the Atlantic to Jackson, Mississippi, where an ambitious iniative is just getting underway. Cooperation Jackson is part of the same trans-local organizing movement that inspired Cooperation Richmond—which was featured in Episode 1. Cooperation Jackson aims to be the Mondragon of North America, and in doing so has learned many lessons that will hopefully help them to succeed in their broad economic and political vision of Black liberation and the eco-socialist transition away from capitalism.

Featuring:

• Kali Akuno — Co-founder and Co-director of Cooperation Jackson
• Gorka Espiau —Senior Fellow at the Agirre Lehendakaria Center at the University of the Basque Country
• Sam Gindin — Writer, Director of Research at the Canadian Auto Workers (retired), Professor of Political Science at York University (retired)
• Ander Exteberria — Cooperative Dissemination at Mondragon Corporation
• Izaksun Ezpeleta — Worker/member at Fagor Electronics
• Andoni — Worker/member at Fagor Ederland

Music By:

• Chris Zabriskie
• Will Stratton
• Mississippi Sheiks

This is part 2 of a 2-part series. Listen to Episode 1 here.

Upstream is an interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Weaving together interviews, field-recordings, rich sound-design, and great music, each episode of Upstream will take you on a journey exploring a theme or story within the broad world of economics. So tune in, because the revolution will be podcasted.

For more from Upstream, subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher Radio. You can also follow Upstream on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to get daily updates.

Header graphic by Phil Wrigglesworth

A version of this blog post was originally published by Shareable.

The post Podcast: Cooperative Islands Within a Sea of Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Gillis presents a compelling explanation for the ineffectiveness of many political organizations, focused on some of the inescapable artifacts of human communication. Paraphrasing some of the salient points:

• Knowledge problems: language is a lossy codec for communicating our internal experiences to other agents, leaving an immense gap between words and meanings.
• Computation problems: tools like wikis and markets are subject to the massive efficiency gains of concurrency as they decentralize communication both in time and space. But most radical organizations prefer consensus meetings, which are severely constrained by the extremely low bandwidth channel of sequential one-at-a-time utterances.
• Tribalism: in organizations, the cognitive biases and psychological needs of most humans act as a constant pressure to prioritise the self-preservation of our collective identities ahead of measurable progress towards shared aims.

However, while the critique is illuminating, I found myself unsatisfied, wishing that they had offered more light at the end of the tunnel. Frankly, I don’t care for critique without reconstruction.

Through my work at Loomio I’m connected with social movements around the world, as they use our collective decision-making software. These international connections give me great optimism, as I see new developments in organizing strategy and digital technology overcoming the limitations outlined in Gillis’ talk. Optimism is more fun when you share it, so I wanted to document two cases that I think are worth emulating.

The movements I’m most inspired by are inspiring precisely because of their combined competencies in organizational and technological development. Namely, they’re:

1. The international municipalists informally headquartered in Spain.
2. The conservative anarchists building new democratic forms in Taiwan.

Organized citizens in Spain have made an extraordinary demonstration of the necessity of making uncomfortable coalitions (they talk about “complicated majorities”). You see this when distinct organisations temporarily coordinate in service of one shared issue, disbanding after victory. Radical leftists are working shoulder-to-shoulder with organised labour, with immigrant groups, with progressive politicians and social entrepreneurs. Stacco Troncoso credits this practice of coalition-building as the primary factor in keeping the far right mostly out of action in Spain. It’s hard to fuel the hate-fires between tribes when they are being continuously reminded of their shared interests, and continuously invited into acts of mutual aid (e.g. the old unemployed factory worker loses some of his xenophobia when the immigrants show up to prevent his home eviction).

Another uncomfortable coalition you see in Spanish cities is the collaboration between A) the people who understand the state apparatus as a means of redirecting civil unrest it into channels that support the status quo, and B) the people who understand the state apparatus as one of the most effective levers in catalysing social change. In most parts of the world, this is a boring argument between radicals and liberals, an endless ping pong match where each team claims to have the One True Strategy while the Evil Others are undermining the struggle. In Spain activists have made peace with this tension, courageously taking the reins of institutional power while maintaining the grassroots mandate and accountability. For example, the most radical political conference I’ve been to was mindblowing not just because the speakers were incredible, but especially when you consider the event was hosted by the same people who run the Barcelona city government.

To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extituion: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy.

Similarly, you see elements of the same “organizational + technological innovation” recipe at play in Taiwan. In 2014 their occupy movement won. Since then they’ve been dramatically reformatting the government, moving beyond political parties, and deploying technology for mass citizen participation in law-making. This 4-minute video from queer open source hacker turned movement spokesperson turned digital minister Audrey Tang is a great introduction.

In Taiwan as in Spain, the credibility of the new political actors is rooted in the streets. Second, those actors have deployed a rigorous political strategy, systematically making allies throughout the public & private sectors, and civil society. The folks from vTaiwan told me how they interviewed every state official they could find and used the results to map out which government departments were most ready to concede decision-making power to citizens. Then they used those early engagements as leverage, playing departments off each other in a competition for who could be the most participatory. That is the kind of strategic genius that could be repeated the world over.

On the tech front, you see a dual strategy: comprehensive research of existing tools, plus regular hackathons for developing new tools. Perhaps the best-documented example of this approach is the vTaiwan Uber case, where Uber drivers, taxi drivers, citizens, and officials efficiently found the region of their agreement using a combination of face-to-face deliberation and digital sentiment mapping using .

Perhaps most importantly, these processes are being hosted by people who appreciate the immense skill required to facilitate multi-stakeholder deliberation, who are up-to-speed with the palette of tools available, and who are pre-emptively mitigating the risks of “open-washing”.

In 4 years of hobby-horsing, I’ve met exactly 2 other westerners who were familiar with the Taiwan story before I told them about it. I realise I sound like a stuck record. I feel like I’m in a little bubble where nobody seems to care much about these stories. I don’t know who else is capturing the lessons, building the transnational networks, and remixing strategies into their local context. So I’m confused, like, am I an early adopter way ahead of the curve, or am I making a mountain of a molehill, or am I just hanging out with the wrong people?

Photo by speedbug

The post Organizing Beyond Organizations: Good News Stories from Spain and Taiwan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: Lying a few miles south of Marin County and just across the bay from San Francisco, the city of Richmond, California, is situated within two of the wealthiest regions of the United States. Richmond, however, does not share in this wealth. Its downtown has been largely abandoned and its northern periphery is on the front lines of the Chevron Richmond Refinery, processing over 240,000 barrels of crude oil every single day and creating a toxic environment to those living in the surrounding vicinity. It’s an example of what we know as a “sacrifice zone” — a community that has been largely incapacitated by environmental damage and economic neglect.

