Republished from Remix the Commons

Joan Subirats(1) (UAB) Conferencia FEPSU 2016

AA: In your recent article in La Vanguardia(2), you set out a framework for a cultural policy, you refer to putting into practice the key community values that should underpin that policy… Maybe we could start there?

JS: For me, whereas in the 20th century the defining conflict was between freedom and equality – and this marked the tension between right and left throughout the 20th century because in a way this is the frame in which capitalism and the need for social protection evolved together with the commodification of life while at the same time the market called for freedom – ie: no rules, no submission. But the need for protection demanded equality. But in the 21st century there is rejection of the notion of protection linked to statism: Nancy Fraser published an article(3) in the New Left Review, it is a re-reading of Polanyi and she claims that this double movement between commodification and protection is still valid, but that the State-based protection typical of the 20th century, where equality is guaranteed by the State, clashes since the end of the 20th century with the growing importance of heterogeneity, diversity and personal autonomy. Therefore, if in order to obtain equality, we have to be dependent on what the State does, this is going to be a contradiction…. So we could translate those values that informed the definition of policies in the 20th century, in 21st century terms they would be the idea of freedom (or personal autonomy, the idea of empowerment, not subjection, non-dependence) and at the same time equality, but no longer simply equality of opportunities but also equality of condition because we have to compensate for what is not the same (equal) in society. If you say “equal opportunities”, that everyone has access to cultural facilities, to libraries, you are disregarding the fact that the starting conditions of people are not the same, this is the great contribution of Amartya Sen, no? You have to compensate for unequal starting situations because otherwise you depoliticize inequality and consider that inequality is the result of people’s lack of effort to get out of poverty. So equality yes, but the approach is different. And we must incorporate the idea of diversity as a key element in the recognition of people and groups on the basis of their specific dignity. That seems easy to say, but in reality it is complicated, especially if you relate it to culture, because culture has to do with all these things: it has to do with the construction of your personality, it has to do with equal access to culture just as cultural rights and culture have to do with the recognition of different forms of knowledge and culture – canonical culture, high culture, popular culture, everyday culture, neighbourhood culture …
So for me, a cultural policy should be framed within the triple focus of personal autonomy, equality and diversity. And this is contradictory, in part, with the cultural policies developed in the past, where there is usually confusion between equality and homogeneity. In other words, the left has tended to consider that equality meant the same thing for everyone and that is wrong, isn’t it?, because you are confusing equality with homogeneity. The opposite of equality is inequality, the opposite of homogeneity is diversity. So you have to work with equality and diversity as values that are not antagonistic, but can be complementary. And this is a challenge for public institutions because they do not like heterogeneity, they find it complicated because it is simpler to treat everyone the same, as the administrative law manual used to prescribe `indifferent efficiency’: it is a way of understanding inequality as indifference, right?

AA: In your article you also talk about the opposition between investing in infrastructures versus creating spaces and environments that are attractive to creators and you put an emphasis on the generation of spaces. What is being done, what has been done, what could be done about this?

JS : In Barcelona we want to ensure that the city’s cultural policies do not imply producing culture itself, but rather to try to influence the values in the production processes that already exist, in the facilities, in the cultural and artistic infrastructures: the role of the city council, of the municipality, is not so much to produce culture as to contribute to the production of culture. Which is different, helping to produce culture…. Obviously, the city council will give priority to those initiatives that coincide with the values, with the normative approach that we promote. There are some exceptions, for example, the Grec festival in Barcelona(4) in July, or the Mercé(5), which is the Festa Mayor, where the city council does in fact subsidize the production of culture, so some productions are subsidised but generally what we have is a policy of aid to creators. What is being done is that 11 creative factories (fablabs) have been built, these are factories with collectives that manage them chosen through public tenders. There are now 3 factories of circus and visual arts, 2 factories of dance creation, one factory of more global creation housed at Fabra & Coats, 3 theatre factories and 2 visual arts and technology sites. So there are 11 factories of different sorts and there are plans to create others, for example in the field of feminist culture where we are in discussion with a very well consolidated group : normally all these creative factories have their management entrusted to collectives that already become highly consolidated in the process of creation and that need a space to ensure their continuity. Often the city council will cede municipal spaces to these collectives, sometimes through public competitions where the creators are asked to present their project for directing a factory. This is one aspect. Another aspect is what is called living culture, which is a programme for the promotion of cultural activities that arise from the community or from collectives in the form of cooperatives and this is a process of aid to collectives that are already functioning, or occasionally to highlight cultural activities and cultural dynamics that have existed for a long time but have not been dignified, that have not been valued, for example the Catalan rumba of the Gypsies, which is a very important movement in Barcelona that emerged from the gypsy community of El Raval, where there were some very famous artists like Peret. There we invested in creating a group to work on the historical memory of the rumba, looking for the roots of this movement, where it came from and why. Then some signposts were set up in streets where this took place, such as La Cera in El Raval, where there are two murals that symbolise the history of the Catalan rumba and the gypsy community in this area so that this type of thing is publicly visible. That is the key issue for culture: a recognition that there are many different cultures.

