An integral cooperative is a tool to create a grassroots counterpower based on self-management, self-organization and direct democracy, so that it might help overcome the generic state of human dependence on systemic structures. Its aim is to move toward a scenario of freedom and full awareness in which everyone can flourish under equal conditions and opportunities. It is a constructive proposal for disobedience and widespread self-management to rebuild our society from the bottom-up – holistically, across all areas and fields of work and thought – and to recover the affective human relationships based on proximity and trust. The name reflects these values:

• Cooperative, because it is a project practicing economic and political self-management with equal participation of all its members. Also, because it uses the official legal structure of a co-op.
• Integral, because it seeks to unite all the basic elements of an economy such as production, consumption, funding and trade. And at the same time, it seeks to integrate all the activities and sectors needed for the basics of life: food, housing, health, education, energy, transport.
• Catalan, because it is organized and works mainly in the territorial scope of Catalonia.

The establishment of the CIC was influenced by many events such as the Degrowth tour in spring 2009, a bicycle tour through all of the Catalan counties whose purpose was to spread information about the principles of economic activity without growth. The CIC’s founding was also influenced by several pamphlets – Crisis,² Podemos³ and Queremos ⁴ – which have had a strong impact on the public discussion about self-government and self-empowerment. Finally, the CIC was influenced by the creation of numerous barter networks (ecoredes)⁵ that organize bartering using “social currencies”⁶ that were created spontaneously and at the same time in various places across the Catalan territory.

The CIC was founded on this fertile soil in May 2010, when it adopted some fundamental principles, including consensual decisionmaking during its first “Assembly Day” (Jornada Asamblearia). The assembly days are open and nomadic, which means that they always take place in different towns in Catalonia on a weekend at the end of the month. In this way, the co-operative can get to know associated projects and decentralize itself. The assemblies are the place where we discuss fundamental issues and examine them from a communal point of view. They provide a space to share, to be together, to think, to plan, and also to find playful avenues to approaching things. They often end with an improvised concert.

The topics discussed at assemblies vary widely. In the forty-seven Jornadas Asamblearias held in our first four years, CIC members have discussed health, living in community and the principles of the Integral Revolution.⁷ The assemblies are also a place for us to establish networks with other cooperatives or interested individuals who support the CIC and are already working on a certain set of problems.

The CIC started as an initiative of just a handful of activists, but in recent years, more and more people have joined. It is a varied bunch of people of all age groups, nationalities and genders. Whether they are men, women, the so-called disabled, girls or boys, CIC members all try to create a space for team spirit and community. This diversity enriches our debates even if the process can sometimes be difficult. For example, there are (unconscious) power and gender expectations that sometime encourage women to fall back into culturally determined, submissive roles while men seek power and recognition as men. The men usually discuss technical questions while the women focus on social issues: a complex of problems for the Jornada Asamblearia.

Many things developed very rapidly in these early years, 2010-2011 – the numbers of people and communities with close relationships to us, the number of members, the annual budget, the real estate we use. In August 2014, the CIC had 2,600 members – although that figure is not particularly significant because membership is not a prerequisite for participation. In the four years since our founding, our budget grew from zero to 458,000 euros.

Calafou is the most important of the properties we have collectivized. We are transforming this old industrial settlement that we jointly bought in 2011, and have been renovating it into a post-capitalist eco-industrial neighborhood.⁸ Today, thirty people live in Calafou. Several projects are already emerging there – Circe, an experimental lab for producing soaps, essences, and natural remedies; and a hackerspace/FabLab for people to work on free software,⁹ network administration, dissemination of open source principles, and security and encryption on the Internet.

The organizational structure that CIC uses to secure the provision of basic essentials, outside of state and market structures, is the Sistema Público Cooperativista (SPC). The SPC is not a legal structure, but rather consists of working groups that organize around various topics such as therapy, education and food production. Each of these areas has what we call an “office” – not always a physical space but rather an intentional work group, with an assembly that is used as a space to meet and talk. These projects are autonomous and, like the Jornadas Asamblearias, open to anyone.

One such project, “Living Education Albada,”¹⁰ is a space in which families with children can work together to pass on techniques and skills to aid in their personal growth and to follow whatever path they please, in a respectful and loving environment.¹¹ Another example is the health group, which explores the idea of health as a living process, supported by a communal financing model based on mutuality. The transport office attempts to reduce the need to transport people and materials while reducing our own use of fuel through renewable alternatives such as recycled vegetable oil.