But in the shadow of the looming refinery, and within the spaces between boarded up storefronts and abandoned lots, something is stirring in Richmond. Residents, organizers, and activists have come together to create an incubation hub for community revitalization and resilience. They call themselves Cooperation Richmond, and their aim is to empower the marginalized and exploited residents of this city to build community-controlled wealth and wellbeing.

Founded in October of 2017, Cooperation Richmond is plugged into a broader national movement that includes similar initiatives like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. These initiatives have largely been inspired by the Mondragon cooperatives, a highly integrated network of cooperatives that form a self-supporting ecosystem in the Basque region of northern Spain. Like these other initiatives, Cooperation Richmond’s mission is to build a cooperative economy that puts people and planet before profit. It does this through providing education, coaching, and both credit and capital development to cooperative businesses in Richmond.

Robert Raymond spoke with Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni of Cooperation Richmond about their work and the importance of the growing cooperative movement in Richmond and beyond.

Robert Raymond: There’s been a buzz around a new book recently written by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” I actually found out about Cooperation Richmond when I heard that one of your board members, Najari Smith, was going to be interviewing Kali Akuno during a book tour stop in Oakland. Can you tell us about Cooperation Richmond, what you see as your mission, and how you are connected to a broader cooperative ecosystem that includes, among others, Cooperation Jackson?

Gopal Dayaneni: Cooperation Richmond is a really good example of what we call trans-local organizing — autonomist, place-based organizing with a unifying vision, shared strategies, and common frames. We are connected with many other organizations who are doing or supporting cooperative development and who are all connected by a common vision. It’s a movement that is trying to build meaningful infrastructure for economic democracy in order to build a new kind of political power. We want to actually transform the very nature of the economy and of governance in our communities — that’s what we’re engaged in.

And so Cooperation Richmond is an organization that we have developed for the purpose of supporting worker-owned and community-owned cooperatives in Richmond, California, which is one of the poorest parts of the Bay Area — a majority people of color community. We provide coaching, connections, and capital. We’re focused on folks who are most excluded from the dominant economy, folks who we think should be the foundation of building the next economy.

Doria Robinson: The idea behind Cooperation Richmond is that we’re taking somebody from a place where they’re just getting started, somebody at the point where they really want to make an impact, and they want to take charge of their lives, but need some help making it happen. Maybe they have an idea for a business, but they don’t have much more than that idea. We’ve structured Cooperation Richmond to basically take it from there, to help them take it to the next stage.

You launched Cooperation Richmond less than a year ago, but you’ve already played an important role in fostering cooperative workplaces and community engagement in Richmond. Can you tell us about your first initiative?

Doria Robinson: Our pilot project was Rich City Rides, a bike and skate shop. It’s a really powerful story. It’s a small bike and skateboard shop in Richmond, a place that had no real bike shop. Before Rich City Rides, if you wanted to do any repairs to your bike, you had to go to Walmart or Target, which are not exactly bike repair places. That was it.

You know oftentimes bikes are associated with gentrification, or kind of an elitist kind of thing you do on the weekends. In Richmond, it’s really different. People can’t afford cars. Not a lot of people in low income communities have cars, or if they do, their car is constantly breaking down. So they’ll default to riding a bike just to get to work or just to get to the store, just to go get around. So people actually really needed to have a good place to be able to fix their bike. And so people mostly just threw out their bike if they got a flat — they would literally throw their bike out. It was painful to see. Or it would just sit in the garage once it had something wrong with it, and that was it. There was no access to any kind of bike tools or anything like that — people literally had no way to fix their bikes.

So three young men started to run a loosely associated collective bike shop out of different spaces that they could find. They worked out of a storage space for a while, they had a kind of pop-up bike shop going on for a while. They were finally able to get into a retail space across from the Richmond BART station, a space on the main street that had been boarded up for years. Rich City Rides was the first place that really started to revitalize the main street. I think it was one of the only places that’s locally owned on that block as well. But they were really running a pretty substantial business at that point with very little resources, and they needed capital. They also needed a facelift — the shop looked like somebody’s garage.

So we took them on and worked with them to create an action plan to strengthen the business. We got them their first loan and helped them incorporate as a California Cooperative. So now Rich City Rides is leading the effort to completely transform and revitalize the downtown, to create this opportunity for people to have healthy transportation; healthy in terms of environment and in terms of your own body. So yeah, it’s kind of an honor to just see them carry this vision forward.

And why is the cooperatives structure important? What role do they play in the broader mission of creating the next economy?

Gopal Dayaneni: Well there’s a few different pieces of that. So the first is that bosses just suck. You don’t need them. All wealth is generated through the work of the living world. Making money off the movement of money is just extraction of wealth from other people. So the idea of all of us being able to voluntarily co-participate and control our own labor to meet our needs — and the needs of our communities — is very important.

It’s also important to share that wealth. Creating commons of wealth and commons of resources is a necessary element of the transition that we need to be in. The dominant economy extracts wealth from the living world, and it begins with extracting wealth from our own work. And so in order to both confront that, but also to build a new kind of muscle memory, a knowledge of how to be in the world, to actually practice self-government on a daily basis, we need institutions and infrastructure that can do that.

The second part of it is really that cooperatives allow us to do things that the extractive economy won’t do. For example, we would never exclude folks because they were formerly incarcerated — because we don’t believe humans belong in cages. We would never exclude folks based on their their status as documented or undocumented because we recognize the border as an enclosure enforced through violence that fragments ecosystems and communities. So we are able through cooperation to actually live our values in a way that is foreclosed upon in the dominant economy, and particularly for those who are most excluded by the dominant economy.

Doria Robinson: I think that there’s some really vital things that being in a worker owned cooperative can provide. Democratization of the workplace is something that can’t be underestimated. In a worker cooperative, that’s really run through democracy, folks are voting through each owner having a say in the day to day decisions as well as the trajectory of the enterprise. That’s a really big deal, especially in communities like Richmond where power has really been taken out of the hands of the people. This transition of decision-making and profit-making back to the people — the transition of accountability and responsibility — is truly transformative.

If you take somebody who has never been in a place where what they do actually matters, where their whole livelihood actually depends on them completely showing up and making decisions — that’s transformative. And then once you start to get a taste of that it spreads and you don’t want to stop. As soon as people really get a taste of being in a position to make decisions that impact themselves and their community, it begins to extend out to other things. It doesn’t just stay within the realm of the workplace. You begin to realize that, for example, the city government impacts you. Or that decisions made around the streets impact you. You start to realize that you actually do have a voice in shaping the things that impact you, and that you can stand up and advocate for things. I think that is one of the most powerful and important reasons why we chose to focus on cooperatives. We want to thoroughly empower people in every place and in every way.