Then there is the area of civic centres: approximately 15% of the civic centres in the city are managed by civic entities as citizen heritage, and those civic centres also have cultural activities that they decide on, and the city council, the municipality helps them develop the ideas put forward by the entities that manage those centres.

So, if we put all those things together, we could talk about a culture of the urban commons. It is still early stages, this is still more of a concept than a reality, but the underlying idea is that in the end the density and the autonomous cultural-social fabric will be strong enough to be resilient to political changes. In other words, that you have helped to build cultural practices and communities that are strong and autonomous enough that they are not dependent on the political conjuncture. This would be ideal. A bit like the example I often cite about the housing cooperatives in Copenhagen, that there was 50% public housing in Copenhagen, and a right-wing government privatised 17% of that public housing, but it couldn’t touch the 33% of housing that was in the hands of co-operatives. Collective social capital has been more resilient than state assets: the latter is more vulnerable to changes in political majorities.

AA: You also speak of situated culture which I think is very important: setting it in time and space. Now Facebook has announced it is coming to Barcelona so the Barcelona brand is going to be a brand that includes Facebook and its allies. But your conception of a situated culture is more about a culture where social innovation, participation, popular creativity in the community are very important…

JS : Yes, it seems contradictory. In fact what you’re asking is the extent to which it makes sense to talk about situated culture in an increasingly globalized environment which is more and more dependent on global platforms. I believe that tension exists and conflict exists, this is undeniable, the city is a zone of conflict, therefore, the first thing we have to accept is that the city is a battleground between political alternatives with different cultural models. It is very difficult for a city council to set out univocal views of a cultural reality that is intrinsically plural. Talking about situated culture is an attempt to highlight the significance of the distinguishing factors that Barcelona possesses in its cultural production. This does not mean that this situated culture should be a strictly localist culture – a situated culture does not mean a culture that cuts off global links – it is a culture that relates to the global on the basis of its own specificity. What is most reprehensible from my point of view are cultural dynamics that have a global logic but that can just as well be here or anywhere else. And it’s true that the platforms generate this. An example: the other day the former minister of culture of Brazil, Lluca Ferreira, was here and talked about a program of living culture they developed, and they posted a photograph of some indigenous people where the man wore something that covered his pubic parts but the woman’s breasts were naked. So Facebook took the photograph off the site, and when the Minister called Facebook Brazil to say ‘what is going on?’, they told him that they didn’t have any duty towards the Brazilian government, that the only control over them was from a judge in San Francisco and that, therefore, if the judge in San Francisco forced them to put the photograph back, they would put it back, otherwise they wouldn’t have to listen to any minister from Brazil or anywhere else. In the end, there was a public movement of protest, and they put the photo back. The same thing happened here a few days ago, a group from a municipal theatre creation factory put up a poster with a man’s ass advertising a play by Virginia Wolff and Facebook took their entire account off the net – not just the photograph, they totally removed them from Facebook. And here too Facebook said that they are independent and that only the judge from San Francisco and so on. I believe that this is the opposite of situated culture because it is a global cultural logic, but at the same time it allows itself to be censored in Saudi Arabia, in China, that is to say it has different codes in each place. So to speak of situated culture means to speak of social transformation, of the relationship between culture and social transformation situated in the context in which you are working. But at the same time to have the will to dialogue with similar processes that exist in any other part of the world and that is the strength of a situated culture. And those processes of mutuality, of hybridization, that can happen when you have a Pakistani community here, you have a Filipino community, you have a Chinese community, you have a Gypsy community, you have an Italian community, you have an Argentinean community: they can be treated as typical folkloric elements in a theme park, or you can try to generate hybridization processes. Now at the Festival Grec this year there will be poetry in Urdu from the Pakistanis, there will be a Filipino theatre coming and a Filipino film fest at the Filmoteca – and this means mixing, situating, the cultural debate in the space where it is happening and trying to steep it in issues of cultural diversity. What I understand is that we need to strive for a local that is increasingly global, that this dialogue between the local and the global is very important.