A project devoted to food has brought producers and consumers together to create their own system for certifying that foods are produced organically, going beyond the requirements of government labels. Another office is concerned with helping people create common living spaces through, for example, contracts of assignment,¹² subsidized housing or donations. There is even a science and technology working group that helps develop tools that we need for production. Apart from these open workshops, the CIC has a number of internally organized work commissions that are concerned with finances, for example, and support networks for the cooperative. These commissions are open to anyone as well. Although any commission depends on the other commissions and they often reach common agreements, each is autonomous in their decisionmaking.

This entire organizational structure is subject to constant transformation; in each case the structure and process depends on what the people involved need and what motivates them. Besides its internal systems, CIC is connected with many groups in the bioregion that are self-governed or that work on similar topics. We use or contribute to those tools that we produce as commons. One example is IntegralCES, an open source Community Exchange System that is used for the accounting of all CIC goods and services that are distributed internally and bought and sold externally. The system also oversees accounting for numerous barter exchanges that belong to the system as well as the virtual market, an online sales platform for CIC members. One of its special features is that people can pay with social currencies as well as with euros or cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Faircoin.

Taken together, these self-organized systems have a fractal structure. That means that one group can represent the whole in one context, but at the same time only part of the whole in another context. That is not possible in hierarchical structures. The groups make all decisions by consensus, which neither gives an advantage to majorities nor discriminates against minorities. The point of the fractal structure is to allow decisionmaking that is optimal for a particular group at a particular time, based on the principles of direct democracy, ecological integrity, equality in diversity, human development, team spirit, integral revolution and voluntary simplicity.

Voluntary simplicity in this context means that the more a person is integrated into the CIC and benefits from it, the less money that person receives, for the logical reason that he/she needs less. After all, the way in which the CIC uses its common resources differs from the wage system in which people are paid money and their pay correlates with people’s time, efforts and specific achievements. At the CIC, people are invited to join working groups where they can follow their expectations and interests, switch groups when they wish, and even participate in several ones at the same time.

The CIC work environment is about building trust, which is essential to enable everyone involved to become aware of their own vital needs (food, housing, transportation, etc.). These needs are met by the common project, independently of the number of hours that an individual may contribute to the cooperative and the responsibility he or she bears. The main assembly makes decisions about the distribution of common income to individual members. These decisions are publicly accessible and transparent – just like all the other decisions made by the main assembly and also the social currency balance sheets. Successful social relationships are based on transparency, but also on each person participating to the best of his or her ability, refraining from making value judgments, and showing responsibility for his or her own decisions.¹³

Everyone belonging to the CIC can receive tax-free products and services within the cooperative, from bread to English language courses to plumbing work. The transactions outside the cooperative are subject to taxation. CIC has taken strong stands against the legitimacy of the state following the Spanish government’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The government bailed out banks with billions of euros of taxpayer money and, in CIC’s words, it committed a “financial coup” in 2011 by changing the Spanish constitution to benefit financial institutions. Meanwhile, banks also foreclosed on millions of people’s homes and the government cut budgets for healthcare, social services and unemployment aid. CIC believes that the state has in effect abandoned any legitimate social contract with citizens, and so it openly calls for citizen insubordination to the state and “disobedience to all laws and all policies that we consider unjust.” It urges Spanish citizens to deposit their taxes in a “tax treasury” escrow account that withholds funds from the government until it meets CIC demands for institutional transparency. It is redirecting taxes towards self-management in the local assemblies that arose from the M-15 movement.

Our financing ranges from supporting production to microfinancing platforms. Coopfunding is a free website that enables joint financing of self-organized projects, and uses other currencies in addition to the euro.¹⁴ We have been able to raise 80,000 euros through the finance cooperative CASX.¹⁵ In 2014, we succeeded for the first time in working entirely independently of the banking system, which is regulated by the state. That was unthinkable when we founded the CIC.

We have achieved a lot, but the greatest challenges still lie ahead, not as the Catalan Integral Cooperative, but as people. We speak of what we call Integral Revolution: joining together in networks and supporting and recognizing one another. We are committed to taking this path that leads to a society of the communal.

Ariadna Serra (Spain) works at l’art du soleil (http://www.lartdusoleil.net), a travelling eco-show in a converted truck, which proposes itself as an alternative approach to the current socioeconomic situation. She co-wrote this essay in Spanish with input from many people at the Cooperativa Integral Catalana interested in sharing our work.

Ale Fernandez (Spain) works in the CIC’s housing commission (http://habitatgesocial.cat) and with Guerrilla Translation (http://guerrillatranslation.com). He helped with the English language translation of this essay and with various edits and corrections. 

 Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC): On the Way to a Society of the Communal appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We’ve recently featured Coopfunding, an Open-Sourced crowdfunding platform designed to “…promote the financing of projects with a social, self managed and cooperative nature.”  Today we present a guest article by Enric Duran, one of the developers behind Coopfunding and its parent-project, the Catalan Integral Cooperative, explaining the reasons that led to the creation of Coopfunding. This article was originally published in Radi.MS

The expansion of crowdfunding in the last few years has been quite vertiginous.