Gopal Dayaneni: Like I said earlier, Cooperation Richmond is part of a larger “just transition” vision and process taking place in Richmond but also in lots of other places in the United States and around the world. The idea is that for there to be meaningful political democracy, there has to be economic democracy. So the idea is not only about creating sustainable livelihoods in the workplace but also being able to reimagine the very nature of the work that we do and how we do it. So we could support worker-owned cooperatives that just do absolutely anything, or we could prioritize those that have ecological and social value. We do the latter. So Rich City Rides, for example, is not just a bike shop, it’s not just a bike shop run by folks who are normally excluded from the economy — you know, young men of color from Richmond — but it’s also an organized bike shop that supports community bike rides, transit justice, and bike safety. It’s really committed to a larger vision of reimagining our relationship to place, to home, and to the economy itself.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni by Robert Raymond/Shareable

The post How Cooperation Richmond is empowering marginalized communities to build an equitable economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Stephanie Rearick:  Happy new year! (yeah, I know it’s a bit late but this too-long post took too-long to write! but you can take too-long to read it, there’s plenty of good stuff to be found)

I’m excited to see what big developments 2018 will bring, and expect that we’ll have some happy ones in MAN-land. There’s a convergence afoot among lots of likeminded people and their networks, all across the globe. And that’s all we need to remake this world. So let’s get on with it!

But first, some reflection on 2017…

I wrote much much less than usual in 2017, primarily because it was so extremely eventful and that eventfulness included breaking my shoulder (and other arm injuries from the same bike crash), and more recently getting tendonitis in my other arm while helping redo my roof.

So I’m trying to make up for some of that in this recap. Hope you enjoy it!

January we worked on proposals for hubs in the Madison MAN here at home.

February we decided to officially change our name from the Main MAN to HUMANs (Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks). Read more about that here.

Then we hosted another Summit.

We scheduled this to coincide with a visit from our friend Kali Akuno, of Cooperation Jackson. He and other friends were set to present at a public event called Resist & Build, of which Mutual Aid Networks was a sponsor. So we organized a summit around this event, and brought more of our active members and pilot stewards together for mutual learning.

A lot of very rich discussion and forward momentum happened here, and I’ve shared pictures of our whiteboards and shown where to find some notes here.

But now will note just one very lovely bit of serendipity –

Our friend Blair Anderson, a potential pilot steward in Detroit and generally amazing human and organizer, was in Chicago for a family memorial. The night before our summit’s last day, Blair suddenly felt called to come to Madison. He went and booked a bus at one in the morning, then got here early the next day. He called me in the morning to ask what was happening here, and I was able to invite him to our last day of workshops and planning.

Blair came and gave us a really beautiful and poignant history of his own family, through slavery, then chain gangs under Jim Crow vagrancy laws, then civil rights activism, to Black Panther leadership, to political imprisonment, to organizing new ways of thriving in this culture. And then introduced an incredible vision of making a mutual aid network that can provide meaningful sanctuary to people under threat for a variety of reasons, unfortunately the list of which grows daily.

This discussion spawned lots of new ideas and energy. And also inspired me to think of creating a Church of HUMANs (for real, I’ll share details later) and gain a fondness for the adjective “superversive.” Superversive incorporates, transforms and transcends all which comes before it. That’s the HUMAN approach to our economy.

Speaking of (needing) a new approach to our economy – In March we officially Ran Out Of Money. Well, it actually does hurt. But it is the way of getting all our (my) skin in this game. As the main person who has relied on Mutual Aid Network work for somewhat of a livelihood, it’s giving me a new urgency to making this work to support me doing what I feel called to do in this world.

April – I did a MAN tour of New Zealand!!! This one I did post about, a bit, as I went – in segments 1 and 2 (more photos here). And it resulted in a couple radio interviews you can hear here. But in a nutshell, I was given the most incredible opportunity to tour New Zealand for three weeks, with 11 different stops and hosts, at no monetary cost to myself. My hosts paid for my flight so I could speak at the Living Economies Expo (amazing!) in Lyttelton (home of the famous Project Lyttelton and Lyttelton TimeBank that did such fantastic work in earthquake relief after the 2011 quakes). Then Cherie Conrad put out word to cooperative economy leaders throughout the country and I was hosted for the rest of the time on an epic journey of learning and sharing experience, ideas and inspiration. I learned how they approach savings pools and was also able to show how MAN frameworks could turn savings pools into a more deliberate driver of equity. Tons of beautiful ideas emerged throughout the trip, and are taking form as Mutual Aid Networks of Aotearoa (MANA).

I returned home April 22 and a week later I broke my arm (left humerus right up by my shoulder) in a bike crash. Ouch.

May – The week after breaking my arm I flew to Barcelona Spain to present at the fourth International Complementary Currencies Conference. Actually, staying with 10 friends at a beautiful home in Barcelona was a fine place to recover from a freshly broken arm. And my presentation went well too, despite my awkward gesturing with a sling-bound arm… Here are the slides to the presentation I gave and here is the paper I wrote, Becoming HUMAN: Superversive Strategies in the Face of Fascism and Ecocide, in order to be able to present. Unfortunately I wrote the paper in a hurry so it isn’t academic enough in style and doesn’t have good citations in order to be publishable. But I do hope to keep working on the theme, and implementing the ideas. The gist is that, during this time of the US doubling down on corporate hegemony, private ownership and deregulation, Mutual Aid Networks are a form of corporation that should position ourselves to compete for the new economy and win by playing a smarter game that’s more fun and that includes everyone.

And speaking of smarter, I had the immense pleasure of meeting some of the people from Cooperativa Integral Catalana, a beautiful project I’ve heard about (in concert with Fair Coop, another favorite of mine) for years. I got to talk a lot with Joel, meet one of the coop’s founders, and tour their Barcelona space (photos from there). Here’s an article that p2p Foundation ran about them. Check it out! They’re great at integrating different sectors of a local economy to make a pretty self-sustaining system.

June we held a small MAN retreat and pilot exploration in Detroit and attended the Allied Media Conference.

During the conference we crashed the meeting of the Digital Stewards, a Detroit organization making mesh wireless networks owned and operated by neighbors, who also use them to create community communication systems. We plan to replicate this in Madison and beyond! We were also thrilled to connect with people from Red Hook Initiative in Brooklyn, who train in this and lots of other cool tech stuff. Hopefully we’ll work together in the future.