AA: Returning to social innovation and popular creativity, social innovation is also a concept taken up pretty much everywhere: how is it understood here? Taking into account that in the world of the commons, Catalonia, and especially Barcelona, is very well known for its fablabs, which are also situated in this new era. How then do you understand social innovation and how do you see the relationship between education and social innovation?

JS : What I am trying to convey is that the traditional education system is doing little to prepare people and to enhance inclusive logics in our changing and transforming society, so in very broad lines I would say that if health and education were the basic redistributive policies of the 20th century, in the 21st century we must incorporate culture as a basic redistributive policy. Because before, the job market had very specific demands for the education sector: it knew very well what types of job profiles it needed because there was a very Taylorist logic to the world of work – what is the profile of a baker, of a plumber, of a miller? How many years you have to study for this kind of work. There is now a great deal of uncertainty about the future of the labour market, about how people will be able to work in the future and the key words that appear are innovation, creativity, entrepreneurship, flexibility, ability to understand a diverse world, teamwork , being open to new ideas: this has little to do with traditional educational profiles, but it has much to do with culture, with things that allow you to acquire that backpack of basic tools that will help you navigate in a much more uncertain environment. And for me, to find the right connection between culture and education is very important because it allows the educational system to constantly transform itself by taking advantage of the creative potential of an environment that is much more accessible now than before because of new technologies, and therefore to make the transition from a deductive system where there is a teacher who knows and tells people what they need to know – to an inductive system: how do we explore what we need to know in order to be able to act. And that more inductive, more experimental logic has to do with creativity whereas the traditional education system didn’t postulate creativity, it postulated your ability to learn what someone else had decided you needed to study. It’s art, it is culture that allows you to play in that field much more easily …

Translated from Spanish by Nancy Thede.

1 Joan Subirats is Commissioner for culture in the city government of Barcelona led by the group Barcelona en comu. He is also professor of political science at the Universitat
autonoma de Barcelona and founder of the Institute on Governance and Public Policy.

2 “Salvara la cultura a las ciudades?”, La Vanguardia (Barcelona), Culturals supplement, 12
May 2018, pp. 20-21. https://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20180511/443518454074/cultura-ciudadesbarcelona-crisis.html

3 Nancy Fraser, “A Triple Movement”, New Left Review 81, May-June 2013. Published in Spanish in Jean-Louis Laville and José Luis Coraggio (Eds.), La izquierda del
siglo XXI. Ideas y diálogo Norte-Sur para un proyecto necesario Icaria, Madrid 2018.

4 Festival Grec, an annual multidisciplinary festival in Barcelona, now in its 42nd year. It is
named for the Greek Theatre built for the 1929 Universal Exhibition in Barcelona:
http://lameva.barcelona.cat/grec/en/.

5 Barcelona’s annual ‘Festival of Festivals’ begins on Sept 24, day of Our Lady of Mercy, a city holiday in Barcelona. It especially highlights catalan and barcelonian cultural traditions and in recent years has especially featured neighbourhood cultural activities like street theatre. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mercè.

Photo by PJ Nelson

The post Interview with Joan Subirats: The challenges of a cultural policy for the city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Megan Hafner and Elizabeth Ramaccia:  Far too many young people in the United States today are growing up without tangible examples of people impacted by a problem having the opportunity to shape their own reality. A teenager in a rural community could feel this absence after the town’s lone employer, which long provided the power and leadership to look after the basic needs of most people, shutters its doors, and no one knows quite how to fill its shoes. For a teenager growing up in an urban Rust Belt neighborhood, it could be because for decades her community was redlined, and power was, and still is, systematically denied.

We believe that knowing how to shape your own reality—be it individually in professional or personal matters, or together as communities—should be a core part of young people’s education. With that knowledge, they will be better equipped to navigate their own futures as well as participate in shaping the future of the place they call home. This belief, however, begs the questions: What does it look like for a community to own its own future? What do the people who make up a community need to know and be able to do?

In 2014, we founded Why We Work Here (WWWH) and embarked on a year of research to observe, record, and analyze what it looks like when various place-based groups seek not just to “fix” problems head on but also to make problem solving an inclusive, community-driven process, wherein power and leadership are shared. We selected six groups to look at across the country, representing a range of sectors (nonprofit, private, and philanthropic) and issue areas (economic development, environmental sustainability, education, housing). Each group distinguished itself in how it saw its role in and relationship to its community, and the degree to which it controlled decision-making processes. All saw measurable, positive, equitable change ensue from their efforts. We wanted to know: How do they do what they do? What do they believe? And, technical skills aside, what do they know how to do?