Hundreds of projects have been able to get off the ground around the world coming from very different backgrounds but united in the aim of creating a link between donors and the projects they sponsor.

Crowdfunding, for its practicality and usefulness, has expanded without any ideological limitation and while it served to finance many social projects it has also supported more conventional initiatives based on consumerism and business as meant in the capitalist system.

In this way, more traditional fund raising events like benefit gigs and have been overlooked, and we should take in to account that with the crowdfunding model we are at risk of leaving the financing of social initiative in the hands of unscrupulous business which, through the management of crowdfunding platforms, are making the same profit that any middle man would make in an ordinary business transaction, through the charge of commissions which range between 5% and 10% of the donations received. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indygogo have already made profits in the millions region.

we are at risk of leaving the financing of social initiative in the hands of third party business

Also, there are several projects which are managed by cooperatives which nevertheless still charge a 5% fee on donations in order to support themselves, like Goteo.org, managed on mainland Spain by a foundation dedicated to the expansion of common good, funditaly.it, a recent cooperative project and also a foundation in Veezuela calledwww.causasolidaria.com.

Another interesting project, which promotes the decentralization of its supporter, is Awesome Foundation, where donors from all over the world can network by theme or territory, pool their savings together and choose a project to which donate $1000 every month. Although it isn’t a micro-financing platform, it is still a project without intermediaries.

Still, there are some projects around the world that avoid supporting themselves through fee charging, like for instancehttp://www.microgenius.org.uk/, managed as a public service by http://www.communityshares.org.uk/ with the aim of facilitating the selling of shares in cooperative projects. Also without commission are Mymoneyhelp.fr, born in Lille, which is financed by social enterprise sponsoring and http://crowdfunding-italia.com, which is operating through voluntary work.

The majority of platforms impose an “all or nothing” clause with a limited term of not many days to accomplish the target

Another obstacle is that the majority of platforms impose an “all or nothing” clause with a limited term of not many days to accomplish the target (40 days is the usual). It’s a mechanism which benefits the intermediaries, since generally it is asked that promoters use their own funds or funds they had already secured through other means to start the campaign, of which they will have to loose the 5% commission fee in order to reach their target and secure the donations.

Furthermore, it seems to benefit the donors by guaranteeing the success of the projects they sponsor, whilst, in a sort of paternalistic way, denying them the choice to fund the projects regardless of it success in reaching the target.

Probably this does not affect the projects which have a strong human capital and who are well connected to social networks, since they will be able to fulfill the terms imposed, but this dynamic definitely puts smaller projects at a disadvantage, since they may not have the capacity to mobilize support in such a short amount of time. In this way then, a sort of social darwinism is created, where only the strong projects are likely to succeed, where as the smaller ones are lost on the way to oblivion. Evidently, this competitive and pressure are typical of the system in which we live, and not of the one most social movements are trying to create.

The fact is that a lot of projects which may need self financing can survive whether they reach their target or not, since that’s always been the case: many self managed projects have survived through the determination and creativity of their promoters. Many projects then, may need to receive on going financial support, or at particular times of the year, something that platforms such as crowdfunding do not take in to account.

Coopfunding.net re invents the concept of crowdfunding and adapts it to the real needs of the social projects that make use of it.

For this reason, it is necessary that we re invent the concept of crowdfunding and adapt it to the real needs of the social projects that make use of it. This is what the project coopfunding.net is trying to do, having become operative after many months of gestation.

Some of you may remember that Coopfunding already had a pilot appearance in the Spring of 20013, when a crowdfunding platform decided to cut our campaign due to the legal risks that it might have posed.

The campaign was collecting funds in order that Radi, which is not in operation at radi.ms, could become an alternative communication media through which we could still organize our activities despite my forced clandestineness since 2013.

This then, is another thing to bear in mind. 99% of crowdfunding platforms abide by the rules chosen by the 1% of the population, within the legal boundaries decided by different countries. Therefore, if we want to enjoy a crowdfunding platform which is coherent with the principles of projects which propose disobedience and revolution, we have to build one ourselves since we cannot depend on those which, despite their best intentions, are still bound by the legality of their policies.

Coopfunding is a crowdfunding platform, newly released, without commissions or mediation, where each project can choose their terms according to their needs. With or without dedlines, rewards, with total flexibility and with the objective of being a tool for supporting social change projects.

The financial sustainability of the project is envisaged to be relying on the donations of social activists, through varied payment options and through the inclusion of local currencies, barter and criptomoney, whatever each project decides.