For our pilot exploration we held a discussion about how to move forward on a couple projects, including the sanctuary network that came up in our February summit, and a learning circuit between different pilot sites including St. Louis, Detroit, Jackson, and Madison. We had people from St. Louis, Madison, and Detroit, and laid the initial groundwork for a more future work in Detroit and between sites.

July 27 was an inauspicious day, when we lost the wonderful Cheri Maples to injuries she’d sustained in a bike/van accident the previous summer. The loss of Cheri was huge for me personally and for all of us professionally, and as humans. Cheri was instrumental in helping to start and run the Dane County TimeBank, and especially its various transformative justice efforts including the TimeBank Youth Court, mindfulness and NVC training in prisons, support for people coming home from prison, and timebanking in jails. This work was just one piece of a lot of interconnected, powerful, beautiful work in the world as a Dharma teacher (ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh) and former cop, corrections official, assistant WI Attorney General, and more. You can read more about her here.

Summer was spent building the Madison MAN Cooperative, for which we met weekly.

October I did a little MAN tour through Ohio and then Asheville NC. Ohio stops included Columbus, Youngstown, and Yellow Springs where I presented at the Economics of Happiness Conference hosted by Community Solutions, and also did a MAN exploration there. Lots of exciting possibilities, and the conference was cool.

Youngstown was an informal chat at the TimeBank Mahoning Watershed’s monthly movie night.

Columbus was particularly fruitful, and fortunately we solidified more of a relationship with the Care and Share TimeBank and especially Steve Bosserman, who has been helping a lot with Mutual Aid Platform software and way more. Here’s his report on the Columbus MAN developments:
“We gave a presentation at our September Care and Share Time Bank potluck to prep the audience for your program at the October Potluck on the OH-NC tour. Here’s a link to the presentation handouts.

Also, following your visit, we posted a summary of outcomes to our CSTB Facebook group in which we outlined ways we could bring CSTB more fully into the MAN experience. Here is the link to that post on Facebook and as a viewable Google Doc.

In addition, based on your tour visit, we are featuring MAN in a grant proposal to be submitted by the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio (IACO), Simply Living, and CSTB to the Ohio Humanities in March with a preliminary review next month. The purpose of that grant is to have faith groups, “nones”, and secular humanists convene a set of online and face-to-face conversations in the Columbus area to explore how we can move more aggressively toward a “time-based economy” rather than remain dependent on the prevailing monetary economy.”

Awesome!

Then I headed to Asheville NC at the invitation of our friend from the Impact Economy summit and Madison mapping summit, Paul Hartzog.

At the end of the Asheville trip Steve Cooperman took me to meet Kevin Jones, co-founder of SOCAP and champion of Impact Hubs, among other stuff. We had a quick and energetic chat about each of our work. He’s working toward making a long-term investment model for young people to invest in forests. I was able to show him the way MANs can create means for people with money to directly redistribute it, investing in communities with less access. He was intrigued enough to become my first-ever patron! Helping me with a regular donation toward my living expenses, Kevin got the ball rolling on the vision we’ve held for awhile, creating crowdfunded patronage that everyone can tap into. His generous support will be a good motivator for us to create a web-based template to accept contributions like this regularly, in all kinds of currencies and resources. Watch for it!

November – We incorporated the Madison MAN Cooperative, our multi-stakeholder cooperative which we intend to be our city-wide MAN pilot site!

And the next day I flew to LA and went straight to Santa Ana, about 40 min. south, to spend time with the amazing and wonderful Ana Urzua, one of my fellow BALLE fellows and powerhouse cooperative organizer, and her friends and colleagues. I learned some of what they’re doing with Santa Ana Building Healthy Communities and beyond, and we held a MAN pilot site exploratory discussion that was super exciting.

December 13 we held the official launch party for our Madison MAN Cooperative. And one of the first projects we’ve set up is to host a monthly gathering with food and childcare, to make it easy for people to drop in after work or whatever they need. We’ll partner with a founding member organization, Dane County TimeBank, to be at each other’s monthly events so that each of us can have a presence on both a weekday and a weekend each month. The point now is maximum accessibility and consistency so we can keep inviting people in and building our collective work. Stay tuned!

If you’ve gotten this far, you just read a long-ass post. (or skipped ahead. but that’s OK. You can always search keywords if you want to know about certain places, or bits of work, or you can read bit by bit or skip it altogether). Thanks for bearing with me!

Follow the links to learn more about each thing, and join us in our soon-to-resume office hours. And of course join the HUMANs global cooperative network.

And thanks for your interest, work, support, and everything else.

Enjoy your 2018!
–Stephanie

founder of this version of Mutual Aid Networks, Board President of HUMANs

The post Mutual Aid Network: an update appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

Social ecology helped shape the New Left and anti-nuclear movements in the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of Green politics in many countries, the alter-globalization movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and most recently the struggle for democratic autonomy by Kurdish communities in Turkey and Syria, along with the resurgence of new municipal movements around the world — from Barcelona en Comú to Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi.

The philosophical vision of social ecology was first articulated by Murray Bookchin between the early 1960s and the early 2000s, and has since been further elaborated by his colleagues and many others. It is a unique synthesis of social criticism, historical and anthropological investigation, dialectical philosophy and political strategy. Social ecology can be viewed as an unfolding of several distinct layers of understanding and insight, spanning all of these dimensions and more. It begins with an appreciation of the fact that environmental problems are fundamentally social and political in nature, and are rooted in the historical legacies of domination and social hierarchy.

Capitalism and Climate Change

Bookchin was among the first thinkers in the West to identify the growth imperative of the capitalist system as a fundamental threat to the integrity of living ecosystems, and he consistently argued that social and ecological concerns are fundamentally inseparable, questioning the narrowly instrumental approaches advanced by many environmentalists to address various issues. For climate activists today, this encourages an understanding that a meaningful approach to the climate crisis requires a systemic view of the centrality of fossil fuel combustion to the emergence and continued resilience of capitalism. Indeed, capitalism as we know it is virtually inconceivable without the exponential growth in energy usage — and widespread substitutions of energy for labor — that coal, oil and gas have enabled. As the UK-based Corner House research group explained in a 2014 paper:

The entire contemporary system of making profits out of labor depended absolutely on cheap fossil carbon [and therefore] there is no cheap or politically-feasible substitute for fossil fuels in the triple combination of fossil fuels–heat engines–commodified labor that underpins current rates of capital accumulation.