We discovered that, despite hailing from different sectors and geographical locations, the approaches used by these organizations have strong common threads, including:

• Leadership development and capacity building. The groups recognize that supporting self-aware, empathetic, and action-oriented residents capable of working collaboratively across differences is critical for change to be transformative and enduring. Specific projects or efforts are vehicles for ongoing capacity building as much as they are about project-specific outcomes.
• Building a foundation of trust. The groups prioritize the development and sustenance of trusting relationships, both between them and the greater community and among community members. They do this through supporting diverse constituencies by identifying common values, being transparent in their own decision making and operations, and delivering on their word.
• Shared vision. The groups recognize the value of “looking at the same picture,” and work to ensure that stakeholders are a part of the development and execution of a shared vision.

These tenets, along with the specific skills and mindsets we identified through our research as essential to the groups’ effectiveness, are the inspiration and underpinnings for WWWH’s current work with educators and high school students. Through real, project-based experiences that are contextualized in the community, we support young people to recognize their own agency in shaping both individual and community-wide outcomes, and equip them with the skills to act with courage. We work closely with educators so that they can lead these programs and integrate skill-building activities into the regular school day.

We would like to share the stories of three of the groups we researched in the hope that tangible examples can help others imagine how their own actions could support alternative futures for their own communities.¹ 

Incourage Community Foundation

Gus (left) was a high school principal in 2000, when Consolidated Papers, Inc. and the regional economy collapsed. Today, he and his teammates (Corey, center, and Heather, right) facilitate resident engagement efforts at Incourage and focus on building strong relationships and networks founded on trust. Their goal is to move people from a place of “They will take care of it,” to “I have a responsibility to be involved,” and eventually to “We can have shared stewardship of this place.”

Incourage is a community foundation that’s fostering a participatory culture whereby residents are shaping a renewed, inclusive economy in south Wood County, Wisconsin.

For much of the twentieth century, the regional economy of south Wood County was dominated by the paper industry and flush with stable jobs that allowed most people to live comfortably. In 1999, however, Consolidated Papers, Inc.—a Fortune 500 company headquartered there—announced that it was cutting seven hundred jobs, and the following year it was sold to a foreign company. By 2005, total employment in the county had been cut by 40 percent.² The sudden loss of this economic anchor heightened social divisions and the sense of hopelessness throughout the community, and resulted in the loss of a shared identity.³

The collapse was a wake-up call for Incourage—then the Community Foundation of Greater South Wood County—which at the time operated the same way as many community foundations: it reacted to the needs of the community. Its board and staff began reexamining the foundation’s role toward helping the region heal and regenerate a local economy. Their belief was that upward, lasting change would be possible if residents could develop the enduring confidence and competencies to envision and implement community-wide transformation.

In the past decade, Incourage has invested in efforts that are laying the groundwork for a new culture of collective self-determination locally, including their most ambitious project yet—the community-led redevelopment of the Tribune Building, once the home of the local newspaper. Incourage purchased the abandoned building in 2012, and since then it has facilitated a process for the community to direct the building’s redevelopment and programming.⁴

As anyone involved will tell you, this was about more than a building. At its core, the Tribune is a vehicle for building relationships based on mutual interests and hopes, for establishing new skills and ways to collaborate constructively, and for rebuilding a collective sense of confidence to act proactively. Regular meetings begin with a discussion of what progress has been made to date and how the current evening’s activities will influence the development process. Community members—usually several hundred in attendance—work in groups around a programmatic component of shared interest: the microbrewery, the kitchen incubator, the children’s spaces. Groups are led by community members who are trained facilitators.

While the Tribune process itself encourages new expectations, behaviors, and mindsets in participants, it also builds off of previous efforts investing in adaptive leadership skill development and building partnerships to support a stronger local economy. “What we’re seeing now wouldn’t have been possible previously,” an Incourage staff member explained, referencing the way participants are coming together to hear one another and collaborate and recognizing the value and potential of their own ideas.

Saint Paul Federation of Teachers

When her undergraduate advisor encouraged her to do her internship with SPFT, Zuki said, “Are you crazy?!” She felt like she’d been burned by teachers as she tried, and failed, to get answers and support during the first few years of her oldest son’s schooling. She reluctantly took the internship, however, and found herself a part of the pre-contract-negotiation listening sessions SPFT was facilitating. She saw how many teachers had both the same desires and frustrations as she did. Today, she’s a huge advocate for teachers, and she wants more parents and teachers to have control over how their schools are run. She’s a trainer for Parent Teacher Home Visits, a PTO chair, and she was elected to the school board in late 2015.