Coopfunding is a cooperative project open to the participation of whoever may want to contribute to make it possible, within a framework of disobedience towards the current system and a vision of integrated revolution. Furthermore, Coopfunding is a shared ownership projects, since it relies ultimately on the open consensus process of the Cooperativa Integral Catalana.

The tools which we use to access such support should be shared and communal too

I think it is important that, if we want a society where the tools we need are shared and communal, we might as well start with the ones where we can already apply this principle. Since financial support is a key factor in the success of many projects who are building alternatives, the tools which we use to access such support should be shared and communal too.

It would be very interesting if we could create a network of cooperative initiatives so that they may collaborate and support each other and gain public visibility, something very important in order to reach all the people that are necessary to have an effective fund raising campaign.

We are hoping and wishing that soon many other projects of this nature will spring up around the world, if you know of any please share the information!

The post Enric Duran on shared and disobedient crowdfunding platform networks appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The P2P Foundation is a full supporting partner of the Cooperativa Integral Catalana, or CIC. We feel that they’re doing essential work in prototyping pre-figurative models of peer production, governance and property. You can find a lot of information about them, their ethics, and long term plans in their excellent English website, or in our own wiki entry on the CIC. We plan to report regularly on the CIC’s activities and our involvement with the group. Today, we want to highlight just one of their most inspiring initiatives: beyond specific target and time based crowdfunding, there is “Coop-funding“. Coopfunding’s own literature describes its platform in the following way. It is:

• A crowdfunding platform to promote the financing of projects with a social, self managed and cooperative nature.

• Supported by open source software

• We envisage it as a self financed project which will sustain itself through donations and which will collect resources (monetary and non-) which will support its management. We will not charge commissions on the published projects or on their received donations.

Out of all their currently active campaigns, we’d like to showcase their contributive investment campaign, where all the funds invested will be returned in less than a year. Read on for more details.

After the general council of the cooperative of last Monday, June 9th, we want to share an important message which we hope will receive a response from all those who are in a position to do it.

First of all we want to express how rapidly the cooperative has grown in these last 4 years, counting nearly 2.000 members currently, between individuals and groups. The cooperative though, has not only risen in the number of people but also in the number of core groups in local self organised initiatives where all participate to make possible the revolution which we have envisaged.

All this growth has been supported financially up till now with the income of the Cooperative itself and the contributions form its members, always loyal to the principle of independence form State funding, so that none of our funds have come from banks, something we want to keep that way.

Since 2010, we have not made any requests for new contributions from the members and supporters who are in a position to do so, now we think it is the time to do so.

Why now?

This year, the targets are: the consolidation of our economic system, the strengthening of our autonomy and the diversification of our sources of income.

While we develop the software and the management structures to optimize the work in the most sensitive areas of the cooperative, like the economical management and the welcoming of new members, we also aim to create technological and physical tools and projects which will allow us to generate more economic interaction between the members and also with the outside world. In this way, we will shortly add to our Coopfunding project already released, the Integral CES, the Exchange Offices and the digital marketplace, all of which will not only benefit the members but the Cooperative itself.

All of this without entering too much in the details of the work that is still ongoing in relation to the Public Cooperative System, which include areas such as health, housing, education, transportation, technology, food etc. in order to materialise the objectives we have set ourselves through our consensus decision assemblies,

All these are costly enterprises which are stretching to the limits the capacity for self financing solely through our own activity.

Since the expansion we envisaged for 2014 is, at the present moment, slower than we had expected in our yearly budget, we have a need for short term financial support, something we had not anticipated, in order to sustain the 90% growth we designed in this very budget.

The contributions given to this campaign are returnable in the medium term. We are only asking for a commitment to leave this money at the CIC’s disposal at least until the end of 2014, better beginning of 2015.

Lastly, we also want to share some reflexions.

The sum proposed as target for this campaign is 25.000 euros , corresponds to only a little over 5% of anticipated income (458.000) for 2014 and even though it would be a significant help it would not change our commitment to self financing and economic self reliance through membership fees, and economic activity of many of the members.

In the budget we can see how the balance of incomings and outgoings is not even at present, yet we expect it to be within the 4th trimester of this year, this is why we see these financial contributions as short term.

We are moving more and more towards the use of 100% local currency in all the services we provide, something which should reduce our dependency on euros significantly in the short to long term, including the activation of all the before mentioned projects to promote economic interaction between members and outside.

We include the budget here, in order to have a more transparent picture of how funds are allocated in reality and how incoming and outgoings are fluctuating.

More info and contact

If you can give a sum in response to this calling, Fill the contribution form here in Coopfunding

You can also write us to [email protected] in order to recive more details :

Thank you for being there!

Let’s make possible a new way of living!

[Proposal approved in the General Assembly of the CIC of 9th June 2014.]

Contribute to the campaign here

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