The perspective of social ecology thus allows us to see that fossil fuels have long been central to the capitalist mythos of perpetual growth. They have driven ever-increasing concentrations of capital in many economic sectors, and advanced both the regimentation and increasing precarity of human labor worldwide. In Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm explains in detail how early British industrialists opted to switch from abundant water power to coal-fired steam engines to run their mills, despite increased costs and uncertain reliability. The ability to control labor was central to their decision, as the urban poor proved to be vastly more amenable to factory discipline than the more independent-minded rural dwellers who lived along Britain’s rapidly flowing rivers. A century later, massive new oil discoveries in the Middle East and elsewhere would drive previously unfathomable increases in the productivity of human labor and breathe new life into the capitalist myth of unlimited economic expansion.

To address the full magnitude of the climate crisis and maintain a habitable planet for future generations we need to shatter that myth once and for all. Today the political supremacy of fossil fuel interests far transcends the magnitude of their campaign contributions or their short-term profits. It stems from their continuing central role in advancing the very system they helped to create. We need to overturn both fossil fuels and the growth economy, and that will require a fundamental rethinking of many of the core underlying assumptions of contemporary societies. Social ecology provides a framework for this.

The Philosophy of Social Ecology

Fortunately, in this respect, the objectives of social ecology have continued to evolve beyond the level of critique. In the 1970s, Bookchin engaged in extensive research into the evolution of the relationship between human societies and non-human nature. His writing challenged the common Western notion that humans inherently seek to dominate the natural world, concluding instead that the domination of nature is a myth rooted in relationships of domination among people that emerged from the breakdown of ancient tribal societies in Europe and the Middle East.

Social ecology highlights egalitarian social principles that many indigenous cultures — both past and present — have held in common, and has elevated these as guideposts for a renewed social order: concepts such as interdependence, reciprocity, unity-in-diversity and an ethics of complementarity, that is, the balancing of roles among various social sectors by actively compensating for differences among individuals. In his magnum opus, The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin detailed the unfolding conflicts between these guiding principles and those of increasingly stratified hierarchical societies, and how this has shaped the contending legacies of domination and freedom for much of human history.

Beyond this, the philosophical inquiry of social ecology examines the emergence of human consciousness from within the processes of natural evolution. Reaching back to the roots of dialectical thought, from Aristotle to Hegel, Bookchin advanced a unique approach to eco-philosophy, emphasizing the potentialities that lie latent within the evolution of both natural and social phenomena while celebrating the uniqueness of human creativity and self-reflection. Social ecology eschews the common view of nature as merely a realm of necessity, instead perceiving nature as striving, in a sense, to actualize through evolution an underlying potentiality for consciousness, creativity and freedom.

For Bookchin, a dialectical outlook on human history compels us to reject what merely is and follow the potentialities inherent in evolution toward an expanded view of what could be, and ultimately what ought to be. While the realization of a free, ecological society is far from inevitable — and may appear ever less likely in the face of impending climate chaos — it is perhaps the most rational outcome of four billion years of natural evolution.

The Political Strategy of Social Ecology

These historical and philosophical explorations in turn provide an underpinning for social ecology’s revolutionary political strategy, which has been discussed previously in ROAR Magazine by several social ecology colleagues. This strategy is generally described as libertarian or confederal municipalism, or more simply as communalism, stemming from the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871.

Like the communards, Bookchin argued for liberated cities, towns and neighborhoods governed by open popular assemblies. He believed that the confederation of such liberated municipalities could overcome the limits of local action, allowing cities, towns and neighborhoods to sustain a democratic counter-power to the centralized political institutions of the state, all while overcoming parochialism, promoting interdependence and advancing a broad liberatory agenda. Furthermore, he argued that the stifling anonymity of the capitalist market can be replaced by a moral economy in which economic as well as political relationships are guided by an ethics of mutualism and reciprocity.

Social ecologists believe that whereas institutions of capitalism and the state heighten social stratification and exploit divisions among people, alternative structures rooted in direct democracy can foster the expression of a general social interest towards social and ecological renewal. “It is in the municipality,” Bookchin wrote in Urbanization Without Cities, “that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into a creative body politic and create an existentially vital … civic life that has institutional form as well as civic content.”

People inspired by this view have brought structures of direct democracy through popular assemblies into numerous social movements in the US, Europe and beyond, from popular direct action campaigns against nuclear power in the late 1970s to the more recent alter-globalization and Occupy Wall Street movements. The prefigurative dimension of these movements — anticipating and enacting the various elements of a liberated society — has encouraged participants to challenge the status quo while advancing transformative visions of the future. The concluding chapter of my recent book, Toward Climate Justice (New Compass 2014) describes these influences in some detail, with a focus on the anti-nuclear movement, green politics, ecofeminism and other significant currents from the past and present.

Contributions to Contemporary Movements

Today, social ecologists are actively engaged in the global movement for climate justice, which unites converging currents from a variety of sources, most notably indigenous and other land-based people’s movements from the Global South, environmental justice campaigners from communities of color in the Global North, and continuing currents from the global justice or alter-globalization movements of a decade ago. It is worth considering some of social ecology’s distinct contributions to this broad-based climate justice movement in some greater detail.

First, social ecology offers an uncompromising ecological outlook that challenges the entrenched power structures of capitalism and the nation-state. A movement that fails to confront the underlying causes of environmental destruction and climate disruption can, at best, only superficially address those problems. Climate justice activists generally understand, for example, that false climate solutions such as carbon markets, geoengineering and the promotion of natural gas obtained from fracking as a “bridge fuel” on the path to renewable energy mainly serve the system’s imperative to keep growing. To fully address the causes of climate change requires movement actors to raise long-range, transformative demands that the dominant economic and political systems may prove unable to accommodate.

Second, social ecology offers a lens to better comprehend the origins and historical emergence of ecological radicalism, from the nascent movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s right up to the present. Social ecology played a central role in challenging the inherent anti-ecological bias of much of twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism, and thus serves as an important complement to current efforts to reclaim Marx’s ecological legacy. While the understanding of Marx’s long-ignored ecological writings, advanced by authors such as John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Saito, is central to the emerging eco-left tradition, so are the political debates and theoretical insights that unfolded over many pivotal decades when the Marxist left was often vehemently uninterested in environmental matters.

Third, social ecology offers the most comprehensive treatment of the origins of human social domination and its historical relationship to abuses of the Earth’s living ecosystems. Social ecology highlights the origins of ecological destruction in social relations of domination, in contrast to conventional views suggesting that impulses to dominate non-human nature are a product of historical necessity. To meaningfully address the climate crisis will require overturning numerous manifestations of the long historical legacy of domination, and an intersectional movement aimed toward challenging social hierarchy in general.