The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT)⁵ is a teachers union that has evolved its priorities and built stronger relationships with parents in order to support the development of “the school system Saint Paul students deserve” (one of SPFT’s main rallying cries). Nationally, the dialogue about the problems with U.S. schools often focuses on the deficits of teachers and the ineffectiveness of teachers unions. This story was playing out in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as well, and many teachers felt deeply discouraged by the divisive climate and narrative that excluded the voices of the people at the heart of the matter: teachers, parents, and students.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

During this process leading up to its 2013 negotiations, SPFT engaged teachers and parents in a series of listening sessions. They discussed three questions: “What are the schools Saint Paul children deserve?”; “Who are the teachers Saint Paul children deserve?”; and “What is the profession those teachers deserve?”⁶ What they came up with was a bold, constructive vision that became a guide for the union’s negotiations. Just as important, teachers and parents saw each other as allies who ultimately wanted the same opportunities and outcomes for children and wanted to support one another to achieve their shared goals.

While most collective bargaining sessions remain closed, SPFT opened its sessions to the public. Because of SPFT’s consistent and deep investment in teachers and parents up to this point, throngs of people filled the negotiating room as conversations heated up. Union members and parents went door to door and rallied outside in the depth of winter. Parents created their own Facebook pages to better organize themselves in support of their students’ schools and teachers. Ultimately, the school board agreed to negotiate on every point they presented, which included smaller class sizes, less standardized testing, and the hiring of additional librarians, nurses, social workers, and counselors.

Today, more teachers are joining the union and more parents are getting involved in ways ranging from running for the school board to becoming trainers for the Parent Teacher Home Visits.⁷ In a move to support leadership development for both teachers and parents, SPFT employs two full-time organizers, who support long-term constructive strategies and focus on matching people’s interests and availability with opportunities to get involved.

People United for Sustainable Housing

Often referred to colloquially as “the mayor of the West Side,” David “Saint” Rodriguez is a leader, activist, and prominent personality in the neighborhood. A lifelong resident there, Saint struggled for much of his life and was imprisoned for several years. He had a hard time finding work after his release, but noticed a construction crew rehabbing a house nearby and started showing up every day as a volunteer. “I treated it like a job,” he recalls. Soon, it became one. His basic needs met, Saint was able to look beyond the paycheck from PUSH and see the holistic way the organization facilitates neighborhood-led local development. Today, he carries a strong sense of neighborhood responsibility with him and is an active member of PUSH’s board.

People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) in Buffalo, New York, is a member-driven organization that combines community development and organizing to address Buffalo’s West Side residents’ needs and build greater community control of resources.

Buffalo’s West Side is a poor neighborhood in one of the nation’s poorest cities, and has suffered from decades of disinvestment. Yet the neighborhood has a rich cultural legacy, and today it’s more diverse than ever. Its affordability allows many to build new lives—including refugees from Burma, Somalia, and other countries beset by conflict—yet because it borders a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the West Side’s affordability is being jeopardized as property values rise.

PUSH began, humbly, in 2005, when its cofounders went door-to-door listening to issues voiced by residents. Jennifer Mecozzi, PUSH’s organizing director (now its logistics coordinator), was one such resident. “[One of the founders] came to my house one day and asked all these questions…. He didn’t write anything down, but he must have really written a book after he left. He came back about three months later…and he brought up everything I had talked about. I was totally impressed…so I thought, ‘Well, you took the time to do this, so I’ll go to a meeting.’”⁸

Based on what the founders heard—that vacant and substandard housing was a major problem for many—they began rehabbing a house in the neighborhood. Many service providers had previously entered and exited the neighborhood, and many residents had grown accustomed to and skeptical of newcomers promising support and solutions. PUSH quickly set itself apart from its predecessors by being action oriented, responsive, and accountable to the conversations staff had with residents.

Today, PUSH is building a self-supporting ecosystem in the West Side neighborhood: it builds housing for sale and rent; provides energy-efficiency retrofits; develops urban gardens and storm-water management infrastructures; manages green economy and construction crews who hire locally and pay living wages; and runs an afterschool program for neighborhood youth. The ideas that become campaigns or programs come from residents through many avenues, including annual community congresses, regularly convening working groups, and conversations community members and PUSH staff have that happen organically.⁹

PUSH’s focus on building human capital every step of the way gives this ecosystem durability and power. The success of its capacity building and leadership-development efforts relies on first addressing the most basic, unmet needs of residents (housing, employment) and then supporting individuals to participate more deeply in actions that support their community’s shared future.

These groups recognize that making inclusive, community-driven processes the norm and sharing power and leadership calls for a cultural transformation that takes a long time to evolve, necessitates immense patience and thoughtfulness, and requires an appetite for risk and for practices atypical of their sector. Their investments are paying off, however, and we hope that their pioneering efforts will serve as examples that will help other organizations, regardless of sector, issue area, or geography, to facilitate deep cultural transformation in their own communities.

Notes

1. The stories are from interviews conducted by the authors over a four-month period in 2015, and from the organization’s websites and/or other supplemental materials.
2. Judith Millesen and Kelly Ryan, “Community Foundation Leadership in the Second Century: Adaptive and Agile,” from Here For Good: Community Foundations and the Challenges of the 21st Century, Terry Mazany and David C. Perr (New York: Routledge, 2014).
3. Ibid.
4. “Tribune: Our Community Accelerator,” Incourage Community Foundation website, August 31, 2015.
5. All information in this section was taken from Eric S. Fought, Power of Community: Organizing for the schools St. Paul children deserve (St. Paul, MN: Federation of Teachers, 2014).
6. Fought, Power of Community, 11.
7. “Parent Teacher Home Visits,” Saint Paul Federation of Teachers website, accessed November 7, 2015.
8. From an interview with the authors, October 2014.
9. “About Us,” PUSH Buffalo website, accessed November 7, 2015.

Megan Hafner is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Elizabeth Ramaccia on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Megan has a background in media, storytelling, education, and community organizing. At Purpose, she focused on projects connected to public education and sustainable food systems. She has also worked with the independent global TV/radio news hour “Democracy Now!,” in New York City.

Elizabeth Ramaccia is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Megan Hafner on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Elizabeth has a background in community development and civic participation. Prior to Purpose, she led community-based design projects at a housing nonprofit in rural Alabama. Her prior research focused on the role of design thinking in community leadership development in underresourced American communities.

Photo by Johnny Silvercloud

The post What Does It Look Like for a Community to Own Its Future? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which the government “intrudes.” In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be natural and the inevitable consequences of impersonal “market forces.” … If you aren’t paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they’ll have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they’ll be earning next month or even next week, that’s unfortunate but it’s the outcome of “market forces.”

Reich’s point is that market forces aren’t the result of a free market, which doesn’t exist, never has existed, and probably never will exist. What we do have is a highly engineered marketplace with hundreds of thousands of rules — rules most often created behind closed doors by people who will benefit from every word and comma they put into place. These rules take endless form — the tax code, appropriations bills, new laws, court rulings, executive orders, and administrative guidance to name just a few.

Democrats and Republicans alike — at all levels of government and in all three branches—design these market forces. They grant favors to local businesses, friends, and favored industries, as well as emerging and dying technologies. While these rules are more likely to limit the liability from the disastrous effects of mountain top coal removal than they are to provide tax benefits to solar energy, most industries have figured out how to play the game. They hire lobbyists, donate to politicians — and they find the benefits exponentially greater than the cost. Journalist Nicholas Kristof noted that the chemical and pharmaceutical industries alone spent $121,000 per member of Congress on lobbying last year. Research from Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics shows that corporations in general get up to $220 return for every dollar they “invest” in lobbying Congress.

The governing classes and elected officials have always created the rules of the economic game. These legal frameworks and the systems they support affect our nation’s economy and daily life more than the most visible government programs, including social security, food stamps, or health care.

Reich goes on to say:

The rules are the economy. … As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized [in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation], those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for different government — often one that favors them or their patrons. “Deregulation” of the financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as “reregulation.” It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules.

In the book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the University of Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang writes:

The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How “free” a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined “free market” is the first step towards understanding capitalism.

Our “Unfree Market”

Many opposed environmental regulations, which first appeared a few decades ago on things like cars and factory emissions, as serious infringements on our freedom to choose. Opponents asked: If people want to drive in more-polluting cars, or if factories find that more-polluting production methods are more profitable, why should government stop them? Today, most people accept these regulations, but they’re a sign of an unfree market. So some limitations on freedom (i.e. protective legislation) can be helpful. But most ‘unfreedoms’ can be devastating. In essence, we have to choose which unfreedoms we want to live with.

Most would consider monopolies a sign of an unfree, and even an immoral market. Monsanto, through the licensing of technology with its GMO seeds, controls 90 percent of the soybeans and 80 percent of the corn planted and grown in America. According to the Center for Food Safety, this drove up the average cost of planting a single acre of soybeans 325 percent and for corn it has been 2,659 percent between 1994 and 2011. So through their monopolized control of seeds, they are driving the price of food through the roof, ensuring the starvation of millions of people around the world.

Powdered cocaine is a drug generally preferred by rich, white Americans, while the poor tend to use crack cocaine. While both are illegal, crack carries a legal penalty 100 times longer than the same substance in powdered form. It seems that there’s also no free market when it comes to jail terms. Not surprisingly, with wealth, power, and influence come lighter criminal penalties.