Fourth, social ecology offers a comprehensive historical and strategic grounding for realizing the promise of direct democracy. Social ecologists have worked to bring the praxis of direct democracy into popular movements since the 1970s, and Bookchin’s writings offer an essential historical and theoretical context for this continuing conversation. Social ecology offers a comprehensive strategic outlook that looks beyond the role of popular assemblies as a form of public expression and outrage, looking toward more fully realized self-organization, confederation and a revolutionary challenge to entrenched statist institutions.

Finally, social ecology asserts the inseparability of effective oppositional political activity from a reconstructive vision of an ecological future. Bookchin viewed most popular dissident writing as incomplete, focusing on critique and analysis without also proposing a coherent way forward. At the same time, social ecologists have spoken out against the accommodation of many alternative institutions — including numerous formerly radical cooperatives and collectives — to a stifling capitalist status quo.

The convergence of oppositional and reconstructive strands of activity is a crucial step towards a political movement that can ultimately contest and reclaim political power. This is realized within the international climate movement through the creation of new political spaces that embody the principles of “blockadia” and “alternatiba.” The former term, popularized by Naomi Klein, was first coined by the activists of the Tar Sands Blockade in Texas, who engaged in an extended series of nonviolent actions to block the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The latter is a French Basque word, adopted as the theme of a bicycle tour that encircled France during the summer of 2015 and highlighted scores of local alternative-building projects. Social ecology’s advocacy for creative human participation in the natural world helps us see how we can radically transform our communities, while healing and restoring vital ecosystems through a variety of sophisticated, ecologically-grounded methods.

Global inertia, municipal responses

Following the celebrated but ultimately disappointing conclusion of the 2015 UN climate conference in Paris, many climate activists have embraced a return to the local. While the Paris Agreement is widely praised by global elites — and activists rightly condemned the US Trump administration’s announced withdrawal — the agreement has a fundamental flaw that largely precludes the possibility of its achieving meaningful climate mitigation. This goes back to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s interventions at the 2009 Copenhagen conference, which shifted the focus of climate diplomacy from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s legally binding emissions reductions toward a system of voluntary pledges, or “Nationally Determined Contributions,” which now form the basis of the Paris framework. Implementation and enforcement of the agreement are limited to what the Paris text describes as an international “expert-based” committee that is structured to be “transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive.”

Of course the Kyoto regime also lacked meaningful enforcement mechanisms, and countries such as Canada and Australia chronically exceeded their Kyoto-mandated emissions caps. The Kyoto Protocol also initiated an array of “flexible mechanisms” to implement emissions reductions, leading to the global proliferation of carbon markets, dubious offset schemes, and other capitalist-inspired measures that have largely benefited financial interests without meaningful benefits to the climate. While the original 1992 UN Climate Convention enshrined various principles aimed to address the inequalities among nations, subsequent climate diplomacy has often resembled a demoralizing race to the bottom.

Still, there are some signs for hope. In response to the announced US withdrawal from the Paris framework, an alliance of over 200 US cities and counties announced their intention to uphold the cautious but still significant commitments that the Obama administration had brought to Paris. Internationally, more than 2,500 cities from Oslo to Sydney have submitted plans to the United Nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, sometimes in defiance of their national governments’ far more cautious commitments. Two local popular consultas in Columbia moved to reject mineral and oil exploitation within their territories, in one case affiliating their town with the Italian-based “Slow Cities” movement — an outgrowth of the famous Slow Food movement that has helped raise the social and cultural standing of local food producers in Italy and many other countries. A Slow Cities statement of principles suggests that by “working towards sustainability, defending the environment and reducing our excessive ecological footprint,” communities are “committing … to rediscover traditional know-how and to make the most of our resources through recycling and reuse, applying the new technologies.”

The ability of such municipal movements to build support and pressure for broader institutional changes is central to their political importance in a period when social and environmental progress is stalled in many countries. Actions initiated from below may also have more staying power than those mandated from above. They are far more likely to be democratically structured and accountable to people who are most affected by the outcomes. They help build relationships among neighbors and strengthen the capacity for self-reliance. They enable us to see that the institutions that now dominate our lives are far less essential for our daily sustenance than we are often led to believe. And, perhaps most important, such municipal initiatives can challenge regressive measures implemented from above, as well as national policies that favor fossil fuel corporations and allied financial interests.

For the most part, recent municipal initiatives in the US and beyond have evolved in a progressive direction. Over 160 US cities and counties have declared themselves as “sanctuaries” in defiance of the Trump administration’s elevated enforcement of US immigration laws — a very important development in light of the future displacements that will result from climate change. Such ongoing political and legal battles over the rights of municipalities against states speak to the radical potential of socially and ecologically progressive measures emerging from below.

Social and environmental justice activists in the US are also challenging the trend of right-wing electoral victories by running and winning bold campaigns for a variety of municipal positions. Perhaps most noteworthy is the successful 2017 campaign of Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, in the heart of the Deep South, with a program focused on human rights, local democracy and neighborhood-based economic and ecological renewal. Lumumba ran as the voice of a movement known as Cooperation Jackson, which takes its inspiration from the Black American tradition and the Global South, including the resistance struggles of enslaved Africans before and after the US Civil War, the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, and recent popular uprisings around the globe.

Cooperation Jackson has put forward numerous ideas that resonate strongly with the principles of social ecology, including empowered neighborhood assemblies, cooperative economics and a dual-power political strategy. Others working to resist the status quo and build local power are organizing directly democratic neighborhood assemblies from New York City to the Pacific Northwest, and developing a new national network to further advance municipalist strategies, as Eleanor Finley importantly recounted in her essay on “The New Municipal Movements” in ROAR Magazine’s Issue #6.

Visions of the Future

Whether local efforts such as these can help usher in a coherent and unified municipalist movement in solidarity with “rebel city” initiatives around the world still remains to be seen. Such a movement will be necessary for local initiatives to scale up and ultimately catalyze the world-scale transformations that are necessary to fend off the looming threat of a complete breakdown in the Earth’s climate systems.

Indeed, the projections of climate science continually highlight the difficulty of transforming our societies and economies quickly enough to prevent a descent into a planet-wide climate catastrophe. But science also affirms that the actions we undertake today can mean the difference between a future climate regime that is disruptive and difficult, and one that rapidly descends toward apocalyptic extremes. While we need to be completely realistic about the potentially devastating consequences of continuing climate disruptions, a genuinely transformative movement needs to be rooted in a forward-looking view of an improved quality of life for most people in the world in a future freed from fossil fuel dependence.

Partial measures are far from sufficient, and approaches to renewable energy development that merely replicate capitalist forms may likely turn out to be a dead end. However, the cumulative impact of municipal efforts to challenge entrenched interests and actualize living alternatives — combined with coherent revolutionary visions, organization and strategies toward a radically transformed society — could perhaps be enough to fend off a dystopian future of deprivation and authoritarianism.