Higher education has also never been part of the free market — admissions spots at universities are “sold” more often that we we’d like to believe, whether through the influence of legal donations, or powerful friends or family.

The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.

Social Inequity by Design

“We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”—Louis Brandeis

An undeniable result of this unfree market is the continued consolidation of wealth and influence. On average, CEO pay has increased 937 percent between 1978 and 2013. The average worker’s pay increased just 10.2 percent over the same period. This increase has little to do with the increasing value of these CEOs, and everything to do with the power and influence they have over the rules of the system that allow them to enrich themselves.

The real earnings of the median male have declined 19 percent since 1970, and the median male with only a high school diploma saw his real earnings fall 41 percent from 1970 to 2010. Among those classified as poor, 20.4 million people live in what is considered “deep poverty,” meaning their incomes are 50 percent below the official poverty line. One quarter of the nation’s Hispanics and 27 percent of African Americans live in poverty.

Reich writes, “There is no longer any significant countervailing force (like powerful labor unions), no force to constrain or balance the growing political strength of large corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.” He also describes research conducted by Princeton professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, which analyzed 1,799 policy issues to determine the influence of economic elites and business groups on public policy issues compared to average citizens. It found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”

The notion that we live in a democracy turns out to be just another illusion. The deteriorated state of our democracy more easily enables the wealthy and powerful to write the rules and give themselves the greatest benefits. Activists Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha argue that the current set of rules that articulate the values of our economic operating system can be best characterized as extractive, exploitative, greedy, selfish, elitist, hierarchical, patriarchal, life-denying, and indeed, psychotic. They invoke the Cree Indian term, wetiko, which is a cannibalistic spirit with an insatiable desire for consumption, that eventually even subsumes its host. They are essentially saying that the animating force of late-stage capitalism is the mind-virus of Wetiko.

In sum, we have a system that has already chosen winners and losers. A system that elaborately ensures who gets into Ivy League colleges, gets the best jobs, makes the most money, and enjoys the most privileged lives. This is the same system that decides which businesses receive the most corporate welfare, benefit most from regulations, receive the best protection from foreign competitors, and are most likely to get the best returns on their lobbying dollars. We have, at the end of the day, the freest marketplace that money can buy. A system created by Wetikos to perpetuate Wetiko.

Thirteen Ways to Start Fixing the Problem

The solution lies not in a freer marketplace with less government intervention, but in a marketplace that expresses the wishes and best interests of the majority — in one that fairly protects the rights of minorities with what we might call a “democratic marketplace,” driven by a commitment to justice, equity, interdependence, ecological regeneration, and the well-being of all life.

How do we move toward this goal? Here are thirteen ways to start fixing the deep psychosis of our system.

1.  Get money out of politics. We must overturn Citizens United v. FEC, support organizations like Free Speech For People (which has led an attack on the ruling), and ultimately transition to 100 percent publicly financed elections.

2.  Require disclosure on the source of funding for any and all documents published academically or in the public domain.

3.  Create new anti-trust laws that prevent and eliminate monopolies.

4.  End all corporate financial subsidies.

5.  End insider trading.

6. Initiate an immediate living wage and transition to a basic minimum income for all citizens.

7.  Expand the definition of unionized labor to increase the number of workers that unions represent.

8.  Set a corporate minimum tax rate of 25 percent.

9.  Eliminate the second home mortgage deduction.

10.  Increase funding available to fund Employee Stock Ownership Plans and build greater tax incentives for co-operatives and other forms of employee ownership.

11.  Stop transferring the cost of product externalities from business to society. The American Sustainable Business Council has a working group developing policy recommendations that would begin to move us toward full-cost accounting.

12.  Permanently eliminate payroll taxes.

13.  Mandate that women make up 50 percent of the directors of all public and private companies over the next three years.

This is not an exhaustive list, but rather an example of what is possible that highlights how many existing solutions already exist. We have been taught that politics and economics are separate fields. But that is an artificial distinction that serves the power elites and their agents of exploitation. We must reign in the corporate take-over of society so that we can reimagine commerce, community and government itself, and usher in a just transition to a post-capitalist, post-wetiko world.

*An earlier version of this article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on March 30, 2016.

Originally published at FastCompany. 

Part of the Seeing Wetiko series. See all articles here.

Photo by angermann

The post Seeing Wetiko: The Freest Marketplace Money Can Buy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

While our conversation and its results took place on the Internet, everything was easy. If we published an online book and there were two possible covers, we did not choose between them, but published both and left the readers to choose which to download. If we wanted to protest against a law because we thought that it ruled against our civil rights and there were two strategies… We followed both and each member of the community chose which one to do… Or even to do both. We call this system “plurarchy”. Plurarchy is the essence of distributed networks: nobody can filter anybody, everybody can do, say and publish what they want without subtracting from the opportunities for other’s expression, and the “decisions” are seldom a clear yes or no, but usually “more or less”. As our conversation deepened, we became closer and more consensual but our diversity did not decrease. In fact, just the opposite happened. We had more diversity. To the external world we might look like a crazy rainbow of surprisingly passionate nuances.

But in some cases it was necessary to make a decision. If we published a book on paper, there usually were big savings of scale and we could not afford publish two different editions with the money we had. That is, sometimes we were in situations of scarcity and scarcity makes it necessary to decide. And to make a decision means to renounce a certain degree of diversity.

Through this we discovered that every conversation that acted as if there was only one output from all the inputs of our members was condemned to centralization, as democratic as it might be. The problem is that, once you create a mechanism for centralizing, it is very easy to generate artificial scarcity.

For example, why is it that a newspaper–however democratic–cannot reflect as many points of view as there are? Why are not all articles in Wikipedia approved? Why is that the “Towel Day” article is “relevant” in the English Wikipedia but “irrelevant” in the Spanish version and thus remains unpublished? The short answer: because each incorporation, each extra text, increases the global costs and therefore subtracts opportunities for the other contents that are published thanks to a limited amount of money. It is necessary to choose. It can be done through authoritarian methods–as it happen in the usual newspapers–or through oligarchy–as with Wikipedia’s bureaucrats–or democratically–as in some alternative media. But you must choose, because scarcity is real…

Yes, it is real… but unnecessary, we said. It is a kind of artificial scarcity because there were other way to organize the media or a wiki which makes abundance and thus maximum diversity, possible. There is no bureaucracy or voting system in BitTorrent. Nobody decides which contents can be published in the blogsphere or in the world wide web, because distributed networks make abundance possible: a new page, a new point of view, is not an extra cost for anybody. Choose a distributed structure for publishing your book, your magazine or your encyclopedia and we are back to the world of diversity!

Since then we have investigated distributed networks and how apply their logic to more and more fields of the human activity, even physical production. We learned something extremely important: diversity lives in distributed networks… but not necessarily in its nodes.

Take other example: we used to insist that a blog is not media, the blogsphere is. Why? Because a blog has the same problems that a newspaper or Wikipedia has. Alone it lives in scarcity. But as part of the distributed world network of blogs, it takes part and contributes to abundance and diversity.

Why am I telling you this story? Because when I listen the concerns about the diversity of American communes, I feel they are like a blog trying to include the whole content of the world in itself. And I think that is not their role or what they should want from themselves, but from their network.

Nodes, communities, have to be free and distinctive to contribute to a really diverse network, and not try to substitute for the role of the network we must build.

Take las Indias. We are sociologically not representative of our environment in many issues. For example: the number of females is double the number of males. It also happens that the percentage of us born in South America, 50%, is a lot higher than the percentage of people born out of Europe living in Spain… but it is a lot less than the percentage of South American born people in the global map of Spanish speakers… and so on, and so on…

The question is, are we more or less diverse than the society we live in? I cannot say. We are just different, as it is different today to live in an egalitarian community. We have a distinctive culture and it attracts–and selects by itself–distinctive persons. We have had in our history more male sympathizers than female sympathizers but, the fact is, our way of living has been more attractive for women. Are we doing anything wrong? Should we worried about not being representative? Should we refuse the application of new female members for a while in order not to become sexually biased in our way of looking the world? We don’t think so.

I understand the concerns of American communities. It is shocking for me that you have so few “foreigners”. English is one of the three most spoken languages in the world and there is a vibrant conversation in English online. Shouldn’t you represent these diversities in your composition? Or is it the diversity of your suburb, your state, the USA or English speaking North America that you should represent? I think the answer is that you should not represent anything but yourselves. It does not mean a community should not be concerned about diversity. But the diversity we have to be worry about is not about how our fellow communards “are” according to sociological divides, but what the communal life allows them/us to do. The kind of diversity directly linked with what we call “abundance”. I think the main ethical commitment of the commune life is not to artificially produced scarcity and I also believe that abundance, diversity in what we do, is the real measure of success for a community.

The kind of diversity many of you are concerned about, even looking for, sex, sexual orientation, race, etc. will come by itself, but probably not to every community, but to the network we must build together.

Originally published in «Commune Life Blog»

Photo by art around

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