Democratically confederated municipalist initiatives remain our best hope to meaningfully reshape the fate of humanity on this planet. Perhaps the threat of climate chaos, combined with our deep knowledge of the potential for a more humane and ecologically harmonious future, can indeed help inspire the profound transformations that are necessary for humanity and the Earth to continue to thrive.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by David Istvan

The post Social Ecology: Communalism against Climate Chaos appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To date, popular opposition to Trump has been expressed largely through mass demonstrations and street protests. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, an estimated 2.9 million people marched throughout dozens of US cities. These watershed moments, such as the Women’s March or the March for Science, present people with much-needed opportunities to feel catharsis, express solidarity and recognize shared values. Yet, as protests, they are inherently limited. Specifically, they fail to bring about a program for the deep institutional transformation that our society so desperately needs.

Beneath highly visible mobilizations, grassroots and municipal forms of opposition to Trump are also taking shape. Under the banner of “sanctuary cities,” community-based organizations, faith groups, legal advocates, workers’ centers and engaged citizens have been setting up crisis networks to support immigrant families living under the threat of deportation. These projects, structured largely on a neighborhood-to-neighborhood basis, challenge dominant assumptions about political participation and raise the crucial question of what it really should mean to be a citizen.

Meanwhile, mayors and city officials have surfaced as some of Trump’s most vocal opponents. This past June, nearly 300 mayors, including nine of the ten largest cities in America, disobeyed the president’s wishes and re-committed to the Paris Climate Accord. Whether these declarations amount to genuine acts of political defiance or merely symbolic gestures by local elites looking to advance their careers is tangential. What matters is that during a period of unprecedented political turmoil people are calling upon local officials to act on behalf of their communities — regardless of citizenship — rather than according to the wishes of a far-right regime. They are looking to their own municipalities as sites of grounded political action and moral authority.

The Municipalist Alternative

In the midst of this milieu, a small constellation of civic platforms have emerged with the purpose of transforming how US cities and municipalities are actually run. Blurring the lines between social movement and local governance, these municipalist experiments organize on the basis of existing municipalities or districts, demanding socially just and ecological solutions to issues that concern the community as a whole. Yet their common agenda extends far beyond electing progressive parties to local office. Patiently, through a combination of political education, grassroots mobilization and reform, municipalists seek to place decision-making power back in the hands of citizens. Municipalism is not simply a new strategy for local governance, but rather is a path to social freedom and stateless democracy.

The term “municipalism” itself derives from “libertarian municipalism,” coined during the 1980s by social theorist and philosopher Murray Bookchin. By claiming the label “libertarian,” Bookchin invoked its original meaning from nineteenth-century anarchism. In his view, essential concepts like “liberty” and “freedom” had been wrongly subverted and appropriated by the right wing, and it was time for leftists to reclaim them. Nonetheless, the label “libertarian” has been dropped by many of the new municipal experiments. Most recently, the Catalan citizen’s platform Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) has popularized municipalism as part of its political project in Catalonia, Spain. Their version of municipalism also ties closely to the theory and praxis of the commons, which they marshal to defend the city against runaway tourism and urban development.Municipalism is distinguished by its insistence that the underlying problem with society is our disempowerment. Capitalism and the state not only cause extraordinary material suffering and inequality, they also rob us of the ability to play a meaningful role in our own lives and communities. By seizing the power to make decisions, they deprive us of our own humanity and sense of purpose — they deprive us of meaning.

The solution, as municipalists see it, is direct democracy. To achieve this, we can cultivate the new society within the shell of the old by eroding the state’s popular legitimacy and dissolving its power into face-to-face people’s assemblies and confederations. This means having faith that people are intelligent and want things to change. In Bookchin’s words, libertarian municipalism “presupposes a genuine democratic desire by people to arrest the growing powers of the nation state.” People can, and ought, to be the experts regarding their own needs.

Not all movements that align with a municipalist program refer to themselves as such. For example, the Kurdish freedom movement advocates a very similar model under the term “democratic confederalism.” Bookchin himself later adopted the label “communalism” to highlight the affinity between his views and the 1871 Paris Commune. Virtually every region and culture of the world is fertile with some historical legacy of popular assemblies, tribal democracy or stateless self-governance. The question is how do we revive those legacies and use them to erode the dominance of capitalism and the state over the rest of society.

The Role of Cities

Municipalities, towns, villages, city wards and neighborhoods provide the actual physical scale at which such an empowering politics can flourish. Historically, cities have drawn people together, facilitating diversity by encouraging cross-cultural interaction. This inherent feature infuses cities with a humanistic sensibility — and by extension also with radical potential. As Hannah Arendt put it, “politics is based on the fact of human plurality.” Cities weave many different kinds of people together into a rich tapestry of everyday life.

Fear and distrust of cities has been a central pillar of Trump’s far-right movement. The Trumpists are afraid of immigrants, black people and those who play with gender norms. They fear elites, political domination and the economic precarity that ruthlessly dazzling cities represent. A whole gamut of caricatures are arranged in one foreboding image of a decadent cosmopolitanism.

These antagonisms are all the worse for the stark inequality found in major metropolitan areas. “Gentrification” comes nowhere close to describing the mass internal displacement taking place throughout the US. In San Francisco, a small, modest home costs about $3.5 to 4 million; simple one-bedroom apartments range from $3,500 to $15,000 per month to rent. Beneath the shimmering towers of tech billionaires, tent villages wedge precariously between the concrete pillars of highway underpasses. Meanwhile, the working poor are banished to isolated suburbs, where there is little street life and often no viable public transportation.

While European movements call for preserving urban residents’ “right to the city,” in the US we are the position of figuring out how to simply insert ordinary people back within the urban landscape. Capitalism has birthed distorted American cities. Their vast, jutting shapes convey the helplessness and alienation of capitalist social relations. What little livable space does exist in recent years has been gobbled up by real estate and high finance. This distorted rendering of urban life expands ever outward, converting farmland into parking lots, family-owned shops into Walmarts and tight-knit rural communities into dull suburban hinterlands.

Municipalism can combat the tendency for working people in rural areas to distrust cities — and the diverse people who occupy them — by putting power back into the hands of the people. Within cities, municipalists can advance programs to transform their inhumanly scaled physical and material characteristics. A municipalist agenda would ultimately seek to reclaim urban areas as places where people actually live, not simply go shopping. In rural and suburban contexts, municipalists can offer a vision of decentralization and independence from the state that is void of bigotry and abuse. Rural allegiances to extractive industries can be broken by offering ecological ways of life tied to local, civic decision-making. These are not easy tasks, but they are essential to the holistic social change we so direly need.

Organizing for Municipal Power

The municipalist movement in the US today is like a seedling. It is small and delicate, fresh and brimming with potential. Although we often look for leftist leadership in big cities like New York City or Chicago, these new municipal leaders are rooted in relatively smaller cities including Jackson, Mississippi and Olympia, Washington. Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. As big cities are emptied of their original inhabitants and character, small and moderate-sized cities are offering relatively more opportunities for communal interaction and organization.

This summer, I had the opportunity to meet leaders from several municipal projects, including Cooperation Jackson, the Seattle Neighborhood Action Councils (NAC), Portland Assembly, Olympia Assembly and Genese Grill’s District City Councilor campaign in Burlington, Vermont. Consistently, these activists brought sophisticated analysis, raised challenging questions and shared innovative approaches to organizing. But what I found most striking was their ability to articulate utopian ideas with common-sense policies aimed at actually improving people’s lives. Their political aspirations are serious and grounded in the belief that popular power really can offer superior solutions to difficult social issues.

In Seattle, the Neighborhood Action Coalition (NAC) formed during the dramatic aftermath of Trump’s election. Like many anti-Trump groups, their primary goal is to protect targeted groups against hate crimes and provide immediate services. Yet instead of convening big, amorphous “general assemblies” like Occupy Wall Street, the NAC delineates its chapters according to Seattle’s dozen or so city districts. Each neighborhood chapter is empowered to select its own activities and many groups have evolved through door-to-door listening campaigns.The NAC is creating new forms of encounter between citizens and city officials. Seattle is currently in the midst of a mayoral election with no running incumbent. The NAC is thus hosting a town-hall series called “Candidate Jeopardy,” during which candidates are quizzed on a selection of citizen-authored questions. Like the game show Jeopardy, they must select within a range from easy questions to difficult. “Who will pick the low-hanging questions?” reads an event callout in the Seattle Weekly, “Who will pick the hard ones? Will we have a Ken Jennings [a famous Jeopardy contestant] of the 2017 elections? Come find out!”

The NAC may eventually find a friendly face in office. Nikkita Oliver, one of the front-runners, is a Black Lives Matter activist running on a platform of holding local officials accountable to the public. If she wins, Seattle’s situation may begin to resemble Barcelona, where radical housing rights activist Ada Colau holds the mayorship.

In Portland, Oregon, the organization Portland Assembly uses a similar “spokes-council” model and enrolls new members to Portland’s existing neighborhood associations. They are currently working to create a citywide, pro-homeless coalition; they advocate for radical reformation of the police. This spring, friends of Portland Assembly made newspaper headlines with the project “Portland Anarchist Road Care.” Following a record-breaking winter, activists in familiar “black bloc” attire — with all-black clothes and bandanas covering their mouths — took to the city streets with patch asphalt and fixed potholes. Anarchist road care playfully disrupts the notion that those who advocate for a stateless society are reactive, destructive and impractical. It is also an excellent example of what Kate Shea Baird calls “hard pragmatism” — the use of small gains to demonstrate that real change is truly possible.

Perhaps the largest and most promising municipal movement in the US currently is Cooperation Jackson, a civic initiative based in America’s Deep South. In a city where over 85 percent of the population is black while 90 percent of the wealth is held by whites, Cooperation Jackson cultivates popular power through participatory economic development. Over the course of decades, Cooperation Jackson and its predecessors have formed a federation of worker-owned cooperatives and other initiatives for democratic and ecological production. This economic base is then linked to people’s assemblies, which broadly determine the project’s priorities.

Like Seattle’s NAC, Cooperation Jackson engages in local elections and city governance. Jackson, Mississippi’s new mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, comes from a family of famous black radicals and has close ties to the movement. Lumumba has endorsed Cooperation Jackson’s initiative to build Center for Community Production, a public community center that specializes in 3D printing and digital production.

Municipalism’s Revolutionary Potential

These are just a few of the municipal experiments taking place throughout the US. Do these initiatives signal the birth of a revolutionary democratic movement? Will they rescue us from the jaws of fascism and realize our potential for a truly multicultural, feminist and ecological society? Perhaps — and we should all hope so. Indeed, something like a new municipal paradigm is taking shape with the recognition that anti-racism, feminist liberation, economic justice and direct democracy are intertwined. Enthusiasm for this paradigm brews at the city level, where diverse peoples are encouraged by their surroundings to hold humanistic views.

However, there are good reasons for municipalists to be wary and cautious. While radical leftists lay the groundwork of grassroots political engagement, liberal and “progressive” reform organizations like MoveOn and Indivisible are poised to absorb and divert this energy back into party politics. Ambiguous terms like “participatory democracy” are effective tools to engage people who are uncomfortable with terms like “radical” or “revolutionary.” Yet they can also be easily exploited by institutions like the Democratic Party, who, humiliated and sapped of credibility, now look hungrily upon city and municipal elections.

Thus, engaging with “progressive” movements will no doubt be something of a chimera. On the one hand, they may be important allies in municipal campaigns and points of entry for political newcomers. On the other, they may crash a popular movement. And when these state-centered schemes fail, people will become upset and disillusioned — potentially re-channeling their dissatisfaction to support for the far right.

We do not need, as The Nation gleefully calls it, a new age of “big city progressivism.” We need a non-hierarchical way of life that confers abundance and freedom to all. For today’s municipal movements this means that:

• We must valorize the city not as it is, but as it could be.
  We must infuse the idea of citizenship with new meaning and call for radical citizenship based on participation within the municipal community, and not upon a state’s bureaucratic approval.
• We must resist the temptation to impute our faith in benevolent mayors and other personalities, no matter how charismatic or well-intentioned, unless they seek to dissolve the powers they hold.
  Revolution is patient work. We are all of us unlikely to live to see the revolution we seek. Yet we have more tools at our disposal than we realize. The United States’ own mythology is one of decentralization. In his book The Third Revolution, Murray Bookchin recounts the waves of popular assemblies that broke loose from their base in rural New England during the American Revolution and swept down to the Southern colonies. The Articles of Confederation and the Bill of Rights were concessions to popular pressure. Confederal thinking persists in the popular imaginations of even some of the most seemingly conservative individuals of our society.

Today, most people believe that nothing can be done about their government. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. The bitter lesson of Trump’s victory is that change — be it for better or worse — is the only constant in human affairs. As the science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. LeGuin so eloquently put it: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” The municipalist movement may be small, but its potential is revolutionary.

Eleanor Finley

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #6, “The City Rises“.

Lead Illustration by David Istvan.

The post The New Municipal Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.